Luca Caminati — Mao in Milan, or ‘get off the horse in order to gather flowers’
A still from
Il popolo calabrese ha rialzato la testa (Marco Bellocchio, 1969)
In this presentation I will engage with Italian Maoist film productions by the group Unione dei Comunisti Italiani (marxisti-leninisti) best known for their journal Servire il popolo. I focus on two films produced by Marco Bellocchio, at the time an active member of the group: the revolutionary black-and-white film shot in March 1969, titled Il popolo calabrese ha rialzato la testa (The People of Calabria Have Raised Their Heads, 60 min), which describes the squatting of public housing by subproletariats under the leadership of the Unione; and Viva il primo maggio rosso proletario (Long Live the Red and Proletarian May First, 28 min) on the celebration by the Unione in Rome and Milan on May 1st, 1969, in which images of Maoist demonstration through the streets of Milan and Rome are accompanied by a political lecture.
These two films, while quite at odds with each other, can be thought as a potential way to produce Western Maoist films, certainly more in line with films produced in China in that period than the Brechtian Modernism in which Godard and his Dziga Vertov group were involved, or the infamous situationist approach of Chinois, encore un effort pour etre revolutionnaire (Peking Duck Soup, 1977) by Rene Viénet and Ji Qingming.
BIO
Luca Caminati is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. With James Cahill, he co-edited a collection entitled Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (Routledge, 2021).