History, Myth, and the Everyday: Luchino Visconti, Renato Guttuso, and the Fishing Communities of the Italian South

Abstract

In 1941, the aspiring filmmaker Luchino Visconti authored an article titled ‘Tradizione ed invenzione’ describing his recent trip to the east coast of Sicily, where he had visited the fishing village of Aci Trezza, near Catania, the location of Giovanni Verga's classic novel of 1881, I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree). A landmark text of Italian literary realism, Verga's tale of a poor fishing family's pursuit of economic advancement was celebrated for its lyrical engagement with social struggles. In using the choral voice, regional expressions, proverbial sayings, and dialectal syntax, Verga sought to evoke the specific reality of his novel's location. Visconti, and other members of the left-wing group surrounding the journal Cinema, looked to Verga's lyrical realism in the early 1940s as a means of revitalising Italian cinema, and this novel was the focus of their initial efforts to realise a cinematic adaptation of his work.1 The young antifascist intellectuals associated with Cinema saw Verga's portrayal of everyday life in his native Sicily as the ideal model for this cinematic renewal, offering a much-needed alternative to the bourgeois escapism that they felt had dominated cinema during the twenty years of the fascist regime.2 For Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, the ‘truth and poetry’ of Verga was the antidote to the stagnation they found in contemporary Italian cinema: Giovanni Verga not only created a great body of poetry, he also created a country, a time, a society. For those of us who believe in an art which above all creates truth, the Homeric and legendary Sicily of I Malavoglia … seems to offer us both human experience and a concrete environment. Miraculously pure and real, it could inspire the imagination of a cinema that seeks objects and events in real time and space, in order to redeem itself from the easy suggestions of moribund bourgeois taste.3