L'uomo che verrà: Horrorism and the Face of Italy

Abstract

This paper examines Giorgio Diritti's 2009 film L'uomo che verrà (The Man who Will Come) as the product of a post-national practice of commemoration by which the nation, whose death has been theorized by Gentile, Fogu, and others, is resuscitated from the ground up through the depiction of the massacre at Marzabotto. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's notion of horrorism, it argues that the film's emphasis on the faces of its feminine victims and heroines exists in productive tension with its Christological overtones, eventually militating, ambivalently, for a feminine, and decidedly maternal, face of the nation.