Alongside the official story of the Risorgimento, which sees the creation of a united Italy as a revolution carried out in the name of civilization and progress, there is another, which for a long time remained on the margins, semi-clandestine.
They Still Burn tries to give voice and body to this parallel history, in which the Unification of Italy is nothing other than a process of colonization of the South, still ongoing today.
The first of the many interesting ideas that a film like this releases, sometimes even against its will. They still burn, concerns its festival placement. If for Arturo Lavorato and Felice D'Agostino the presence at the Turin Film Festival almost marks a homecoming (the duo won the award for best documentary in 2005 with The song of the new emigrants(inspired by a poem by Franco Costabile), the theme around which the entire film revolves can, without too much exaggeration, appear as a battle cry launched against the former Savoy kingdom. The murdered, the starved, the deprived, the deprived that the unification of Italy left behind, with that only apparent push towards a progress that was in reality unattainable in those ways and with those forms, come back to life to reclaim their right to hate, to oppose, to fight against a hegemonic power that for the last hundred and fifty years and more has seen southern Italy as an occupied territory, annexed to a northern kingdom with which it had very little in common, even a dissimilar language despite the common origin. D'Agostino and Lavorato do not mince their words – it should be noted, however, that They still burn is the inevitably, partly unbalanced, synthesis of a much more collective effort, which has set in motion the visions and intelligence of a land too often forced into a tortured and underpaid silence – and they make a clear choice, which cannot help but spark debate: the Unification of Italy, they say, was a colonization, a massacre of poor people, the exploitation of labor where (in Piedmont) it was lacking. Nothing poetic or romantic, but simply a strictly economic necessity. A Unification born of Capital, therefore, and of its long, grasping fingers. In this perspective, Giuseppe Garibaldi, on whose stone back the unfolding of the Unification of Italy opens, They still burn, can only be a conniver or, at best, a romantic fighter who failed to understand that he was being exploited by a cruel force superior to him and his loyal comrades. To Garibaldi, D'Agostino and Lavorato prefer the combative and uncompromising attitude of Carlo Pisacane, who died fighting and signed this famous hymn to the struggle with the other twenty-four conspirators: "We, the undersigned, declare loudly that, having all conspired, despising the slanders of the mob, strong in the justice of the cause and the strength of our spirit, we declare ourselves the initiators of the Italian revolution. If the country does not respond to our call, not without cursing it, we will know how to die bravely, following the noble phalanx of Italian martyrs. Let any other nation in the world find men who, like us, sacrifice themselves for its freedom, and only then will it be able to compare itself to Italy, even though it remains a slave to this day." You can easily get caught off guard by They still burn, and precisely its nature as a multi-headed creature, built around the passion and ideas of a collective of people, makes it both multifaceted and, on more than one occasion, verging on disarray. The narrative structure, built on an emphasis on drama that, on the one hand, focuses on "cross-eyedness" and, on the other, on a participation that is anything but abstract but rather genuine and passionate, gets lost in more than one stream and even risks contradicting itself on occasion. But perhaps this is right. Likewise, the attempt to create an internationalist aura, interpreting the events of the last century in Calabria and southern Italy by drawing on the texts of Frantz Fanon, the poetry of Aimé Césaire, and Thomas Sankara's celebrated speech on African debt at the twenty-fifth conference of the OAU (Organization of African Unity) in Addis Ababa in July 1987, seems at times almost an instinctive legacy, devoid of any real depth. But, and it's worth repeating, that's okay. The point of a complex operation like They still burn It's not about organizing a counter-history punctuated by documents, data, sentences, and memoirs. We live in the midst of a pamphlet, a rhetorical j'accuse that needs only the people, the faces of the people, and the voices of the people, to find its meaning. Weeping for the blood shed by Piedmontese weapons, the film in turn weeps blood, becomes blood, flows, and reaches the brain. An act of rebellion that starts from the gut, and forces the brain to accommodate this need. Read in this light They still burn, despite its naivety, its gaps, its preconceived position – the Southern question deserves a much more structured historical, anthropological, social and economic analysis, even from a purely guerrilla perspective; in this sense, placing this film and We believed by Mario Martone, to stick to the last decade, is an almost indispensable work – takes on a value of primary importance, and may even prove to be one of the most interesting works to emerge in Italian cinema in the last year. A work in which it is necessary to believe, but it can be equally essential to create a dialectic, to build, from superstructure to superstructure, the first step towards a revolution that not only liberates southern Italy and the world. But liberates everyone. Raffaele Meale 29/11/2917
https://quinlan.it/2017/11/29/essi-bruciano-ancora/
