Salvatore Giuliano is a movie whose eponymous protagonist’s voice is heard only once, off-camera, and we only ever see him as a corpse. Yet, despite his near-total absence from the screen throughout, every frame of the movie is all about this notorious Sicilian hill bandit who was also, at various times, a partisan involved in the 1943 liberation of Sicily, a kidnapper, a fighter-for-hire for postwar Sicilian nationalists, a foe of the mafia and, most notoriously, a murderer of Sicilian communists.
Director Francesco Rosi had once worked with Michelangelo Antonioni, whose L’Avventura is another mystery not much interested in solving itself, and one of his earliest jobs was on Visconti’s La Terra Trema, perhaps the bedrock movie of postwar Italian neorealist film-making. However, like many younger Italian film-makers at the turn of the 60s, Rosi was impatient with the limits of the form, or the doctrine, or whatever it was. He wasn’t alone. Neorealism – which fancied real locations, amateurs in most roles, and a realistic depiction of everything ignored by the Mussolini era’s frothy cinema dei telefoni bianchi (white telephone films) – arose from the ashes and rubble of the German retreat in 1944-5, and was a cinematic equivalent to all the reawakening leftist tendencies so long suppressed by Il Duce.
But a decade after the war, even its pioneers were wearying of its strictures. Hence we saw new and marvellous variants from the mid-50s onwards. Rosi’s breakthrough with Salvatore Giuliano was to pioneer an analytical, diagnostic neorealism, making it a sister film to Pontecorvo’s The Battle Of Algiers. Structuring his movie as multi-perspective investigation – Citizen Kane minus Rosebud – Rosi delineates all the lines of power and influence, corruption, murder and lies (by individuals, armies, criminal gangs, the police, the courts, the state itself and implacable social forces in general) that intersected on or through this notoriously hard-to-read figure, whose loyalties were entirely expedience-based.
The opening sequence, a restaging by Rosi of a crime scene that was itself originally staged by crooked carabinieri on the same piece of ground in 1945, lets you know that Rosi is interrogating his own form right from the outset.
I’m making this sound dry and theoretical; Salvatore Giuliano is anything but. It is exquisitely shot, and showcases Rosi’s mastery of shooting figures and crowds in landscapes, and of revealing by intimation the forces that doom an entire society (it’s also a despairing autopsy on Sicily). I cannot imagine that it was not seen on its original release by Ken Loach, Alan Clarke and Miklós Jancsó, because all of their movies seem to have one root firmly implanted in Rosi’s style. It is as modern today as Gomorra or Il Divo, a deeply unsettling paranoia movie for proper grown-ups.
