The Allied occupation of Naples in cultural memory

The Allied occupation of Naples has generated a wealth of official and unofficial documentation, visual and oral histories, memoirs and other cultural works, ranging across photography, popular song, literary production, documentaries, and feature films. Together, these works constitute a substantial corpus of historical and cultural value, which stands in sharp contrast to the relative scarcity of academic analyses.Footnote ³ However, although the sources are many and varied, a few key works, produced exclusively by men and for the most part in the immediate aftermath of the war, dominate the cultural imaginary of the Allied occupation of Naples. Of the Italian corpus that is the focus of this article, four works produced during the 1940s are notably prominent in the public sphere and continue to shape the Italian cultural imaginary of Allied-occupied Naples.Footnote ⁴ These are Eduardo Nicolardi’s popular song ‘Tammuriata nera’ (1944); the Naples episode of Roberto Rossellini’s film Paisà (1946); Curzio Malaparte’s literary epic La pelle (1949) and, above all, Eduardo de Filippo’s Napoli milionaria! (1945; 1952; 1966).Footnote ⁵ Together, these works encapsulate the major thematic concerns of the occupation in the Italian cultural imaginary (see Gribaudi Reference Gribaudi and Davis1997, 297–298): the appalling hunger, poverty, disease and desperation experienced by Neapolitans in the war-ravaged city. They also convey the psychological unease surrounding the proliferation of theft, black market racketeering, sexual licentiousness, and prostitution, amid rampant inflation and the abundant spending power of the US forces.

As the living memory of the occupation has faded, ‘Tammuriata nera’, Napoli milionaria!, Paisà and La pelle have become ever more central to the cultural memory of the encounter between Neapolitans and Allies. Viewed through the theoretical apparatus of cultural memory studies, these works represent what Aleida Assman would term the ‘canon’ of Italian cultural memory addressing the occupation of Naples. For Assmann (Reference Assmann, Erll and Nünning2010, 100), the canon represents the active dimension of cultural memory built on a small number of ‘normative and formative texts, places, persons, artifacts, and myths’ that are actively circulated and communicated to keep the past present. In contrast to the inert ‘archive’ or storeroom of cultural relics that are potentially available to memory but not actively interpreted, the ‘canon’ is understood to be ‘charged with the highest meaning and value’, containing cultural messages that are addressed to posterity and that reproduce, recycle, and reaffirm the cultural capital of a given society (A. Assman Reference Assmann, Erll and Nünning2010, 99).

Among the prominent messages communicated by the canon of cultural memory surrounding the Allied occupation is the construction of occupied Naples as a ‘contact zone’ in the terms outlined by Mary Louise Pratt: a social space ‘where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt Reference Pratt1991, 34). In applying Pratt’s theorisation to occupied Naples, I do not mean to equate the Allied occupation with the colonialism of Latin America studied by Pratt but to recognise the relevance of Pratt’s discussion to cultural representations of the occupation. For not only does occupied Naples exhibit some of the inequalities and cultural misunderstandings of the colonial contact zone; it is also permeated by similar ‘autoethnographic’ practices, in which oppressed persons or groups ‘undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them’ (Pratt Reference Pratt1991, 35).

In the case of Allied-occupied Naples, such views and understandings include not only those generated by Allied personnel on their encounter with the city and its inhabitants but also the wider historical repertoire of discourses that posit Naples and the Italian south as other to a national and European norm (see Moe Reference Moe2002; Carruthers Reference Carruthers2016, 39–49; Glynn Reference Glynn2021; Lowe Reference Lowe2024, 146–157). A second prominent aspect of the canon is the construction of the Allied occupation and its consequences as an aberration – a temporary disruption to established social and moral order. In this respect, the Allied occupation of Naples occupies a similar position to Fascism in the postwar period: injurious to the discourse of ‘good Italians’ that would be so central to restoring Italian dignity in the aftermath of Fascism (see Fogu Reference Fogu, Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu2006; Patriarca Reference Patriarca2010), it tends to be bracketed off in mainstream understandings of Italian identity and history. But perhaps the most important cultural message conveyed by the ‘canon’ of cultural memory is the deep sense of shame associated with the deleterious moral effects of the Allied occupation on the Neapolitan people.Footnote ⁶ This is tightly interwoven with the feminisation of Naples in the cultural canon and the prominent attention afforded the bodies of Neapolitan women. The emphasis on the corporeal effects of the occupation communicates the intimacy of the encounter between cultures in the ‘contact zone’ of the occupied city while adhering to – and perhaps deriving its canonical power from – a longer tradition of representation in which gendered corporeal metaphors signal Naples’s divergence from the mainstream of Italian national modernity (Glynn Reference Glynn2019, 262–263).

It is an established principle of cultural memory studies that ‘collective memory is constantly “in the works”’ (Rigney Reference Rigney, Erll and Nünning2010, 345). That is to say, the canon of cultural memory is not fixed but open to alteration, in accordance with the fluctuating concerns of an evolving society (A. Assman Reference Assmann, Erll and Nünning2010, 104). It has also been recognised, however, that cultural memories ‘tend to converge and coalesce’ over time (Rigney Reference Rigney2005, 18) and that ‘consensus … is ultimately the road to amnesia’ (Rigney Reference Rigney, Erll and Nünning2010, 346). On that view, the fact that the canon of cultural memory pertaining to the Allied occupation of Naples has remained remarkably impervious to change since the 1940s – unlike, say, the memory of the Holocaust or antifascist Resistance – suggests a certain societal indifference towards that experience that is perhaps symptomatic of the marginalised position of the occupation in Italian cultural memory.

Yet, despite that, the canon of cultural memory of the Allied occupation of Naples has not gone unchallenged since the 1940s. Rather, all subsequent cultural products treating the occupation – literary works (and their translations), films, oral histories – engage in implicit if not explicit dialogue with the canon and, to different extents, seek to intervene on the cultural memory of the occupation. This is especially true of remediations, works borrowed or ‘repurposed’ from another medium and, in the process, subjected to ‘a necessary redefinition’ (Bolter and Grusin Reference Bolter and Grusin2000, 45). As outlined above, this article addresses Liliana Cavani’s dramatic reconstruction of Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle alongside Francesco Patierno’s Reference Patierno2016 documentary reworking of Naples’44 (1978), a military memoir by the British travel writer and novelist Norman Lewis. As rare remediations of ‘canonical’ works of cultural memory within their respective contexts, these films overtly seek to revitalise and reshape the memory of the Allied occupation of Naples and represent significant interventions in the existing canon of Italian cultural memory. Cavani’s La pelle presents a feminist provocation that exposes and challenges the androcentric focus of the canon, resists the official version of truth classified as ‘history’, and produces a radically new understanding that amounts to a ‘counter-memory’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1977, 160) of the Allied occupation. Patierno’s Naples’44 takes a radically different approach; it incorporates into the cinematic corpus Lewis’s British perspective and provides a retrospective, summative account that pays homage to the existing corpus of filmic representation but betrays a contradictory impulse to both renew the cultural memory of the occupation and lay that memory to rest. In their different ways, both texts shed light on the condition of the wider memory of the Allied occupation at distinct moments in time.

La pelle’s feminist provocation (1981)

Released in 1981, Liliana Cavani’s La pelle takes a rather free approach to Malaparte’s controversial and deeply disturbing literary portrayal of Allied-occupied Naples. Banned by the Catholic Church and widely denounced for bringing shame on Naples, Malaparte’s original presents a highly fictionalised account of the author’s experiences while serving as a liaison officer in the newly constituted Italian Liberation Corps attached to the US Fifth Army in Naples. Rich in literary and biblical allusion, the text combines fictional invention with recording of historical events to fulfil its testimonial mission to expose the abject degradation and the moral compromises visited on the Neapolitans in their desperate struggle to survive. The ‘complex psycho-social drama’ (Gatt-Rutter Reference Gatt-Rutter and Davis1997, 61) deriving from that mission presents Naples as ‘host to all manner of corruption, excess, and transgression’ (Glynn Reference Glynn2017, 5). However, rather than condemning the Neapolitans for their moral failings, La pelle characterises such transgressions as exemplifications of the terrible consequences of the Allied ‘liberation’, overtly presented as an imperialist occupation and the origin of a moral plague afflicting the local population (see Glynn Reference Glynn2017, 5). Published while Italy was a major beneficiary of Marshall Plan aid and intent on developing commercial relations with the US, La pelle’s construction of the ‘liberation’ was, inevitably, spurned by Italian authorities. However, the critical suspicion with which the book was greeted owed as much to Malaparte’s renown for political inconstancy, especially in relation to Fascism, and to his divergence from the intellectual tendencies of postwar Italy (see Baldasso Reference Baldasso2017; Martellini Reference Martellini1976).

Cavani’s decision to adapt Malaparte’s work was no more positively received; the film was viewed as a misguided departure from the erotic dynamics and aesthetic choices of the director’s more recent work and criticised for its recuperation of an unreliable historical account (see Giardino Reference Giardino2011, 103). A French-Italian co-production based on a screenplay co-written by Cavani and Robert Katz, La pelle owed its generous budget and star-studded cast (including Marcello Mastroianni, Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale) to the international success of Cavani’s Il portiere di notte (1974). La pelle shares with that film an interest in the unsettling sexual, psychological, and power dynamics generated by war but departs from it in externalisation of its exploration and in its grand cinematic scope. As I observed elsewhere (Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 346–347), the film is faithful to Malaparte’s original in its graphic exposé of the humiliations and compromises of the occupation, especially in the sexual realm. However, it is at pains to show ‘the unspeakable degradation of the Neapolitans as being the counterpart to the unspeakable behaviour of the US and other Allied soldiery who are the Neapolitans’ clients, circus-masters and exploiters, posing as benefactors’ (Gatt-Rutter Reference Gatt-Rutter and Davis1997, 61). In this way, Cavani’s film works to counter widespread misapprehensions about the literary work and restore to cultural memory Malaparte’s core message: that the moral ‘plague’ visited upon Naples originated with the Allies rather than the Neapolitans, and that any cause for shame lies with the ‘liberators’ rather than the local population. Though Cavani has consistently claimed to occupy a position uninflected by political ideology (see Marrone Reference Marrone2001, 6–7), her decision to adapt La pelle would appear to endorse Malaparte’s interpretation of the Allied occupation as the economic and cultural subjugation of Italy; it thus broadly coincides with Italian leftist political hostility towards the USA (see Brogi Reference Brogi2016).

Where Cavani’s film departs from Malaparte’s original – and, indeed, from the broader representation of the occupation – is in placing women at the centre of the action by developing significant storylines for female characters only briefly mentioned in the literary text (Giardino Reference Giardino2011).Footnote ⁷ As I have previously argued (Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 347), the film reflects the feminist turn of the 1970s and participates in the project of excavating and bringing to public attention the experiences of women in war. Significantly, Cavani’s gynocentric remediation of La pelle eschews the historiographical focus on the minority of women who actively contributed to the partisan struggle in the centre-north of Italy (see Forgacs Reference Forgacs, Peitsch, Burdett and Gorrara1999, 191–192) and foregrounds instead the experiences of women throughout Italy who were subjected to the effects of war and occupation without participating in armed resistance. In the analysis that follows, I am indebted to two related elements of my earlier reading of La pelle (Glynn Reference Glynn2015): first, that, in its graphic depiction of the violence perpetrated by the Allied forces within the supposed ‘safe zone’ of the occupied city, Cavani’s film presents the occupation as an extension of the militarised violence of war; and second, that in its use of narrative and visual comparison and metaphor, La pelle reconceptualises the Allied occupation of Naples as a form of rape. From a cultural memory perspective, Cavani’s radical departure not only from Malaparte’s understanding but from all existing political and cultural interpretations amounts to a feminist ‘counter-memory’ of the Allied occupation of Naples. I understand ‘counter memory’ in the terms outlined by Foucault: that is, as a challenge to hegemonic or official accounts and the creation of alternative histories, memories and narratives that mobilise the memories and struggles of marginalised or oppressed groups. However, my understanding is also influenced by Verónica Tello’s preference for a non-dialectical counter-memory, structured not as an either/or or us/them formula that sustains ‘one history over another’ but in accordance with an and–and formula that posits ‘multiple histories being held together, or networked – not without tension or difference’ (Tello Reference Tello2022, 391).

Indeed, that ‘and-and’ formula underpins Cavani’s approach to Malaparte’s literary original and the wider cultural memory of the Allied occupation of Naples. In challenging the androcentric bias of that memory, the film both endorses and complements the autoethnographic thrust of Malaparte’s literary narration, a major structuring element of which is the ‘systematic juxtaposition of Italians and Americans’ (Gatt-Rutter Reference Gatt-Rutter and Davis1997, 63) for the purpose of contesting misunderstandings of Neapolitan behaviour in the context of occupation. The cinematic challenge to the revulsion expressed by the American liberators and conquerors at the abjection of the local population centres on Captain Malaparte’s interactions with two American characters: the unsophisticated young officer Jimmy Wren (Ken Marshall) and the rather more cultured female aviator Deborah Wyatt (Alexandra King). Where Malaparte’s interactions with Jimmy centre on the commodification of female bodies in the occupied city, those with Deborah Wyatt focus on her seizure of the moral high ground and build to the deployment of rape as a metaphor for the occupation.

Unlike Malaparte’s book, which opens in medias res, amid the babelic confusion of the occupied city, Cavani’s film takes a more circuitous approach to provide historical context for the 1980s viewer and establish Malaparte’s credibility as guide to Naples and interpreter of the occupation.Footnote ⁸ When the viewer is finally confronted with images of Allied-occupied Naples, the city is presented as a carnivalesque playground of corporeal exhibition, visual pleasure and sexual adventure (see Marrone Reference Marrone2001; Brignoli Reference Brignoli2011; Glynn Reference Glynn2015). A medium shot follows Malaparte and Jimmy as they descend a flight of stairs, passing uniformed or jellaba-clad Allied personnel surrounded by women flirting in English, raising their skirts or exposing their pudenda (Figure 1). Visually, the scene constructs the city as host to all manner of promiscuity and licentiousness. However, the accompanying dialogue offers opposing readings and presents an autoethnographic challenge to external understandings of Allied-occupied Naples. For Captain Malaparte, the corporeal exhibition is a product of the ‘highly asymmetrical relations of power’ operating in the contact zone that is the occupation (Pratt Reference Pratt1991, 34); he discusses it in relation to the falling ‘price of human flesh’ and implicitly construes it as part of degradation of human life arising from the military subjugation of Italians and from the market economy of the occupation. For Jimmy, instead, the corporeal exhibition amounts to an exhilarating ‘initiation’ (Brignoli Reference Brignoli2011, 200); he describes it as a ‘spectacle’ and equates it to ‘seeing Europe’. His inability to understand that the spectacle on display is not inherent to the culture but a product of the contact zone that is the occupation is amply demonstrated by his bemusement at Malaparte’s discussion of the economic, racial and power dynamics at play.

Figure 1.

‘Seeing Europe’. La Pelle, directed by Liliana Cavani, Reference Cavani1981.

As the film progresses, the carnivalesque quality of this introductory scene is replaced by a distinctly sobering understanding of the realities of the occupation, informed by increasingly explicit autoethnographic challenges to external misreadings – diegetic and pre-emptively extradiegetic – of life in the occupied city. Two scenes exemplify this approach. The first involves Deborah Wyatt, the arrogant American aviator whose relationship with Malaparte is constructed from the outset as adversarial and symbolic of the power dynamics between Italy and the USA. As part of a wider ‘pattern of reciprocal acts of cruelty’ (Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 350), Malaparte takes Wyatt to witness a back-street market in child prostitution. The American’s horror at the sight of children being manhandled and led away by North African soldiers, as their mothers look on, conveys her obliviousness to the desperation of the local population and to the economic realities of the occupation, while also evidencing her inability to correctly attribute the existence of a flourishing sex trade to the presence of the Allied forces. Rather than expressing outrage at the fate of the children (under Allied governance), her anger is directed towards Malaparte for making her witness the depravity: ‘You are degenerates, Naples is degenerate. Why did you bring me here? … We didn’t want this war, we don’t sell our bodies for a packet of cigarettes’.Footnote ⁹ Thus, Wyatt confuses the conditions of the Allied-occupied city with what she sees as ‘a moral degeneracy inherent to Naples and sets it against the superior moral code of American civilisation’ (Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 350). By way of response, Malaparte – exemplifying the autoethnographic disposition emphasised by Pratt (Reference Pratt1991) – provides a short lesson in the real-life economics of the occupation, demonstrating how much food a packet of cigarettes can buy and signalling the centrality of sex as a vehicle for survival. As previously noted (Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 351), the scene ends with a chastened Wyatt calling for the first of their truces, in words that will recur with great poignancy at a later stage: ‘are we even?’.

The second episode follows Jimmy’s discovery that, in a city rife with prostitution, the virginity of his beloved Maria Concetta – whose innocence and purity are symbolised by her simple white dress – has been commodified by her father, with scores of soldiers paying to see the intact hymen of the renowned ‘Virgin of Naples’.Footnote ¹⁰ Oblivious to his own part in the exploitative economy of the Allied occupation, the wounded Jimmy ends the enterprise by digitally penetrating the girl and angrily denounces Italians as ‘filthy pigs’, echoing Wyatt’s condemnation of the North African soldiers in the previous scene. Malaparte’s response amounts to a lesson in the economic and power disparities of the Allied occupation, and its sentimental and moral consequences. Just as he had chastised Wyatt, so too Malaparte berates Jimmy for failing to recognise the asymmetrical nature of his relationship with Maria Concetta (‘You entered that house, convinced you could buy anything with chocolate and cigarettes’). He explicitly relates the commodification of her body to the occupation, which is construed as a consequence of Italy’s defeat and an extension of the battlefield but with women and children most exposed: ‘We lost the war. Women and children lost it most of all.’ In thus foregrounding and elaborating on the literary original’s cursory acknowledgement that ‘women have lost the war too’ (Malaparte Reference Malaparte2013, 77), Cavani’s remediation endorses the book’s autoethnographic stance while simultaneously announcing its feminist challenge not only to Malaparte’s androcentrism but also to that of the wider cultural memory of the Allied occupation of Naples.

Unexpectedly, perhaps, it is through the body of Deborah Wyatt that Cavani’s feminist counter-memory of the occupation will be conveyed, in the final third of the film, when the American becomes the unlikely vehicle for the metaphorical construction of the Allied occupation of Naples as an act of rape. Wyatt’s transformation from a uniformed representative of the US army to an elegantly dressed woman attending an exclusive dinner party exposes her to the gendered power dynamics of the occupied city (see Giardino 2012, 107; Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 352–353). Amid the chaos of bombardment and the simultaneous eruption of Vesuvius, Wyatt is separated from her party and finds herself alone at night on the streets of Naples (Figure 2). There, bereft of her uniform and military insignia, she loses the protection afforded her as representative of American military power and falls prey to the logic of occupation when she is picked up by a company of US soldiers who mistake her for a local woman and proceed to rape her.

Figure 2.

Deborah Wyatt. La Pelle, directed by Liliana Cavani, Reference Cavani1981.

The rape of Wyatt, though curiously overlooked in the early scholarship, has more recently been subject to diverse critical interpretations. For Giardino, reading the film in the light of a revival of fascism and militarism in the fashion and film of the late 1970s and 1980s, Wyatt’s combination of faithful wife and uniformed officer evokes the spectre of the Fascist woman. The rape thus recalls ‘the diegetic punishment that in Fascist movies would be commonly perpetrated upon prostitutes [or] sexualized women’ (Giardino 2012, 107). However, it also serves a broader purpose insofar as it demonstrates ‘the real condition of women in a patriarchal society’, where ‘female virtue and moral integrity are never innate’ but contingent and capable of being revoked (Giardino 2012, 107). Where my own reading departs from Giardino’s is in viewing Wyatt’s rape as exemplary of the fate of women in war and a metaphor for the treatment of Naples under the Allied Occupation. The latter is conveyed through the association forged between the rape and the series of antagonistic battles between Wyatt and Malaparte as spokespersons for their respective cultures and understandings of the occupation. Key to that association is Wyatt’s reiteration of the phrase ‘are we even?’ when she re-encounters Malaparte in the aftermath of the rape. As I previously argued, the compassionate tone with which Malaparte replies, ‘we’re very even’, is a clear endorsement of the position that the rape is a metaphor deployed to equate the treatment of Naples under the Allied occupation – indeed the occupation itself –with the gendered violence of rape (Glynn Reference Glynn2015, 353).

Extending beyond my previous assertion that Cavani’s cinematic remediation of La pelle presents a radical challenge to the existing representations of the Allied occupation of Naples, I want to suggest that the film also seeks to construct a non-dialectical feminist counter-memory that recognises and incorporates the experiences of women and children alongside the existing focus on men in the canon of cultural memory. By rejecting Malaparte’s literary construction of the occupation as a ‘moral plague’, carried by the Americans but affecting the locals (Reference Malaparte2013, 7–41), and by fore-fronting the violence and humiliations visited on women and children, Cavani’s remediation highlighted the continuities between the battlefield and the supposed safety of the occupied city, and reconceptualised the occupation as an act of rape. In so doing, La pelle talked back, in autoethnographic vein, not only to the representations that others have made of Naples in this period but also to the androcentrism of Malaparte’s work and of the wider canon of Italian cultural memory.

The non-dialectical quality of the counter-memory envisaged by Cavani is neatly illustrated by the epilogue to the film, which centres on the male body and takes the viewer beyond the Neapolitan context to the outskirts of Rome. The Roman setting pre-empts Lowe’s thesis that what happens in Allied-occupied Naples is a harbinger for what will happen elsewhere in Italy after the Allies take hold (2024, 6). Here, following the breakthrough at Monte Cassino, the US Fifth Army is preparing to liberate the city from Nazi occupation. As the local population welcomes the American ‘liberators’, a man holding up a child, waving an American flag, and shouting ‘long live the Americans!’ is mercilessly crushed by the inexorable advance of an American tank. The grotesque image of the squashed remains of the civilian male body provides graphic exemplification of the indiscriminate brutality and violence of occupation, irrespective of gender, age or status. It also reinforces the point that cause for shame lies not – or not only – with the civilian Italian population but with the Allied forces who remain indifferent to the human cost of their ‘liberation’.

Patierno’s summative conceptualisation

Where Cavani’s feminist remediation of La pelle is marked by its overtly oppositional and corrective approach to the cultural memory of the Allied occupation of Naples, Francesco Patierno’s documentary adaptation of Norman Lewis’s Naples’44 – the latter first published in 1978 and translated into Italian in 1993 – takes a more subtle approach. The film conforms to the conventional presentation of the Allied-occupied city as a ‘contact zone’ between Allies and Neapolitans and reverts to the overwhelmingly male bias of the canonical memory of the occupation, thereby reinforcing it. Moreover, to the extent that it conceptualises occupation as such, Naples’44 implicitly construes it as partial respite from the ongoing war that continues to threaten the city in the form of aerial bombardment and as an opportunity for military grand-tourism of a rather more elevated kind than that enjoyed by La pelle’s Jimmy Wren.

Nonetheless, Patierno’s adaptation intervenes on the Italian cultural memory of the Allied occupation in substantial if contradictory ways. First, it incorporates into the Italian cinematic corpus the perspective of an apparently impartial British observer and reminds contemporary audiences of the notable British presence among the Allied forces. Second, in embracing the perspective of a foreign observer, the film eschews the deep sense of shame that pervades earlier Italian representations of Allied-occupied Naples and abandons the productive autoethnographic practice of talking back to externally produced representations that typifies the Italian canon of cultural memory. Finally, at the same time as it pays homage to the experience of the occupation and works to transmit the cultural memory to a new generation, Naples’44 signals the pastness of the past. It takes a summative approach to the existing cinematic corpus and deploys archival footage, dispassionate narration, and the corporeal metaphor of an ageing veteran to distance the past from the present and lay the living memory of occupation to rest.

Unlike Cavani’s La pelle, Patierno’s Naples’44 bears little relation to the social and political concerns of the present day. Although the film is not an entirely isolated intervention on the memory of the Allied occupation, being released just two years after the publication of composer Roberto De Simone’s autobiographical account of that experience (2014), its genesis appears to be personal in nature. Patierno attributes his remediation to his father’s recollection of his childhood experience of wartime Naples and his recommendation to his son that, ‘if you want to understand what happened during those years in Naples, you have to read Norman Lewis’s book’ (cited in Senatore Reference Senatore2016). Patierno thus credits Lewis’s narrative – an outlier in the corpus of representations not only for its British perspective but also for the late date of its publication and translation (see Escolar Reference Escolar2019, 133) – with providing the most authoritative account of Allied-occupied Naples.

The authority Patierno grants Naples’44 reflects its standing in the popular and academic historiography of the Allied occupation, where it is cited extensively by Anglophone and Italophone historians alike, treated as a reliable source and admired for its compassionate portrayal (Escolar Reference Escolar2019, 132). The work’s prominence in the historical sphere is not, however, matched by its standing in the cultural sphere, especially in Italy; it is rarely cited in the context of commemorations of the Allied occupation and has only recently been subject to close critical interrogation, by the US-based Italianist Escolar (Reference Escolar2019).Footnote ¹¹ The text recounts Lewis’s experiences serving in the Field Security Service of the British intelligence corps, mediating between the military and the civilian population and vetting potential wives of British servicemen.Footnote ¹² However, as Lewis’s biographer Julian Evans has argued, the book is not the wartime diary it purports to be but a retrospective ‘remaking’ based on hurried, one-line entries in the writer’s wartime notebooks between September and December 1943 and, thereafter, on a ‘more detailed and discursive’ diaristic account (Evans Reference Evans2008, 232). Even then, however, Naples’44 is not the straightforward eyewitness account its ‘invented diary technique’ might lead one to believe (Evans Reference Evans2008, 232). Rather, the ‘remaking’ incorporates ‘vast changes’ to the content of the notebooks (Evans Reference Evans2008, 232) and, as Escolar has outlined, the published work is a highly mediated narrative that ‘blurs the boundaries of historical referent and literary intervention to its own strategic ends’ (Reference Escolar2019, 133); it is also in covert dialogue with other cultural representations of the Allied occupation, most notably Malaparte’s La pelle (Escobar Reference Escolar2019, 140).Footnote ¹³

Echoes of the latter may be found in Lewis’s detailed descriptions of rampant prostitution, gynaecological examinations, ‘flamboyant’ instances of ‘Neapolitan kleptomania’ (Lewis Reference Lewis2002, 79), and the infamous banquet scene (see Escolar Reference Escolar2019, 141–143). However, Lewis’s book presents as the antithesis of Malaparte’s La pelle and constitutes a more palatable alternative to the graphic excesses and satirical tone of the Italian author’s much maligned epic. Escolar contrasts the baroque prose style and extravagant satire deployed by Malaparte to expose the distortions and moral ambiguities at play in the occupied city with the restrained style of Lewis’s narrative. Her detailed analysis undermines the historical authority afforded the British author and offers devastating critique of Lewis’s deceptively ‘clear-eyed’ perspective, arguing that the avoidance of moral complexity and the ‘pernicious … subtlety’ of his sober style enable the most extreme stereotypes and Orientalising topoi to masquerade as fact (Escolar Reference Escolar2019, 135, 144).Footnote ¹⁴

Contrary to Escolar’s critical reading, Patierno’s documentary reflects the mainstream historical interpretation of Lewis’s work as an impartial and authoritative account of Allied-occupied Naples. It follows the broad chronological thrust of Lewis’s narrative but condenses some storylines and eliminates others entirely in search of a balance between faithful distillation of the literary original and a compelling cinematic experience capable of resonating with contemporary audiences (see Saturnino Reference Saturnino2017). In formal terms, Naples’44 conforms in part to what Bill Nichols has termed the ‘expository mode’ of documentary filmmaking, which privileges the rhetorical or narrative frame over the aesthetic or poetic frame and creates the impression of objectivity (2004, 138–144). This mode addresses the viewer directly and relegates the images to an illustrative function, in s upport of the ‘voice-of-God’ narration organising the material, driving the film forward and representing its rhetorical perspective (Nichols Reference Nichols2024, 138). Thus, for instance, narrative accounts of destitution, disease and devastation are illustrated by archival images of people queuing for food or attempting to desalinate seawater for drinking purposes; crowds in the street being sprayed with DDT to counter typhus; and bodies of dead children being pulled from the rubble of bombed-out buildings (Figure 3). The apparently faithful approach taken to Lewis’s ‘diary’ extends beyond the chronicling of historical events to incorporate Lewis’s close observation of Neapolitan social interactions, sexual mores, religious customs and practices, and superstitious beliefs. Also included are Lewis’s criticisms of the Allied command – most notably, his description of General Clark as ‘the destroying angel of southern Italy’ (Reference Lewis2002, 23); his misgivings about the potentially enduring impact of the Allied presence on the sentimental life of the city; and his ever-growing admiration for the resilience and dignity of the suffering Neapolitans.

Figure 3.

A dead child recovered from the rubble. Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno, Reference Patierno2016.

Yet, Patierno’s Naples’44 departs from the literary source text and from the expository mode of documentary in ways that point to the film’s contradictory impulses. Visually, the film is an extraordinary work of montage. It combines never-before-seen historical film footage in black-and-white, retrieved from archives in Italy, the UK and the US, with relatively well-known black-and-white photographs; clips (in both black-and-white and colour) from Italian and American feature films dramatising the Allied occupation; and colour shots of contemporary Naples. The latter provide visual support for the structuring device underpinning the voiceover narration and the film’s mediation between the past of the Allied occupation and present-day Naples: the imagined return to Naples of the ageing Norman Lewis (who had in fact died in 2003).Footnote ¹⁵ The colour shots also serve to introduce the corporeal metaphor that – in a manner akin to La pelle before it – encapsulates the rationale for the remediation of Naples’44. However, where the violated bodies of La pelle operate on a spatial level insofar as they highlight the continuity of military violence in the supposed safe space of the occupied city, the corporeal metaphor that distinguishes Naples’44 – the body of an ageing man in reminiscent mood on a return visit to Naples – is characterised by a temporal dimension that serves to communicate the pastness of the past.

The film’s assertion of the pastness of the past plays out in various ways. The deployment of newly exhumed archival footage and the meticulous research undertaken to retrieve it speak to the strength of Patierno’s desire to do justice to Lewis’s account, bring the past to life and reanimate public interest in the Allied occupation of Naples. In her discussion of cinematic remediation, Astrid Erll observes that the integration of historical footage into new cinematic productions serves to create an effet de réel and thereby endow such productions with an aura of authenticity. This is because ‘what is often integrated via remediation … is not merely actual documentary material but also its specific “look” (which usually derives from the media technology of the time but also from historical aesthetics)’ (Erll Reference Erll, Erll and Nünning2010, 395). However, while the expository use of archival footage in Naples’44 bolsters the authority of Lewis’s account and provides an aura of historical authenticity, the historical aesthetic may in fact undermine Patierno’s stated desire to convey the continuities between the Naples of the 1940s and contemporary experiences of war (see Finos Reference Finos2016). Certainly, the use of black-and-white footage signals the aesthetic as well as the material and conceptual distance of Allied-occupied Naples from the contemporary city, depicted throughout as a site of leisure and through the medium of colour film.

Furthermore, the film’s apparent commitment to historical authenticity is complicated by the juxtaposition of archival footage with clips liberally drawn from a generous corpus of feature films and a single documentary short, all produced between the 1940s and the 1980s. Among the more prominent examples, which range from realist dramatisation to satirical comedy, are Nanni Loy’s Le quattro giornate di Napoli (1945), Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946); Duilio Coletti’s Il re di Poggioreale (1961); Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970) and Liliana Cavani’s La pelle (Reference Cavani1981). The inclusion of Catch-22 speaks to the interrelation of Allied and Italian cultural memories and implicitly presents the cinematic corpus itself as a contact zone between differently articulated memories of the occupation of Naples. The breadth of the corpus reflects the director’s aspiration to pay ‘homage to the cinema which knew how to narrate those terrible years’ (TGcom24 2016). It also speaks to a personal desire to reanimate the cinematic memory of the Allied occupation, which had lain dormant since the release of Cavani’s La pelle in 1981. Patierno’s recirculation – albeit in highly selective form – of elements of the existing corpus, including lesser-known films such as Chi si ferma è perduto (dir. Corbucci 1960) and Il miracolo di San Gennaro (dir. Emmer and Gras 1948), complements his retrieval of historical footage and signals an attempt to extract such films from ‘the storehouse or archive of cultural memory’ and return them to the ‘actively circulated memory that keeps the past present as canon’ (A. Assman Reference Assmann, Erll and Nünning2010, 98).

However, the often-seamless cutting between documentary footage and feature film in Naples’44 exemplifies Marita Sturken’s observation that ‘the boundaries between documentary material and fictional reenactment are often blurred in the course of remediation’ (1997, 395). This raises questions about the ontological status of the images presented and their relationship with the voiceover narration. On the one hand, Patierno’s montage suggests an undifferentiated and purely illustrative approach to diverse cinematic texts, thereby signalling the constructed nature of all representations, irrespective of genre. However, the montage is sometimes indiscriminate to the point of distortion; this is best evidenced by Patierno’s incorporation of footage from the ‘Rome’ episode of Paisà, focused on prostitution, rather than the ‘Naples’ episode, which emphasises the destitution of the city’s residents. It is also demonstrated by the choice of clips from La pelle, which forefront the figure of Captain Malaparte and disregard entirely the film’s feminist reconceptualisation of the occupation. On the other hand, Patierno’s liberal recourse to feature film alongside historical footage gestures towards the fictionality embedded in Lewis’s retrospective account. Particularly revealing in this regard is the reliance on feature film clips to illustrate assertions relating to the flourishing of the black market, the extent and daring of ‘Neapolitan kleptomania’, and the pervasiveness of prostitution. While such reliance likely originates in the dearth of documentary footage of illicit or shameful activities, it implicitly acknowledges the tongue-in-cheek nature of many of Lewis’s observations (see Escolar Reference Escolar2019, 148) and questions the reliability of both Lewis’s account and historical interpretations indebted to it.

Accompanying the visual montage, the narration voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch in the English-language version of the film (and Andrea Giannini in the Italian) is necessarily selective and features heavily condensed excerpts from Lewis’s original. The mellifluous and measured quality of the voiceover combines with the dispassionate tone and the anthropological focus of Lewis’s description of conditions, customs and cultural practices in Allied-occupied Naples to convey a distanced, nostalgic approach to the past presented. That approach is supported by the elimination of key elements of Lewis’s original. These include entire plotlines with graphic depiction of the defilement of Neapolitan women under the Allied occupation; overtly racist accounts of reported mass rapes carried out by French colonial troops; the documentation of Allied officers’ dishonesty; and the extensive and highly original discussion of endemic corruption in the Zona di Camorra.

The elimination of these elements – all decidedly pertinent to contemporary concerns – combines with the undifferentiated montage of archive footage and feature film to sanitise the gendered violence of the occupation, downplay its relevance to the present and thereby consign the occupation to history. Supporting that mission is the prominence granted to Lewis’s anthropological perspective. This emerges throughout the film, in accounts of civilians who offer their services as informers, for instance, or in the light-hearted reports of the gravity with which extramarital affairs in Naples are conducted. However, it is most evident towards the end of the film, in the extensive descriptions provided of the religious beliefs, superstitions, and customs to which Neapolitans turn ‘in a state of nervous exhaustion’. The timeless quality afforded these practices and the generous space granted to the documentary footage detailing the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood (Il miracolo di San Gennaro, 1948) construct Allied-occupied Naples as a world apart, far removed from the mindset of the dispassionate foreign observer. This, then, is a rare form of remediation that, rather than heightening the immediacy of the past to facilitate audience identification, effectively distances it from the here and now of the contemporary audience.

That strategy is embedded from the very outset of Naples’44, which opens with an image of the pastness of the past – a classic historical map portraying ‘The Invasion of Italy’. The camera zooms out to a split screen to contextualise Lewis’s writings in relation to the Allied landings in September 1943, before introducing the motif that structures the film – the figure of the ageing Lewis, whose wanderings amid verdant foliage and the contemporary city evoke the black-and-white memories of the wartime past. In the first such instance, we see the protagonist reach into a hole in a wall to extract a watch inscribed with the name ‘N. Lewis’ and the date ‘8–9–43’, signifying the date of both Italy’s surrender to the Allies and Lewis’s first diary entry in Naples’44 (Figure 4). The stopped clock, the ageing male body, and the nostalgic quality of the scene, heightened by a plaintive string and piano score, eloquently convey what I see as the elegiac quality of the film as a whole. The corporeal metaphor of the elderly author’s return combines with Patierno’s summative cinematic construction of the occupation to suggest, paradoxically, that the film’s primary mission is to stop the clock on the cultural memory of the Allied occupation of Naples and, perhaps, restore it to those who experienced the events first-hand. In this respect, Patierno’s film marks the moment of passage identified by Jan Assman (2010, 111) between the ‘communicative’ or living memory of the past and the moment at which cultural memory proper – the much longer phase when all eyewitnesses and participants have died out – begins. The film thus speaks most directly to the idea that, as we move beyond the living memory of the occupation, we can only revisit it, in effect, as tourists, and in mediated or remediated form.

Figure 4.

The stopped watch. Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno, Reference Patierno2016.