Archibugi's cinematic representations of the socio-cultural changes in the Italian family.

The Italian cinema is turning its attention to the family, detonating, contradicting, and mocking centuries of rhetoric on the beautiful Italian family. Populated with a choir of new members, the family presents itself with a modern genetic and ethic map, the product of a metamorphosis that, over the past forty years, has changed its structure and educational role. Tradition and modernity seem to coexist in a dialectic relationship where socio-cultural dynamics among people and institutions lead to reflecting on, elaborating and experimenting with newly established models of family. According to sociologist Anna Laura Zanatta, the Italian society is experiencing a "transition from the golden age of marriage to the dawn of cohabitation" (7) together with a shift from the centrality of the parents-children binomial to a plurality of family forms. These are the topics at the center of recent demographic studies, as well as literary and cinematic representations.

The need to sublimate the familiar and ordinary in everyday life is a sentiment that underlies Francesca Archibugi's work. This Roman 43-year-old filmmaker has received unanimous critical acclaim and numerous awards for her films: Mignon e partita, 1988; Verso sera, 1989; Il grande cocomero, 1993; Con gli occhi chiusi, 1994; L'albero delle pere, 1998; and Domani, 2000. Archibugi explores the theme of friendship, love affairs and family relationships in the life histories of people of her own generation and the younger generation. Inspired by Francois Truffaut's films about children, she brings to life a polyhedral human universe. Archibugi casts her poetic gaze upon a mosaic of the tiniest emotions and examines the most diverse private worlds. Hovering between comedy and civic commitment, she offers her audiences carefully orchestrated films dealing with a spectrum of sociological issues relating to the new Italian familyscape.

The cinema of Francesca Archibugi is about the complex galaxy of the Italian family. The family's evolutionary process gives her the opportunity to explore the fluidity of this term, elaborate its multiple meanings and redefine parental figures and educational roles. Using the family as a societal cell, she represents various life trajectories, placing her young and adult characters in a symbiotic relationship of human apprenticeship. With an empathetic authorial eye, Archibugi's cinematic narrative portrays the relationships, emotions, anguish and frustration of the post-everything generation. Acting as a psychologist, sociologist, educator and parent, Archibugi can be defined as the director of the growing-up Italian. She documents, analyzes, chronicles and celebrates the qualities that make children and adolescents cultural protagonists of our era.

In order better to understand Archibugi's cinema, one must introduce the situation that characterizes the Italian family. Nowadays sociologists tend to refer more often to "families than to family to point out the plurality of new ways of living, and family experiences" (Zanatta 9). Rather than being concerned with the dissolution of the family, as the primary social cell and a place of loving and affectionate relationships, demographers use the plural form, families, to underline the profound transformations affecting this institution. Archibugi states that feminism has corroded the family, which had been "immota" (Mori 158) for centuries. In her films, in fact, families seem to be in constant movement. When she was asked what she thought about these transformations, more specifically about the future of the family, whether she had a new definition for it, given that the original term appears to have become obsolete, she replied:

   Let's say that not only feminism, but the entire women's revolution
   in the 1900s, even before the feminist movement, has affected the
   family, starting when women came out of their homes and entered the
   work force.... It was a real change in life and in the social
   structure, I think. Let's say that the family as an institution
   without love, as it still was in the 1800s, when people lived
   together, raised children and continued to live their lives without
   communicating, gradually lost reason to exist, thank heavens! What
   seemed to have happened violently in the center of the family is
   [the shift from] a social pact, [to] a pact of love that two people
   stipulate. It is no surprise that there are so many separations, so
   many divorces, when this love crumbles, ends, and changes. I think
   that the family continues to exist because it is the engine of the
   world.... But now to this union we ask something new that we did
   not ask before: happiness, that people are happy together, and, if
   this happiness is not there, it is not right; so it is licit, and
   it is becoming more and more natural, to break the pact. (Laviosa
   405-06)

Zanatta argues that "in spite of the weaker stability of conjugal life and the presence of a multitude of families, forming a couple, married or not married, stable or temporary, with or without offspring, is still the most preferred human condition" (16). It is therefore more appropriate to refer to the decline of a certain family archetype, rather than a crisis of the family in general. The modern family is sociologically complex and variegated, and "the word family has a very low descriptive function" (Cioni 10), which would need further qualifications to be sociologically defined. Having access to a choice of family examples creates, in other words, the need for a new terminology and phraseology. The following list, elaborated by sociologists, is an attempt to agree on the definitions of the newly coined vocabulary describing the picture of Italian family cells. The famiglia unipersonale is the smallest unit. It consists of a single person, of any age, living alone. It is often an option open to individuals who are without children and have never married, or are divorced, or widowed. The famiglia mono-parentale offers a solution to a single parent who finds him/herself in a situation of independent single parenthood, monogenitorialita. The recent wave of couples without children constitute an example of the micro-nuclear family, famiglia micronucleare.

Very common is the long family, famiglia lunga, composed of two or more generations living in the same household, i.e. parents with their adult single or divorced children. This type of family is defined as a form of business, famiglia impresa (Ginsborg 157). Its members establish new intra-family relationships, re-negotiate their private space and manage to protect their own life-styles. They also find solutions to an inter-generational exchange of emotional support and strengthen their economic interdependence.

Psychologically and anthropologically, the Italian family is in the midst of a paradigm shift. Uncertainty appears when the family adds social parents, genitori sociali, to biological parents. Examples are: the reconstituted family, famiglia ricostituita or famiglia ricomposta; the expanded family, famiglia allargata or nuova famiglia estesa; the step family, famigliastra; and the open family, famiglia aperta (Zanatta 69). Its members, usually parents with children from previous marriages or relationships, live together with their own newborn children, and experiment with novel formulas of loving coexistence. The reconstituted family struggles in the attempt to define new caring roles and share responsibilities of co-parenthood, cogenitorialita (Pocar and Ronfani 171). The emotional and physical presence/absence of the former spouse, together with sharing educational and financial responsibilities between biological and social parents, lead couples to explore forms of plural parenthood, plurigenitorialita (Pocar and Ronfani 193). This family structure is more like a clan composed of several father and mother figures cohabiting with siblings and half-siblings. The effort to function as an operational family in a new kind of kinship is the challenge that contemporary Italian society faces.

Archibugi addresses the central theme of the family's closeness and interdependence by focusing on the challenges of parenting and the pains of adolescence. She carries out a psychological and anthropological study of the seasons of the Italian family, works with the conceptual indeterminacy of the word family and gives intense representations of new parental figures in recent family forms. She exhibits an artistic vocation for the study of the relationships across generations and in different social contexts. Produced from 1988 to 2000, her films cinematically rewrite the historiography of the Italian family, and traverse the evolutionary stages till the end of the twentieth century.

In 1988, Archibugi's debut feature, Mignon e partita, depicts what seems to be the prototype of the nuclear and united Italian family: the large and lively household of the Forbicionis who live in an intense emotional atmosphere of tolerance and hypocrisy. The story is narrated by the voiceover of the main character, Giorgio Forbicioni, a bespectacled thirteen-year-old. Reading from his journal, he narrates the encounter with his snobbish fourteen-year-old cousin Mignon, daughter of the wealthy Parisian branch of the Forbicioni family. During her long stay in Rome, Mignon behaves as a reluctant visitor to the modest home of her uncle Federico, in the Flaminio neighborhood. Giorgio reflects retrospectively on the seismic psychological changes and the pain of growing caused by his falling in love with her. Contrary to all mythical images of the united Italian family, the Forbicionis are chaotic and noisy. There are five children; a disillusioned, dissatisfied mother Laura approaching middle age, often complaining about her lost dreams and heavy family duties; and a childish, unfaithful father who is busier with an extramarital affair with the shop assistant than with his family. While conflicts are inevitable in the hectic household, there are compensatory factors in the casual, affectionate portrayal of family life as indicated in the scenes at the dinner table where they have pasta tights and use toilet paper in place of tissues.

In 1989, in the film Verso sera, Archibugi presents her first example of a broken family consisting of a separated couple--a single mother and her child with an abdicating biological father who is fully replaced by the paternal grandfather. This family is temporarily recomposed in a long family structure with the mother and child living in the same household with the grandfather. Archibugi observes the cross-gender and cross-generational interplay in the disintegration of the family nucleus, especially when the Bruschi's family life is animated by the mother's escapes and returns, abandonment and appropriation of her parenting role. In this scenario of conflict and pain, as Laura Benedetti (1999) points out, adults are only partially accountable as individuals, because their responsibilities are profoundly influenced by the specific socio-cultural dynamics of the 1970s.

The story unfolds as Ludovico Bruschi's voice-over reads a yearning letter-narration he writes for his granddaughter Papere when she turns eighteen in 1989, the year the film is made. From those notes, she could better understand her past and new present as Ludovico concludes "If your mother was right or if I was right, you will probably know." This lyrical letter traces a psychological and moral analysis of Ludovico's life as a private flashback and recounts the events of the year that she and her mother Stella spent at his house in 1977.

Oliviero, Papere's father, withdraws from the demands of the family and the stress of urban life, finding an alternative solution to his failed masculinity in an environment that is more congenial to his timid nature: the pastoral tranquillity of a farmhouse in the country where he tends goats in a communal type of life with a new female partner. Ludovico and Stella therefore hold complimentary and strongly conflicting parental positions over Papere's upbringing. Meanwhile, Papere is a little girl who lives in her own world of lively imagination. She sees herself split into two inseparable and distinct identifies: Papera "prima" and Papera "seconda" (which explains the plural Papere). Her perception of a double self is symptomatic of the state of anxiety caused by her parents' conflicts. Her real name is Mescalina. She thinks that it refers to the fact that she was conceived under a mushroom. Stella's mother believes that it is the name of an ancient, beautiful Roman queen, while Ludovico explains, during a conversation with Stella's mother, that it is the name of an hallucinogenic mushroom. This element foreshadows the drug related theme that will be later developed in L'albero delle pere.

In 1993, after four years of artistic silence, Archibugi explores the theme of dysfunctional parenthood and the psychological repercussions of conjugal crises on children in Il grande cocomero. She examines the altered psyche of a young teenager whose psychological implosion generates a state of chronic neurosis. In order to counterbalance the devastating consequences of family disharmony, Archibugi in this film gives a moving characterization of a single man, the apotheosis of the father figure, devoted to his humanitarian mission, in contrast with an unhappy married couple with a daughter.

Once again, the narration is punctuated by the main character's voiceover reading while typing his medical journal. Arturo, a character profoundly inspired by the life and values of the neuropsychiatrist Marco Lombardo Radice, is a brave, idealistic and passionate child psychiatrist. His civic commitment, moral sacrifice, humane style, and lay therapy are rewarded by the patients' love and respect. The story starts in October in 1991. Arturo and Valentina, a twelve-year-old girl affected by epilepsy (nicknamed Pippi like the heroine of the famous film because of her long, skinny legs), struggle together in search of a solution to her condition. The family element is introduced through the addition of two weak parents set against a darkened background. The father is involved in lucrative and obscure criminal activities, while the mother, nervous and fragile, is busy shopping and watching television. They are virtually helpless when they have to cope with their daughter's illness. They overprotect her, leaving her alone at the same time.

Escorted by her mother, Pippi is taken to the hospital following one of her periodic fits. By sheer chance, she is visited by Arturo who immediately realizes that her pathology is the expression of a severe existential crisis. The treatment is a gradual process with highs and lows. The hospital becomes a new home for Pippi where she chooses to live. Here she overcomes her hostility and mistrust of doctors, built over years of unsuccessful psychiatric therapies, and manages to establish a privileged relationship with Arturo. Unlike her mother, no one is afraid of her illness in the hospital where she finds a family of doctors and nurses who take care of her. She meets friends whose insanity, like hers, is not perceived as a disease or a social threat, but is considered a different and dignified way of being. These young patients are like social brothers and sisters. They form an extended, nurturing and playful community where Pippi finds the motivation to grow and recover.

In Il grande cocomero, Archibugi denounces the overwhelming inefficiencies of the Italian public health care system, glorifying the heroic personal effort of a militant psychiatrist who devotes his life for the good of his patients. Antonio Vitti (2003), however, argues that both the ethical message and the style of the film have little in common with the political films produced in the 1970s, the years of protest and social unrest.

After the parenthesis of the adaptation of Tozzi's novel Con gli occhi chiusi, in 1994 (not examined in this article), Archibugi ventures into more painful family situations. The deterioration of the family structure escalates and reaches a level of pure chaos in L'albero delle pere, 1998. She analyzes the moral and emotional destructiveness of drug addiction in an open family or quasi-family consisting of two biological fathers, one half-brother and one half-sister from the same mother. The drug element adds an extra dimension to the violent explosion of the family, which breaks into small particles: parents and children, all being pulled into the orbit of the heroin addicted mother.

In this film, Archibugi explores youth in the strenuous effort to survive in problematic families. The seemingly poetic title anticipates a sense of apprehension and foreshadows tragedy. Archibugi explains what she alludes to: "In Italy 'pere' are the fixes. The tree made me think of a genealogical tree. The tree gives a sense of family. So I wanted to tell, in a very impressionistic way, the story of a family that was so violently conditioned by drugs and by the mother's drug addiction" (Laviosa 381).

The main character is Siddharta Pelosi, a fourteen-year-old, curly-haired, who roves the streets of Rome on a personalized scooter during the congested rush hours. Siddharta studies studio art at the high school, plays rock music, is a cyberfan, is completely autonomous, takes care of his mother, and baby-sits Domitilla, his five-year-old half-sister. She lives with her father Roberto, an affluent lawyer obsessed with cell phones, who occasionally and reluctantly lets Domitilla stay with her mother and half-brother. Siddharta, instead, lives with his mother Silvia, a drug addict who does not work, lives by her wits and engages in destructive relationships. Siddharta's long-haired father, Massimo, is an alternative director of experimental videos for television, who separated from Silvia after fifteen years of a difficult marriage destroyed by her heroin addiction. He often drops by and helps Silvia and Siddharta when he can, even with his illusions.

Siddharta and Domitilla are the children of parents in their forties who nostalgically insist on living as if they were still in the 1970s. In a family pulled apart by all sorts of quarrels, the parents are unable to assume their own responsibilities. It is the young adolescent male protagonist who replaces them and takes care of them. With this film, the cinematic world of Archibugi examines the example of a stepfamily or expanded family, experiencing complex relationships and extreme conflicts.

The story is set in Rome during the Christmas holidays in 1997. Domitilla moves into her mother's home and, as in a cruel fairy tale, pricks herself on a used needle while searching among her mother's toiletry. This accident is reminiscent of Charles Perraults' princess in Sleeping Beauty who pricks her hand on the spindle of a spinning wheel. Siddharta does not want to cause anguish or pain to his mother, nor does he wish to reveal the problem to Roberto who would keep Domitilla forever. He is also unwilling to seek advice from his father Massimo who would not know how to help. Therefore, without involving any of the adults in the family, Siddharta immediately starts an Internet search to find information. He is helped by anonymous doctors and is advised to have his sister tested for AIDS and various forms of hepatitis.

Siddharta's expanded family, whose genealogical tree consists of only partially blood-related members, is scattered in various parts of the city. Even though they are separated, possess very diverse life styles and hold different values, they are not entirely disconnected. In fact, they are brought together on New Year's Eve by Silvia, the only family member that they all share. Her drug addiction, however, is a negative centripetal force that first attracts husbands and children to her, then turns intimate moments of family reunion and celebration into occasions for irrational fights and old recriminations. With L'albero delle pere, Archibugi completes her tetralogy of thematically and structurally related films set in Rome.

In her most recent film Domani, released in 2000, Archibugi chronicles urban, private family dramas and she places them in a broader socio-cultural background of unresolved contrasts. She digs into the realms of the human soul, bringing out the private clashes occurring in situations of extreme tragedy, as in the natural disaster caused by an earthquake. She also uses this tragic event metaphorically to analyze the damaging shocks and aftershocks within the domestic tensions of several family groups.

In Domani, Archibugi leaves the urban Roman culture. She is the first director to tackle the aftermath of Italy's devastating earthquakes in the Umbria region in 1997 and to give a choral representation of a small town struck by seismic shocks. The story describes the life of the Zerenghi family, with Paolo, the father, who, as deputy mayor, takes charge and has the job of putting the pieces back together. His wife Stefania is saddened by the calamity, while their two children, Filippo, the tall and thin, polemic and litigious sixteen-year-old, and Agostino, the eleven-year-old, are in open conflict with their parents.

Archibugi's narrative eye lingers also on two eleven-year-old girlfriends: the impulsive Vale and the curly-haired Tina (reminiscent of Siddharta). Vale and Tina, who sound like "Vale[n]tina" (reminiscent of Valentina/Pippi in Il grande cocomero), one name and one person, are really inseparable. While the earthquake disrupts social and family life of the town, they react by strengthening their friendship, becoming closer and innocently more intimate. They share journals, secrets, kisses and photos of their childlike chests. The fragility of their souls is unveiled by the destruction of their homes and the precarious conditions of their lives.

"There is a quake of bodies and souls which preexists the earthquake and of which the earthquake is only an amplified reflex" (Terrone 56). This ensemble drama details the friendships that grow and the relationships that change between the survivors of the earthquake. The townsfolk deal with various personal issues as they try to resume normal lives in a tragic situation. The story is laid out in a series of existential jolts: the young boy Agostino fears a crack appearing in his warm home life, he suspects his mother of finding consolation with their young and attractive roomer Giovanni; while Vale and Tina become estranged as their classmate Agostino chooses Tina as his girlfriend. The shocks of the earthquake become the occasion for breaking the tranquil daily routine of individuals, for revealing their fear, courage, and, most of all, for exposing life with its defeats.

Archibugi's films are crowded with children and adolescents who populate a world of confused parents. These disoriented adults are often in search of new educational roles. They are sometimes unprepared and unaware of their responsibilities, or in denial and tired of their parental duties. In her stories, adults are institutional bourgeois mothers and fathers usually in their forties and in a state of lazy ideological reflux. They lack authority, behave carelessly, are too easygoing, and often reveal moral disengagement masked as tolerance. Against this panorama of weak grown-ups, children do not face infantile adversities; on the contrary, they deal with open wounds and are put in the position to grow up fast. Archibugi firmly believes that

   childhood and adolescence [are not] a happy age precisely because a
   child is not equipped to face wounds, a child is much more
   vulnerable than an adult. For this reason, ... I do not understand
   where the whole idea of a lighthearted childhood comes from. It
   seems that no one remembers the moments of bewilderment and anguish
   in front of things that seemed to be bigger than they really were,
   more frightening, more mysterious because children in general do
   not know them. (Laviosa 407)

In Archibugi's films, parents seem to have lost their authority. However, she is not pitiless towards them. She shows empathy and solidarity mixed with subdued sadness. Her dramaturgy is never inflamed; it is rather linear, steady and calm. She refuses to portray mean, cruel, dark, negative, vile, despicable characters; she would not work "creatively with contempt or revenge," while her characters are "people who make mistakes, but have two qualifies: authenticity and respect for the difference in the other" (Sesti 13). Adults choose to live different stages and novel forms of happiness. Although Archibugi sees the end of a marriage as a positive change, she is also aware of the price that children pay:

   Obviously children suffer a lot because breaking a pact of love
   between a father and a mother is a psychological earthquake. There
   are two parts of you that separate. Before you were one thing made
   of two things, then you become a thing made of two separate things,
   and we need to take this into account.... The wound however is
   part of life, the wound is a form of mourning, like losing a
   parent, and developing a new identity. These are things that need
   to be dealt with because they change life. (Laviosa 406)

Unhappy children like Giorgio, Mignon, Papere, Pippi, Siddharta, Domitilla, Tina and Vale are surrounded by withered parents. These adults are exhausted by mediocre and disappointing relationships and no longer believe in their own feelings. Children ask questions, expect exemplar behavior, but instead receive inadequate and evasive answers from adults. "Adult children and child adults" (Sesti 11) are Archibugi's characters. She uses her children's turmoil to magnify and mirror adults' troubles.

   Children are watching us. And they say that we are very bad, that
   we have identity crises, that we form improbable families, that we
   are the real adolescents, that we do not have the authority to
   raise them. In one word, that we grope. (Sebastiani 18)

In this manner, Archibugi's cinema talks about children, but speaks to their parents. Battling between harsh criticism and a desperate cry for help, children unveil the abysmal void in communication, and play a central role in establishing the scheme for a moving dramaturgy.

Children and adolescents are cultural protagonists in Archibugi's films in the sense that these "people of few years of age" (Sesti 10), as she defines them, are often victims of family situations. They experience a painful and problematic growth and seem to act as moral judges towards the actions of adults who are often their parents. When asked whether her young characters are intentionally put in the position of expressing a critical and moral judgment towards their parents, Archibugi answers:

   The main characteristic of the age of adolescence is to be critical
   towards parents. It is a natural stage, necessary to acquire one's
   own identity. When this does not happen, there is often something
   that does not work, like in situations when, for example, there is
   an excess of emulation or no need to read adults" actions
   critically. This is a psychological and anthropological thesis.
   This particular situation is usually a spark for me to narrate
   characters, and characters are better presented in moments of
   crisis.... So, children seem to be more critical, or parents more
   fragile than they really are, just because I have isolated those
   characters in a moment of crisis in their lives. Let's say that it
   is a dramaturgic device. (Laviosa 376)

Through an exploration of several family types, from Giorgio's to Pippi's, Papere's, Siddharta's, Vale's and Tina's, Archibugi introduces her audience gradually and effectively to the social restructuring and moral function of the family. "The moral tone of Archibugi's work had grown more insistent with the passing years.... she appears to position herself not as an elite director, but as a moralist and a filmmaker whose work is addressed to a broad range of Italians" (O'Healy 135). Her message is that parents continue to wield tremendous influence over their children and play a vital role in coordinating and mediating what touches their children. As a director, Archibugi an alarming message to warn parents and invoke their educational authority. She seems to alert them to the imperative to love, connect, monitor, limit, provide for, and advocate for their children.

WORKS CITED

Benedetti, Laura. "Il tema dell'infanzia nel cinema di Francesca Archibugi." Women in Italian Cinema. Ed. Tonia Caterina Riviello. Roma: Fabio Croce Editore, 1999. 255-67.

Cioni, Elisabetta, Maria Carla Meini, Alessandra Pescarolo, and Paola Tronu. Famiglie in mutamento. Le fonti e i dati 1971-1991. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1997.

Ginsborg, Paul. L'Italia del tempo presente. Famiglia, societa civile, Stato 1980-1996. Torino: Einaudi, 1998.

Laviosa, Flavia. "Intervista con Francesca Archibugi. La famiglia post-moderna nella sua firma d'autore." Roma, 16 marzo 2002. Incontri con il cinema italiano. Ed. Antonio Vitti. Caltanisetta: Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 2003. 403-14.

Mori, Anna Maria. Nel segno della madre. Torino: Frassinelli, 1992.

O'Healy, Aine. "Are the Children Watching Us? The Roman Films of Francesca Archibugi." New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema. Annali d'Italianistica. Ed. Gaetana Marrone 17 (1999): 121-36.

Pocar, Valerio, and Paola Ronfani. La famiglia e il diritto. Roma: Laterza, 1998.

Sebastiani, Massimo. "Piccoli e grandi (disagi)." Francesca Archibugi. Ed. Carola Proto. Roma: Dino Audino, 1995.18-19.

Sesti, Mario. "Non sono bambini, sono persone di pochi anni." Francesca Archibugi. Ed. Carola Proto. Roma: Dine Audino, 1995.10-14.

Terrone, Enrico. "Domani." Segnocinema 108 (2001): 56-57.

Vitti, Antonio. "Un profilo dell'identita del nuovo cinema italiano tra crisi, televisione e omologazione culturale." In Search of Italia. Ed. Antonio Vitti and Roberta Morosini. Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 2003. 235-56.

Zanatta, Anna Laura. Le nuove famiglie. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997.

FLAVIA LAVIOSA, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College, received her PhD in Foreign Language Education from SUNY Buffalo and her Master's Degree in European Film Studies and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Her research interests focus on pedagogical aspects of foreign language education, the history of the Italian feminist movement, and the cinema of Francesca Archibugi, Liliana Cavani, and Roberto Benigni. Her current research project is a study on film directors from Apulia.