Keywords

• This paper examines the ways in which contemporary Italian middlebrow cinema has revisited the recent political past
• and in particular the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s. It will examine three particular devices: the use of flashback
• the use of musical montage sequences
• and the use of original archive footage
• to attempt to identify a poetics of memory in films such as La prima linea (De Maria
• 2009)
• Il grande sogno (Placido
• 2009)
• La meglio gioventù (Giordana
• 2003)
• Romanzo criminale (Placido
• 2005) and Il caso Moro (Ferrara
• 1986).
• Further
• it will argue that these devices work to establish a poetics of what I will call 'middlebrow impegno'
• a designation that chimes with the recent call by Antonello and Mussgnug (2009) for a «resemanticization of impegno»