Political Perspectives - Hands Over the City

Political Perspectives
Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City


A strange bad luck hit the cultural development of the United States when we were granted full rights of the international movie business in the 1930s and 40s. Just a few decades before the U.S. was one of a few countries (including Germany, France and Italy) who were making major blockbuster films with the economic power to develop independent film studios into full fledged studio systems. Multiple countries becoming major world markets would have fostered a true international film market, but after two brutal World Wars that devastated European infrastructures, the U.S. won out with a monopoly of international sales.

When movies hit the United States, the result was the creation of the biggest vehicle of mass entertainment. It was also the perfect vehicle for manipulation of the public. Films began to back public slogans of democracy and the will of capitalism. Studios gained the power to control the distribution of films coast to coast so their backed films would be seen in every city.

The tides of film across the coast in Europe were radically different. Over shadowed by the dominance of the U.S. in the world market, European national cinemas began to foster filmmakers and films that purged the myth of political decency.

The Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi is unknown to most filmgoers in the U.S., but fostered a successful career in Europe to become one of the premier political artists in film history. His work began as assistant director to Luchino Visconti on La Terra trema (1948), but he ventured into his own by the late 1950s and 60s to make major works like Salvatore Giuliano and Mattei Affair. His ability to handle political affairs with great execution was so renowned that Federico Fellini once said, “[Rosi] is a leading filmmaker who reverberates our profession with a social dignity, of a crusader, living film as a heroic undertaking that requires will, courage, honesty, spirit of sacrifice.”

The 1963 film, Hands Over the City, is a prime example of Rosi’s social prowess. It deals with the beaucratic politics within Naples, Italy. The story is about the events after a collapsed building that left two dead and one injured. The citizens are outraged because it took place in a working class district. The Naples City Council takes notice of the public outcry but determines that no wrong doing took place to initiate the collapse. A lone Communist council member assumes something else is at work and pushes the council to investigate further.

The evidence leads to one man, a Naples land schemer named Edorado Nottola. He is in charge of questionable building project at an adjacent site to the collapse. The film follows Nottola’s maneuvers with politicians and City officials to hide the evidence of his crime. The structure of the film becomes a social realist effort to take a step by step look at how a terrible devastation could have been the work of a greedy businessman that was aided by a corrupt city government.

In this film there is no miraculous righting of the wrong. The lone Communist member out to uncover corruption fails in his regards while Nottola shakes hands with the right politicians to guarantee not only his safety from any prosecution, but the promise his future projects will go through because of the economic dividends they can do for the city. The film ends with a mocking celebration as Nottola cuts the ribbon to his new project and makes the promise of better future for Naples.

The contrast to American Cinema is clear. Whenever American films look at the corruption of political institutions, they mainly focus on outside forces doing the corrupting. Numerous films from The Godfather to the recent film, The Departed, continue a bad idea that our worst threat comes from the mafia. The idea is pure myth. The mafia once posed a larger threat but their incarnations now are just for romantic idealizations of the old idea of good guys and bad guys.

Films with the social insight of Hands Over the City do exist in America, but they do not crowd the multiplexes across the country. With the film Francesco Rosi won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. He also was able to get real City Council Members to appear as themselves during very heated scenes of debate between party members. It is stunning he was able to do that given the charges of corruption the film levies against the government, but Europe sometimes is able to have a deeper idea of freedom of speech with that cooperation. Better relationship with the arts afforded them that right.