Cavani's La Pelle: "Il Soldato Negro," Naples, and the Theater of World War II

This paper will examine the cinematic representation of African American soldiers in Italy during the Second World War. I will begin by tracing the filmic signification of the African American soldier in Italy: as representative of the liberation of Italy from the Fascist regime, as symbol of the solidarity between two marginalized and oppressed groups (Italians under Fascism and African Americans), and simultaneously, as the dangerous “other” who threatens the racial homogeneity of the postwar Republic. This dual signification can be seen in a group of neorealist and immediate postwar era films, including Paisan (R. Rossellini, 1946), Without Pity (A. Lattuada, 1948) and Tombolo Paradiso Nero (G. Ferroni, 1947). While this postwar group of films have been well documented, the majority of this paper will turn to a later representation of the WWII African American soldier as found in Liliana Cavani’s La pelle (1981), an adaption of Curzio Malaparte’s novel set in Naples during World War II. While this film does not fall within the traditional canon of neorealist and postwar films that feature the African-American GI, Cavani’s adaptation offers an opportunity to reflect upon prior representations of black American soldiers in the Italian cinema. Through scene analysis, I argue in Cavani’s La pelle, viewers are asked to re- think racial and gendered difference, as well as the use of blackness as metaphor within the Italian WWII war film and the greater Italian cultural imaginary.

This paper examines the representation of Italian and African American servicemen in the Italian war film. While existing scholarship has examined the representation of Italians, scant attention has been given to the image of Italian American servicemen in Italian film. Similarly, discussions of the African American soldier have focused on their appearance in a number of immediate post-World War II and Italian neorealist films, and has centered on John Kitzmiller, the most prominent African American actor in the Italian postwar cinema. Through an examination of films and broader contemporary visual culture, our contribution explores the representation of American soldiers of Italian and African heritage in the Italian cultural imaginary. In relation to the image of Italian servicemen, we argue that the representations of Italian and African American soldiers stage oppositional masculinities (in terms of race, language, ethnicity), which support the construction of an Italian national identity.