Cinematic remediations and the Allied occupation of Naples: Experiments in Cultural Memory

This article addresses cinematic remediations of literary works treating the Allied occupation of Naples: Liliana Cavani’s La pelle (1981) and Francesco Patierno’s Naples’44 (2016). Taking a memory studies approach, it surveys the corpus of cultural representations of the occupation and asks what the remediations studied contribute to the Italian cultural memory of the occupation. Analysis focuses on the diverse strategies deployed by the films to reshape the cultural memory of the occupation for their respective audiences. I argue that where Cavani’s remediation seeks to construct a feminist counter-memory of the Allied occupation, Patierno’s film betrays a contradictory impulse to both revive and lay the cultural memory to rest. I close by asking how successful the two films are in becoming meaningful ‘media of cultural memory’ (Erll 2010, 390) and what that may tell us about the place of the Allied occupation in Italian cultural memory at distinct historical junctures.