Format: 16mm, b&w and/or color
Length: max. 20 minutes
Camera: Arriflex 16s, Bolex H16 Rex 5
Sound: mono, recorded on 1/4" tape w/NAGRA
As the new radical right is gaining acting power in Italy, Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Cultural Hegemony is offering us a possible explanation and solution.
For the first time since World War II, a post-fascist party has acting and policy-making power in Italy. To find a possible explanation on how conservative narratives -- constantly triggered by societal, cultural, and economic events: such as a possible economic crisis (Frank 2012; Hochschild 2016), the fear of the other (Stichweh 2010), and the threat of losing the identity of our imagined community (Anderson 2006) -- keep on reproducing, Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Cultural Hegemony (1971) is offering us a way to understand how social movements come to be and how a hegemonial class tries to keep its power. It does so through the establishment of a common sense, making the lower, subaltern class believe to find itself in the best possible of worlds. Gramsci’s fragmented theory explains us, how narratives get created, where to find them, and how they’ll end up into such a common sense, that will continue to repeat them. But Gramsci also offers a way out, by telling how this common sense can be changed through the emergence of new, organic intellectuals and by creating new forms of knowledge. Populist right-wing parties often like to describe themselves as such: as outsider social grassroots movements, like the American Tea Party -- or like Giorgia Meloni from Fratelli d’Italia, who calls herself an underdog. But very often they are orchestrated from neoliberal and big business friendly parties, and are therefore doing nothing else than just repeating the same kind of conservative narratives (Crehan 2016) -- through tax cuts; dismantling of the welfare state; privatizations,...
This is a reflexive and essayistic documentary film about Gramsci’s theory and the emergence of the new Radical Right in Italy.