Landlocked behind the ‘Gothic Line’, Veneto was one of the last regions in northern Italy to break free from German occupiers at the start of World War II, marked throughout by acts of radical resistance, extremely controversial and equally brutally repressed. by the enemy. An extraordinary film, black star of Italian political cinema, terrorist (1963) he returned with unprecedented dryness and precision to these facts, but twenty years later, when it was again possible to look them in the face, once the post-war neorealism that had made it its mythological basis had been resolved.
This first feature film, one of the rare ones by Gianfranco De Bosio (1924-2022), reappears in cinemas in a brand new format. Known as the director of Brecht’s theater, De Bosio was also an important figure in the Resistance, a member of the National Liberation Committee (CNL), active in the patriotic action groups, the GAP, these small self-piloted cells to commit sabotage. The man therefore knew what he was talking about when he recaptured this clandestine sequence, less in the form of a story than a report of activity, with this austere lucidity of examination that unleashed from within the unitary myth of Italian partisanship.
It is the winter of 1943, in Venice, shortly after the fall of the fascist regime, in the spring. Three partisans organize in the presbytery of a church to commit an attack against the headquarters of the Kommandantur, installed in the Doge’s Palace: dressed in German uniforms, they deliver boxes of bottles with a trap by boat. The operation, piloted from afar by a shadowy man, Renato Braschi known as “the engineer” (Gian Maria Volonté), fails. The targeted dignitaries escaped, the only victims were the Venetians.
Palpable tension
The response of the occupier was not long in coming: the captured partisans would be shot. The local section of the CNL, which brings together various political forces from communists to liberals, is agitated, the most moderate pleading not to be associated with these clandestine strikes described as “terrorists”. It is decided to disable the GAP until further notice, but the “engineer” continues his strategic strikes, now operating outside of any political control, even if it means finding himself increasingly isolated and exposed.
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