Acousmatic Voices and Visual Glitches: Colonial Hauntings in the Experimental Cinema of Bacigalupo and Orsini

Abstract

This article examines the spectral afterlives of Italian colonialism and the elusive forms through which they resurface in postwar experimental cinema. Complicating the very concept of the postcolonial, I propose a counter-archive of 1960s Italian films that resist conventional modes of representation. These works—seemingly disconnected from Italian imperial history—challenge the a priori signifiers that define postcolonial cinema, particularly its reliance on explicit depictions of colonial temporalities and geographies. From within this counter-archive, I focus on Massimo Bacigalupo’s Quasi una tangente (1966) and Valentino Orsini’s I dannati della terra (1969). Both films ambiguously evoke Italy’s fascist colonial campaigns, while also bearing witness to mechanisms of ambivalence, hesitation, and sanitization—entangled with complex affects such as shame and nostalgia—through which colonial history was remembered and refracted in the specific conjuncture of the 1960s. These works emerge at the intersection of Third Worldism, decolonial thought, and workerism, within a broader historical context shaped by efforts to “defascistize” and rebuild the nation in the aftermath of World War II, the student uprisings culminating in the 1968 protests, the period of economic growth, and the subsequent phase of recession, civil unrest, and political violence that defined the “Years of Lead.” Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the diagram and engaging—while also departing from—Jacques Derrida’s figuration of the specter, this essay explores how these films operate at the limits of language and signification: in Bacigalupo’s work, through the disjunction between sound and image and the use of acousmatic voices; in Orsini’s, through the displacement of Italy’s colonial memory—an eloquent absence that materializes in what I define as a visual and conceptual glitch. Through its own distinct anti-representational, non-indexical, or spectral mode, each film in this postcolonial counter-archive prompts a rethinking of Italy’s overlooked underground cinema of the 1960s and the very terms by which colonialism is signified on screen.