“Evening Rituals: Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead.” Presented at Intersections: Crossing Italian Borders in Music, Art, Literature, Theater, and Cinema. June 2-5, 2016. Kent State University, Gonzaga University, and California State University Programs. Florence, Italy.

ABSTRACT: Focusing on Dillinger is Dead, this study explores how the geopolitical changes brought by the economic miracle and the early RAI television images impacted the so-called “battle of sexes” of the 1960s. Constructed around a few uncut sequences, the film depicts an uxoricide by a corporate employee in cold blood. Throughout the display of a rich intertextuality, the film reverses Vincendeau’s formula of “autistic masculinity” at work in many Hollywood film noir and French New Wave works, choosing instead to show the progressive feminization of its protagonist. In doing so, director Ferreri adopts an anti-narrative regime and a phenomenology of gratuitous acts, arm wrestling with television’s real time. For this reason, I argue that the movie’s allegorical subtext is that of a luxury apartment haunted by the ghost of duration.

KEYWORDS: Conspiracy films, television, masculinity, film noir, Gilles Deleuze.