“Shifting the Present: Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano.” Chronica Mundi 11.1 (2016), Special Issue on “Bandits and Banditism.” Ed. Sara Delmedico.

ABSTRACT: Salvatore Giuliano was a legendary Sicilian bandit whose story Francesco Rosi portrays in an unorthodox editing style, involving numerous flashbacks and flash-forwards that incessantly break the movie’s chronology. Rosi was resolute that there be nothing in Giuliano that was not taken from a version of the bandit’s mysterious death presented by the institutions, newspapers, and, probably more than any other source, television reports. The director does not use the plot to provide information, rather the information itself is the core of his work and becomes the actual narrative. Here the traditional neorealist narrative mode is deconstructed to displace consecutive narrative with multiple reports. The film explores the borders of the economic miracle and considers Southern Italy as a colonial outpost for the Northern economy, underlining how the nation was destabilized by intense regionalism. By focusing on the issue of banditry, Rosi exemplifies how the new global space has to coexist with traces of the past and imbalances between regions.