A serial distrust: conspiracy and blame in the Italian poliziottesco and news media.

Abstract

The article explores the poliziottesco (Italian Cop Thrillers) to document its contribution to the national debate on political, criminal and institutional violence in the early 1970s. It investigates the representation of the police and the judiciary in films with state-driven conspiracies at the centre of their plots. The article interrogates the possibility of using these films as historical documents by connecting them to news media discourses around the so-called strategia della tensione (strategy of tension), a series of terrorist attacks aiming at artificially raising political tension in Italy. Positioning the films as intermedial texts (Rajewsky, 2005), it is possible to identify shared representational and interpretative strategies between the seriality of Italian newspapers and that of these low-budget and fast-produced genre products. The use of news media as devices and news media narratives in the films allows them to intercept both the trauma related to the outcomes of terrorist attacks and the rage for the lack of effective state action. This approach sheds a new light onto often critically dismissed products and aims at situating them as a place of negotiation for the attribution of blame for the failures of the Italian state in the struggle against political violence.