At one point in this film* the photographer Letizia Battaglia** talks about holding an impromptu exhibition of her photographs on the streets of Corleone, a Sicilian mafia stronghold. You think that maybe this is that film convention – the pivotal moment, an act which changes the tide of events. The interviewer asks what it was like to do such a thing, to take the war into the enemy’s camp, so to speak. “It was terrifying” says Letizia. and you see footage of the town’s residents looking at the horrifying images of violence and murder and walking silently away. Clearly, nothing is changing.
Uncredited publicity shot
From the mid-1970s on Battaglia photographed the results of Mafia violence in Palermo and beyond when it did seem as though the Italian state was losing the fight against organised crime. She wanted to show that this was not simply a war exclusively between so-called mafia men of honour but a campaign which used fear and violence to silence a population. The photographs themselves are both shocking and mesmerising, showing corpse after corpse and murder after murder. The photographer says that at times she was shaking so much she had trouble even remembering basics like exposure and focus. Still some reviewers insist on talking about the aesthetics of the images, of her sense of composition and so on – which just seems like a way of avoiding the reality of the photograph.
One of the main themes that emerges from the film is the sustained courage that it must take to do this work over such a long period in the face of harassment and death threats and an all-pervasive fear. Yet she has captured also other sides of Sicilian society in very beautiful photographs. This mercurial quality comes out in the film: she talks deeply and passionately about her work and then suddenly dismisses it and suggests it achieved nothing.
I came out of the film feeling a bit shaken myself. Partly it is the sheer power of her personality: being in her company must be a bit like being on a bicycle in a hurricane. Partly also it was the nature of the photographs. And then it was the archive footage of a society on the brink of chaos. Not unlike the photos of Gordon Parks that I reviewed in a December 2017 blogpost. you think that these images have done their job and that they are now history. Then suddenly that same chaos in a different guise reappears on the horizon. Then photos like these are back in the fray. In that sense, this is a very timely film.
The focus of the film, though, is the photographer. She provides the narrative which is filled out by colleagues and lovers plus old newsreel and documentary clips. The visuals, including her own photography, tend to be ancillary. It’s that imbalance again between the word and the image. Many of the photographs are unexplained shots of male corpses: we have no real idea who the victims are. Personally I would like to have heard a little less of the Letizia herself, compelling presence though she is, and seen a little more of the photography with details of how it was used in the anti-mafia campaign.
* Shooting the Mafia (2019) is a documentary directed by Kim Longinotto and produced by Niamh Fagan
** LB appears not to have a website - that I can find anyway, though any search engine will pull up plenty of material about her.