The Transitional Human Being

This book analyzes the crisis of the idea of human being based on timeless notions, in the Euroamerican context, as seen primarily through literature and cinema. It focuses on Italy, which has been and remains a crossroads for diverse cultural and political currents—open to Mediterranean cultural influences while remaining within a typically Western cultural context. The “new man,” defined by Corrado Alvaro during his trip in Russia in 1934 as “transitional,” implies a human being with a fundamental need for change. Instead of the “new man,” Italo Calvino in the 1960 preface to his I nostri antenati wrote about the incomplete human being who is always changing, always being completed without ever reaching completion, and thus always in transition.

In these pages, the author examines the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries Italian metamorphosis of the concept of the human being, mirroring closely at every historical turn the contextual demands of the country. From Brignone’s film Sotto la croce del sud (1938), and its faulted “biracial” protagonists to the Netflix series Summertime (2020), characterized by the intentional lack of problematization of a multicultural society; from the fascist manhood represented by Roberto Rossellini’s aviator “modern knight of our time”(1942), to Fellini’s Marcello who chooses to not choose (1959); from Marinetti’s idea of the woman who belonged “to the race’s development” (1919) to Mazzacurati’s Mara, who wishes “to live thirteen different lives” (2007); from Primo Levi’s non-humans and stripped men, to not-belonging, to Arendt’s stateless persons, to migrants crossing the desert and the Mediterranean sea in Segre’s and Rosi’s movies (2008, 2016): the journey chronicled in these pages is a surprising one, as today’s Italy is very different than that imagined toward the second half of the nineteenth century.