Italian Film Noir and the Fragmentation of Modernity. The Any-space-whatevers of Postwar Melodrama

This paper aims at investigating the intertwining of the aesthetics of film noir and neorealism in the context of Italian cinema after the Second World War. In order to individuate the similarities between these two trends, the article will highlight how both neorealism and film noir partake in the wider discourse of melodrama, and how the melodramatic imagination is key to understanding the relationship of these texts within the issue of modernity. Through a reflection on Gilles Deleuze’s category of the ‘any-space-whatever’, the article will focus on the deployment of postwar spatiality in a series of noir films dealing with the 1950s process of reconstruction. The fragmentation of space these films register and enhance creates a productive tension with the affective intensity of the melodramatic body. The result is a form of spatial anxiety that encompasses both neorealism and film noir, thus highlighting the importance of a transnational frame to the interpretation of Italian cinema on the verge of the economic boom.