The subaltern cinematic voice: Silence and singing in southern Italy

The subaltern is a concept embraced by postcolonial theorists that owes most to Gramsci’s work on the Italian Southern Question. One of the early proponents was Gayatri Spivak who introduced it in her influential essay about the female voice of the subaltern. This article adopts Spivak’s considerations in relation to recent films about the Italian south. It will juxtapose the ‘voiceless’ shepherds in Michelangelo Frammartino’s two feature films Le quattro volte ( The Four Times ) (2010) and Il buco ( The Hole ) (2021) with the ‘raucous voices’ of the characters in the films of Marco and Antonio Manetti Song e’ Napule ( Song of Napoli ’) (2013) and Ammore e malavita ( Love and Bullets ) (2017). This article suggests that the clamour of the Neapolitan metropolitan voices do not stand in opposition to the silence of the rural world, but both are in fact aspects of the subalterns that, as Cere puts it, ‘can speak and know their conditions’.