Capturing fireflies as performative intervention: The YA chronotope of Le cose belle (2013) and Selfie (2019)

This article examines two films about Neapolitan youth – Le cose belle ( Beautiful Things ) (2013), by Agostino Ferrente and Giovanni Piperno, and Selfie (2019), by Agostino Ferrente – as illustrations of the Bakhtinian threshold chronotope. By capturing cross sections of southern Italian youth culture, the films give cinematic evidence that supports the French critic Georges Didi-Huberman’s response to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s famous 1975 essay ‘L’articolo delle lucciole’ (‘Disappearance of the fireflies’), where the Italian poet reads the disappearance of fireflies in the Italian countryside as the loss of pre-industrial popular culture. We argue that the complex, layered youth chronotope in both films shows the protagonists as enduring fireflies, exhibiting Benjaminian fulgurance and beauty, resistant to the lifestyles of crime and corruption that dominate media depictions of Naples today.