Sono sempre storie complicate. Il progetto Stanotte hanno sparato di Michelangelo Antonioni

The essay identifies the sources and reconstructs the context and events of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized story Stanotte hanno sparato (1950). Thanks to unpublished documents, it traces the strategies used by the authors to deal with a bureaucracy meant to act as a form of censorship, and the strategies used by Giulio Andreotti’s subordinates to prevent Antonioni from filming his story because of its homosexual main character. The procedures followed on both fronts were abnormal in the way they played a surprisingly open hand but according to obscure rules. Nonetheless, the consequent superimposition of Fascist practice and contradictory postwar laws clearly reveals the institutional choices which ruled for at least a decade such sensitive an issue as male homosexuality.