Screening the Fragments: Pasolini's 12 December : A Cinematic Archaeology of the “Strategy of Tension”

Abstract

This article examines Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1972 documentary 12 December, a collaborative work with Giovanni Bonfanti and the Lotta Continua collective, as a cinematic investigation of the “strategy of tension” and the Piazza Fontana massacre. While contemporary representations of Italy's Years of Lead often risk transforming political violence into a fetishized object of nostalgic or suspenseful consumption, Pasolini's film offers a radically different approach. Through an analysis of the documentary's aesthetic strategies—its testimonial camera work, its symbolic topography of power, and its phenomenology of suffering bodies—this article argues that Pasolini constructs what might be called a “cinematic archaeology” of the broken republic. Rather than reducing the massacre to an isolated mystery (the fact in itself), the film restores it to its material context: the worker-student struggles of the Autunno caldo (Hot Autumn), the crisis of political representation, and the systemic violence of Italian capitalism. By juxtaposing Pasolini's method with contemporary televisual and cinematic narratives, this article demonstrates how 12 December remains a vital ethical model for representing historical trauma—one that prioritizes understanding over spectacle and symptom over enigma. In doing so, it invites us to inherit not Pasolini's style, but his parrhesiastic gaze: a commitment to telling the truth of reality in all its conflictual complexity.