François Truffaut states that cinema is “a window on the world”, the view through which is granted to all and which opens up new horizons of understanding and awareness.
But which world presents itself before the eyes of the spectators? Film can play, more and better than any other expressive form, an important role in education toward tolerance, welcome, listening and the search for truth. This is a feeling perceived with greater insistence in moments of stronger political, social and cultural tension. To this corresponds the need, on the part of filmmakers, to investigate current affairs, to enter into the dynamics of power, to write and rewrite history, dramatizing its content and at the same time making it accessible and close to the spectator.
Cinema is an agent of history, of a cultural transformation that takes place not only in the collective imagination but also in life, that is, in a real context. In everyday life. In the way of observing, of understanding, of evaluating.
The 1970s channel a strong feeling of cultural and social rebellion into a path of awareness that has its roots in the cinema of Sydney Pollack and Alan J. Pakula; in Francesco Rosi, who anticipated the genre as early as Le mani sulla città (1963); in Ken Loach who, between past and present, between family tale, social critique and inquiry, makes of his films a political manifesto, an invitation, an exhortation to spectators to reclaim their identity as citizens, to return to taking part in public life, so that it is they, and not government apparatuses, who bring about the changes society needs.
Such a political passion tied to cinematic storytelling, relegated to a niche phenomenon over the last twenty years, is powerfully reborn after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the most tragically important event of recent history.
Cinema changes not only in the redefinition of the models it proposes, but in the themes it tackles. The changes are at first small but significant. The documentary returns to cinemas sixty years after Why We Fight by Frank Capra illustrated the reasons for American intervention in the Second World War; this renewed attention is dictated not only by an audience more predisposed and interested in the new strategies of information, but also by the intuition and the ability of producers and directors to work political tendencies and cultural tensions into an audiovisual form that weds a documentary slant with the rhythm proper to cinematic fiction, through a simple, often ironic and captivating language. Godawa and Winter coin the term “docu-ganda” to define the assault documentary in the style of Michael Moore, a cine-documentary that breaks away from the educational aims of its origins and figuratively mounts the barricades of politics, making the audiovisual medium the instrument for explaining the author’s point of view, as the author adapts the narrative to his own communicative and strategic needs.

Michael Moore’s commercial success opens the way for Al Gore and his An Inconvenient Truth, which opens an unresolved debate on global warming, for the biographical interviews with political figures of the 1960s and 1970s such as the former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (The Fog of War) or the former President Jimmy Carter (Man from Plains, directed by Jonathan Demme). The Corporation too, which refers, albeit indirectly, to the Enron scandal, falls in this wake, becoming a point of reference for the anti-globalisation movement, whose foremost spokeswoman, Naomi Klein, appears in the documentary as a commentator.
But the rebirth of the cine-documentary is only one of the novelties of the cinema that came after 11 September. In an ideal parallel that links the turbulent decade of the 1970s to the years of the new millennium, war is the theme that most allows these two periods, so distant and yet so similar, to be compared.
For the collective imagination, the war in Iraq becomes a new Vietnam still to be interpreted, with the difference that now the film industry, aided also by a different expressive and analytical maturity, tackles the controversial theme of war in its psychological dimension rather than in that of narrative: the public’s perception of the war at home leads to rethinking stories and settings, to reconsidering the problem of veterans returning home, of the indelible aftermath that war leaves in the lives of servicemen and their families.
As in a collective working-through of grief, American cinema at first denies that 11 September ever happened: the autumn of 2001 is marked by this understandable and evident denial of the facts. The sentimental film Serendipity, set in New York, has every image showing the Twin Towers deleted, and the same goes for Spider-Man, in which the planned promotional trailer (Spider-Man trapping the Twin Towers in his web) is immediately scrapped. Spider-Man also inaugurates a line of extraordinary success, that of superheroes, which effectively replaces science fiction to bring a new genre made of cross-contaminations among a multiplicity of expressive codes. What is more, the superhero is what America needs, and this new idol is an ordinary man, overshadowed by life but for whom destiny holds a future as saviour of humanity. The spectator’s emotional catharsis before the deeds of the masked hero merges with the impossible in reality; nevertheless, in the dimension of dream and illusion of the cinema hall, which amplifies every emotion and brings it to light, the miracle is accomplished, humanity is saved, and the hero, like a cowboy, for love renounces love, and takes on a moral responsibility that condemns him to torment and solitude, but that restores freedom to the people, of whose life he is the wise, silent guardian.
Entertainment cinema, though not explicitly tied to 11 September or to Iraq, seems to focus on the working-through of a grief, a trauma of the past, a dramatic individual situation that, however, becomes an allegory, the means to recount a devastating collective tragedy. Thus, even in purely entertainment films, in comedies and thrillers, such elements can be found. This is the case, for example, with Anger Management, The Butterfly Effect, 50 First Dates, The Interpreter.
Nevertheless, alongside the triumph of escapist comedies and the spectacular films inspired by the graphic novel, cinema progressively rediscovers the fascination of the war movie. With the exception of Black Hawk Down, the first war film to be released after 11 September and one that interprets the sense of revenge, courage, brotherhood and sacrifice of the American army precisely in such a delicate historical phase for the United States, the war film of the new millennium abandons the triumphalist tones that made it famous and often takes on the tones of a human tragedy, inexplicable and without reason. The interpretive key is for the first time so introspective as to give the idea that America sees the war in Iraq not only as a mistake for which no explanation can be found, but above all as an evil that, having crept into the bosom of the family, suddenly explodes, bringing about dramatic consequences for individuals and for the community.

Between the Iraqi desert and the American provinces there is a red thread, the soldier, connecting two apparently opposite worlds. The observation that cinema makes of this particular reality is oriented toward explaining war through the traumas it brings to servicemen and their families. The recent Brothers, Grace Is Gone, Reign Over Me, Home of the Brave are only some of the films that take up this perspective. Even an innocuous comedy like Valentine’s Day inserts the character of a soldier (Julia Roberts, a subtle symbol of America) on leave from the front, who goes to visit her daughter. War is taken up as a human condition, a part of everyday life that involves and concerns everyone.
The war is inside, it is everywhere, at home, on the streets, in people’s minds and hearts. The protagonists are ordinary people, soldiers or veterans, struggling against themselves in the complex working-through of their own personal grief. The private is the collective, and the process of identification/projection is instantaneous.
A new awareness takes shape, one that becomes political consciousness after twenty years of slow and progressive disengagement, alongside a renewed politics of integration.
11 September makes it necessary to rethink relational dynamics and society, the multicultural and multiethnic web: the working-through of collective grief gives way to a deeper reflection on causes and responsibilities, renewing the splendour of the espionage and “conspiracy” cinema of the seventies. The success of the series inspired by the character of Jason Bourne, born from the pen of Robert Ludlum, is the sign that the new hero of spy stories can no longer be just any Jack Ryan, honest and determined but bound to the hierarchy of the intelligence services, nor an Ethan Hunt of Mission: Impossible. He is a lone wolf, without identity and without memory, who lives as an outlaw, an evolution in line with the adventures of Three Days of the Condor. Once again, the political class, distant, authoritarian and detached from the moods of the country, becomes the object of conspiracy thrillers, and acts of terrorism are, with ever greater audacity, attributed to the highest spheres of power. The effectiveness of the cinematic narrative makes the conspiracy theory credible, even when it directly implicates the Capitol. In the attempt to build an unofficial and alternative collective historical memory, impossible but undeniably captivating, filmmakers become standard-bearers of a cultural movement that soon changes into a political movement and that cannot but influence the surrounding reality, public opinion, sowing doubt about hidden truths that have been withheld from the people.
And if cinema issues an invitation to become active citizens and not to accept passively the decisions of one’s own Government, at the same time it seeks to sensitize consciences to the themes of welcome, interculture and integration.
The culture of integration invests all of cinema, in its most global dimension: from Private, to Crash, Babel to No Man’s Land, up to the allegorical District 9, political analysis knows no geographical limits and above all gives way to a social analysis that first becomes a deconstruction of stereotypes, then changes into a proposal of education toward interculture.
The first film of the trilogy inspired by the X-Men arrives in cinemas as a science-fiction film, but the subsequent chapters transform the story of the mutants into a parable about talent, diversity and the need for integration between cultures; in the events of the X-Men one can make out the difficulties of any community outside the norm, different and suspended between inclusion and self-exclusion.
It is instead the film Gran Torino that represents, almost definitively, the fears and needs of a society that, in order to overcome those very fears, must necessarily open up. The film recounts a slice of provincial life, and in its protagonist, a grumpy and lonely old man, isolated in the past and in the melancholy of an almost mythical era, there is the whole of America (though, broadening the frame, one might say the whole of society) closed in on itself, rooted in its own convictions and incapable of looking at the present as a reality in the making. That part of the world that stays sitting on the porch watching time flow by and that, all of a sudden, finds itself catapulted into a future where the only barriers are those created by the mind. Where overcoming prejudice is the challenge to better oneself and help others, to change destiny and to find in sacrifice a way of making peace with one’s fears, faults and mistakes. Gran Torino is the bearer of an important message of tolerance, powerful and timely, that works through the widespread fears of the community by offering the spectator a simple but not easy solution. Learning to listen, to communicate, to support the other and to recognize in him the shared traits of one’s own being. The protagonist’s inner journey is the one everyone ought to make. Knowing how to open up, to welcome the other into one’s own life, to unhinge every conviction and look ahead in order to learn, to question oneself every day in order to grow, improve, give meaning to the human condition. More significant than The Hurt Locker, whose critical success ideally puts an end to war stories and at the same time consecrates their rationale, the work of Clint Eastwood bears witness to an important change of perspective, a song to humanity that will find in Invictus the symbolic closing of the circle.

Cinema no longer proposes itself merely as a metaphor of its own time, in which films represent a document, important though it is, of the present, but as an instrument of intervention to interpret the new orientations, the directions, the states of mind and the moods of individuals and of the community, and consequently to help change, to bring to evolution, to open society to the knowledge of itself, of its lives and of the breath of the worlds that, ever more indelibly, intertwine with it.

Francesca Borrione lives in Perugia, where she is pursuing a PhD in Human and Educational Sciences. She has published the volume Il maccartismo e gli anni inquieti del cinema americano (Morlacchi, Perugia 2007) and the novel L’uomo che attraversò il tempo per me (Il Filo, Rome 2008).