Between elaboration and dismissal. An analysis of documentaries broadcast by public Italian television on terrorist violence and ideology during the Anni di piombo.

In our paper we want to describe a specific kind of communication that could be seen as going “over the top”. We refer to documentaries recently broadcast by the Italian public television broadcaster (Rai), asking victims of the massive social violence that occurred in Italy during the Seventies to recall their sufferings in order to help their audience – especially young people born after the end of these events – to have a representation of this difficult period of the Italian past. We observed in-depth these communicative acts of victims, paying special attention not only to the verbal contents of their bearing witness but also to their body communication. Using a mixed methodology, based on a multimodal analysis of communication (Poggi, 2007) as well as on the analysis of facial expressions of emotions (FACS, cfr. Ekman & Friesen, 1978), we detected some significant differences in the communicative acts of victims recalling the past massive violence that occurred in Italian society. Two different kinds of stances (Goffman, 1981; Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) emerged from an initial analysis of these communicative acts: victims either judged that by now the time had come to allow former perpetrators to be reinserted into social life, or continued to express their resentment against them. Although journalists authoring documentaries clearly showed, through several communicative signals, that they preferred the forgiving stance to the resentful one, the aim of our paper is to describe how, using an in-depth analysis, not only the expression of resentment but both these communications of victims seem somehow to go “over the top”. At the end of this in-depth description, we propose an interpretation of the functions fulfilled by these different kinds of communication by framing them in an overall hypothesis on the more general societal processes that are expected to be used in order to arrive at elaborating a traumatic collective past (Nadler, 2001). The final point that we will try to make is that the broadcasting of the polemic dialogue between the forgiving victims and the victims sticking to their resentment may perhaps be an effective way to enhance societal elaboration of this past violence. We think in fact that, without the harsh debate between victims sticking to their resentment and victims distancing themselves from it, the memory of these difficult years risks somehow being dismissed from contemporary social discourse.