Shoot­ing the Mafia

Glanc­ing back over the incred­i­ble career of British doc­u­men­tar­i­an Kim Longinot­to, one might gen­er­alise that she has, through her films, shown an abid­ing inter­est in the female vic­tims of male vio­lence. As far back as her metic­u­lous and patient 1998 film Divorce Iran­ian Style, and through work such as 2005’s Sis­ters in Law, 2008’s Rough Aun­ties, 2010’s Pink Saris and 2015’s Dream­catch­er she has focused on oppressed women who have cho­sen to fight their corner.

At first, her new fea­ture Shoot­ing the Mafia seems like some­thing a bit dif­fer­ent for a direc­tor who usu­al­ly prefers a con­fes­sion­al, jour­nal­is­tic and obser­va­tion­al mode. This time around we have reams of juicy archive footage, mono­chrome pho­tog­ra­phy slathered in that Ken Burns-style slow direc­tion­al zoom, and only a small amount of new material.

This is a pro­file of Letizia Battaglia, a Sicil­ian pho­to­jour­nal­ist who worked through­out the ​’70s and ​’80s for the (now defunct) left wing news­pa­per L’Ora. Her gris­ly beat saw her first on the scene for the var­i­ous and fre­quent Mafia slay­ings in and around the city of Paler­mo, and one recur­ring visu­al motif of her pho­tographs is a corpse lying beneath a blood­ied white clothe with blood flow­ing out in all directions.

While her voca­tion meant she had to wit­ness macabre scenes often shield­ed from pub­lic view, an ulte­ri­or motive soon comes to light. She start­ed to doc­u­ment the grief of fam­i­ly mem­bers (often moth­ers) upon learn­ing that their son had, say, been clipped in broad day­light for miss­ing a pay­ment to a loan shark. The facial expres­sions she cap­tures mange to be far more haunt­ing than the butchered bodies.

Battaglia’s fight for legit­i­ma­cy in a male-dom­i­nat­ed pro­fes­sion­al envi­ron­ment makes for enter­tain­ing view­ing, though it’s real­ly the images them­selves that do much of the talk­ing. She is louche and con­fi­dent, and just a short time in her com­pa­ny reveals why she was able to suc­ceed. Like so many of the women in Longinotto’s pre­vi­ous work, Battaglia under­stands that she can­not remain pas­sive while local crime king­pins mur­der with impuni­ty, and so she decides to piv­ot to activism by set­ting up exhi­bi­tions of her work which force peo­ple to deal with the glum real­i­ty of this situation.

Longinot­to has long been an advo­cate of the idea that we some­times need to be con­front­ed by vio­lence to know the best way to fight it, and with that in mind, Battaglia seems less like a sub­ject than she is a sis­ter in arms.

The film grad­u­al­ly shifts away from pro­fil­ing this pio­neer­ing woman in order to tell the more well-known sto­ry of the Ital­ian government’s high-wire attempts to incar­cer­ate var­i­ous Mafia boss­es. This includes extra­or­di­nary video footage of the so-called 1986 Maxi Tri­al which took place over six years and led to the indict­ment of 475 mafiosi. As a post­script to all this, var­i­ous Ital­ian judges work­ing for the pros­e­cu­tion were killed (along with fam­i­ly mem­bers) by hired goons.

This switch to straight Mafia his­to­ry cer­tain­ly makes for com­pelling view­ing, but it’s almost as if Battaglia has been for­got­ten, and a male-focused sto­ry takes the lime­light. She nar­rates much of the tale, but it’s no longer about her. It’s per­haps the first time Longinot­to has pro­filed a per­son who is no longer doing her job, and nos­tal­gia isn’t her strongest suite.