Italian Polizieschi of the Anni di Piombo and the Filmic Aesthetics of Random Violence: Children, Community, and Catharsis.

This article studies the cultural function of the representation of violence in Italian polizieschi of the 1970s within the historical context of the anni di piombo. Focusing especially on the representation of victims in the filone, the article claims that polizieschi presented for the first time a particular aesthetics of victimhood that I call 'aesthetics of random violence'. I retrace the experiential core of this aesthetics in the filone's recurring representation of imperilled, wounded, or dead children. The pervasive presence of this representation has so far remained practically unregistered in Italian studies scholarship. I therefore propose a novel periodisation of the filone based on the evolution of the aesthetics here described. Finally, I argue that through this aesthetics polizieschi allowed viewers a communal catharsis that reinforced the bonds between them as a united social body against the violence produced by terrorism and organized crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]