Part 5 (C)
Faux-tography
Artists have incorporated another documentary source, the photograph, into the vast majority of esistenza comics, whether from the 1940s or last year. Italian comic artists over the years have borrowed from a practice of the wider commemorative tradition that collects portraits of partisans into books or on public monuments. To adapt this practice to their own medium, artists include reproductions of photos within panels, draw directly from photos, or, less often, invoke the photo/Polaroid image as a panel frame. Like a
foundation on first hand testimony, this device has the effect of authenticating a comic's narrative, but deceptively, as is the case for photography in general, an image brought to us from another time and place conceals and omits just as much as it allows us to see (among others, Barthes famously muses on inexactness and the photo in Camera Lucida [1981]). Also like first-hand testimony, the inclusion of photography can serve to reinforce established traditions and imagery related to Resistenza memory, the
photographic portrait of the partisan will be familiar to Italian readers and call to mind the commemorative practice mentioned above. The comic image invokes the established narrative, which informs reader interpretation.
Just as artists use first hand testimony to achieve a range of results in Resistenza comics, photography can offer more than a simple reference to artistic traditions already in place. For example, the anthology Resistenza, Cronache di ribellione quotidiana features Dario Morgante and Thomas Birres short strip In futuro ci scorderanno [In the future they'll forget about us]. Morgante's text of this minimally narrative piece recounts an episode in the area of Leonessa on Italy's northern plain with facts, figures,
reproduction of documents, while Birres's images provide an emotionally charged, figurative counterpart to the words. As Costantini uses Ultimo to delve into alternative manifestations of the partisan figure, Birres portrays groups of partisans that Italians do not often encounter in traditional photographic commemorative works, in addition to the standard robust young men, he also depicts an older man, women, and, perhaps most disturbingly, a trio of hanged partisans (of both sexes). Birres employs multiple styles to depict these partisans, making for a visually stunning strip, for this argument though, I will only call attention to those images whose style invokes photographs. This affect is achieved namely by the style of drawing, but also by vertical captions along their sides or frames that recall a Polaroid (I have confirmed with the artist that he referred to specific photographs, some of which reside at Rome's Museo della Resistenza). Birres drawings allude as much to the photograph form as they represent particular photographed subjects. What does it mean when an artist chooses to draw photos in a stylised manner, when the tradition permits and even encourages their direct inclusion into a strip or a photo-realistic style of drawing them?
With this choice, whether he intends to or not, the artist calls attention to his role as mediator between the history he portrays and the reader. Writing about photographic inclusions in Maus, Cioffi remarked that "by inserting a photo, an artifact from 'our' world, into the closing pages of the narrative, Spiegelman reminds readers that their constructed version of the Holocaust story has behind it an actuality, with guards and uniforms and real people: here is a photo from that world" (Cioffi 2001: 119-120). In his own piece, Birres invokes a "photo from that [past] world," and he goes a step further, indicating that the images on the comics pages are from our own time and world and have been interpreted by the hand of the artist. While the portrayal of partisans is sympathetic to the established Resistenza narrative, his means of executing his drawings serve as a literal reminder that forces of the present inform and even
reconstruct Resistenza history and memory.
Fiction as a channel to fact
Comics that root themselves in documentary sources make up the entirety of Resistenza comic work, with one exception, to my knowledge, to which I will turn now. Alberto Pagliaro's series Storie Partigiane has appeared roughly every month in the humour/satire magazine Il Vernacoliere and on the artist's online blog since April 2007 (I will discuss the communicative implications of online work in a moment), and it merits some attention for a couple of reasons. First, in it, the reader encounters a very different picture of partisans than those of the pedagogical comics mentioned at the beginning of this paper, reminiscent of adventure strips of previous decades. In Pagliaro's series, partisans cuss, ogle women through their
binoculars, fight physically, argue, and antagonise each other. At the end of the strips, it is clear that they participate in the same fight as the official narrative's dutiful partisan, strong in his camaraderie with his fellow combatants, but the day-to-day behavior and antics of Pagliaro's characters reflect a rather different paradigm, or at least, an under-represented aspect of the partisan experience. Further, the reader encounters characters who are not partisans themselves, but who aid in the struggle, again, the question arises of what Resistenza entails.
Besides portraying alternatives to the official narrative's version of the partisan, Pagliaro's strip stands out among other Resistenza comics because of its non-historical basis, he finds inspiration for his strips not in specific episodes from the past, but in his own daily experiences (he recounted these origin stories, so to speak, in an interview at the opening of Una storia partigiana, the artist's first public showing of this series, in Lastra a Signa, 25 April, 2008). A fictitious account of la Resistenza, though, may not be without merit, as it can serve to activate memories and post-memories that do correspond to actual events. Scanning the comments of Pagliaro's blog-readers, one finds instances of close reader identification with the strips, or of their connection between the strips and their grandparents stories of partisan activity. Pagliaro has struck a chord with his readers, and even if he is not telling a factual event, his work serves
as an access point to very real, personal history and stories for them. Witek asserted that there is a space between the historical fact and experiential truth, and that "'realism' becomes a conspiracy between writer and reader, not an essential relation between certain texts and the world of experience" (Witek 1989: 116).
Even though the connections Pagliaro's readers make with his strips are probably not quite the conspiracies that Witek had in mind, the point still stands that one can reach reality by means other than fact. With the online incarnation of Pagliaro's strips, a reader reaches another access point, this time, into the comic itself. When a reader looks at his blog, which includes all but the first strip of Storie Partigiane, he or she finds information related to the creative process, allowing a greater understanding of the work's content, in much the same way that Ultimo's documentary supplements reveal the research that went into the project or the way that Birres' drawings in In futuro ci scorderanno encompass both the forms of the
documentary source, the photograph, and of the mediated interpretation, the drawing. Further, contact with the artist and with other a reader promotes exchanges not only about the strips themselves, but the memories and perceptions they invoke. This channel into individual memory is invaluable in a climate where the historiography of la Resistenza remains malleable, and political forces continue to work towards establishing a generalized national memory where these individual experiences may be glossed over. It should be noted that the Internet as a site for accessibility and discussion is not limited to Pagliaro's strip: Costantini, Carnoli, and Colombari have made Ultimo available for download for free in its entirety, and
artists who publish work in the anthologies Resistenze and RES-istanze include their email and/or blog addresses. This online access to artists and their work multiplies possibilities for discussion about the art of a comic and the history it portrays. Conclusions, Refocusing on the reader. So, what can one conclude about la Resistenza as comic artists from the past few years have interpreted it? In conjunction with currents from Resistenza scholarship and from the international comics scene, one can trace, first and foremost, an increased presence of the artists within their work. When treating a national history, this has implications distinct from fictional or more personal autobiographical comics. Besides the problems and possibilities we have already mentioned, this presence may constitute an attempt to participate in la Resistenza as a national experience, as the second or third generation's way of claiming one instance of national identity (Hirsch [2001] discusses this same claiming process as it applies to Holocaust and post-survivor generations).
