ABSTRACT
In one of the opening scenes of Carlo Lizzani’s 1951 neo-realist masterpiece Achtung! Banditi!, the first great Italian World War II epic, the heroic partigiani, or anti-fascist partisans, descend from the Appennines to sabotage a munitions-factory towards the war’s end. Passing around a bombed-out and still smoldering farmhouse on their way down the mountainside, they come across one of the numerous road signs put up by the German army across Italy wherever it felt uncertain of its territorial control: ‘Achtung! Banditen’: ‘Beware! Bandits’. Defiantly, the partisans strike the sign with their weapons, tear it down, and throw it towards the cloud-shrouded valley below. The short scene encapsulates the movie’s moral message by underlining the historical polyvalence of banditry; for who were really the bandits in the Appennines? The sign clearly referred to the partisans themselves, dubbed bandits by the occupying forces, but in appropriating it the partisans expressed a warning to the real bandits in the movie’s moral economy: the Fascist regime itself; ‘Beware, bandits’, their stern faces seem to say, ‘we are taking our rightful lands back’. 1 One man’s bandit, to repeat a tired yet lucid cliché, is often another man’s freedom fighter. 2
