Film Details:

• Film: L’abbaglio (2025)
• Director: Roberto Andò
• Cinematography: Maurizio Calvesi
• Editing: Esmeralda Calabria
• Music: Michele Braga, Emanuele Bossi
• Screenplay: Roberto Ando, Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso
• Production: Angelo Barbagallo, Attilio De Razza (Tramp Limited, BiBi Film, Rai Cinema, Medusa Film, with Netflix)
• Main Cast: Toni Servillo, Salvo Ficarra, Valentino Picone, Tommaso Ragno, Giulia Andò
• Locations: Palermo and other historical areas of Sicily.

L’Abbaglio is not a film that openly absolves its characters, its institutions, or its historical project. On the contrary, it never declares anyone innocent. Yet this absence of explicit absolution is precisely the mechanism through which responsibility is systematically neutralized. The film constructs a world in which violence is always visible, but never fully imputable. No one is cleared. No one is held.

Historical action is never presented as the product of a decisive moment. Characters act, but their actions are consistently framed as responses to circumstance, necessity, or context. Violence appears as something that happens because it must, not because someone chooses it. The gesture is never isolated as an act that could have not occurred. As a result, the historical subject is neither innocent nor guilty in any strong sense. Responsibility dissolves into situation.

This logic reaches its most refined form in the treatment of Garibaldi. He is not staged as a historical agent confronted with uncertainty, error, or conflict. He functions as a completed figure, already sedimented into myth. He does not decide. He embodies. He does not hesitate. He traverses. His speech and gestures operate in a temporality that no longer belongs to conflict, but to commemoration. The Risorgimento, through him, acts without anyone ever being shown as accountable for its consequences. History moves, but no one answers for it.

Institutions follow the same logic. The State, the army, and the historical process itself are never presented as sites of choice. They are environments. They are already there, already operating, already producing effects. Violence emerges from them as a condition, not as a decision. What is given is not judged. It is observed. The film does not deny institutional violence. It renders it unassignable.

The most delicate effect of this construction concerns the spectator. The viewer sees violence, recognizes distance, and detects anachronism. Yet the film never places the spectator in a position where judgment can attach. The temporal frame has already been flattened. The act has already been displaced. What remains is visibility without imputability. The spectator is not absolved because judgment is suspended. The spectator is absolved because there is nothing to which judgment can firmly adhere.

This structure is sustained through the combined operation of anachronism and distance. Anachronism does not function as error or oversight. It produces a flattened historical time. Words, objects, and gestures that do not belong to the period circulate freely. Political language anticipates later categories. Modern materials appear without friction. Military gestures are simplified into forms immediately legible to a contemporary eye. Garibaldi himself appears as an icon rather than a figure in formation. The past offers no resistance. It is already translated.

When time is rendered homogeneous, responsibility no longer appears as a situated choice. It becomes a recurring function. Anachronism normalizes rather than simplifies. It transforms historical specificity into surface.

Distance completes this operation. Violent acts are consistently staged away from the moment of decision. They are seen from afar, from behind, or through other bodies. Consequences are shown without the gesture that produced them. Decisions are attributed to necessity or circumstance rather than embodied in a face. Ellipsis resolves what might otherwise generate ethical fracture. Violence is not hidden. It is disincarnated.

Where anachronism flattens time, distance suspends attribution. Together, they produce a precise effect. Violence appears as the outcome of an eternal context rather than the product of a historical decision. It is not that no one is guilty. It is that guilt no longer has a time or a face.

Sicily plays a decisive role in this configuration. It functions as a space of symbolic discharge. Landscapes dominate bodies. Light, dust, and immobility render violence environmental rather than political. The territory absorbs responsibility. Brutality is associated with place rather than decision. What happens there appears inevitable, almost natural. By territorializing violence, the film removes it from history. If it belongs to Sicily, it no longer fully belongs to anyone.

This logic extends to the treatment of sacrifice. Orsini, Domenico, Rosario, and Assuntina are not constructed as tragic figures whose deaths open conflict. They are narrative instruments that allow violence to conclude rather than to question. Orsini’s late search for forgiveness in the epilogue does not reopen history. It seals it. His descent into clandestine space does not confront responsibility. It absorbs it. Redemption arrives not as transformation, but as exhaustion.

Assuntina’s passage from religious authority to secular cause follows the same pattern. Divine legitimacy is replaced by national rhetoric, but the structure of justification remains intact. Violence continues, only its language changes. The film does not show the substitution as problem. It presents it as resolution.

What L’Abbaglio ultimately organizes is not an error of representation, nor a failure of courage, but a coherent epistemic choice. When the past is rendered contemporaneous and the act is rendered distant, history becomes a surface. On that surface, violence can appear repeatedly without ever needing to be assumed. The film does not claim that no one is responsible. It constructs a world in which responsibility can no longer take hold.

Bibliography

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Responsibility and Judgment.
New York: Schocken Books, 2003.

Foucault, Michel
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Benjamin, Walter
On the Concept of History.
In Selected Writings, Volume 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Said, Edward W.
Culture and Imperialism.
New York: Knopf, 1993.