Dead Man Walking: The Aldo Moro kidnap and Palimpsest History in Buongiorno, notte

Abstract

The centrist Italian politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped in 1978 and murdered 54 days later by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) a far-left revolutionary group. The kidnap has come to be perceived as the key event of the Italian terrorist period of roughly 19691983, and has displaced the other events of the period in national memory. There are several films devoted to the kidnapping; Buongiorno, notte (2003), based on the memoir by one of Moro's jailers, is unique among these in evincing a sophisticated awareness of the means by which historical understanding is constructed through a clash and superimposition of discourses, including various forms of fictional representation. The film is a meditation not solely on the Moro events in themselves, but on the place of the memory of Aldo Moro in Italian culture, and on the means by which the perception and historicising of the Moro kidnapping is generated.