The Fossil Disappearance of Fireflies: Energy Modernity, Cultural Genocide and Industrial Harmfulness Between Neocapitalist Italy and the Ecosocial Emergency

Abstract

The article analyzes the relationship between the imaginaries of fossil modernity and the cultural transformations taking place in neocapitalist Italy, with the aim of proposing a broader reflection that speaks to the current context of ecosocial emergency. To this end, it draws on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Scritti corsari (1973–1975) and his posthumous novel Petrolio (1993), in which the Italian poet, filmmaker and intellectual investigated the history of ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi). Once conceived as a project of national and anti-colonial capitalism with a human face under the leadership of entrepreneur Enrico Mattei, this state-owned company had by then become a prototype of neoliberal globalization under Eugenio Cefis. The article addresses the role that fossil ideology played in the audiovisual imaginaries produced by ENI, particularly through the analysis of two specific films: I prigionieri del sottosuolo (1956), by Ubaldo Magnaghi, and L’Italia non è un paese povero (1960), by Joris Ivens. “Finally, the last part of the article describes how the socio-energetic narrative promoted by ENI’s documentaries, but also Pasolini’s critique of hyper-consumption, were challenged by the mobilizations of the new generations of activists that emerged in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, organized around operaismo, feminism, and an industrial ecology based on the concept of ‘nocività’ (harmfulness).”