Conclusions Judicial Truth and Historical Truth

Let us, in conclusion, return to the controversies about Spike Lee’s film, from which I started. I do not here intend, for lack of space, to enter into the merits of the debate about the film. Succinctly, I maintain that every artist should be free to rework, and also literally to invent, or to distort, the historical reality of the facts, preferring his “own” style, suitable for the messages he is interested in communicating. If then the dramatic fiction that caused such a stir— the invention of the figure of the partisan traitor—has produced a good film or not (and, previously, a good novel), and if it has shown respect or not for the feelings and expectations of the survivors, who had warmly welcomed the director to Sant’Anna, is a question that does not concern the logical reasoning of the subject I have been dealing with in this book. I would like to point out, among other things, how the problem of the transmission of more or less distorted historical knowledge through the media—cinema, television, the press, the Internet—is a question that goes well beyond the controversies contingent on the film in question, and on the Italian Resistance, and concerns the nature of those who mould the collective memory—namely, the widespread perception of the events of the past—following the crisis of the agencies that were traditionally the depositaries of such an important task: the school system, and therefore above all the state institutions, but also the political parties and their ideologies.