A great success from the first day on the platform with 80 percent approval of users. The TV series «Brigans» it defeated the competition with a mix between history and the western genre, between reality and fiction. Many characters actually existed, from Filumena Pennacchio to Michelina De Cesare, others don’t and sometimes they seem to have been cloned from Clint Eastwood in “A Fistful of Dollars”. This is the case of the «Sparviero», the same big hat and the same cigar perpetually in his mouth. Photography and location (almost all in Puglia) are beautiful though. Strengths and weaknesses of a fiction.
For goodness sake, no historical certification, despite this the television series is destined to cause discussion because it deals with an era, the post-unification one, from 1862 onwards, showing it in a different light and promoting a message, right from the start, totally different from the one that has always been provided on brigandage and its repression. Here the “cops and robbers” stories give way to “civil war” clashes. And the media message, as we know, creates opinion.
Furthermore, the Piedmontese are coming for the first time portrayed as an invading army, ruthless, who corrupts and kills without mercy. At times the series brings to mind “Soldier Blue”, Ralph Nelson’s 1970 film which was a point of no return in American cinema regarding the tragedy of the Indian people. The John Wayne western epic has been completely overturned. Furthermore, for the first time, after Pasquale Squitieri’s film «engaged» in 1999, the brigands are shown as “partisans” or oppressed, tortured farmers, forced into hiding and fighting because they want freedom and their land. And this brings to mind “The Man Who Will Come”, a film about the Marzabotto massacre by the Nazis. Obviously all relevant comparisons must be made with the necessary “distinctions”, but the discussion has already begun.
Gennaro De Crescenzohistorian, essayist, professor of Italian in Scampia and president of neo-Bourbon movement after watching the first episodes thanks Netflix. «”They say that my land is poor and cursed but it is not true: my land is rich and for this reason there has always been someone ready to plunder it…”. Thus begins the Briganti and the message series starting from Bennato’s song Raiz version he is strong and decisive. We really need to thank the authors and producers of this drama, partly foreign, because they give the opportunity to look at those historical events from another point of view.”
Well, obviously some university professors will turn up their noses…
«It’s not a historical fiction but that doesn’t mean that there are many interesting ideas. After about a century and a half and with very rare exceptions, until now the Unification of Italy had not been told from the other point of view, including the resulting war of the so-called “brigandage” which devastated the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for over ten years”.
But in movies there are always good guys and bad guys.
«The scheme is simple, true and effective: on one side the “bad guys” (the Piedmontese led by General Fumel, the real architect, among other things, of many massacres in those years), on the other the “good guys”, the brigands (“we are not bandits, we are brigands”, shouts the protagonist) who, despite cruelty and betrayal, fight for “the gold of the people of the South” in a battle that “is not only for the gold but for the land that God gave us and for our freedom and that of the women and men who will come.” Summary executions, deportations to the North, the support of the church (“God will understand me”), the Bourbon flags, the concept of foreign invasion and plundering of the South: many of the theses often defined as “neo-Bourbon” pass through. Despite the 160 years of totalitarian dominance of the official media and intellectuals and despite our few and small means to fight back, our reading of brigandage, perhaps, then, has won and will win again, also given the spread of Netflix especially among young people” .
Another striking thing about fiction is that women, all of them, have a leading role. They are the ones who command, who decide, who direct the people. A film license?
“I would not say. In reality it was like this. Just think of the figure of Michelina Di Cesare on which the fiction focuses a lot. For example, the symbolic image of her on the poster with the word “freedom” which is put up in peasant villages. And Filumena herself, the protagonist, is none other than Filumena Pennacchio, one of the most famous brigands of the time, and then there is “Ciccilla”, alias Maria Oliviero who with the Monaco gang gave the Piedmontese army a hard time. In short, despite sometimes magical-surreal scenarios, even in this case we are dealing, in the background, with historical truths.”
It should be underlined that the anthropologist Domenico Scafoglio, who (together with Simona De Luna) dedicated a 600-page essay based on unpublished documents to the brigands, interviewed by the Corriere del Mezzogiorno reiterated the strength of a protest that kept the army in check Piedmontese for ten years with very few men, excellent fighters and strategists and bearers of a culture that was later defeated.
