Children can represent both truth and rebellion.*
—Chiara Bisconti, child viewer of La torta in cielo,
written response to the film, 1973
I am a militant of the workers' movement who is trying to make cinema
and I intervene in a disorderly way.
—Lino Del Fra, director of La torta in cielo,
personal correspondence, 1974
In 1973, Italian communist film director Lino Del Fra and his constant collaborator Cecilia Mangini released a children’s film, La torta in cielo (The Cake in the Sky), that was also a satirical antiwar film, in which liberation takes the form of an enormous flying cake. The film was funded by Istituto Luce, the same state body that then proceeded to attempt to shut down its production and its distribution.1
In the opening scene depicting widespread panic in a Roman suburb, La torta makes explicit reference to the Communist Manifesto when a military commander describes the cake as a “spectre haunting the skies over Rome.” The cake represents communism, and throughout the film it betokens the destruction of militarism, the evaporation of nuclear force, the dissolution of the ruling class, and the end of commercialism and media corruption, all while operating, in pied-piper fashion, as an irresistible magnet for the visionary exuberance of children.
Chiara Bisconti, quoted in the epigraph above, is one of several children who provided reviews of the film after its release.2 Del Fra and Mangini specifically sought the views of children on the film, turning away from the critical elite in order to prioritize the vision of kids. Honouring the children’s talent for truth-telling, this kind of enlistment was coherent with the strategies that informed the film’s production—in which children were both actors and consultants—and with the filmmakers’ broader practice of socialist critique through the documentary form.
As 2023 saw the surfacing of a political art seemingly unrecognizable to the art establishment, I’m fascinated by this prioritization of the views of children instead of culturally anointed experts. From posters to music to writing to videos and performance, art led by youth and informed by revolutionary traditions has flooded our phones and public spaces. In a moment when the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher, repeated failures to mention this art of rebellion shamefully fastens the art world to the bankruptcy of a culture whose institutional framework dully refuses to acknowledge Palestinian resistance and existence.3
In addition to innumerable firings, exclusions, and punishments for being Palestinian or showing solidarity with Palestinians over the past months, we saw a slew of art and cultural institutional disgraces on the subject, from Documenta, to Artforum, to the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, to the Frankfurt Book Fair—exposing a damning slate of deliberate evictions and revocations rooted in outright bigotry, fear, and ultimately, an allegiance to Western foreign policy. To those who would shrug at cultural institutions’ adherence to such policy on the grounds that it’s always been that way—we should ask why an open display of that historical consistency, that long project of normalization, should be felt as less horrific instead of more.
It was astounding to read year-end reviews that absented, or bemoaned a lack of, vibrant political art, while failing to mention the final, world-altering months of 2023. But it is precisely because the art world holds art institutions, rather than art, up as social and societal reflectors, that it so often becomes the most flagrant of cultural disappointments. The refusal to acknowledge genocide is justified here through the claim that it is beyond the scope of a given cultural context.
Of course, mass murder and massive revolt aren’t outside of any cultural scope, nor are they actually unseen by any cultural establishment. Our institutional apparatuses willfully evade the confrontation of a truth that would place their funding, and themselves, at risk. The same mouthpieces that try for politically, racially, and monetarily-motivated reasons to swipe the masses into line by equating support for Palestinian resistance with antisemitism, are then also free to refuse altogether to address a genocide with massive world-historical implications. In self-protective fashion, they insist that to even acknowledge politics is inherently extreme, that political activity of any kind is a choice to provoke, and that political concerns are mere trends, rather than realities at the locus of our survival.
Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra recognized the absurdity of this position in the late 1960s, understanding that part of their work was to help film audiences confront the hypocrisies of the institutions of capital. La torta in cielo is about a war on children, and in this sense, it couldn’t possibly be more reflective of our present. As I sat in the Cineteca di Bologna archives last February and March researching the film, I could not have imagined that, by the time I would show it in Winnipeg (in December of 2023), its central narrative: a war waged upon innocent children by the fascist military force of a ruthless state wielding its many arms: media propaganda, corporate power, military force, against them—would bear such a garish reflection in the form of the unimaginable slaughter of thousands of Gazan children by the Israeli military.
Here the limits of imagination become their own horror, as vision and comprehension are usurped by a scale of death and misery that overwhelms both computation and emotional response. But beyond the panic of this incomprehension resides the enormously significant incapacity that I discuss above: the cultural unwillingness to confront the truth. An unwillingness to accept an implication that is as unavoidable now as it was in 1973: the destructive force of capitalism and its pinnacle in imperialism.
That children are visionary, fair-minded truth-tellers may be more fantasy than not, but the impulse to conclude that adults are the world’s experts of fucking everything up, and children its clairvoyants, has legitimate origins.
Cinema of resistance
The choice to create a fantastical children’s film might at first seem odd for a duo of documentarians committed to exposing complex social issues. But an element of the supernal can be found in all of the Mangini-Del Fra projects. And while Allison Grimaldi Donahue divides Mangini’s filmography into two conceptual categories: the proletariat and the magical,4 one could argue the irrelevance of such a divide; that instead the two concepts cohere as an indivisible presence that forms the basis for every one of the films made by the “unorthodox communist”5 Mangini and the theoretically inquisitive Del Fra.
La torta was produced at the beginning of the Years of Lead, a time of intense ideological dislocation, and a political climate so involute that “the very existence of Italy seemed to be in question.”6 With Palestine on my mind and the link between the film and the present established, I was curious about the significance of Palestinian resistance to the Italian left of the time. Indeed, the importance of Palestinian resistance to communists and the left after World War Two and through the Years of Lead was significant. The film’s entire production, from conception to release, can be mapped historically between two massive Israeli aggressions against Palestinians—the Naksa, 1967, and the October War, 1973. After the war, the Italian Communist party viewed Palestinian liberation “not only as anti-colonial, but also as an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolution,”7 and Italy at that time, and increasingly through the 1970s and 80s, became the Western European country most sympathetic to the Palestinian plight.
The 1967 War in particular would play a crucial role in the development of that solidarity. Many Palestinian students who came to Italy after 1967 immediately undertook political action, and subsequently formed the General Union of Palestinian Students, an organization that became an influential political force. The GUP was successful in building relationships throughout popular and grassroots movements, as well as within leftist political parties like the Communist Party and Unità Proletaria, and with political organizations like Lotta Continua, Potere Operaio, “and other Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist groups.”8
Del Fra and Mangini’s choice to step behind cameras at all was born of a desire to challenge the systemic frameworks that they were born into and immersed.9 According to Mangini, Antonio Gramsci’s thought “forbade us to produce folkloristic documentaries on the poverty of the South, the spectacularisation of rags, the extolling of farmers to the status of holy figures in a Neapolitan nativity play.”10 Together, they looked at filmmaking as an expression of social depth and movement toward change through investigation and experimentation.11 Every subject was to be afforded humanity and respect without valorization.
Although the student movement wasn’t as strong in Italy as it was in France and other European countries, it did serve a unifying purpose. The GUP and the broader youth movement became a door for the subsequent workers’ movement.12 Del Fra was involved in the workers’ movement and had a background in pedagogy. Mangini was frustrated with the fatalism of neorealism; “those sentimental populist tropes which, through catharsis, depicted the issues in our society as inescapable, fatal conditions of living.” The two worked together to produce films on issues facing the working class and the marginalized in Italy: migrant workers, the rural and urban poor, women, youth, and, in the case of Mangini’s documentary short film that came out a year after La torta, La briglia sul collo (1974), the child outcast, the young misfit.
The truth-tellers
The film begins with the absurdity of misguided fear. Instead of being fascinated or enchanted by the enormous flying cake’s appearance in the sky (as the children are), the adult world panics and is thrown into chaos. Not only do adults fail to see the cake’s beauty, but their fear catalyzes all of the typical destructive responses: call the police, call the mental hospital, call in the troops. Before even understanding what they are dealing with, these subjects of state propaganda refuse their own liberation. Children, however, are equipped with vision and fascination, and are thus poised to refuse this refusal. By the film’s logic, those who cannot believe in the cake (communism), cannot comprehend it, and vice versa.
Set in the late 1960s and released in the early 1970s (production spanned an almost five-year period due to ongoing state obstruction), this fabular story follows the question of truth in the form of the cake. The adults refuse to believe, not only that the cake is not a threat, but even that it is what it is: a cake. Television media conspires with government, military, and an evil chocolate magnate, working desperately to spread a state-sponsored lie: the cake is poison, an evil enemy.
The children are not fooled, and even when jailed, interrogated, and attacked, they kick up every kind of resistance and disruption with their truth-telling, including interrupting the flow of media propaganda by hijacking radio waves and sabotaging media broadcasts.
They undertake missions to rescue their imprisoned comrades, reject the false promises of commercialism, laugh in the face of authority, and construct plans of counterattack to secure their freedom, and their right to the cake. They revel in their own liberation, and the film—fantastical and exaggerated in every aspect, from colour, to gesture, to dialogue, to script—is designed to champion their vision.
The idea of children as truth-tellers isn’t uncomplicated; one doesn’t know to lie until one learns to, and so, due to what’s not yet learned, young children inadvertently earn our respect as society’s most trusted observers. That children are visionary, fair-minded truth-tellers may be more fantasy than not, but the impulse to conclude that adults are the world’s experts of fucking everything up, and children its clairvoyants, has legitimate origins. The idea that adults refuse the correctness of liberation, and that children embrace its naturalness and inevitability, can be a useful in an ideological bind.
Del Fra too, rejected the binary mode of thought that finds contrasting realities in a division of ages. He openly rejected the idea that children and adults live in “separate worlds.” This oft-repeated absurdity, he asserted, lent small service to both the obviousness of a shared social and political reality, and to the complexity of the ways that children and adults influence one another’s experience. He denied that these allegedly separate worlds were closed “and difficult to communicate except at the level of prevarication sometimes even mutually.”13 La torta’s extreme divide: all adults lie, all children tell the truth is a deliberate pedagogical strategy. The film’s satirical framework, its very maximalization, “taken to exasperation and paradox,” drives to the truth of an existing absurdity through the extremity of its demonstration.14
In an interview with Aldo Paladini in 1973, the latter asked what the director thinks of current children’s cinema in Italy.15 Del Fra’s response reveals the extent to which he viewed the dominant cinema’s disservice to children as an audience:
Usually, in our country, films intended for children are made, rather than for them, to reassure their parents and perhaps some teachers and some education supervisors. La torta in cielo instead wants to alarm the parents and reassure the kids: they will be able, if they want, to be free.16
Children deserved honesty, and thus, political coherence as well. Del Fra’s son Luca, eleven at the time the film was released, was the reason for his first becoming interested in making the film. He describes Luca’s fascination with the original story by Gianni Rodari in the context of his being “oriented in a clearly democratic sense.”
Though the story’s message is the same, the film is more politically strident than the storybook version, “much more aggressive,” in its reflection of the political resentments that rose up around the late 60s.17 Rodari celebrated and acknowledged the need for the film version’s grotesque intensity. In September of 1973, he was quoted in the Italian Communist Party newspaper L’Unita on the subject:
The film is beautiful precisely because it is aggressive, because it amplifies the good-naturedly satirical cues of the story into the grotesque, because it furiously digs into a cake that perhaps I had made too sweet for Del Fra's taste: it is beautiful, it is alive, dynamic, without compromises.18
Regarding the caricatured nature of its adult figures, Del Fra observes: “Here the realities and the reactionary potential of the society in which we live are laid bare: they are schematized and embodied in characters cut with an axe so that no misunderstandings arise.”19
While the adult protagonists are executed by professional actors with fictional character names, the children are non-actors, real-life impoverished youth, whose real names are used. They lived at the time in the same Roman suburbs that the film depicts, and their personalities and dialect bring a documentary element to what is otherwise a wildly colourful fantasy of satiric exaggeration. These children are not equivalents to the roughly hewn schematizations of their adult counterparts in the film. On this Del Fra was specific: the children in La torta were not meant to represent children abstractly. They were the children of Italy in 1973.
I discussed with the kids who made the film and with other kids from the suburbs of Rome for ten days, before the start of filming, about the story, about how they saw it, about how they would react to this story, about how they identified with certain characters.21
Del Fra and Mangini also took the children’s suggestions and applied them to the screenplay. The seriousness with which the filmmakers took the opinions and perspectives of the children feels notable, but to Mangini and Del Fra, such treatment was only natural. In a letter written in defense of the film, the director of the Rome Pedagogy Institute Raffaele Laporta wrote,
In the current Italian climate, children must be treated with all the seriousness that [results from] the crisis of a society in which the adults have grown up badly, both because of the school and because of the entire cultural transmission apparatus to which they have been subjected by the ruling class of the country.22
This seems like the film’s larger imperative; to free youth from the confines of Christian Democracy, the residual infection of fascism, and all capitalist norms. The great symbolic and gestural divide between the children and adults, rather than a split of ages, manifests as human caricature through the contrast between the ideological usurpation enforced by the older generation and the empirical and instinctively humane response of the young. The seriousness with which children must be treated demonstrates respect for their humanity, and, as Del Fra would have it, their democratic orientation.
Rita and Paolo, the film’s main child protagonists, are able to reach the cake by eating and digging their way into it, making a surprising discovery at its centre. There they find the sleeping beauty Thomas, the first and only teenager who appears in the story. At first, they mistake him for an alien. But here, the heart of communism lies sleeping, waiting to be awakened.
Once roused, Thomas tells the children the fantastical story of how he arrived there: His father was a wealthy arms manufacturer and Thomas grew up abhorring the sundry weapons he created. A flashback montage shows the child Thomas’ disinterest in armaments as he grows up being presented, year after year with new weapons, each more destructive than the last. Finally, at a gathering of world leaders to celebrate his father’s creation of an H-bomb, Thomas learns that the device can split and replicate whatever is placed into it. He decides to reclaim the bomb and sabotage its deadly purpose by planting it with pastries stolen from the party. He then climbs inside and waits. The transformation takes the billionaire revellers by surprise, literally blowing them away as the atomic weapon is magically transformed into the marvellous flying cake.
Not really a child and not fully an adult, Thomas represents a synthesis, able to bring a sense of focus to the children’s exuberant spirit of justice: the vision of a future world free from the old operations, where all destructive adult hypocrisy is transformed to a just future. He is the cake’s magical ingredient that will combine truth and justice with political clarity.
The boundaries that keep politics apart from every other cultural category of discussion are kept in place by design but originate in capitalism’s economic and social structure that functions through segmentation. This was just as true in 1973, and as Del Fra and Mangini’s work demonstrates, those walls need to be dismantled.
The state that funds what it censors
[T]he intervention of censorship is not only the ministerial kind… the intervention of censorship takes place at the level of production, it takes place at the levels of conception.23
Del Fra’s statement reveals his understanding of the pre-emptive nature of state suppression. Under the state logic of advanced capitalism, a film like La torta in cielo would not even be conceived of, let alone funded and produced. We see the proof all around us; a state funding body in the West that would produce a revolutionary film today is inconceivable. Fortunately for the children of 1973, state bureaucracies aren’t traditionally perceptive of even the most heavy-handed of metaphor, and La torta’s dangerous revolutionary message was not detected by the powers that would wish to stifle it until too late.
From the start, the film faced obstruction by the state film body, Istituto Luce, that had funded it. The first delays remained unexplained, then changes were requested to the script, followed by additional delays.24 Del Fra had to fight Luce over everything: from script details to the too-familiar look of the military flag and army uniforms, to the film’s attacks on television media. When he pointed out that Italy’s major television broadcaster RAI-TV, was actually not a state institution, Luce responded that RAI was their “best client.” Indeed, state bureaucracy was behaving in exactly the same manner in which La torta’s script had depicted it.
The postponements and delays in production were due, according to Del Fra, to the film’s being “opposed by the Christian Democrat side of the Luce management for its libertarian and anti-militarist values.”25 Once the department had realized what they’d funded, “immediately a thousand hesitations and fears and pettiness were triggered.”26 Del Fra speculated in the middle of one suspension, that the film’s production would not recommence until “the return of a socialist to the film management body.”27
Del Fra and Mangini drew upon a number of labour allies to keep the film going. In March of 1969, The National Association of Film Authors (Anac) released a statement declaring the Istituto Luce guilty of “a serious episode of preventive censorship” by blocking the film. The statement called the decision “ideological discrimination,” and went farther, accusing the government of procrastinating on a new cinematic policy, and failing to democratize cinematic corporations. Luce responded predictably, denying the existence of any deliberate censorship.28
Technicians also got behind the production, and in that same month, after a twenty-two-day film workers’ strike, and the occupation of the Rome Cinema Management Body by Luce workers, all of their nine demands were accepted, among them, number eight: the resumption of La torta’s production.29
“We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children”30
One of my hopes in exploring this obscure, and to most, unseen, film, and its context, is to honour children in a way that can transcend the abstraction of historical curiosity. The boundaries that keep politics apart from every other cultural category of discussion are kept in place by design but originate in capitalism’s economic and social structure that functions through segmentation. This was just as true in 1973, and as Del Fra and Mangini’s work demonstrates, those walls need to be dismantled.
The words that make the above heading were spoken by one of a group of unnamed children who held a press conference outside of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza on November 7th, 2023. When I hear them, all I can think of through my rage is the liberation they deserve. Why should the liberation achieved by the children in La torta not be theirs as well?
During rapidly escalating state repression within a cracking and sinking empire, when one can say seemingly anything except the truth, the urgency of art’s political purpose feels very real. Whether through agitation, overt propaganda, or covert infiltration, every rude awakening to this urgency begs for a humane response using every means available to us. For anyone, this means tooling the usual methods of pressure available to us: communicating our demands to government representatives at all levels, conversing with our contacts however ideologically diverse, agitating in the streets at rallies and actions, and drawing historical and political connections to make sense of our daily reality.
With lives extinguished on an inconceivable scale, including, at the time of writing, the murder of twelve-thousand Gazan children, while the “free world”—as Palestinian journalists reporting from Gaza often refer to it—watches, the surviving Gazan children speak to us directly through our phones about their suffering, begging us to act, making it clear that the world that has stolen everything from them is false, and that the world of their aspirations for a just life is what is real and true. Del Fra’s respect for children’s “irrepressible desire for truth” and his disdain for the “ferocious selfishness” of capital has lessons for the present:
Essentially, I believe in the juxtaposition of the world of children with its demands for fantasy, its acceptance of the marvellous, and above all an irrepressible desire for truth, against the official world of adults caught in the grip of the apparatuses, driven to lies and cynicism by class interests, loyal to convenient moral codes, oppressed by the narrow-mindedness of clichés: a genuine, fresh and unprejudiced vision of life, as opposed to passive habits of thought, ferocious selfishness and vigorous inclinations to arbitrariness.31
Del Fra describes the final confrontation with the children wielding the cake to defend their own futures in a physical battle against the Italian military as “a liberating act, a cheerful desecration of the established order.”32 The scene is funny, as is much of La torta, and at its Winnipeg screening on December 9th, 2023, the audience frequently erupts in laughter. But afterwards, some of us discuss the disturbing evocations of scenes of children being bombed, however cartoonishly, by military forces. The messages of La torta in cielo are deadly serious ones, and as the astute child Chiara Bisconti observed, “You have to watch it carefully enough, otherwise you risk confusing it with a comedy film.”33