Italian filmmaker Riccardo Giacconi has been making experimental documentaries for the past 15 years. Possibly his best-known film to date is Two from 2017, a medium-length examination of a vast residential compound known as Milano 2, an antiseptic suburb manufactured on the outskirts of Milan in the early ’70s. It was the first major investment project of Silvio Berlusconi, and Giacconi considers how the neo-fascist urban design project can be understood as a physical manifestation of Berlusconi’s top-down vision of governance and social control.
With his second feature-length film, Memories of Lightning, Giacconi takes the rather unusual step of ceding the floor to another documentarian, providing a kind of formal framework for someone else’s analysis. The film is a second-order study of a documentary made for RAI Radio Tre by audio engineer Sibilla Scinti Roger, about a 40-year-old murder case in a small town. For much of Memories of Lightning‘s runtime, we watch Roger conduct interviews with townspeople and collect ambient sounds from the environment. We also observe technical anomalies, such as the deliberate separation of sound and image, as well as outtakes and re-recording of portions of the voiceover. It’s essentially a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of another documentary.
The subject of Roger’s project, we learn, is the killing of her aunt Gianna, who was kidnapped and burned alive as an adolescent, by four local boys whose motive is never quite clear. From what we learn, it was a random thrill-kill that destroyed the community and from which many of the locals never truly recovered. Later, the town was devastated by a major earthquake, and then large portions of it were flooded for the creation of an artificial lake. By Roger’s reckoning, the murder of Gianna was a kind of original sin that set the town’s destruction in motion.
As you might expect, the story of Gianna’s death is still quite emotional for Roger and for the various people with whom she speaks. Some, like an old friend of Sibilla’s mother, seem to have been wanting to discuss the tragedy for years but have had no outlet to do so. Others, some of whom were tangentially involved in the killing, are far more reluctant, one of them even seeming to vaguely threaten Roger. In fact, in an early scene, we hear Sibilla’s side of a phone conversation with her mother, who seems to be against the project.
It’s inevitable that when watching Memories of Lightning one thinks about the extreme popularity of true crime TV docs and podcasts, and so to a large extent the purpose of Roger and Giacconi’s project can be understood in the specific ways in which it differs from those more mainstream productions. We don’t usually witness the mechanics of how such content is produced, and in one painfully awkward scene, we listen as a segment producer at Radio Tre rejects Roger’s proposal because she can’t “locate the narrative,” or doesn’t see the broader interest value of the Gianna story. When Roger explains her personal family history, the bureaucrat replies, “you should have led with that.”
While Memories of Lightning strives for a metacommentary on contemporary crime media, the results are decidedly mixed. Not enough insight is generated from the formal framework to really function as a critique of the fascination with the true crime format. At the same time, we also see that Roger is willing to employ portentous dialogue and moody music to make her audio essay more conventionally seductive. So Giacconi’s film falls between chairs. It doesn’t depart enough from run-of-the-mill podcast content to feel like a critical intervention, while the distanciation techniques just work to disrupt our more typical forms of engagement. It’s an experiment, and an admirable one, but the results are simply too inconclusive to make any full-throated argument in the film’s favor or cogency.
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