LOTTA DI CLASSE E LOTTA DI LINGUA. Il massimalismo e il grottesco nel cinema di Lina Wertmüller

This article investigates the linguistic dimension of Lina Wertmüller’s cinema through the study of Mimì metallurgico ferito nell’onore (1972) and Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (1974). Framed within research on film speech, on variation in Italian and on the representations of Southern Italy and gender, the paper reads Wertmüller’s stylistic “maximalism” and grotesque mode as a device which, at the level of language, articulates class conflict and gender violence. The analysis focuses on a selection of sequences and combines a qualitative examination of lexical choices, morphosyntactic structures and pragmatic-discursive features. In both films, varieties of Italian and dialect (particularly Sicilian) are used to construct the North/South divide and to encode hierarchies between bourgeoisie and subaltern groups, between men and women. The article shows how Wertmüller’s cinema constructs a complex ideological space in which class struggle corresponds to a genuine “language struggle” – a conflict over who can speak, in which code and with what legitimacy in the public sphere – thereby placing itself in a hybrid dimension that nonetheless fully belongs both to politically committed cinema and to popular comedy