The So-Called Groups of Militant Insanity Against the Video Police: Anti-Psychiatry and Autonomia in 1970s Italian Audiovisual Media

This talk explored how anti-psychiatry was taken up both in the Radio Alice free radio station and also cinematic culture in Italy in the 1970s, focusing on the work of Marco Bellocchio, Elio Petri, and especially Alberto Grifi. While Grifi's work Anna (Grifi and Sarchielli, 1975) is a relatively well-known anti-psychiatric video experiment, anti-psychiatry runs through his 1970s work in proximity with the creative autonomia movement that also gave rise to Radio Alice. However, these currents were already present in key works of Bellocchio and Petri, especially in Fists in the Pocket (Bellocchio, 1965), Matti da slegare (Fit to be Untied, 1975) and La classe operaia va in paradiso (Petri, 1971). In the latter sound is especially significant to indicate the inter-relations between class struggle, sexuality and psychic and emotional states and this would also form the basis for Radio Alice's reinvention of radio as a delirious machinery for a militant destabilisation of the state, capital and the mass media. If this militant insanity lost out in the end to the video police in the form of both mass arrests and the rise of Berlusconi's media empire, it provides a rich legacy for 21st century reinvention