Groups of Militant Insanity versus the Videopolice: The Schizoanalysis of Radical Italian Audiovisual Media Culture as Post-Media Assemblages

This chapter applies Félix Guattari’s concepts of minor cinema and the post-media era to explore how anti-psychiatry was taken up both in cinematic culture in Italy in the 1970s and also by the Radio Alice free radio station, focussing on the cinematic work of Marco Bellocchio, Elio Petri and Alberto Grifi, especially. While Grifi's film Anna (Grifi and Sarchielli 1975) is a relatively well-known anti-psychiatric video experiment, a schizoanalytic approach 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 Marco Bellocchio and Elio 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 schizoanalytic inter-relations between class struggle, sexuality and psychic states presented as explicitly machinic and this would also form the basis for Radio Alice's reinvention of radio as delirious machinery for a militant destabilization of the state, capital and the mass media. In many of these media phenomena, it is not just an anti-psychiatric representation expressed but a minor politics in tune with the transformation of cinema, video and radio into schizoanalytic ecologies breaking down the distinctions between producers, technologies and consumers, albeit more effectively in some cases than others