“Una rapida storia scritta a caratteri di sangue”: Mussolini ultimo atto di Carlo Lizzani

"A SWIFT STORY WRITTEN IN BLOODY LETTERS": THE LAST DAYS OF MUSSOLINI AND LIZZANI'S NOVELISTIC INVESTIGATION Carlo Lizzani's archive presents a diverse and rich array of documents that constitute the investigative specificity of his gaze on twentieth-century history. However, the extensive documentation from magazines, private memoirs, and photo-investigations has rarely been studied as a source for the director's film narratives, particularly those considered more “worthy” and “respectable” by contemporary critics. This essay aims to document the generative grafting of the novelistic onto historical research in The Last Days of Mussolini (1974) by considering three documents from Lizzani's archive which dismantle given hierarchies in themes and forms, combining and mixing different narrative registers in their investigation on the last days of the Fascist dictator. This very same novelistic character is detectable in Lizzani’s film.