Concetta Licata (1994)

This chapter examines Concetta Licata (Mario Salieri, 1994)—the first installment of a Sicilian crime trilogy—as a landmark of Italian adult cinema whose cult status rests on three intertwined dimensions: narrative content, production mode, and sexual mise-en-scène. First, the film mobilizes a “serious” and unusually elaborate plot that refracts the early-1990s season of Mafia bombings and the concomitant media discourse, transforming journalistic chronicle into a pornographic melodrama of institutional collusion, social fear, and martyrdom. Second, emerging from Salieri’s 999 Black & Blue Production at the height of Italy’s porn “blockbuster” trend, the work exhibits elevated production values (large and international cast, location shooting, careful acting direction) and a hybrid visual style that couples art-cinema refinements (deep focus, low-key lighting, temporal shifts) with neorealist inflections (dialect dubbing, squalid settings, non-professionals). Third, its sexual representation systematically eroticizes male coercion while voiding female pleasure, and deploys estrangement devices—brief, under-shown sex acts, opaque lighting, eerie extra-diegetic music, wide framings, and deframing—to inhibit the genre’s normative “maximum visibility.” We argue that Salieri instrumentalizes pornography as public outcry and cultural legitimation, seeking to exceed generic boundaries. Adapting André Bazin’s notion of the “superwestern,” the film operates as a “super-porno”: a work that “would be ashamed to be just itself,” importing aesthetic, sociological, and political ambitions to enrich and contest the pornographic form within the specific historical conjuncture of Mafia violence in Italy.