eriving an engrossing documentary from archival footage can be a tall order—too academic, too based in recreation, and too staid are all present dangers. The rare film like Capturing the Friedmans has the boon of exhaustive source material: The wretched child-abuse saga was already intensely there when the filmmakers found it, waiting to be cut and spun. A doc like My Architect uses a paternity quest to guide the story of Louis Kahn’s architecture, but it still comes out as unfulfilling gimmickry.

Marco Turco’s new documentary, Excellent Cadavers—concerning the Sicilian mafia and gumshoe attempts over 15 recent years to break it—has the extra complication of being based on a book. But the film succeeds because it has a central theory that faces up to the archival-footage obstacle: “violence is the key to understanding” Southern Italy. How this translates is into hundreds of images of Mafia victims as they were found, car crashes, bullet wounds, and body parts displayed in full. Cadavers is a film of gestures and expressions, with footage of death at its center—and a world of corruption, frustration, and suffering radiating outward.

The movie opens from bystander perspective, as a camera nagivates the rubble of a 1992 explosion, and we learn that prosecutor Giovanni Falcone—the story’s hero—has met his bloody end. It’s no mistake of pacing that this punchline comes first; unusual for a movie about organized crime, suspense is used only sparingly here. This is because Cadavers cares more to create moments of poignancy than it does to string its audience along. It aims to sustain its dolorous mood through moments of hopefulness, and of drama. The film is carefully edited, and a word like “corruption” is illustrated simply, with a greasy smile and then a quick cut to a frustrated and impoverished street scene. Figures are introduced via narrated newsreel footage, and then we move swiftly into documentation of their thinly covered corpses. We will sometimes get the news of a murder, followed by sonorous music—a pause to anticipate how someone might look after being killed—and then the grimly factual images. This isn’t manipulation, but rather a plainly emotional and level presentation.


In the early 80’s, there was a mafia killing every three days in Palermo, the town where the Mafia was born and this story is centered. As partners in crime prevention, Falcone and Paolo Borsellino tried to unravel and stand up to this mess—a struggle which led to the famous Maxi Trial and its 360 convictions—the murders increased in quantity (and, evidently, in quality: the “excellent” of the title suggests an exalted profile). The photography also grows in intensity. Disembodied ears alongside demoralized children reveal iconography that is culturally fundamental and in no way sentimental. It’s telling that the confessions of photographer Letizia Battaglia provide much of the historical account; to see her in old age walking the 21st century Sicilian alleys confirms that this is a film about loss. (It’s fitting that a person of her résumé became a member of local government.) We’re told that death is the only face of the mafia, and the absence felt is stirring.

While the movie is not politically ideological—it’s tight-lipped on issues like the distribution of wealth or capital gains taxes—it is a love poem or maybe a eulogy for the people, a story about hearts broken by a bizarrely violent culture of corruption. Much of contemporary Italian history dedicates itself to the “Mezziogorno problem,” that criminal and poverty-ridden culture of the South that prevents civilized society from developing. Cadavers profiles the smoking bodies that enforce the status quo, and it allows only a few cathartic moments—in which the overwhelmed people of Palermo riot for change, or maybe just for grief. In the most upsetting instance, rioters crash the funeral for Borsellino—whose death is the last excellent straw—looking to scalp the whole mafia-ridden government. This is a kind of ancient populism on display, as the only power not lodged in Power comes from the physical intrusion of the people. The government is forced to enact changes long advocated by the murdered prosecutors, which lead to a far less violent but still (to this day) much-empowered Mob.

Turco’s film has a few flaws. Book author Alexander Stille narrates in a monotone, and often haunts absent terrain like the Palermo halls of justice when space needs filling. Watching him “research” events that are only recent history muddies the narrative and emotional flow. But this is only peripheral. Cadavers is smart enough not to hype an emotional energy that is perfectly capable of announcing itself. This is the dynamic that makes for great noir, and the payoff is huge as we watch Maxi’s caged rogue gallery listening to their condemnations, able to project our own notions of fear and partial justice onto beastly people.

Excellent Cadavers is playing in limited release.