Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 36

While Sandra Ponzanesi claims that Rosi’s film is an ‘excellent metaphor for the lazy eye
of Europe’ 27 as though it tackles Europe’s ‘compassion fatigue,’ 28 Fuocoammare consistently
maintains the image of the ‘stunned refugee’ throughout. The film’s interaction with the
refugees remains at a distance: Rosi maintains the image of ‘the refugee’ at voyeur level as
he does not engage with them. Although Ponzanesi claims that Fuocoammare ‘functions also
as a warning against the rising indifference [and] apathy, and short-sighted policy of the EU’, 29
the film’s gaze does not challenge what Lodge refers to as “compassion fatigue”. Lodge
defines the phrase as a condition which refers to: ‘the idea that we get so much human
suffering thrust in our faces every day from the media that we’ve become sort of numbed [...]
smudgy black and white pictures of starving black babies [and] stunned refugees’. 30 Similarly
to Figure 1, aboard one of the refugee boats, Rosi captures a particularly invasive shot of one
refugee who stares into his camera lens:
(Figure 2: Screenshot from Fuocoammare. Rosi, G. 2016)
27
Ponzanesi, “Of Shipwrecks and Weddings,” 161.
David Lodge, Therapy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 5.
29
Ponzanesi, “Of Shipwrecks and Weddings,” 153.
30
Lodge, Therapy, 5.
28
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