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The Body in the Mirror
Shapes of History in Italian Cinema
By Angela Dalle Vacche PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05566-4
CHAPTER 1
Fascism before World War I, after World War I, and after World War II
UNITY, CONTINUITY, AND KITSCH
In 1928, under Fascist rule, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) published his History of Italy from 1871 to 1915. In this book, the Neapolitan philosopher describes the newly born Italian nation in a positive light. Croce also establishes a relation of continuity between the yearning for "liberty" expressed by the Risorgimento and Giovanni Giolitti's (1842–1928) modern state. In those days, Italy was under the control of a liberal, upper-bourgeois-aristocratic oligarchy. For Croce the Risorgimento was a successful phase of civic awakening, paying little attention to the fact that the northern Italian upper bourgeoisie benefited from the "national" movement for unification much more than the rural masses in the south. For Croce "liberty" is a moral imperative. "Liberty" is the driving force of human history even when the light of liberty barely flickers in the surrounding darkness. This Crocean hope that fundamental human values will transcend the horrors of history reappears in the dialogue of Francesco and Pina (Anna Magnani) in Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945). Pina tells Francesco she is pregnant and expresses hope for a better life, once the struggle against the Nazis is over.
Croce's light of "liberty" recalls Giambattista Vico's (1668–1744) humanist credo that because history is created by humans, its processes can be understood by them: "But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind." For Croce, history is neither a philosophy nor a science searching for general laws, but an art form which, through narrative, reaches out for the concreteness and individuality of human experience. For Croce, human responsibility for the historical process is a source of hope rather than a reason for despair. Croce's preference for the concrete over the abstract, his faith in human nature, and his emphasis on the subjective experience of history are at the heart of Roberto Rossellini's neorealism—a cinema in the present tense, where spiritual quests acquire a sensual edge, and where a documentary approach prevails over abstract speculation.
Yet, for Croce, only the past can be an object of knowledge; history can tell us nothing about the immediate future. Moreover, Croce's historian can hardly philosophize about the present since he is standing in the middle of an unfinished sentence. While Croce's antipathy for the Hegelian philosophy of history is a powerful revisitation of Vico's awareness of the subjective dimension of history, this very same attitude of neutrality about the future leads to a stance of impotence in the face of the degeneration of created history. Consequently, Croce's light does not shine but only flickers during the dark years of the Fascist regime.
By the time Croce's History of Italy appeared, the Black Shirts had already marched on Rome (1922) and Fascism was a dictatorship. Fearing that the circulation of his book might encounter obstacles, Croce sent a few copies abroad. As early as 1921 Croce was still supportive of Benito Mussolini, because he felt that the country needed a revitalizing force after the pain of World War I, and a return to order in response to violent strikes and social unrest. In 1925, however, Mussolini threw off his mask of constitutional scruples. That year, Giovanni Gentile composed a "Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals" (April 21, 1925), while Croce replied with a "Manifesto of Antifascist Intellectuals" (May 1, 1925), expressing adamant opposition to Fascism and stating his belief in culture's autonomy from politics.
Croce's "Manifesto" became a rallying point for hundreds of prominent intellectuals to oppose the regime and its message stayed alive for those who went into exile. The "Manifesto of Antifascist Intellectuals" turned Croce into the living symbol of cultural resistance in Italy. From 1926 to 1943, Croce's name was banned from public mention. The philosopher, however, never went to jail as did Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) in 1926. In isolation and protected by a wealthy family background, Croce was able to continue to write and publish. In Fascist Italy, Croce's work circulated discreetly. The adjective "crocean," with the small "c," appeared frequently in literary and film publications. Luigi Chiarini, the editor of the film journal Bianco e Nero (1933), for example, held on to a "crocean" orientation to aesthetics. Chiarini agreed with Croce that, while art has an ethical dimension, aesthetics should be kept separate from politics. Although it was academic suicide to visit Croce at his home in Naples, he did meet with young scholars during his vacation excursions.
In his History of Italy from 1871 to 1915 Croce did not launch into an apology for Giolitti's administrations (1892–1893; 1906–1909; 1911–1914; 1920–1921), but did dwell on the economic renaissance of Italy between 1901 and 1910. By contrast, he analyzed much less the violent resurgence and repression of the class struggle. The serene voice in Croce's pages stemmed from his belief that the values of the fathers of the Risorgimento would eventually provide a sense of direction for twentieth-century Italy.
Croce feared that his History of Italy would antagonize Mussolini's censors. In fact, the regime disliked the elitist attitudes of Giolitti's liberal oligarchy and favored a populist retelling of recent history. Today, it is not surprising that Croce's History of Italy avoided obstacles, for his book hesitated in pushing to center-stage the structural weaknesses of Giolitti's Italy. While Croce shunned a critique of Giolitti's government, the newly born Fascist movement was interested in co-opting as many members of Giolitti's administration as possible. In contrast to Croce, historians Giustino Fortunato, Luigi Salvatorelli, and Piero Gobetti also writing in the 1920s, argued that the contradictions of early twentieth-century Italy prepared for the advent of the Fascist regime. For Fortunato, Salvatorelli, and Gobetti, Fascism is a revelation that developed out of Giolitti's failures, rather than an inexplicable aberration as Croce would have it.
Croce's hopeful outlook and his view that Italian history is a linear continuum tending toward "liberty" explain why his History of Italy, despite its overestimation of Giolitti's Italy, became a point of reference for antifascist circles. Faith in the values of Giolitti's Italy led Croce to underestimate early manifestations of Fascism. The regime, for Croce, was not the product of structural evils in Italian society, but an evil parenthesis. Croce's interpretation of Fascism makes possible a comparison between antifascists in the 1930s and the patriots of the Risorgimento, since both groups, according to the philosopher, are seeking "liberty."
In contrast to Croce's positive account, great difficulties in the transition from the Risorgimento to modernity characterized the administration of Giovanni Giolitti. A shrewd, well-trained Piedmontese politician, a man of sobriety and self-discipline, Giolitti preferred to avoid head-on conflicts. The color of Giolitti's working style as a statesman was grey with shifting nuances. Giovanni Giolitti became famous for his timely juggling of political allies, and for his ability to turn an enemy into a friend, and to distance himself from a former ally. Giolitti, in a word, perfected the ancient Italian art of political trasformismo.
Giolitti's Italy experienced the arrival of twentieth-century technology later than other European nations, mostly taking root in the north at the expense of the south. The south, a poor area of Italy, has always been exploited as a pool of cheap labor and has been weakened by heavy emigration. The major protagonists of this transition into the twentieth century were the industrial groups of the Turin-Genoa-Milan triangle. Meanwhile, the working class became more and more aggressive. Giolitti's paternalistic administration, his badly implemented reforms in the north, and his abuses in the south did not meet the needs of rural and urban proletariats. In the climate of disorientation following World War I, seeds of discontent easily germinated.
In contrast to Benedetto Croce, and in agreement with Giustino Fortunato and Piero Gobetti, the historian Luigi Salvatorelli already understood in 1923 the weaknesses inherited from Giolitti's Italy and wrote in Nazionalfascismo: "With a smattering of classical rhetoric, the humanist petty-bourgeoisie is inclined toward dogmatic statements, beliefs in the ipse dixit, in the celebration of gesture and word taking over the place of facts and ideas, in a fanaticism for undiscussed and indisputable formulae." Salvatorelli clearly sees how the culture of melodrama degenerates into the cult of authority, with a taste for gratuitous spectacle prevailing. In Salvatorelli's "humanist petit-bourgeoisie," with "a smattering of classical rhetoric," it is possible to recognize the attitudes of stagnating aristocrats, displaced bureaucrats, and disillusioned war veterans. These groups' frustrations enabled the Duce to seize power.
From its early days to its zenith, Fascism was a mosaic of contradictory impulses and preoccupations, an eclectic montage of conflicting interests and alliances, with both rural and urban forces, lay and religious groups. After sedimenting for centuries, an antidemocratic mentality flourished through layers of regional traditions, economic practices, and stereotypical behaviors.
Despite the archaic and ubiquitous nature of these latent, proto-fascistic tendencies, neither the institutional apparatus of the regime nor the personal charisma of Mussolini succeeded in unifying Italy into the Hegelian ideal of a modern nation. Mussolini's agrarian campaigns in the Roman countryside, xenophobic policies in the South Tyrol, and anti-Mafia purges in Sicily did not defeat strong regionalism and social disequilibrium.
The most popular interpretation of the Risorgimento is the one that celebrates a unified nation, an imaginary celebration since the real Italy remains, instead, deeply divided. Likewise, the body politic of Fascism amounted to an artificial cohesion, rather than any common awareness of civic responsibilities. The Duce was the head of a corporate state the function of which was to homogenize from above a proteiform, ever-shifting maze of competing interests, alliances, and partisanships. Popular consent was the effect of an apparatus whose practices ranged from the brutally coercive to the subtly persuasive, with the educational documentaries of L.U.C.E. (November 1925) and the commercial films of Cinecittà (April 1937) forming the backbone of the Fascist culture industry.
Fascism did not resolve well-known tensions operative in Giolitti's Italy: an oppositional view of social change and political stability; a fascination with modernity and a nostalgia for antiquity; the temptation of a populist mentality and the lingering of aristocratic aspirations; an oppressive rural past and an all too recent urban lifestyle. According to the historian Renzo De Felice, Fascism responded to these tensions by glorifying the role of brutal action in the 1920s, and by putting up a respectable facade in the 1930s after having seized power. In Interpretations of Fascism (1969), Renzo De Felice distinguishes between fascism as a revolutionary movement, after World War I, and Fascism as a regime, in the 1930s.
The two outfits worn by the regime, the black shirt of the manganellatore and the doppiopetto of the government official, use the body as if it were a stage for the spectacle of the national self. In order to homogenize composite audiences, Fascism staged great spectacles of national unity and impressive displays of popular consent.
While Mussolini relied on the power of spectacle to unify, he was also aware of the necessity to personify a multiplicity of roles. The Duce's body became the mirror of the fantasy-selves of Italians. The fascist man supposedly has the efficacy of an athlete and of an intellectual, of a warrior and of a father. In the popular culture of the times, the public personae of the Duce (and of his best "public relations" man, Achille Starace) loom over an art-deco landscape cluttered with Roman ruins, beneath billboards advertising American products, for a culture industry catering serialized icons of high art to the masses.
The Fascist culture industry confronted a situation in a manner comparable to the cinema. Since its invention, cinema has tried to reconcile its identity as a mass medium with its status as one of the new art forms of the twentieth century. The newly born regime elicited support from well-established, high art forms, but also experimented with representational solutions appealing to the masses. Kitsch was Fascism's pseudo-democratic answer, an antidemocratic ideology using a popular form of address while simulating the authority of high art.
Classical art made for consumption and ancient history at the service of spectacle were the components of Fascist "Roman" kitsch. Kitsch refers to menial objects raised to the realm of the aesthetic, while high art is lowered through serial reproduction. Kitsch describes a thriving on status symbols, or on effects of artistic vitality and presence that hide, instead, a death-like stasis, and an absence. Through kitsch, Fascism projected an image of cultural prestige on a national level that bridged the gap between high and popular arts. By concealing an inadequacy, kitsch repeated the logic of the spectacles staged by the regime to cover up poverty and abuse, repression and violence. With its aura of prestige, kitsch worked like a therapeutic device for a country in the aftermath of World War I haunted by a demoralized self-image.
Through a kitsch cinema, Fascism reconciled the populist basis of the 1920s with the elitist aspirations of the 1930s and, in so doing, glossed over differences due to class, region, and gender. This unifying function of kitsch implemented the construction of a corporate state and the production of an ideal mirror-image of the national self. The visual spectacle and allegorical characters of Carmine Gallone's Scipio Africanus (1937), in which kitsch refers to the exploitation of high-culture clichés, correspond to this ideological agenda. Images traditionally associated with great men, crucial battles, and famous events of antiquity grant a narrative authority to the cinema as a mass medium.
Kitsch is the style of cinema where fiction comes closest to propaganda. In Gallone's film, Scipio is a God-like, disembodied protagonist. He is the embodiment of an heterogeneous, but also unified nation: Rome in antiquity, Italy in Mussolini's times. The construction of Scipio's character rehearses the model of the perfect Fascist citizen; Scipio's Rome provides audiences with a mirror image of what the perfect Italian society ought to be.
With the natural forcefulness of an athlete and with the instinctive authority of a statesman, Scipio shapes the course of history as if he were an abstract principle, rising above history itself. Scipio's history-making power recalls Giovanni Gentile's view that ideal forces are the motor of mankind and that the corporate state embodies the spirit of the nation. The Fascist corporate state was the political fulfillment of an "ethical," but also inhuman ideal. Gentile was the official philosopher of the regime and the cinema contributes to the popularization of his Hegelian philosophy of history and view of the state.
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Excerpted from The Body in the Mirror by Angela Dalle Vacche. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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