Fascism in Italy was formed by the various motifs such as the desire to develop the economy and to promote the national identity. The industrial growth particularly began to occur from industrial societies in the north to the rural and agricultural regions in the south. For both Visconti and Pasolini, the fascist ideological reflections throughout the social, cultural and economical crisis in Europe was immediately a necessary political reaction to the social and existential moments of the history.
Of course, Visconti's The Damned (1969) can be considered as the autobiography about his aristocratic social background from which the fascism and Nazism are emerged as the socio-cultural diseases. The ultimate outcome of these historical diseases is the declination of the aristocratic social class and the emergence of the fanatic ideologies. The representation of fascism in The Damned is complex and subtle, and its political maneuvers concentrate on everybody that is intertwined with the aristocratic social class and its maladies such as homoeroticism, individualism and pre-war German capitalism. Visconti shows us the popular S.A. squads that are with S.S. militaristic troops whose elimination of brown-shirts by their motorized units emphasizes on the military high command to seize the power and establish a new order. Obviously, Nazis' ambition to control the industries and to manufacture the weapons for the next war is the only political reason that provokes them to find their own place among the industrialists' social class and make it collapse from within. Aschenbach's plot to create the private war between Friedrich and the other members of the family is the best example that is the testimony of this ambition.
Martin ambiguous sexual desires such as pedophilia and his castration anxiety which turns into a rape of his mother implicitly express Visconti's intentions. Visconti tries to reveal the fascistic plan to sterilize and purify the pre-war German societies from modern decayed life styles. In fact, Martin such as another character, Herbert, who is intellectual and liberal becomes fully-fledged Nazi at the end of the film. The expressive presence of Aschenbach in numerous scenes with them exposes in general the fascist's tendency to sympathize with younger generation. He tries to consume their threatening dynamism to protect Nazi's ideology. The expressionism of the atmosphere at the final sequence forms the symbolic overtones which are associated with the decline of aristocratic social class and rising of Nazism.
Fascists' antipathy to the intellectuals is noticeable stylistically in Herbert's conversation with Nazi fanatic member of the S.A., Konstantin, who is the inheritor of Joachim's wealth and industrial possessions. The abandoning of intellectual utopia by Konstantin's son, Gunther, and his devotion to Aschenbach and his Nazi ideology is emblematically metaphorical of Nazi's success to dominate over cultural productivity of German society.
The voice of every ideology in German pre-war period is echoed in the characters' representations of the film, but the characters begin to lose their autonomies by becoming Nazi's puppets to the end of the film. In general, from Visconti's point of view, the fascist phenomenon is not only social trauma. In fact, the fascism can be a part of individual self-destructive response to the economical and political pressure of the modern societies and industrial civilizations. For instance, Martin's brutality and ruthless domination over his mother, raping her and then forcing her and Friedrich to commit suicide, express his potential mentality to follow the fascist ideology and Nazi's ambitions. Even Friedrich and Sophie are able to express their fascistic ambitions by murdering of Joachim and Konstantin. indeed, the expressive horrified representation of the characters and archeology of mise-en scene emphasize on the repressed fascistic atmosphere which dominates on the whole scenes, sequences and dialogues. Of course, Visconti suggests the presentation of the fascism in the 20th century of European societies as the outcome of the 19th century aristocracy, capitalism, industrialization and modernization of the rural societies. At the same time, he does not overlook the possibility of the self-destructive potentials and mental traumas in the characters that can be main cause of their tendencies and loyalties to the fascism and its ideological structure.
The conversation between Sophie and Aschenbach occurs in the labyrinth of the S.S. official building where people's biographical information are filed and maintained. Aschenbach's self-confidence of his success as the fascist agent, his power of manipulation, his ability to influence the historical moments and his intelligence to change the political scenarios emerge as a kind of symbol. This symbol represents the dependency of the fascistic social systems to their information agencies in order to control individuals and their destinies. In fact, Ascenbach's knowledge of every character's psychology helps him to operate and his machine of war against every member of the aristocratic family. The history of Nazism and the representation of fascism in The Damned revolve around their formal necessity as the external referent to the narrative. At the same time, the key factor here is the offering to the audience a social and political explanation for the emergence of fascism.
Visconti's Marxist analysis of the historical materialism and the materialist dialectic implies and suggests the similarities between communism and fascism in terms of their desperate needs to build an industrial machine of ideology to fight against neo-capitalism and its model of consumerism which is founded on profit. Visconti also views the fate of an aristocratic family in fascistic bourgeois society from the inside. It seems that the aristocratic social class which creates the fascism to protect itself against the communism has to sacrifice itself for the ambitions and survival of the fascist ideology. It should be said that the fascistic text in The Damned can be read significantly as the reference to the cultural and political determinants which are used as the purpose to control the overall structure of the social intellectual activity for any individual.
Ascenbach's intention is to remain forcibly in the foreground. His stylistic methods to develop his plans according to the inner necessity of the fascist regime make an interesting point from which the complexities of modern political systems have been represented. This representation is floating in Viscontian contrast between historical materialism and Hegelian dualism. In fact, fascism appears as an ideological anti-thesis which could be created in side the old aristocratic social class as its thesis. Then, Nazism or neo-Nazism appears as the synthesis of the collision between these two ideological structures.
Pasolini's last film Salo (1975) was received immediately by the critics as the strong reaction to the repressed sexuality of neo-capitalism. The sado-masochistic excesses visualized in Pasolini's film particularly appeared to be shocking in 1975. The degradation of the sexual scenes and the brutality of the acts can be considered as the director's desire to introduce the mise-en scene of Holocaust and its theorem of death. The decadent world of Salo, its fascination upon the destructive forces of human being and the horror of Nazi-fascistc regime are represented by Freudian and Brechtian terms in Pasolini's interpretation of Sade's novel. The complexity of fascistic system in Pasolini's film has be seen and analyzed in terms of historical phenomenon. But the most important aspect of the film is its universality for visualizing the symbolical and allegorical representations of sexual repressive and destructive forces.
The mise-en scenes of the most of Pasolini's controversial scenes and sequences are suggested to be resembled like middle age paintings and their compositions. One also wonders if he wanted to represent the resemblance between the new cultivated modern ages with the old barbarian period of middle age. The horrific depiction of sex and torture in Salo immediately heightens the complexities of the theatricality which is the part of the fascist scenarios to construct the erotic atmosphere. In fact, the fascist bureaucrats are the narrators of the stories that they depict and improvise on the stage. They often take the God's position to manipulate their surrounded environment and prove their supremacy of the free will on the moralistic text of the world. The marriage sequence with its satirical representation of the religious rituals and the theatrical and the erotic aristocratic mise-en scene of the scenes epitomize the potential desire to become master of political narrative. Pasolini consciously or subconsciously revelas the spectator's delirious desire to earn the fascistic power. therefore, he forces them to watch and follow the torturing scenes voyeuristically through the bureaucrat's binocular. The spectator automatically become accomplice of the terrifying and violated scenes represented on the screen. For Visconti, fascism is the outcome of historical conflict between the faith of the aristocracy and capitalism to their socio-political structure and their phenomenological fears to the fragility of its survival. For Pasolini, fascism is a metaphor of wilderness and barbarism which is repressed to human being subconscious under the domination of supremacy of the laws morality and immorality in the civilized societies.
Pasolini's last text is the shocking truth about the dark side of the human being which is turned out to be his success in representing the visual aesthetics of raw reality. The violence caused by modern men in the new societies seems to have origin in the new social logic that shaped the structure of the neo-capitalism: the competition to control and dominate on the reality. The fascists in Salo are no ones except the spectators who are followers of the ideologists and have perhaps reached to the conclusion from which no human being can escape or be liberated: the totalitarian potential of any ideology can interpret the reality just based on its own concepts and definitions. Of course, in observing the reality by an ideologist, no other ideology is tolerable or acceptable. Pasolini signifies a system in Salo explaining the allegorical portrayal of the any totalitarian system that tries to analyze the complexities of the socio-political phenomena only by its own intellectual insights. Hence, Salo is not only a fascist iconography, but it is a political reading about the human being confidence to his rationality and logical theorizing of the social crisis and traumas. The film ought to be seen in the light of Pasolini's meta-language which indicates a text to blame the enemies of multi-dimensional reality. The fascists live in their own utopia which has nothing to do with the reality. Pasolini exaggerates on violence in this created autonomous system of authorial texts.The idiosyncratically mild punishment in an cruel environment is doomed to extinction by its very self-referentiality in Pasolini's text. His antimodernist fascination with symbolic truths can be seen as his obsession to represent visually Theodor Adorno's point of view on the death of poetry after Second World War.
Post-ideological, post-national, post-cultural and post modern status of Pasolini's text is perceived as Pasolini's nostalgia to the utopianism of pre-industrial peasant world as Pasolini tells us:
"What I do feel nostalgic about is the unlimited, pre-national and pre-industrial peasant world, which survived until just a few years ago. (Not by chance, I spent as much time as possible in the countries of the Third World, where it lives on, although the Third World too is now beginning to enter the sphere of so-called Development" (Pasolini, 60).
As Bondanella emphasizes in his book:
" Salo is a film which Pasolini designed to be difficult to swallow, if I may be permitted to continue the dominant metaphor of the work. It is a desperate and highly personal attack against what Pasolini had come to view as a society dominated by manipulative and sadistic power and organized around mindless consumption and exploitation" (Bondanella, 295).
Indeed, the fascists in Salo destroy the latest remaining of the cultural and mythological values of pre-modern world. It was Pasolini's destiny to suffer and to bear witness to the end that Italians gradually lost their rural identity and their societies transferred from the innocence peasantrism to monstrous consumerism.
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., New York. 2002.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Lettera Aperta a Italo Calvino: Paese Sera, 1974. P:60-63
By: Morad Sadeghi
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