Fascism in Italy was formed by various
motifs such as the desire to develop the economy and to promote the national
identity. 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 were immediately a necessary
political reaction to the social and existential moments of 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 emerged as the socio-cultural diseases. The outcome of these
historical diseases is the decline 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 outcomes
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 the
military high command to seize power and establish a new order. The 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 place among
the industrialists' social class and make it collapse from within.
Aschenbach's plot to create a private war between Friedrich and the other
members of the family is the best example that is the testimony of this
ambition.
Martin's 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 lifestyles.
Martin as another character, Herbert, who is intellectual and liberal becomes a
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 the younger generation. He tries to consume their
threatening dynamism to protect the Nazi's ideology. The expressionism of the
atmosphere in the final sequence forms the symbolic overtones which are associated
with the decline of the 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 the Nazi's
success to dominate over cultural productivity of German society.
The voice of every ideology in the German pre-war period is echoed in the
characters' representations of the film, but the characters begin to lose their
autonomy by becoming Nazi puppets by the end of the film. In general, from
Visconti's point of view, the fascist phenomenon is not only social trauma. Fascism
can be a part of the individual self-destructive response to the economic and
political pressure of 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 ambitions. Even Friedrich and
Sophie can express their fascistic ambitions by murdering Joachim and
Konstantin. indeed, the expressive horrified representation of the characters
and archeology of mise-en-scene emphasizes the repressed fascistic atmosphere that
dominates the whole scenes, sequences, and dialogues. Of course, Visconti
suggests the presentation of fascism in 20th-century European societies as the
outcome of the 19th-century aristocracy, capitalism, industrialization, and
modernization of 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 the main cause of their tendencies and loyalties to 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 is filed and
maintained. Aschenbach's self-confidence in his success as the fascist
agent, his power of manipulation, his ability to influence historical
moments, and his intelligence to change political scenarios emerge as a kind of
symbol. This symbol represents the dependency of the fascistic social systems on
their information agencies 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 a fascistic
bourgeois society from the inside. It seems that the aristocratic social class that
creates fascism to protect itself against communism must 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 a
reference to the cultural and political determinants which are used as the
purpose to control the overall structure of the social and intellectual
activity of any individual.
Ascenbach intends 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 the Viscontian
contrast between historical materialism and Hegelian dualism. Fascism appears
as an ideological anti-thesis that could be created inside 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 a
strong reaction to the repressed sexuality of neo-capitalism. The sadomasochistic
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-fascistic
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 been 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 reveals 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 law’s 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 a 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 the 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 innocent peasantries
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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