Beyond Neorealism: Cinema, Biopolitics, and Fascism

BEYOND NEOREALISM: CINEMA, BIOPOLITICS, AND FASCISM A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lorenzo Fabbri January 2014 © 2014 Lorenzo Fabbri BEYOND NEOREALISM: CINEMA, BIOPOLITICS, AND FASCISM Lorenzo Fabbri, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 My dissertation “Beyond Neorealism. Cinema, Biopolitics, and Fascism,” stems from a dissatisfaction with “neorealism” as the category that undergirds all approaches to Italian cinema. I argue that aligning Italian national cinema with neorealism introduces a prescriptive outlook on film history, and reduces all Italian films either to anticipations, prolongations, or betrayals of neorealism. The limits of this approach are particularly evident in the existing scholarship on cinema under Fascism. In the wake of Bazin’s ethical opposition between “location” and “studio” films, cinematic realism during the regime has been retrospectively awarded a progressive thrust. I challenge this conclusion, and discuss Fascism’s investment in realism for the creation of a shared national identity in 1930s Italy. I also show that a critical visualization of Fascism’s identity politics is most often found in literary adaptations and genre films. My contribution to the study of Fascist culture starts from a cue by Philip Cannistraro: Italian liberalism and film industry underwent a simultaneous crisis in the 1910s. Accordingly, I analyze Pirandello’s 1916 Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore as an indictment of both Giolitti’s Italy and its film culture. Underneath Pirandello’s exposure of the distraction industry, I detect the roadmap for the transformation of cinema into a means of socio-political reclamation. From there I turn to how Fascism attempted to realize the cinema Pirandello envisioned by looking at Rutmann’s 1933 Acciaio – based on Pirandello’s Giuca, Pietro! – and at other realist films by Camerini, Blasetti, De Robertis, and Rossellini. In the second part of my dissertation, I explore the endeavors made by the communist cell infiltrated within the Cinema journal (Visconti, Alicata, De Santis, Ingrao) to turn cinema intro an art of resistance. Ultimately, I organize my study of cinema in Italy along two conceptual registers: first, as an apparatus for regulating the life of the nation, and secondly as a means to negotiate alternative forms of national belonging. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Lorenzo Fabbri is an Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He has published extensively in critical theory and film studies. His first book, The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction was released in 2008 by Continuum. iii To my family. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the help and the support of my committee, family, and friends. While I take all responsibility for the weaknesses of my research, the merits for the good moments of this dissertation should go to: Timothy Campbell, Karen Pinkus, Naoki Sakai, Kevin Attell, Jennifer Row, Elisabeth Fay, Rebecca Davidson, Timothy Murray, Bishnu Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar, David Rojas, Ingrid Diram, and the 2012-2013 fellows at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. v TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION: ITALY YEAR ZERO AND ZERO-DEGREE CINEMA: FROM NEOREALISM TO BIOPOLITICS I. ITALY IS A DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC FOUNDED ON FORGETFULNESS II. WHAT IS NEOREALISM? BAZIN III. WHAT IS NEOREALISM? DELEUZE IV. NEOREALISM AS FUTURITY V. ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF NEOREALISM IN ITALIAN (FILM) HISTORY VI. FROM NEOREALISM TO BIOPOLICS: CINEMA AS HETEROTOPIA CHAPTER 1: FROM SERAFINO GUBBIO TO MUSSOLINI: PIRANDELLO AT THE MOVIES I. PHENOMENOLOGIES OF EARLY CINEMA: GUALTIERO ILDELBRANDO FABBRI AND LUIGI PIRANDELLO II. THE LIFE MACHINIC WITH SERAFINO GUBBIO: SHOOTING AS SAVING III. ITALIAN REMAKES: THE MALADY OF LIBERAL ITALY AND THE DESIRE FOR A NATIONAL STYLE IV. TECHNICIZED MYTH AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF A NATION: GIUOCA, PIETRO! AND ACCIAO CHAPTER 2: BLACK MYTHOLOGIES: FASCIST REALISM BETWEEN PROTECTION AND NEGATION OF LIFE I. THE ENEMY WITHIN II. BODY DOUBLES, ILLICIT DESIRES: CAMERINI’S ANTRHOPOLOGICAL MACHINES vi III. THE ENEMY WITHOUT: DE ROBERTIS AND ROSSELLINI CHAPTER 3: “THIS IS NOT ITALY!” CINEMA COMMUNIST CELL AND THE MARCH TOWARDS OSSESSIONE I. SECURITY, POPULATION, REALISM II. ITALIAN REALISM FROM RACE TO LANDSCAPE III. ON CINEMA, LITERATURE, AND VERGA IV. DECOLONIZING ITALY: FASCISM AS OBSESSION BIBLIOGRAPHY vii INTRODUCTION ITALY YEAR ZERO AND ZERO-DEGREE CINEMA: FROM NEOREALISM TO BIOPOLITICS No one can be held more responsible for the simultaneous appreciation and misunderstanding of Italian cinema than André Bazin. No one, except perhaps Gilles Deleuze. Driven either by the illusion of an “Italian school of liberation” or of an epochal exodus from movement-image to time-image, Bazin and Deleuze have each contributed to the success of “Italian neorealism” and to its establishment as an archetypal event in the specific tradition of European new waves and of world cinema as a whole.1 Neither Bazin nor Deleuze considered neorealism as a uniform phenomenon. Still, their recourse to such a portmanteau category consolidated neorealism as an obligatory reference for anyone dealing with Italian cinema. The frenzy for neorealism has compelled some to read all Italian film history in its light.2 Whether one is discussing films from before the fall of Mussolini or after the liberation of Rome, from the time of the Kingdom of Italy or of the second Republic, from the silent era or the digital one, the tendency is to hold neorealism as a paradigm against whose backdrop all other Italian films ought to be situated. Once neorealism is granted the status of inevitable touchstone, film scholars cannot but indulge in nostalgic teleological or genealogical accounts. Anticipations of neorealism. Returns to 1 André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 16–40; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 1–25. 2 Millicent Joy Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). 1 neorealism. Betrayals of neorealism. Tributes to neorealism. The overcoming of neorealism. Neorealism hybrids. Post-modern neorealist films. The pressure to refer to neorealism is such that its traces are seen everywhere, as if there can be no legitimate discourse on Italian cinema beyond the comparison with this movement. When it comes to Italian cinema, a neorealist frenzy seems endemic. The exasperation for this is perhaps best exemplified by Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe’s 2011 incendiary manifesto “Against Realism.” In order to exorcise the ghosts of neorealism and the prescriptive gaze they bring along, in their essay O’Leary and O’Rawe propose a five-year moratorium on neorealism. The idea is to stop talking about new or old realisms for a while. This would allow for less canonical engagement with Italian visual culture, especially with much-overlooked commercial films. Rejecting the idea that cinema works as a mirror of the nation, O’Leary and O’Rawe are interested in cinema as the venue in which national identity is imagined and re-imagined. In particular, they are interested in mapping out the ideas of nationhood that commercial cinema has put forth in post-war Italy. Within this context, they provocatively defend the urgency to study “cinepanettoni” (comedies that come out during Christmas when people eat the “panettone” cake) as alternative declinations of Italianess. Thanks to Gramsci’s transformation into a hero of the national-popular, O’Leary and O’Rawe turn the Frankfurtian condemnation of cultural industry on its head and award commercial cinema a critical value. For the authors of “Against Realism,” films like Natale a Beverly Hills are more progressive, transgressive, and liberatory than the masterpieces of the Italian filmic canon.3 Accordingly, O’Leary concludes his review of Vacanze sul Nilo for the Directory of World Cinema in this manner: “The scene where 3 On this, see also Alan O’Leary, Fenomenologia del cinepanettone. (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2013). 2 General Ombrone uses the swaddling bandages from the only intact mummy in the Great Pyramid to clean himself after a bout of diarrhea, and so reduces the treasure to dust, will cheer anyone who has ever been browbeaten into a museum. This is a film no better or worse than you or I.”4 Since neorealism has been the “bread and butter” of the nation, the time has come to change fare and indulge in the sweet taste of “cinepanettone.” In the end, Italy’s id has the opportunity to rail against the moralizing voice of a neorealism understood as the nation’s super- ego. An active forgetting of neorealism would pave the way for a disinhibited and unrestrained Italian subjectivities. While I am sympathetic to O’Leary and O’Rawe’s gestures, and especially their disdain for cultural capital and orthodoxy, I doubt that a Bakthinian authorization of Natale sul Nilo is the best that new Italian film studies can muster. This defense of Italian popular culture bears the signs of an all too British outlook on the peninsula. In this mindset, Italy is appreciated, but only for being the most corporeal, “Oriental” country of the West – a nice getaway from a gray and boring day spent in a London museum.5 Within the context of this British gaze over Italy, it is striking (as it is unsurprising) that O’Leary and O’Rawe reduce Italian mainstream cinema to a particularly crass trend, with no mention of the more sophisticated comedies that enjoyed a great deal of commercial success in the last twenty years or so (the Fantozzi franchise, Roberto Benigni, Carlo Verdone, Antonio Albanese, the comedic trio Aldo, Giovanni, and Giacomo – to name a few.) 4 Alan O’Leary, “Vacanze Sul Nilo,” in Directory of World Cinema: Italy, ed.

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