The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (review)

At the outset of her book, Kriss Ravetto catalogs the codes that have been employed to portray fascism in the past and speculates on the ways in which fascist iconography lingers in the fibers of contemporary culture. Postwar cinema, and its implementation of fascist symbolism, is used as evidence of broader cultural and ideological developments. Ravetto, as a professor of film history and gender studies at the California Institute of the Arts, offers film as a means of comprehending the evolution of attitudes towards fascism and of recognizing its subsequent associative permutations. She enlists three films as case material: Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Saló, and Lina Wertmüller's Seven Beauties.

By definition, fascism elevates a nation (and frequently a race) above the individual. It imposes, through autocratic governmental practice and dictatorial leadership, stringent economic and social regulations, and quells resistance through force. According to Ravetto, the fascist ideological legacy can be read in productions that broach the discourse of purity, deal with the image of the hero, or portray the radical suppression of "Otherness." Fascist and, particularly, Nazi propagandists, who used film as a didactic tool for the purposes of indoctrination, employed a generally recognized formula to demonstrate the good and bad of their moral ethos. The good and righteous were depicted as strong, uncompromising, and heroic, while the bad were dissolute, fatally weak-willed, and pathologically feminine in character or demeanor. Through a lengthy discursion into the history of the Femme Fatal, signifier of moral decadence, Ravetto painstakingly establishes how "Otherness" became associated with the feminine, a crucial point for understanding fascist and anti-fascist moral and narratological formulae.

Providing a short history of traditional postwar narrative strategies, Ravetto draws a dividing line between the neorealists, those who made films immediately after the fall of fascism, such as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica and the neodecadents, like Wertmüller, Cavani, and Pasolini, who revisit and manipulate the aesthetic codes and semiotics of their cinematic forebears, often with morally perplexing results. Neorealists, occupied with the ethical crisis of fascist politics, merely adopted and reversed fascism's didactic codes: in anti-fascist films, there exists a similar adherence to the polar oppositions of good and evil, pure and impure that appeared in fascist propaganda. A morally tidy, restorative melodrama is thereby produced, in which each character is hermeneutically categorized according to his or her tenets. The feminine, again associated with the pathological, and sexual deviancy, a sometime by-product of femininity and frequent attribute of the abject, is applied to fascists and Nazis, as fascists and Nazis had once applied it to Communists and Jews. Virile, masculine traits are assigned to the heroic figures who resist fascism.

Neodecadents, working primarily in the late 1960s and 70s, adopted a more Brechtian model for their films, incorporating visual non-sequiturs or aural incongruities in the narrative to remind the audience of the film's artificiality, making them less likely to become absorbed in an account filled with quixotic, purportedly enduring truths like those evident in neorealist cinema. Neodecadents also recognized the failure of the neorealist model to deal with the deeper moral complexities confronting survivors. Those who made it through the war or the camps may have done so only by way of fascist complicity, a point made through the character Pasqualino of Seven Beauties. Ravetto describes the survivor's condition through Pasqualino's passage from comical Don Juan to mercenary concentration camp inmate. Such a film provides few comforting rationalizations; instead it questions and disconcerts.

Perhaps the book's most revelatory chapter is Ravetto's examination of Pasolini's Saló. The film's reception was colored by the filmmaker's violent murder, and it was critically condemned for its seemingly gratuitous scenes of sexual violence and painful humiliation. Generally, Saló has been dismissed as indulging the director's own sexual proclivities. However, Ravetto argues for...