Excess and Ethics: The Queering of Fascism from Luchino Visconti to Ivo van Hove

This article is a defense of excess. That is to say, it is a defense of heightened aesthetics and style, of that which goes beyond the boundaries of respectable realist representation. Specifically, it examines the political and ethical weight of excess as a particularly queer aesthetic. Such excessive styles, in both cinema and theater, are often deemed anathema to critical spectatorship, as they produce spectacular effects that are either narcotic and stupefying or distracting and overstimulating. This is particularly the case when such styles are used to represent difficult and weighty subjects, such as totalitarianism and its atrocities. I will make the case for the intellectual and ethical power of such excessive aesthetics in representing the complexities of these weighty subjects. In other words, I will claim that high cinematic style and multimedia stage spectacles function as transmedial modes of inquiry into how to best reckon with political iconography and how to represent the unrepresentable.

My interest lies in the adaptation and transpositions of such aesthetics of excess from screen to stage and from one queer auteur to another. These aesthetics, in both cinema and theater, recoup and re-emphasize their ethical weight. They capture and interrogate that which is ethically difficult to represent: the iconography and nature of fascism. In his 1969 film La caduta degli dei/The Damned (IT/GER, 1969), Luchino Visconti uses a baroque style derived from the Decadentist movements to enact an oppositional aesthetic, which articulates the complex issue of personal and political facets of fascism.¹ In 2016, theater director Ivo van Hove, working with the Comédie Française, staged a version of Visconti's screenplay, entitled Les Damnés/The Damned (FR), for the Festival d'Avignon.² Where Visconti's Damned used decadence for political ends, van Hove's ethical use of excess involves the bold (and potentially distracting) use of video and projection, which interacts with and shapes the live body on stage. This stage-screen relationship addresses the personal and political dimensions of fascism, while also questioning the recognizability and representation of fascism as such.

Visconti's The Damned: Excess and Politics

In its plot and subject matter, Visconti's The Damned embraces excess, and in doing so raises fundamental questions about ethics and representation. The film dramatizes Germany's capitulation to Nazism via the story of a single family. The wealthy, aristocratic von Essenbecks own a steelworks and are being pressured by the Nazis to illegally manufacture weapons. The patrician patriarch, Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals), loathes Hitler, whom he refers to only as "that gentleman." Nevertheless, he names his son, Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff), an SA officer, as his successor, effectively signaling his willingness to collaborate with the Nazis for the sake of the business. Meanwhile, Joachim's daughter-in-law, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and her lover, Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), are plotting for control of the steelworks, encouraged by the Essenbecks' cousin Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), an SS officer. Friedrich murders Joachim and frames the virulently anti-Nazi Herbert Thalmann (Umberto Orsini)—another Essenbeck cousin and a vice president of the steelworks—for the crime. Herbert is forced to flee, and Sophie and Friedrich proceed to eliminate the other Essenbecks, one by one, in a ruthless bid for power. Sophie, aided by Aschenbach, sends Herbert's wife, Elisabeth (Charlotte Rampling), and their daughters to Dachau. (After Elisabeth dies there, Herbert turns himself over to the Nazis in order to spare his children.) Freidrich murders Konstantin. But when Sophie and Friedrich prove less than totally amenable to the Nazis' agenda, Aschenbach undermines their power by blackmailing Sophie's son Martin (Helmut Berger). (Martin is a pedophile and has molested a young Jewish girl who subsequently commits suicide.) Under Aschenbach's influence, Martin rebels against his domineering mother and, in a fit of rage, rapes her. Sophie then falls into a catatonic state. Martin forces both Sophie and Friedrich to commit suicide, leaving both Martin and the steelworks entirely under Nazi control. In the film's final moments, the camera zooms in on Martin as he gives a Nazi salute.

As this...