Remediating the Apparatus: Fabbri’s Al Cinematografo (1907)

Italian film production started picking up the pace immediately after the Lumière brothers’ tour of the country; it seized a prominent position on the world market in a few short years. This situation has always puzzled historians. How does one explain the fact that a late and marginal cinema managed to grow so quickly and play such a critical role in the global history of film? For Luca Giuliani, the incredible success of Italian film was determined—counterintuitively, if compared to what happened in France or the United States—by the outdated technologies, lack of regulations, poor funding, disinterest from the state, and industrial disorganization. As often happens in the Global South, “poverty” in Italy was not a limitation but a resource, fostering a sort of do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality that brought about a generative horizon of experimentation and innovation.6

But it was not only film production that was characterized by an incredible liveliness. As soon as a film industry started to materialize in Italy, there emerged in public debate the urgency to norm the cinema, define a proper use of the camera, and articulate the medium’s specificities vis-à-vis other technologies and diversions. Writers started to make references to the motion pictures in their works, a variegated host of popular and scholarly film journals appeared, and newspapers were keen to feature think pieces on the cinema as well. No other country could boast a comparable early paratextual investment in thinking film, John Welle observes. The first article on the new medium, “La filosofia del cinematografo” (The philosophy of cinema), was published by a well-known intellectual, Giovanni Papini, in a well-read newspaper, La stampa, in 1907. That year also saw the release of Al Cinematografo, which might be the first example in world literature of what Gavriel Moses defines as the film novel, a subgenre of speculative fiction in which the “repercussions of this new twentieth-century medium are explored through the means of narrative.”7

Al Cinematografo is the result of the encounter between two eccentric, forgotten players in the formative years of Italian film: Pietro Tonini and Gualtiero Fabbri. Tonini was a prominent distributor and the owner of a state-of-the-art movie theater in Milan, the Marconi. He was a tireless promoter of the cinema, and of his cinema most of all. We know, for instance, that Tonini set up an automatic shoeshine in the waiting room of the Marconi and gave portable barometers to spectators so they could plan their next movie outing according to the weather. In 1907, Tonini launched a literary contest to publish a novella that would rebrand the motion pictures in the public sphere, dispelling the prejudices surrounding this new form of entertainment. Gualtiero Fabbri’s text was judged as the most apt to showcase cinema’s respectability—to demonstrate that it was not merely a leisure appropriate for the lower people but also appealing for “the more evolved social class,” as Tonini writes in the preface to Al Cinematografo, using the hierarchizing language of evolutionary biology to mark class differences.8

Fabbri, a writer, historian, polemist, and traveling preacher for the Methodist Episcopal Church, was from Bologna. After authoring Al Cinematografo, Fabbri, a firm believer in the educational value of film, went on to become one of the few Italian film theorists whose influence extended beyond national borders. In his history of Russian film, Jay Leyda mentions that for the whole silent era, international production companies relied heavily on Fabbri’s 1910 “rules for the perfect screenplay.”9 Fabbri continued to be an important voice throughout the 1910s, and in 1923 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Los Angeles. He died in 1929 in a convent in southern Italy, where he had retired after converting to Catholicism.

We owe the bulk of our information about Tonini and Fabbri to the invaluable research of Sergio Raffaelli, who in the 1990s rediscovered Al Cinematografo and curated the reprint of the work that “ushered cinema into literature.”10 After selling more than forty thousand copies thanks to Tonini’s promotional efforts, the novella sank quickly into oblivion. This is not surprising. From a literary point of view, Al Cinematografo is forgettable. But where the text’s artistic merits are slim, its documentary value is remarkable. With its frequent and verbose descriptive sections—attributed by Raffaelli to Tonini—Al Cinematografo is a time capsule bringing us back to the invention of Italian cinema. The novella often reads as reportage: of the changing patterns of mass consumption, of the plots of the most successful films of the time, of the movie-going experience, of the composition of the public, and even of the formulas used by ushers to lure passersby into their venues. But this text does more than merely shed light on the realities of early film exhibition. It also attests to an emerging regime of power-knowledge-affect about the apparatus that would become engrained in national film culture and practice until, at least, neorealism. If, as Francesco Casetti argues, cinema is the privileged technology for mediating modern experience, one cannot overlook the fact that modern experience in Italy is an experience marked by racialized anxieties about the state of the nation.11 By speculating on the technology of cinema, Al Cinematografo thus also articulates how the new medium could resolve the racial problems that were supposedly afflicting Italy.

In transitional moments in media history, new technologies of mediation establish their legitimacy by articulating how they refashion, ameliorate, and overcome older apparatuses. This is a dynamic that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation.”12 Remediation, they explain, is the way in which one medium presents itself—or is presented—as reforming or improving upon another. Remediation can be understood as a process of cultural negotiation where the affordances of a new technology are adjudicated by juxtaposing it with previous media. Bolter and Grusin focus on the claims to authenticity that new media advance. However, some forms of remediation are focused not on measuring a new technology’s capacity to reproduce reality but on assessing its power to change it. In the case of Al Cinematografo, cinema is remediated as a generative apparatus that, unlike the sterile attractions from the nineteenth century, can resolve collective existence and birth healthier national subjects.

To promote cinema’s social benefits, Al Cinematografo features the first time at the movies of Gastone Fedi, a card player and theater critic who is accustomed to enjoying the frivolous lifestyle of a member of high society. Fedi is not a bad person; he simply has yet to find his path in life. Like a host of characters from turn-of-the-century Italian literature, Fedi exists in the balance between failure and success, redemption and perdition, “absolute virtue and absolute vice.”13 He is particularly irresolute the evening we meet him. Bored out of his mind and experiencing a sort of midlife crisis, Fedi is reviewing his options for the night—assembling a sort of atlas of the emotions and entertainments the city offers. He could go to the social club to play cards, but people are quite immature there. The theater, with its trite stories and overblown passions, is not appealing to him. Fedi could join a salon, but gatherings at private houses are dull, and they are only good for arranging marriages of convenience. Similar to what happens in cosmoramas, Fedi comments, there is a lot to see, but things get boring pretty quickly. Cafés do not work either because the environment there is degenerate and loathsome and fake. Brothels are expensive, and besides, after his fair number of encounters with seamstresses and vedettes, Fedi has had enough of this kind of woman and sets his sights on someone of “nobler stature” (22). The public night classes offered by the local university are worthless, so there is no point in attending them. Since it is still too early to go to bed, one could always stay out and embrace the experience of getting lost in the busy streets. As a matter of fact, Fedi is quite fond of the spectacle of the crowd flowing through the city at night, under the moonlike light of colossal electric lamps. But he also likens the human maelstrom to something out of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and—unlike Charles Baudelaire’s flâneurs—Fedi fears getting mixed up in such bedlam. Walking the city in desperate need of “something new” (14), Fedi stumbles into one of the movie halls that have been becoming increasingly popular in Italy.14

Should he cross the threshold? Fedi hesitates. Cinema might not be an appropriate venue for someone of his rank. A providential vision evaporates all doubts: a heavenly creature, “a blonde Virgin Mary” (18) entering the theater. The young woman feels like a ray of sun in the dark, cold city night. This fair-skinned and blue-eyed apparition is named Olga, and she is at the movies with her little brother, maid, and grandfather—a man whom Fedi had already singled out in the crowd for his wise gray beard, noble demeanor, and elongated, very symmetrical face. What makes Olga so attractive and her grandfather so dignified is evidently their whiteness. Without much subtlety, Al Cinematografo colors them as Nordic: Olga is an old Scandinavian name meaning “saint,” and Fabbri’s description of her and her grandfather is strewn with physiognomic markers associated with tropes of Aryan whiteness and racial superiority, including skin tone, eyes, and hair but also cranial morphology. Fedi finds comfort in the fact that elite Italians of such noble stock, and not only the “popolino” (populace) and the less evolved classes, appreciate film; thus, in search of new stimuli and experiences, he decides to follow Olga and her family inside. A new world opens up to his sight. Fabbri exploits the narrative device of Fedi’s discovery of the movies as an occasion to stage, but also sell, cinema.

The first thing that Al Cinematografo takes notice of is the stark contrast between the Italians who go to the movies and the ones who do not, between the ordered public attending the cinema and the disordered multitude swarming the city. Outside there is confusion, anonymity, and darkness, but in the movie hall shines a collection of respectable shapes and faces—a humanity that is diverse in its composition and yet peacefully shares a place and an experience (18). As he steps into the movie hall, Fedi cannot tell whether he is among the upper, middle, or lower classes; he is simply among the people and feels connected to each and all of them. There are humble clerks, young professionals, refined retirees, city dwellers and visitors from the countryside, workers and industrialists, soldiers, army officers, and policemen. Whereas the salon, the club, and the café are segregated spaces accessible only to certain segments of the population, the movies welcome all honest people, regardless of their background. Moreover, picture houses abolish the architectural separation between classes enforced in Italian stage theaters.

This sense of commonality has beneficial effects on the nation as a whole, Al Cinematografo explains, as it facilitates a feeling of unity. However, at the movies, people not only learn to be together; they also learn from each other. The prolonged interaction with the bourgeoisie and aristocracy instills in the less civil social strata a keener sense of moderation: one of the virtues of the cinematographic milieu is to suppress obscene gestures and profanity. At the same time, the presence of commoners transmits some bodily vitality to the higher classes and pushes them toward more relaxed mores. A couple from the countryside, for example, is kissing in the dark, but no one minds as long as they control themselves. The cinema audience is quite evolved, the novella approvingly concludes by means of Fedi’s reflections. Such liberality renders the movie theater a stimulating place that nevertheless shuns excesses. There is a lively exchange between age groups, genders, and classes, yet no one at the end oversteps. This is also the case because films put people in their place.

After insisting on the movie theater as a transformative space that allows the nation to assemble, Al Cinematografo turns to featuring the specific improvements film inspires in the spectators. Whereas Fabbri relies on Fedi to show that, at the movies, the multiform Italian body politic gathers, he resorts to Professor Giusti, Olga’s grandfather, to unpack for Fedi—and thus for the reader—the beneficial impact that the forms flickering on the screen have on modern living. Again, the articulation of film’s power to affect life is carried out through a comparison with the theater. The first thing that Fedi needs to keep in mind, Giusti insists, is that films make a more profound and lasting impression on the public than plays. Giusti takes the example of Valparaiso: the Chilean city made the very wise decision to program public screenings of highly moral films, and after only one week of projections the city enjoyed a sharp decrease in crime, drunkenness, and loitering. The Italian government should take notice of cinema’s power to change lives and, Giusti proposes, fully integrate this incredible new technology in its school system.

Guido Cincotti has emphasized that Italian film was born under the sign of the Risorgimento, in the sense that domestic cinema took hold within the context of an ongoing struggle for unity.15 Giusti’s reference to film’s deployment as a tool of reeducation in another newly independent country like Chile implicitly situates the cinema against the backdrop of new states’ nation-building efforts. But the imbrication of the cinematographic apparatus with the Risorgimento’s project becomes fully manifest in Al Cinematografo when people are ushered into the movie hall and the lights go out.

The screen is filled with Filoteo Alberini’s La presa di Roma (The Capture of Rome, 1905)—the first feature film produced in Italy, an epic reenactment of the 1870 annexation of Rome that was originally screened for an audience of thousands outdoors, next to the widely mythologized point of entry of the Italian Royal Army into the city still ruled by the Church.16 The spectators, Fedi expounds, are stunned as the mythic heroes of the battle of Porta Pia appear, larger than life, before them. When the liberation army begins its final assault against the papal army, chanting “long live Italy, long live Rome,” the emotion is pulled to a fever pitch. Fedi cannot stay still or silent. He is in awe. He explodes: “For goodness’ sake, this is a patriotic spectacle, moral and educational par excellence” (27). His heart is throbbing with national pride. In this regard, it is important to highlight that Professor Giusti likens the effects of the cinema on a national people still in its early years to those of Edmondo De Amicis’s patriotic young adult book Cuore (Heart, 1866). The reference to De Amicis’s best seller, a keystone of Italian postunification culture, accomplishes two goals. First, it reiterates the effort to promote the cinema as a governmental technology capable of bringing together a people whom the Kingdom of Italy and its liberal elites had failed to unite. Second, the allusion clarifies that the labor of cinematic subjectification is performed rhetorically and affectively, by moving souls and modulating regimes of embodiment via discursive forms. In fact, Cuore constitutes the most blatant example of a nation-building effort advanced by working the people’s bodies rather than relying on “juridically binding formulations of citizenship,” as happened in other national contexts.17 In Al Cinematografo, as in Cuore, emotivity is “regenerative and redemptive” (39); the transformation of the people starts from touching their hearts.

Yet films touch spectators in different ways; they trigger a variegated array of feelings. The films in the program in Al Cinematografo thereby become occasions to clarify how the different genres of the cinema affect the people and thus regenerate the nation. Giusti prizes social melodramas as especially beneficial for the collectivity: French films such as The Strike (1904), The Poor Mother (1906), or The Good Judge (1906) teach, through tears, the value of moderation and collaboration between classes, preventing social conflicts from erupting into violence. Documentaries expand people’s horizons by introducing them to foreign realities, as happens in the case of the extraordinary film capturing the efforts of “one white hunter and thirty negroes” to hunt down hippos along the Zambezi River in the “Black continent” (50). Historical reenactments, like the film about Venetian history titled Canal grande, excite spectators’ national pride; a crime film like The Wreckers of the Limited Express (1906) offers a moving example of heroism; comedies make one laugh while also imparting moral lessons—as Giusti argues while introducing to Fedi another French movie, The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs (1905).

A powerful confirmation of cinema’s power to redeem life comes with the last film in the program in Al Cinematografo. With its celestial soundscape, the religious parable The Birth of Jesus (1906) guides the public toward pure love and authentic good, as Giusti articulates to Fedi. And in the case of the young bon vivant, pure love and authentic good coincide with doing one’s own part for Italy’s future: put down roots, start a family, procreate an elite lineage. Inspired by Jesus’s self-sacrifice for the collectivity, Fedi—who was once an unabashed bachelor and enjoyed the presence of lesser women—promises eternal love to Olga, such a perfect white beauty, and kisses her “ardentemente” (passionately) on the forehead (78). The cinema is indeed, to paraphrase Fedi, a place where unbelievable emotions and ineffable experiences are orchestrated.

The problem is that film cannot touch everyone; there are individuals that it simply cannot regenerate or save. We already know that the city is a dangerous place. At the beginning of Al Cinematografo, an older lady has her wallet stolen steps away from the cinema’s entrance. Later, a gang of thugs assaults Fedi and the Giusti family as they walk home after their night out. Fedi had noticed and confronted this group earlier that evening. Taking advantage of the darkness, they were molesting Italian women—Olga included—and harassing them with all sorts of indecent proposals. Fedi intervened and kicked them out of the theater. In reviewing their aspect, attitude, and demeanor, Al Cinematografo characterizes this group of unrestrained Italians who do not belong at the movies as a different breed of subjects threatening the smooth reproduction of authentic national life. Fabbri profiles these other Italians as a “genìa” (45)—genus, lineage, or ethnicity—whose deviation from national norms is materialized in their primitive fashion choices. Fabbri stresses that they style themselves “alla bula” (45), a mysterious locution that I believe constitutes a derogatory reference to the costumes of the Bula people of South Sudan. In fact, in La mala vita a Roma, a fascinating 1897 first-person dramatized ethnology of Rome’s underground (“mala vita” literally means bad life, and by extension organized crime), Alfredo Niceforo and Scipio Sighele use the expression alla bula to flag the backward, primitive, and pathologically hypersexualized codes of conduct adopted by the Italian capital’s masses.18

Niceforo and Sighele were among the most prominent supporters of Nordic Aryanism in Italy. In La mala vita a Roma, which was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, they insist on the need to understand what they present as the Italian masses’ abject behaviors through a bioracial lens. They explain eagerly that segments of the “popolino,” a term also used by Fabbri, had not yet gone through all the stages of cultural evolution and were stuck in a condition of quasi-feral instinctiveness. In line with Lombroso’s criminology, they attribute this delay to the racial divide imagined to be running through the nation. Whereas the white Aryan stock prevalent in the North had progressed to rational behavior and moderation, those of Mediterranean ethnicity had been spoiled by the sun and centuries of contact with Africa and the East, with Hamitic and Semitic blood. Niceforo and Sighele, who like Lombroso were socialists, argued that it was urgent to civilize these other Italians, to heal the problems that their laziness and vice had brought upon the country. Otherwise, Italy would remain “unified but not united” and decay even further.

To resolve the uneven development that kept Italians apart from one another, La mala vita a Roma did not plead for structural investments that would ameliorate the living and working conditions of the masses. It did not ask for opportunities or schools to reduce crime; it did not support a redistribution of wealth. It instead entreated the Italian state to ramp up its medical-penal apparatus and create institutions where Italy’s natural-born criminals could be either reformed or contained until their deaths—until they changed or vanished, as the book’s ending dramatically puts it. Unlike hard-core Aryanist theories, Italian racial science under liberalism recognized the possibility of relative improvement even in individuals from presumed inferior breeds, such as southerners or Semites, on the condition that they assimilated the Italian spirit.

I pause on La mala vita a Roma because this intervention—juxtaposing the Risorgimento call to unify the people and Lombroso’s racist science—challenges the “color-blindness” through which prefascist Italian political history has been written and showcases the central place occupied by race in the postunification project to remake Italians that I have already touched on. As Miguel Mellino, among others, reconstruct, Italian state racism did not start in 1938, with Fascism’s racial laws.19 It had already been implicated in the process of so-called national rebirth carried out by the House of Savoy and hegemonic ruling blocs. In aligning cinema with the elites’ ideology, in branding the cinema as a Risorgimental media weapon, Fabbri could not help but embrace the racial capitalist project and “civilizing mission” discourse upon which Italian unification was undergirded. On the one hand, Al Cinematografo medicalizes delinquency and connects it with a specific genus of people: the race that remains, the remnants of a time and a world past that, whenever possible, need to be redressed to grant them the great opportunity of contributing to modern Italian life. On the other hand, the novella remediates the cinema as an apparatus that, similar to the medico-penal institutions of La mala vita a Roma, could save some of this stock from their natural unruliness and harvest them as labor: if it had been possible to turn the “negroes” from the Black continent into bodies in service of white pursuits, why couldn’t the same result be achieved with Italy’s own quasi-Black savages?

Describing the workings of biopower under racial capitalism, Ann Laura Stoler emphasizes the stratified operations of governance characterizing the capitalist-colonial order.20 White bourgeois individuals are trained to reproduce the social order, while the underclass—racialized as backward—is disciplined to produce economic wealth. Al Cinematografo ends with a similar class-, race-, and gender-specific conversion.

Outside the cinema, the dysgenic “genìa” that Fedi kicked out of the theater tries to take their revenge. The un-Italian group has organized Olga’s kidnapping and rape. In a dark alley, the underdeveloped breed of Italians attempts to neutralize Fedi and Giusti to have Olga for themselves. Fedi fights back with his knuckleduster and then draws the pistol he always carries for protection, given the armies of thugs endangering modern Italy. He is about to shoot when another weapon intervenes to exorcise the specter of race mixing and miscegenation: a young man comes out of the cinema and commands the gang to leave. He is their former leader, who has had a change of heart thanks to the movies. The Poor Mother made such an impression on him that he could not go on with the same existence; he had to become a different person. Now, he can finally emerge from the underworld and leave behind his primitive customs. The cinema has imparted on the young thug the idea that the way forward in life is work rather than crime: the cinematographic apparatus has brought him “from bad to good living” (63), and an honest job will allow him to evolve from undeveloped lowlife to national resource. It is a process of whitening through work that Fabbri articulates.

But film has also made Fedi renounce his own rogue living in favor of marriage to Olga and fathering a family. These two men from distinct socioeconomic backgrounds and with very different racial profiles were stuck in unproductive, abject lifestyles, but thanks to the movies, they embrace healthy forms of existence. Those whom the cinema cannot reform or cure, those whom the cinema cannot reclaim or civilize, end up embroiled with the other great modern apparatuses of normalization and social control. From Professor Giusti we learn that the gang members will end up in jail or committed to a mental ward under the care of a good phrenologist. For their kind, there is not much hope. But for the people who are moved by cinema, for the folks who can live good, proper lives, it is time to go to discuss the details of the wedding and dowry at Giusti’s house. The Italian dreams of a peaceful home and homeland are coming true, thanks to cinema’s power to change people.

One of the last films viewed by this nice Italian family before they go home is Trains of America, a documentary feature about the U.S. railroad system. In Trains of America, we see modernity, we see speed, we see the majesty of the trains, these mechanical snakes running at full speed and “huge huge huge” (67) on the metallic tracks. We also see elegant, comfortable interiors and perfected class/race relations. Earlier, Fabbri had voiced a great deal of appreciation for the zeal with which thirty Black men served the white explorer on his African hunting trips. Now, Al Cinematografo marvels at the industry showcased by the Black servant on the train who cares for the refined white travelers.

Every five minutes, the adorable moretto [dark-haired boy], making less noise than a mouse, comes and offers passengers candies, perfumes, books, newspaper, cigars, drops, photographs, maps, fruit, knick-knacks, and so forth. He leaves them there for you, on the ample, comfortable red-velvet couch without proffering a word. If one wants to buy something, that’s good; otherwise, he collects his stuff, without insisting, always silent, and goodnight! He goes away, to come back in a bit, of course. (69)

Gramsci famously characterized liberal rule in Italy as a case of internal colonialism, where the lower classes were racialized as inferior, infantilized, and maintained in a condition of quasi-forced labor to serve the demands of a capitalist bloc that was ramping up its colonial ambitions.21 It is thus unsurprising that the segregated United States—the land of technological progress, opulence, and strict color lines—is hailed as a model of civility in Al Cinematografo. In the United States, Fedi and Giusti recognize not only the type of nation Italy ought to become—modern, efficient, and rich—but also the kind of workers the homeland needed to achieve such an aspirational whiteness: affable, meek, and silent, creatures that, like moretti and mice, can be disposed of when their presence becomes a nuisance.

Barbaric Invasions: Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1915)

Whereas 1907’s Al Cinematografo branded the movie theater as a kind of heterotopia, a space where the normal flow of existence is suspended and healthier national bodies are styled, nearly a decade later in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore there are no substantial differences between the forms of life that the motion pictures elicit and the degraded existences that people already endure. Fabbri built up film as a security apparatus to be deployed in the battle to control, redress, and put to work both the elites (Fedi) and the unevolved Italian genìa (those who dressed and behaved like members of the “primitive” Bula tribe). Pirandello instead approaches the camera—“macchina da presa” in Italian, that is, the machine that captures—as a synecdoche conjuring the ruined state in which industrial capitalism under liberal rule has trapped the people. Historian Philip Cannistraro posits that Italian liberalism and Italian cinema underwent simultaneous crises in the 1910s.22 Pirandello’s fictional notebooks of a resentful cameraman evoke the entanglement of these two crises, raising the alarm about the “stench” permeating the liberal nation and taking stock of a film industry whose melodramatic scenarios and operatic affectations did nothing but accelerate the disintegration of a people that had never really come together.23 Pirandello’s scathing take on liberal Italy and its (film) culture was not an isolated case.

Italy’s economic growth at the beginning of the twentieth century had allowed the ruling parties to temporally reconcile the opposing interests of various social factions, fostering a situation of relative national peace after the turn-of-the-century turmoil. However, the slowing down of the economy in the 1910s and Italy’s entrance into World War I put a definitive end to Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti’s aspiration to broker a peace between capital and labor, or—according to the liberal racial order—between the white elites and the darker masses. The sense of a lack of cohesion and purpose in national life intensified. The mala vita—which in Niceforo and Sighele’s 1897 study appeared confined to bigger Italian cities—was perceived as a pandemic fifteen years later. However, unlike before, Italy’s ruination was not considered the population’s fault; it was the state’s failure to properly govern Italians that had led to this. Giolitti was dubbed the “ministro della mala vita” (the minister of bad living, of the underworld) by socialist politicians, and liberal governance was faulted for failing to impress a clear direction on national life, leaving it at the mercy of a tardy second industrial revolution and doing nothing to remedy the social fragmentation brought about by it.24

In this context of antiliberal resentment, a form of “antiracist racism”—as Fabrizio De Donno aptly calls it—took hold of public imagination.25 This new racial paradigm did not contest the fact that there were two species of humans dwelling in Italy, but it inverted the traditional and hegemonic hierarchies between these distinct stocks. Giuseppe Sergi was the most authoritative voice in the protest against liberalism’s racialized geopolitics and the assumption that white people, Italian elites included, were better than darker and southern folks. Bringing together skeletal morphology with paleology and archaeology, in foundational texts from the end of the nineteenth century like Origine e diffusione della stirpe mediterranea (The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of European Peoples) or Arii e Italici (Aryans and Italics), Sergi advanced the argument that Western civilization and culture were not birthed in the North by Aryans but in the Mediterranean by “olive” races like the Italic stock (stirpe).26 Simultaneously anti-Black, anti-white, and anti-Asian, Sergi was careful to specify that this olive race did not originate from a mixing of the inferior Black, white, and Eastern races but was a pure and original racial aggregate. Moreover, he pontificated that science proved that before having been civilized by Rome and before contact with Mediterranean culture, the white North was a land of barbarians living in semiferal conditions—so a space that was not much different from Black Africa.

But if this were true, in light of the racial superiority exhibited by non-white, non-Black Mediterranean nations and the Italic lineage especially, how did one account for the current ruination that afflicted the olive-skinned stock? Why, Sergi asked, was the finest race that has appeared in Europe experiencing such decline in the present, to the point that, after millennia of glory and beauty, it was compared to Africa and ruled by the descendants of the barbarians who had invaded the peninsula in the Early Middle Ages? Sergi’s answer was that while Aryans (like pack animals) are naturally disposed to order and discipline, there is something excessive in the Mediterranean race—an energy, a creativity, a spontaneity, an individualism, a taste for freedom and for experimentation—that was a blessing but also could become a curse. When this natural excessiveness is not mitigated and held in check, as it was not in liberal Italy, it favors chaos and anarchy instead of revolutions in the arts, sciences, and culture. Industrialization acted as a sort of catalyst for the natural unruliness that characterized Italians. Thus, Sergi advised, it was urgent to restrain them through racially appropriate cultural forms and policy interventions, before the sort of autoimmune logic governing the Mediterranean specimens brought the Italian breed to self-extinction.

Can we find resonances with Sergi’s racialized antiliberalism and his ideas on race-making in Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore? Doesn’t this early film novel articulate cinema as an apparatus that could restrain the excesses of Italian humanity and hence contribute to the reordering of national life that Sergi, among many others, advised to be so crucial and critical?

Quaderni has been discussed at length. Scholarship has reviewed in depth and with precision the resonances between its take on mechanical reproduction and the stances on the apparatus later elaborated by Benjamin, Zavattini, Bazin, Baudry, Dziga Vertov, and Siegfried Kracauer.27 Most discussions, however, overlook the situation out of which his fictional notebooks grew and thus miss the implicit political reverberations of Pirandello’s intervention. In this regard, Fiora Bassanese highlights the three-fold dimension of Quaderni: it is at once an exemplary tale of the destructive mechanization of modern life, a depiction of an Italian cinema and its odd denizens in crisis, and a nostalgic take on preindustrial Italy.28 Building upon this analysis, I consider how the different textual layers of this film novel interface, so as to relate its intertwined expectations for new cinematic forms and new forms of Italian living with concurrent phantasies of racial rebirth that challenged liberal rule and paved the way for the fascist putsch.

The protagonist and narrator of Quaderni is Serafino Gubbio, a troubled man and the most highly skilled cameraman at Kosmograph, a big production house in Rome. Growing up, Gubbio wanted to study humanities and philosophy. However, his family pushed him toward technical studies and thus he moved to Liège, Belgium, to become better acquainted “with all the machines invented by man for his own happiness” (32). This move is not the beginning of a process of enrichment for Gubbio. On the contrary, in line with antimodern and anti-Nordic sentiments, the sojourn in one of the centers of the European industrial apparatus has devastating effects on Gubbio, to the point that he eventually loses contact with reality and the people around him. Back in the southern Italy of his origin, Gubbio squanders an inheritance and then drifts to Rome. There, Gubbio begrudgingly finds a job but still has no stable attachments or relationships. Gubbio insists he does not mind this solitude, which he paints as a choice. But it is clear even from the beginning of Quaderni that Gubbio hails from a position of disappointment, resentment, and frustration—deluding himself that his isolation is a blessing in disguise, a refuge keeping him safe from further disappointments, especially with women. Unable to admit his own unhappiness, Gubbio gloats about how his disinterest in worldly things has trained him to become a master of mechanical reproduction.

Gubbio’s impassibility—we learn from his diaries—has allowed him to dominate the cinematographic apparatus to the point that he can accurately modulate the shutter speed of his camera to match the pace at which a scene unfolds before him. Alas, such a remarkable talent is wasted at Kosmograph. The films he is forced to shoot to make a living, Gubbio laments, follow the blueprint that made the fortune of silent Italian cinema: exotic settings, lavish productions, operatic passions, unrealistic plotlines, stylized characters, a penchant for melodrama, and overblown rhetoric. But Gubbio’s reservations about film production in liberal Italy are not exclusively a matter of style.

In Gubbio’s eyes, the aesthetic and narrative features of current national cinema are actually contributing to Italy’s disaggregation by feeding the public’s addiction to cheap attractions. Aroused by films and the other attractions of modern times, people move frantically and relentlessly from one activity to the next, from one distraction to another. The excessive and unbound character of the Italian people that Sergi warned about appears in Quaderni to be out of control, unleashed by the power of industrialization to melt all traditional cultural forms and social norms into air. The consequence of “the mechanical framework of the life which keeps us clamorously and dizzily occupied” (4) is a constant, trancelike state wherein one is always preoccupied by what one can do next, by the latest new experience to enjoy. Using a category from Sianne Ngai, one could say that the affect characterizing Pirandello’s representation of Italian life under liberal capitalism is zaniness: the unrelenting and destructive desire of nonstop acting and doing that disregards the unsustainability of this ethos of living.29

In Quaderni, Italians are manic but exhausted, hyperactive but dull, hysterical but apathetic. The situation is not yet as dramatic as it is in the United States, where, Gubbio warns, citizens drop dead while carrying on their everyday business, but Italy is getting there quickly. We notice again here a reversal of values vis-à-vis the terms of Fabbri’s Al Cinematografo. The United States and the “North” more broadly no longer represent a model but rather a token of the future of death and disaggregation that the nation will experience if the body politic does not reform its ways. The machines in Quaderni are not native to Italy but come from the United States, Germany, and France to corrupt the population, putting a whole nation out of joint. Even language is under threat. Gubbio grouses that Italians don’t speak Italian anymore, and one is surrounded everywhere by foreign words. Creativity has been replaced by the passive internalization of foreign life patterns that merely reflect the urgencies of the cycles of production and consumption. The invasion of foreignness in the text coincides with a return to barbarism. Quaderni characterizes this becoming-modern as a regression that has led Italy to drift away from its history and catapulted the people into a different time-space, a dystopic future with no gods, no poets, no ideals, no language of Dante, only mechanical monsters and vain idols. Gubbio laments:

Man who first of all, as a poet, deified his own feelings and worshipped them, now having flung aside every feeling, as an encumbrance not only useless but positively harmful, and having become clever and industrious, has set to work to fashion out of iron and steel his new deities, and has become a servant and a slave to them. (7)

The tempos of the present production-consumption cycle rob individuals of the opportunity to disconnect—to enjoy blocks of free time when they can pause and consider what they are doing with their lives. Given their lack of opportunities for self-reflection, men and women keep making the same mistakes; they keep looking for happiness in the wrong places and, disappointed by the outcomes of their decisions, make even worse choices. People keep rearranging their lives, but all their efforts “hardly fail to reveal themselves sooner or later as illusion or vanities” (11). The machines they have built in the hope of satisfying their needs and desires do not offer them peace. It is as if all these new technologies, cinema included, are gimmicks—to use another of Ngai’s categories—that have caught the nation in their spell, generating incoherent existences that are not worth living, lives that are wasted away serving and servicing the machines that were supposed to make our lives better.30 For Gubbio, these unrestrained lives everyone is living cannot but lead to unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and ultimately rage.

I look at the women in the street, note how they are dressed, how they walk, the hats they wear on their heads; at the men, and the airs they have or give themselves; I listen to their talk, their plans; and at times it seems to me so impossible to believe in the reality of all that I see and hear, that being incapable, on the other hand, of believing that they are all doing it as a joke, I ask myself whether really all this clamorous and dizzy machinery of life, which from day to day seems to become more complicated and to move with greater speed, has not reduced the human race to such a condition of insanity that presently we must break out in fury and overthrow and destroy everything. (4–5)

Gubbio insists that cinema could prevent such an explosion of violence. Notwithstanding his disdain for the way his production company writes the world (Kosmograph = cosmos + graphein), the operator eyes mechanical reproducibility as a means to heal Italian behavior and bring back some law and order in the country. Considering how unhinged everyone has become, considering the risk of an explosion of rage and violence, the film industry should embrace the medium’s specificity and deploy the technology of cinema to document a “life that is not life anymore.” By stopping the flow of lies and fictions, the apparatus would give men and women the opportunity to become aware of a reality on the brink. It would give them a chance to reconsider all their rushed decisions and infantile cravings. The camera operator sighs again: “Ah, if my profession were destined to this end only! If it had the sole object of presenting to men the ridiculous spectacle of their heedless actions, an immediate view of their passions, of their life as it is” (151).

Gubbio’s opportunity to capture on film the tragic consequences of modern living comes during the shooting of the grand finale of a silent film titled The Woman and the Tiger. An English lady is traveling through the savage Indies, fending off a host of suitors and mishaps. In the heart of the jungle, her convoy is attacked by a tiger. The wild animal is about to maul the noblewoman, but a hunter shoots the tiger and saves the woman’s life. As Gubbio explains: “India will be a sham, the jungle will be a sham, the travels will be a sham, with a sham Miss and sham admirers, only the death of this poor beast will not be a sham” (92). In fact, Kosmograph has acquired from the Rome Zoo a tiger unfit for life in captivity. She is too wild to live on, but her death will not be in vain, Gubbio muses, as she will be fed to the movie camera.

Aldo Nuti will play the part of the hunter saving the English Miss from the beast. He is the former lover of the Russian diva Varia Nestoroff, who in the film plays the part of a seductive Indian woman, in brownface. To shoot the film’s spectacular ending, Kosmograph will put Nuti, the tiger, and Gubbio in the same cage: Gubbio will film the scene while Nuti puts the tiger down with a real rifle.

Lights, camera, action. Nuti takes aim at the tiger, the tiger approaches, and Gubbio starts filming. Nuti turns around; instead of aiming at the tiger, he aims at Nestoroff, who is on set as everyone else to check out the realization of this incredible cinematic attraction. Nuti shoots and kills Nestoroff just seconds before being fatally attacked by the tiger. Gubbio goes on filming. Impassible, he records the macabre spectacle of modern life, composing a brutal reminder of men and women’s life expectancy in zany liberal Italy. In fact, bringing misogyny and xenophobia together, Nestoroff in Quaderni stands for the threat that is compromising the Italian body politic. This “razza di donna”— breed of woman—liberal in her sexuality and willful in her desires, has the same effects on men that liberal modernity and liberal cinema have: she unleashes their excessive nature, their insatiable wants. Thus she needs to die, in a sort of apotropaic gesture against all the ills she is made to embody.

By shooting Nuti’s murder-suicide, Gubbio hopes to create a graphic memento that will make an impact on the public. Crowds do flock to the cinemas to catch Gubbio’s footage, but nothing and no one changes in Italy. The Italian public does not receive Gubbio’s filmed reality as a warning; it does not take advantage of the occasion to make amends. Italians are neither healed nor redeemed by cinema. Gubbio abandons the movie camera forever and returns to his notebooks, becoming hospitalized in a mental institution and committed to an obstinate silence. The cameraman appears stunned by his failure to change things, to remake the people. However, having established that the human race is destined to fare poorly in this world insofar as it cannot liberate itself from fictions and illusions, why did Gubbio even hope to make a difference?

Consider Gubbio’s reflections on animal contentment and the unhappiness of men (the original text uses the gendered term gli uomini to refer to humanity). The very separation from nature that propels man into history also condemns us to an existence marked by disappointment and frustration. Whereas animals live in blessed communion with their environment and can satisfy their primary needs instinctively, human beings do not enjoy such a fusion with their reality. In Quaderni—and in Pirandello’s writings in general—men have the same characteristics as Sergi’s Mediterranean specimens: we are excessive beings who bask in the superfluous, who always want more and cannot be satisfied with what we have. We have more than we need, but never enough. An insatiable desire distinguishes men from animals, making contentment impossible. This feature is something endemic to the human race, a marker whose negative effects can be curbed, as in the times of the gods and poets, but are running rampant in the current age of steel and iron. While animals are content in their small dens and nests, in Pirandello’s works men leave behind their homes, women, and families for better homes, women, and families—which, unsatisfied, they leave behind as well. They keep chasing false needs and phantom desires.

Benjamin pointed to Quaderni as one of the first works to deal with the alienation produced in the epoch of technological reproducibility. Yet Gubbio’s notebooks cannot be squarely read as a critique of capitalist alienation, as Robert Dombroski also proposes.31 This is the case because the text’s disdain for the zany affects and destructive gimmicks that dominate life under industrial capitalism is not couched in a structural analysis of capitalism itself. What the text raises concerns about is not an integrated system of production and consumption but the excessive behaviors it generates. What the text wants is for people to behave differently, to interact with the present differently, to be more intentional in how they go about their lives and interface with modern novelties, because the way they are currently carrying themselves is compromising the survival of a phantasmatic traditional Italian way of life and a series of systems of privilege engrained into it. Quaderni does not show any consideration for the bodies that were most maimed in serving the modern economy. The lives of Italy’s colonial subjects and of the Italian proletariat are beyond the scope of Quaderni; the Italian masses are not featured at all in the text, and Africa is mentioned only once, presented as the location of harmless geographical exploration rather than as the site of colonial violence. For Quaderni, servitude and slavery do not appear to be problems in themselves. It is only the loss of status and privileges of middle-class men, their transformation into metaphorical servants and slaves, that matters for Pirandello. The film novel thus labors to trigger resentment not against capitalism per se but against the ruling liberal block that did nothing to protect the poor Italian men from the upheaval that modernity supposedly brought about. Using “man” as a metonymy for humanity, however, Quaderni harnesses the feeling that by doing harm to individual Italian men, one is also harming human life in itself, that the crisis of Italian masculinity here staged was also a global crisis that concerns everyone. Plights of the particular are reframed as the revelatory tale of more generalized looming catastrophe.

Additionally, Pirandello cannot simply criticize capitalist alienation because for him alienation is the inalienable human condition; it is the tragically ironic destiny of the human race.32 The condition of displacement and homelessness that one experiences under liberal modernity is only superficially a matter of political economy, being more fundamentally a racial question. Modern-day alienation and commodity fetishism, for Pirandello, grow precisely out of our race-determined incapacity to know reality and ourselves, to create good lives and good homes for ourselves. What are the machines, apparatuses, and devices that the characters in Quaderni have attached their lives and bodies to if not a host of failed experiments at racial self-realization? What are they if not prosthetic organs, as Bernard Stiegler would call them, through which the human race has tried in vain to construct happy lifeworlds and happy selves?33

Given what he knows of animals and men, Gubbio deluded himself that he could save the nation just by projecting on the big screen the insanity and degradation of Italian life under liberal rule. Throughout his notebooks, Gubbio passes judgment on the naiveté of the people around him, on how pointless and misinformed everyone else’s life decisions are. Yet, at the end, he is the one in the wrong. The effort to deploy mechanical reproducibility to raise awareness and reverse the effects of technology on the Italian body politic is just another futile attempt to rely on machines to order collective life rather than on the past remedies of poetry or art or religion. Gubbio’s failure, then, removes the cameraman from the position of authority often granted him and remarks on the separation between author and protagonist that the novel had more subtly established throughout. Pirandello himself makes a cameo in the diegetic universe of Quaderni: many have recognized the double of the author in the man who is “delicate, pale, with thin, fair hair; keen, blue eyes; a pointed, yellowish beard” (6) and who predicts, in notebook 1, that Gubbio will become obsolete soon.

Here, Pirandello’s stand-in alludes to the fact that one day Gubbio will be expendable: once cameras can regulate their shutter speed automatically, no one will need Gubbio’s talents and he will be “suppressed, replaced” by some mechanism. But he is also useless because the cameraman’s attempted weaponization of the apparatus to redeem the human race, or Italians at least, is misinformed. As Michael Syrimis cogently points out, although Serafino is the name of an angel—that is, of a messenger—we should not take Gubbio’s call for documentary realism seriously.34 Treating this disgruntled man, an incel avant la lettre, as an enlightened film theorist, as many have done, would contradict not only Pirandello’s worldview but also Gubbio’s own assessment of our race’s inability to become aware of itself, achieve self-consciousness, and change.

The joke has always been on Gubbio, and on those who took seriously the cameraman’s considerations on the redemptive dimension of immediacy and technological reproducibility. Notwithstanding his posturing, Gubbio’s speculations are far from being objective and on point: they are additional symptoms of the human incapacity to reckon with the real and to live well, of the profound sickness afflicting the human race and contemporary Italian men especially. At every turn of a page in the operator’s notebook, it is easy to perceive the breaking apart of a fragile masculinity in crisis and poisoned by entitlement, self-importance, and resentment; by the fantasy of being someone other than who he is; by all the small and large delusions of a man who feels victimized but is unable to read his own affects and those of the people around him. Gubbio himself is an unhinged body compromised by contact with European modernity (his sojourn in Belgium first, then his obsession with Varia Nestoroff), and the snuff film he shoots is nothing but the apotheosis of a long filmic tradition composed of melodramatic, Orientalizing attractions. A southern Italian man killing a Russian diva for revenge and then being mauled by a tiger, while everyone watches: spectators cannot wait for this spectacle; it matches the sensibility of the times.

Through quick changes of scale, perspective, and pace, through flashbacks, pans, and abrupt cuts, through a style that indeed has a cinematic feel, Pirandello’s stylistically more modernist work does not just stage an Italy that is decentered, frantic, erratic, and without restraint—an unchecked nation suffering from a profound identity crisis. The convoluted and winding prose of the novel also conjures its protagonist’s distraught mental state, amplifying, in all their inarticulacy, broader social fears and hopes about the impact of industrialization on traditional forms of relationality and life. The well-ordered Italy and the well-meaning cinema of Fabbri’s Al Cinematografo never came to fruition. And in the confused pathos of Quaderni—even in its morbid murder-suicide—we can perceive a frustration with the present, a misplaced nostalgia for a phantasmatic traditional Italy, and a commitment toward a future that can no longer be addressed by Italian liberalism and its film forms. This is the case because the apparatuses of liberal Italy, including the cinematic apparatus, can only reproduce a “condition of insanity” (5)—they can only further foreign lifestyles, just as other imported machines are doing.

Yet this does not mean that all hope is lost—quite the contrary. As I mentioned, Sergi had insisted on the urgency of developing racially appropriate cultural forms that could discipline what he considered the excessive and self-destructive nature of the Italian people, to shepherd this breed of humans toward greatness once again. Quaderni promotes a similar feeling of urgency, by foregrounding the trope of insubordinate life in desperate need of healing and saving (the plethora of references to Christian eschatology is also important in this regard). Gubbio’s failure, his inability to deploy the macchina da presa for the presumed greater good, does not quash but rather further incites the hope that someone might eventually figure out how to weaponize film forms to capture the nation in a more proper ordering. Thus, on the one hand, following Alberto Asor Rosa, one should recognize in Quaderni the effort to demystify the liberal elites’ mythic account of progress and industrial modernity. On the other hand, with Giuseppe Panella, one ought to consider how Pirandello’s own demystification circulates an account of the human race and Italian reality that implicitly establishes its own mythologies.35

If the human race is so misguided, if the malaise of liberal Italy is so serious, if the threats looming over its men are so frightening, then the remedies that could save the authentic Italian people from going extinct cannot help but acquire a mythical dimension. In Quaderni, we have the myth of the cinema as the device of the century; but we also see the mythology of the new man behind the movie camera, a healer-artist who can transform film forms and thereby mitigate, reclaim, or remake Italian life. Quaderni—like Sergi’s Arii e Italici—is an apocalyptic text indeed, one that dwells in the time of waiting and cultivates both absolute discontent with the present and extraordinary hope for a different future. Pirandello’s textual machine functions as a powerful erotic-phobic apparatus, amplifying resentment against liberal modernity and its cinema while simultaneously harvesting the millenarian desire for alternative forms of government, film, and life. But how does one get to this alternative Italian future?

Given that people are incapable by nature of finding their way through life, there is no point in just showing the public the decay of Italy under liberal rule. A phenomenological realism similar to the kind that Bazin will praise in the postwar period will not work. To have an effect, to become a political weapon, cinema needs to do something different from reproducing reality “as is” and Italian lives as they are. It also needs to acquire a normative dimension and impose upon the public what this reality and these lives ought to become in order for happy endings to become possible. Quaderni emphasizes that the human race lives in illusions and that people’s cravings are influenced by the fictions they consume at the movies. Hence, the way to a better Italian future would be to project better Italian lives onto the big screen, even and especially if such lives do not yet exist. What Italy ultimately needed were better fictions and healthier illusions. As a mere operator, Gubbio cannot bring them about. A brilliant author could, but he would have to be supported by an appropriate productive system and backed up by a forward-looking director. In 1915, when Quaderni was published in its original serial format, it was difficult to imagine anyone who could lead the film industry in the “right” direction and allow it to amplify the lives that Italians presumably had to live for their own good and for the good of the nation. In 1925, when the novel was rereleased in book form and with its definitive title, Italians—Pirandello included—had found the dux they desperately felt they needed to be directed by.

Both Italian and Anglophone scholarship tend to dissociate Pirandello’s support of Fascism from his poetics, insisting that there is not anything intrinsically fascist in the Nobel laureate’s art.36 Yet this conclusion is belied by the damning opinion piece Pirandello authored for the one-year anniversary of the fascist March on Rome: “La vita creata” (The created life, 1923) manifests in this regard how the step from Serafino Gubbio to Mussolini might be as short as the one that, according to Kracauer, separates Dr. Caligari from Adolf Hitler.37 Allow me to translate a long passage from “La vita creata,” as if to let Pirandello speak for himself.

Mussolini can only receive blessings from someone who has always felt the immanent tragedy of life, which, in order to acquire consistency, requires a form; but then senses death in whichever form it consists in. Since life is subject to relentless change and motion, it feels imprisoned by form: it rages and storms and pounds until finally is able to escape. Mussolini has shown himself to be well aware of this double and tragic law of movement and form, with so much force that he wants to reconcile the two. Movement must be restrained in an ordered form, and the form cannot become empty, a vain idol. Form must welcome life, pulsating and quivering. In this way, life would be constantly recreated and not resist the act that imposes a form on itself and on others. The revolutionary movement inaugurated by Mussolini with the March on Rome and the methods of his new government seem to me to be, in politics, the necessary and authentic realization of my own conception of life.

To my knowledge, no one has ever mentioned Fascism in regard to Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore. “La vita creata,” however, conjures a much more profound connection between Pirandello’s fictions and his political choices; between the discourse on life, that is, the biology, that emerges in his celebrated works of art, and the reasons why he blessed Mussolini’s coming. Indeed, there are some lines in “La vita creata” that are almost literal repetitions of passages from his works of fiction. The lamentation over modern forms of relationality as vain idols, the need for a revolution in how the body politic moves, the affected pathos over a life that is disordered and thus must be restrained at all costs: these would not be out of place in Quaderni, nor in Sergi’s racial anthropology. Quaderni, “La vita creata,” and Sergi’s work share what I would characterize as a sort of cruel vitalism. While these interventions recognize the force of life and desire to defy all social norms and traditions, they also betray an absolute distrust in the power of the people to govern their own bodies and drives. This vitalism is thus cruel because the notice of the power of the living is not liberatory (as in Baruch Spinoza, Nietzsche, or Deleuze) but, by marking bare life as intrinsically guilty and culpable, enables both the repression of individual freedoms and the biopolitical remaking of collective life. As the work of Étienne Balibar also suggests, in terms of political practices and projects, in the end it might not matter much whether one writes about a life to be created, a race to be restrained, a stock to be reclaimed, a nation to be healed, a populace to be disciplined, or a people still to be made.38 Using different signifiers and through different frameworks, one can be amplifying the same fear-mongering panic in regard to human beings’ ability to form good lives for themselves without external tutelage. This biological anxiety about human autonomy and agency, “La vita creata” shows, has direct biopolitical bearings; it comes with its own sets of inarticulate, but not inconsequential, commitments and allegiances.

In light of the perfect alignment, so emphatically professed by Pirandello, between his own conception of life and Fascism’s methods of government, it is not surprising that the Duce insisted on enlisting the Nobel laureate when the regime—in preparation for its imperial acceleration—decided to look beyond documentary cinema and started to invest in fictions to restrain the nation’s biological body while exploiting its vital force.