From Race to Landscape, from Destiny to History

The revitalization of Italian film in the 1930s coincided with the burgeoning of a lively paratextual debate in magazines and technical journals that strived to formalize a properly Italian way to sound cinema. Such deep reflection on film style, forms, techniques, and technologies constituted an effort to reckon with the medium’s specificity but also an attempt to articulate how cinema might best serve the regime’s plans for social normalization and territorial expansion.7 The recognition of film’s bearing on national life came, in fact, with a heightened degree of anxiety: given cinema’s impact on the collectivity, one had to make sure that only those movies that promoted racially appropriate behaviors reached the movie halls. In light of these biopolitical concerns over mediation practices and film forms, it is fitting that Maurizio Rava, the vice governor of Tripolitania and former governor of Somalia, penned the very first article in Cinema, the authoritative journal founded in 1936 with the aim of honing the cinematographic apparatus in fascist Italy.8

In “I popoli africani dinanzi allo schermo” (The African peoples before the screen), Rava establishes a definitive connection between cinema and white supremacy, insisting that film has a crucial bearing on racial hierarchies and race relations, especially in a colonial setting. Preoccupied by the increased contact between Italian colonists and their Black subjects in the expanding fascist empire, Rava singles out miscegenation as the most serious problem of the present. Fascism’s settler colonialism and its project of world domination required armies of bodies—hence Mussolini’s “battle for births.” Yet it was crucial that these newly mass-produced lives were of the right color and make. Given these related concerns over racial identity and sexual behavior, Rava proposes to ban from the colonies films that could trigger improper longings in the public. It was not simply a question of blocking the release of films that, with their exotic and sensual representation of Black women, might push Italian men to trespass the color line and thus endanger the purity as well as the future of the ethno-nation. It was also a matter of controlling which image of white people (“bianchi”) reached Africa, so to govern how Black people gazed at Italian men and women.9

Consider, Rava intimates, cinema’s influence on children, how it models their way of speaking and walking but also their aspirations, dispositions, and desires. Then consider the potentially catastrophic effect that portrayals of imperfect white men and sexually available white women could have on populations that are as impressionable as children. By projecting films that cast a negative light on whiteness in places like Somalia, Libya, or Ethiopia, one would risk tainting the natives’ judgment of the white master race, and thus also their attitude in regard to white supremacy itself. To ensure the prestige of the Italian race—a fundamental component of imperial dominion and colonial apartheid, according to Rava—colonial administrators should then block the release in Italian Africa of works that might compromise the fearful deference that local populations harbored for Italian masters and their women. What is notable about the very first article published in Cinema is the precision with which it connects the exercise of white supremacy with the realms of media and sexual reproduction. As Ann Laura Stoler highlights, the modern anxiety over sex (What are acceptable forms of sexual intercourse? How does one properly represent desire?) cannot be dissociated from the trajectories of state racism and biopolitics: policing sex is a way to police social reproduction, and thus a means to control the future.10 As Rava’s essay makes clear, the way bodies are represented at the movies ought to be severely policed, lest the prestige, integrity, supremacy, and whiteness of the Italian people be compromised both at the heart and at the margins of the empire. At stake at the movies was the very existence of the Blackshirt race.

A similar concern with correctly reproducing the Italian race also characterizes the interventions in Cinema by Vittorio Mussolini, who had become the journal’s editor in chief in 1939 and was one of the most vocal proponents of weaponizing film in support of imperial expansion and internal governance. While Rava focused on what cinema shouldn’t be doing, Mussolini gave detailed instructions on the route that national film ought to follow to become an effective biopolitical apparatus. In the editorial “Ordine e disciplina” (Order and discipline), Mussolini pressures producers, directors, and screenwriters to docilely accept Fascism’s “attentive scrutiny” and “friendly assistance.” In “Razza italiana e cinema italiano” (Italian race and Italian cinema), an essay penned after the promulgation of the Racial Laws in 1938, the Duce’s son further specifies how this medium can assist fascist race-making.11 Mussolini first laments the lack of realism in current Italian cinema, then affirms that for national cinema to be realistic, it must capture Italian racial unity onscreen. More specifically, Mussolini presses Cinecittà to follow Hollywood in its treatment of moving images as natural emanations of the body politic. Filmic representations convey the nation; therefore, Mussolini urges, directors should cast only actors and actresses whose bodies affirmed the Italian race in all its glorious beauty and physical prowess. In fact, no matter how diverse Italians might look, they must be recognized as sharing one race and one destiny based on their shared biological and historical heritage. Rural yet modern, poor yet courageous, provincial but urban; heroic, young, lively, self-confident, exuberant, and audacious—such was the Italian race that a proper national cinema had to capture and broadcast. By making the core features of the Italian people more recognizable and reputable abroad, cinema would contribute to the affirmation of the fascist lifestyle on the world stage. Moreover, in a time of transnational expansion of the homeland, a precise representation of the Italian race would make the people proud of their identity and thus inspire them to docilely and enthusiastically fulfill their biologically determined destiny.12

Ernesto Laclau was one of the first to highlight that racial imagination is a central engine for social reproduction under fascist populism.13 But whereas for Laclau racism functions as an apparatus of ideological justification, for Vittorio Mussolini the frame of race is key because of its affective affordances. For Mussolini, cinema did not need to convince the people that they were a race, so as to have them consent to the regime or legitimize the existence of Fascism. Rather, cinema ought to inspire the people to perform racism, to ensure the survival of a white Blackshirt Italy even after the Duce’s death. There are two distinct ways in which the reference to race is a resource for policing collective existence. By engrafting Italian identity on an overdetermined biohistorical patrimony, it naturalizes history and disseminates the sense of a foreclosed futurity. At the same time, by recoding the dissimilarities within the country as merely somatic and happenstance variables of the same archetypical matrix, the reference to race neutralizes difference and mediates a pacifying feeling of community and co-belonging. A true Italian cinema was a cinema that would effectively involve the people in Fascism’s projects and practices.

Despite the efforts and demands to transform film into a powerful weapon for making race, for governing the nation and expanding the empire, from the early 1940s onward film became a battlefield for the regime. The entry into World War II, intended to catapult the Italian people to the world stage, had turned out to be a catastrophe. After years of relative political consensus, the brutal realities of war struck a great blow to the fascist state’s capacity to keep Italy and its film industry in check. Even directors sympathetic to the regime now were reluctant to deploy film forms in support of Blackshirt rule. In 1941, Camerini directed I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), and the film’s long, brutal panoramic shots over a Milan tormented by the plague conveys the angst of a nation in disarray. Fascism was in such crisis that even Blasetti was changing registers and moving away from an outright apology for the present. In 1942, he adapted for the screen Sam Benelli’s La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper), a farce that denounced the downward spiral of violence in Medicean Florence and somehow anticipated the looming civil war. The regime’s suspicion of cinema was so high that in 1942 Benito Mussolini personally ordered movie theaters to pull Goffredo Alessandrini’s adaptation of Ayn Rand’s We the Living, detecting an antitotalitarian subtext in the film’s condemnation of communist Russia. The defeats in Albania, Africa, and Russia were sinking Italians’ confidence in the regime but also Fascism’s confidence in its own people and apparatuses of government.

In regard to cinema, the regime’s preoccupations were directed especially toward the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, which—under the direction of Umberto Barbaro and Luigi Chiarini—had become “the foreign legion of anti-fascist intelligentsia.”14 With the Centro, Fascism had created a state-of-the-art facility that formed skilled screenwriters, cinematographers, and directors. This very training made it possible for film practitioners to navigate the intricate censorship system, experiment with film norms, and elaborate alternative deployment of the apparatus. Ironically, it was Vittorio Mussolini himself who introduced Luchino Visconti to this cohort of what today we might describe as media activists.

Mussolini’s heir was a passionate admirer of Jean Renoir, and in 1939 he brought the French director to Rome to adapt Tosca. Renoir fled the country when Italy declared war on France, leaving his young assistant Luchino behind to complete the project. Mussolini introduced Visconti to the editors at Cinema, a journal that under his tenure had become a think tank for students from the Centro Sperimentale, whose impatience with the regime was growing. The thirty-three-year-old Visconti—whose homosexuality was an open secret—immediately bonded with the nonconformist editorial office of Cinema, especially Giuseppe De Santis and Mario Alicata. Both in their twenties and members of the banned Communist Party, De Santis and Alicata had started pondering ways to intertwine art and political activism in the same fashion as Renoir had done in the France of the Popular Front. In Visconti, they recognized someone who—because of his experience, connections, and wealth—could help in their efforts. At that point, the Cinema cell was established. Besides Visconti, future Academy Award–winner De Santis, and the future cultural leader of the Italian Communist Party, Alicata, the group included soon-to-be directors Antonio Pietrangeli and Carlo Lizzani, Gianni and Dario Puccini, novelist Alberto Moravia (who was of Jewish descent), and Pietro Ingrao, who in 1976 would become the first Communist to chair the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Among the members of the cell, Alicata and the Puccini brothers already had files in the political registry of antifascist activities, but the whole group was under surveillance.15

The merits of a “politicization of aesthetics” that would challenge Nazi Fascism’s “aestheticization of politics” were being assessed not only in Germany and Vichy France but also in Italy. In contrast to Nazi Germany, Italy still boasted venues where dissent from official cultural politics could be voiced. It was not out of mere liberality or pluralism that Fascism allowed these spaces to persist, but rather to promote that artistic creativity without which the regime believed that a politically effective fascist art would not materialize. The strategy dictated by the underground Communist Party was to cautiously occupy these free-speech zones to challenge state-sanctioned cultural forms, experiment with new discursive regimes, and make contact with other freedom fighters. The strategy might appear as an iteration of what Antonio Gramsci calls a “war of position”: a struggle that takes place within the realm of collective fantasy, with the goal of shaping an alternative popular culture that would pave the way to armed revolt.16 In the case of the Cinema cell, the entry point to this cultural war was the debate on filmic realism.

From the interwar period onward and all the way to Vittorio Mussolini, the debate on realism was a site of power–knowledge struggle between conflicting accounts of the Italian real with radically different ideological implications.17 “Realism” constituted a fraught term in Italian culture, functioning as a sort of empty signifier that different groups wielded to advance their varying political ontologies. De Santis, Alicata, and Visconti did the same: they took a stance on the issue of realism in film in order to elaborate a perspective on collective identity, a political project, and an articulation of the medium that were incompatible with those expressed under fascist racism. The antifascist and antiracist thrust of their new realism emerges for the first time in De Santis’s “Per un paesaggio italiano” (“For an Italian Landscape,” 1941).18

De Santis begins this programmatic manifesto—the “per” (for) in the title should not be overlooked—by repeating the claims that Vittorio Mussolini and others had made repeatedly in Cinema: Italian reality and real Italian people were missing from the movie theaters; realism had not yet been achieved; Italian film needed to achieve realism. Yet the brilliant student at the Centro Sperimentale swerves away from clichéd positions and instead questions the necessity of holding on to the master trope of “race” as the definitive truth about the nation. In “Razza italiana e cinema italiano,” Vittorio Mussolini demanded that cinema capture Italians as one race and one people. Parroting his father, he insisted that

the somatic differences among Italians, the differences which distinguish the blond from the brown, differences of skin color and skull shape, do not prevent us from agreeing with illustrious scientists and asserting the existence of one Italian race that includes all Italians, from the Alps to Sicily.19

De Santis obliquely signals that Mussolini’s magic formula for achieving realism in film was ill-conceived. How could Mussolini steer the film industry toward realism when he had completely misunderstood the core features of Italian reality and identity? Italians not only looked different from one another but were different, insofar as their fundamental imprint came from their relationship to their surroundings and not from a common spiritual–biological patrimony:

We are surely saying nothing new by claiming that the landscape [paesaggio] in which each of us was born and has lived contributed to making us different from one another. And herein lies God’s mark, which we are unfortunately accustomed to seeing profaned to such an extent that a peasant from Sicily can appear identical to one living in the Julian Alps.20

Although De Santis never mentions race, it is the main focus of his article: by regrounding Italian identity in exteriority, he renounces the frame of racism altogether. From this perspective, “Per un paesaggio italiano” can be described as an exploration of the irrelevance of race when it comes to understanding, and thus representing, a lifeworld. As De Santis reiterates in the sensuous prose of “Il linguaggio dei rapporti” (The language of relations), what human beings hold within themselves, “they have stolen . . . from their elements, from their relations, from their peculiar ways of being in communion with others, from the tree that grows in their gardens or from the passerby they have briefly encountered in the streets.”21 A person does not live in the world as a silkworm enclosed in its shell: she is, De Santis underscores, surrounded by comrades, animals, gardens, streets, mountains, the sky, a sea, and life. For this reason, filmmakers interested in witnessing Italy had no other option than narrating the diverse environments constitutive of the country, situating their plots against the backdrop of actual landscapes. Otherwise, Italian cinema would confine itself to staged depictions of Italy, visualizations that bear no trace of the radical differences between Sicilians and people from the Alps, for instance. De Santis does approvingly comment upon the coeval efforts to achieve realism in Italian cinema (Blasetti, De Robertis, Rossellini); yet, to all effects his proposal for a new national cinema overcomes realism’s way of gazing at Italy and Italians.

Two important consequences follow from De Santis’s argument that are at odds with the tenets of fascist realism:

1. 1. Notwithstanding Fascism’s presumed reclamation of the country, a unified national reality did not exist: Italy was radically diverse.
2. 2. The Italian nation that cinema ought to propagate was not a united race-people but rather a fragmented territory inhabited by a constellation of different forms of life.

With the paesaggio as a backdrop, the paese (the country) not only appeared diverse but also felt precarious. If identity was detached from race, Fascism’s claim of a predetermined fate for the population collapsed: there is a strong sense of agency that emerges from De Santis’s manifesto. Noa Steimatsky pointedly describes De Santis’s piece on realism as a review of how Italian localisms upset the spatial mythology of a centralized ethno-community. I would add that the Cinema cell’s emphasis on Italian landscape also challenges the temporal order of racial determinism, conjuring a different experience of history, a contingent temporality at odds with the idea of a spiritual–biological destiny.22 Indeed, what happens to our attitude toward history when we are reminded that the landscape—the force informing who we are, according to De Santis—is partially of our own making? If the form that life acquires is the result of a nondeterministic interaction between group and environment, then by acting on the environment a community also acts upon itself. This means that identities and peoples are always in a state of becoming, open to negotiation; it means that the future of the nation belongs to those who dwell on its soil; it means that futurity is the very horizon of belonging. Consequently, for De Santis, an authentically new Italian cinema would need to convey this fundamentally transformative dialogue in which people engage with one another and with their surroundings.

The protagonist of Mussolini’s realism was a homogenous people captive to an overdetermined racial fate. In contrast, De Santis figures a landscape with an open-ended history. With an ecocritical sensibility derived from his peasant origins, De Santis painted the nation as a changing microcosm, a contingent and unstable assemblage crawling with life, passions, energies, possibilities, and futurities. In so doing, he also devised an audiovisual regime that, as Derek Duncan argues, instead of contributing to fascist governmentality would upset the very racial order of truth in which the regime was couched.23 In reality, Italians were not a race and did not have a destiny; in reality, there was no fixed Italian identity for Fascism to police, defend, and secure in the first place. What defined Italy as a place and a people was difference and becoming, which also meant that, by trying to unify Italy and by showing a unified, overdetermined Italy, Fascism and fascist cinema were doing violence to the Italian real.

“Per un paesaggio italiano” was only the inception of the Cinema cell’s attack against dominating mediations of Italian reality. The group soon took aim at the “calligraphic” mode in national cinema in a way that resonates with the French New Wave’s 1960s rejection of quality cinema, which was mockingly referred to as “cinéma du papa,” dad cinema. Their positions also echo Roman Jakobson’s considerations on how revolutionary forms of art establish their status in dialectical opposition to previous works, which are denounced as insufficient in terms of both form and content.24 The Cinema cell’s problem with domestic production was that it blindly reduced the search for a proper film style to a question of technique and forms, neglecting to consider larger issues of the politics of representation. Obsessed with technical perfection, directors such as Mario Soldati and Renato Castellani had failed to feature the Italian lives that mattered the most. In their 1941 “Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano” (“Truth and Poetry: Verga and Italian Cinema”), Alicata and De Santis ridicule the staged, superficial, sterile, provincial, polished pictorialism of recent Italian films, all of which busily monumentalize the most trivial details of national life.25 Yet somehow, surprisingly given the unmediated dimension one usually associates with neorealism, Alicata and De Santis state that significant preparation is necessary to eschew trite audiovisual paradigms. Taking a stance, as Umberto Barbaro had done earlier, against the mystical trust in the movie camera’s capacity to capture the real by means of technical reproduction alone, Alicata and De Santis point out that filmmakers had to open their horizons and expand their frames of reference before scouting ports, fields, and factories. Before even thinking of taking their cameras to the streets, film practitioners had to read southern writer Giovanni Verga.26

The approving reference to Verga’s tales about Sicily had apparently contentious overtones. In the concurrent social imaginary, Sicily still represented a space and a time incompatible with the desired image of a “modern, imperially ambitious fascist Italy as it was entering the war.”27 This paese was at the margins of the nation not only geographically but also linguistically, culturally, politically, and historically: with his novellas, Verga contributed to the image of Sicily as something different, a remnant of otherness impossible to assimilate. Whereas for centralized state power radical difference was an unresolved problem, for the Cinema cell it constituted an answer, a resource to excite the collective imagination. In fact, for them, the people memorialized by Verga approximated prerevolutionary subjects fighting for freedom and happiness. His novellas featuring Sicilian workers (fishermen, peasants, miners) limned suffering yet combative social groups who were bravely engaged in changing their lifeworlds, bearing witness to a reality that was resilient to the reclamation plans concocted by the regime.28 In essence, the Cinema cell believed that Verga’s subaltern people were the protagonists of a history that had nothing to do with the singular racial destiny that, according to the fascist establishment, cinema had to manifest. Verga’s Sicilians were the heroes that Italian popular culture lacked; they were fighters but not cut from a Blackshirt cloth.29 Ultimately, the Cinema cell hoped that Verga would open filmmakers’ eyes to this other history taking place at the nation’s margins, causing them to reorient their cameras away from model citizens and toward antagonistic Italians, and forcing them to take notice of overlooked fractures, frictions, and tensions within the country. Alicata and De Santis admit that Sicily will mean nothing to those interested in cinematic awards or technical perfection. Yet to those “who believe in an art which above all creates truth,” Verga indicates the one historically valid urgency: “the urgency of a revolutionary art inspired by a humanity that suffers and hopes.”30

The proposal for a new cinema committed to representing the lives and struggles of these other Italians, a realism that would develop a new truth regime and have spectators experience the nation differently, did not go unnoticed. A few weeks after the publication of Alicata and De Santis’s first article on Verga and Italian film, a vitriolic intervention in Cinema protested that film was a medium of immediacy and that literature had no place at the movies.31 There was no deeper truth to be discovered beneath the fascist ordering of things—no struggle, no tension, no violence, no underground conflicts; no explosive hopes, aspirations, or potentialities to be explored. Accordingly, there was no need for directors to re-view Italy through Verga; the Italian real was immediately available to anyone who cared to record it.

It comes as no surprise that Alicata and De Santis’s intervention caused such an outrage. “Verità e poesia” denounced that what passed for Italian reality on the screen was a fiction; it held that cinema still failed to convey the nation, despite its self-proclaimed authenticity. In one swift provocation, Cinema questioned national cinema and, therefore, given the complicity of media and power since the early 1930s, Fascism itself. If films that featured a suffering yet pugnacious humanity were considered more authentic, important, and inspiring than state-sanctioned movies promoting the united, happy, active, disciplined Italian race, then Mussolini’s grip on the nation suddenly seemed compromised. How could the Duce effectively govern the people if he did not even know who they were? As Luchino Visconti soon reiterated, an authentic outlook on the Italian people and the nation’s possibilities could only be accessed via Sicily’s mediation.

In his earlier essay “Cadaveri” (Corpses), Visconti had extended the polemic initiated by De Santis in “Per un paesaggio italiano,” denouncing the comatose state of Italian cinema and the nefarious consequences of state control over film production. The industry, Visconti warned, was in the hands of corpses who, unaware of being dead, insisted on writing screenplays.32 In “Tradizione e invenzione” (Tradition and invention), Visconti singles out Verga as the author who could steer the industry past the “banality and . . . misery typical of current scenarios.”33 Visconti emphatically recalls that it was by reading Verga that he started sensing that Italy was much more than he had previously understood. The Sicily one could read about in I Malavaoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1890) was physically and symbolically alien to the Italy usually exhibited in the cinemas. It was a wild landscape inhabited by a people that had nothing in common with the ordered nation concocted by Fascism. Verga’s land of passions and conflicts functioned metonymically as an alternative reality through which Visconti could see that, beyond the domesticated lives so often represented in the movies, there were other bodies and other lives waiting to be discovered. Visconti essentially pointed to Sicily as a way to escape the hollow promises and premises of fascist modernity, a return to the “core feature of human life,” as he puts it.

In letters sent from prison after being arrested for his antifascist activities, Alicata raised doubts about Visconti’s fascination with Sicily: he was afraid that Visconti might be indulging in primitivist phantasies similar to those informing F. W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931). Dispelling charges of what today we would call essentialism and antihistoricism, in his “Cinema antropomorfico” (“Anthropomorphic Cinema”)—an essay promoting the imminent release of Ossessione—Visconti clarifies that a cinema that captures humanity’s essential characteristics is a cinema that features life’s potential to change.34 The core of human life, Visconti specifies, is to be found not in an atemporal essence but rather in the “mystical discovery” that one is not well but could do better: no matter how corrupt individuals are, they still have a chance to repent and transform their lives. This empowering sense of agency is precisely what Ossessione mustered for Visconti. However, the film did not merely project that Italians could change their situation and be different, that social life was not overdetermined by tradition or race but instead coincided with an openness toward the future that Italians had, for their own sake, to pursue. By means of its disruptive system of figuration, the final act of the Cinema conspiracy against Fascism charted more clearly the “lines of flight” on which the people might want to embark in order to travel beyond the destructive normality harnessed by the regime. Since Italians were not a race, who could they be?

What a Body Politic Can Do

By the spring of 1943, the tide had turned against the regime. While Stalin’s Red Army pushed back on the Eastern Front, the Allies had taken Tunisia, putting them just a few short miles south of Sicily. The worker strikes in Turin and Milan were unmistakable signs of an expanding unrest in the North. Fascism was under siege. Mussolini was losing control of his country, his people, and his party. It is at this historic juncture that Ossessione was released.

Barbaro was enthusiastic, coining the term neorealism to describe the film’s effort to manifest a new national real. He was among the few that praised Ossessione. The Minister of Popular Culture denounced the Cinema operation as “reeking of latrines,” and critics condemned it as a crass representation of Italian life—a deplorable imitation of what they saw as the coarse cinema of Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir. In the midst of this unprecedented smear campaign, the police so discouraged theater managers from screening the film that very few people could actually see it. Vittorio Mussolini did catch the work that had originated in his editorial office; he did not like it one bit.35 “This is not Italy! This in not Italy! This is not Italy!” he allegedly protested, storming out of his private premiere.

Mussolini was right in not recognizing his nation in the country that the film projected. Ossessione was truly anti-Italian, and not merely from a formal point of view, given its endeavor to conjure a hybrid style that would bring together Verga, American noir, and French naturalism. Ossessione was an anti-Italian work because the people it portrayed were radically other from the Italian race that Fascism sought to produce and demanded that cinema reproduce. If, as the film maintained, twenty years after Mussolini’s rise to power the nation remained a swamp dominated by toxic affects, then perhaps the problem was not simply the Duce or fascist rule. The problem might lie instead in the faith that a race war reactivating “traditional values” would shelter the people from disaster. In this sense, Ossessione did far more than denounce the degradation of the nation’s health, blame Mussolini for it, and advocate for a change in leadership. The Cinema cell indicted Fascism as the culmination of a longer trajectory of racialized traditionalism and suggested that a good life could only be found in the desertion of hegemonic arrangements of intimate and social life.

Gino (Massimo Girotti) is a drifter. Homeless and jobless, he arrives at a roadside inn owned by the aging Bragana (Juan de Landa) and his young wife, Giovanna (Clara Calamai). During the hobo’s work-stay at the inn, Gino and Giovanna fall for each other. Giovanna, who has had enough of her husband, is seeking a partner for her murderous plan: kill Bragana, pocket his life insurance, take over the inn, and start a new home and family. Gino hesitates between going back to his unattached existence on the road and embracing the home life with which Giovanna entices him. The outsiders Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo) and Anita (Dhia Cristiani) give Gino refuge in the cities of Ancona and Ferrara, urging him not to give in to the lure of domesticity and mainstream notions of sex, gender, and family. But in the end, Gino cannot resist Giovanna. He murders Bragana, only to get himself arrested and Giovanna killed.

The Cinema effort to project the darker side of the Italian present is foreshadowed from the opening sequence of Ossessione, which also stages the film’s dialectical relation vis-à-vis coeval Italian realism through its intertextual reference. Over a melodramatic soundscape and through the frame of a truck windshield, the viewer is exposed to a grim and desolate Po Valley, nothing like the enchanted countryside seen and heard in the opening of Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole. The people who inhabit the Italian countryside are as desolate as their landscape: a couple with no children and out of love; an ex-soldier turned Blackshirt turned abusive husband, inept business owner, and animal abuser; a former sex worker who orchestrates the death of the man who rescued her from the streets and then relegated her to the status of housemaid; a drifter with no reservations about sleeping with a married woman and killing her husband. Peter Brooks famously argued that the cinematic removal of housetops and the representation of the sad family existences playing out beneath them is a typical gesture of any narrative that strives to establish itself as realistic.36 Within the context of Fascism, the Cinema reappraisal of domestic life acquires a particular valence. Keeping in mind the normalizing pressures dominating Italy under the regime, the film’s brutal vision of family life emerges as a provocative challenge to state-enforced attachments and investments in heteronormativity. What is, in fact, this longed-for home? What is this place for which one should sacrifice everything? For Ossessione, it is the time-space of melodrama.

In Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, Alexander García Düttmann argues that Visconti’s films are characterized by a melodramatic aesthetic of excess that shatters the stable identity of the viewers and pushes them to feel another possible life pulsing beyond the lives that are assembled in the here and now—a life, as Jonathan Goldberg puts it, “beyond the legal, the social, the rules of existence.” In a 2017 lecture delivered in Berlin, Düttmann returned to the topic, lingering on the weird bursts of laughter in Visconti’s later films, most notably Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971). For Düttmann, these outbursts showcase how the melodramatic imagination entails a charged emotional register culminating in a queer jouissance, where any fixed arrangement of subjectivity is compromised.37

Ossessione, an example of “melodramatic realism” for Henry Bacon, bears no trace of the liberating pathos that Düttmann and Goldberg, in an almost Bataillean fashion, deem central to Visconti’s queer utopianism.38 By using melodrama to read Italian history and by capturing the melodramatic dimension of current national reality, Ossessione resorts to the system of light, color, sound, and music typical of the register to achieve two goals. On the one hand, through this affected aesthetic, Visconti evokes the powerful hold of the Italian investment in domesticity: we might think of the overwrought camera movements and emphatic soundscape that pull Gino toward Giovanna and the home-space at the beginning of the film. On the other hand, the melodramatic chronotopes of an immutable world in which individuals are hostage to pathological passions and victims of an irreversible temporality are mobilized to show how the compulsion toward normality and tradition entails an affective blockage, a compromised system of attachment, a rush of longing and yearning that immunizes history from becoming.

Alicata and De Santis’s “Verità e poesia” advised that in order to avoid fatalism and defeatism, cinema had to discover the presence throughout the nation of alternatives to the fascist ordering of bodies and desires. In Ossessione, the urban landscapes of Ancona and Ferrara—where Gino enjoys time, respectively, with street artist Spagnolo and the ballerina Anita—function as audiovisual counterpoints to the violent existence in the rural home, providing important glimmers of the unexplored forms of embodiment available to the Italian people.

Ancona and Ferrara of Ossessione are spaces of redemptive encounters, replete with exuberant vitality, light and lightness; places where the poor benefit from a system of alliance and support divorced from the market of labor exchange or the exploitative tutelage of the upper class. This is a place grounded in mutual assistance—an example of that parallel welfare structure embedded in Italian non-Stalinist communism.39 In these cities, the film suggests, people invite you into their homes and share their meager supplies with you out of love and solidarity, with no ulterior motives. The Black man pacing Ancona and the two disabled people seen in Ferrara subtly attest to how the landscapes in which Spagnolo and Anita move are spaces of difference, not the site of the white ableist body politic prized by Fascism. Neither does the rhythm to which these localities move hew to Italian nationalism. When Giovanna, in Ferrara, tries to entice Gino with the money from Bragana’s life insurance and with tales of upward social mobility, he is distracted by the upbeat music playing in the background and walks away from her to join Anita, whose demeanor was modeled on Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits (while Giovanna was based on the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani).40 Expanding on Minghelli’s insightful account of how the Cinema film shifts gears whenever Gino disconnects from the fantasies of domesticity, normalcy, and heterosexuality that Giovanna represents, I hold that the opposition between urban and country lifestyles in the film is more than a displacement of Visconti’s homosexual desires, or a repetition of the Aryanism–Mediterraneanism feud. It is the key element for reckoning with the film’s queer interweaving of politics and sexuality.41

After they have sex for the first time, Gino offers Giovanna a conch shell in which she can hear the echo of the ocean and seduces her with the unbound way of life that the sea—borderless, fluid, and always in motion—evokes. Giovanna seems to be convinced and agrees to desert the inn with Gino. A few meters on the road are enough to make her waver: her old life has a gravity that tugs Giovanna back. Whereas on the road Gino perceives glimmers of hope, Giovanna is paralyzed in her existence, burdened by the weight of tradition and the fear of losing social status. She sits down on a mound of gravel. Gino sits down with her, and the camera, in a high-angle shot, embeds them in the backdrop, where a group of peasants is working in a rudimentary wheat-threshing ritual (Figure 34). As De Santis recalls in an essay penned in honor of the film’s fortieth anniversary, the background in this sequence was paramount to advancing the film’s proposal. First, it signals how the two lovers, by aborting their escape plan, would be confined to an archaic existence of toil and labor. Moreover, being modeled on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 The Harvesters (Figure 35), the backdrop was also designed to lift the representation of the national landscape from its provincialism and insert it in wider networks of figuration.42

The reference to transnational cultural affiliations carries on in the reverse shot: Gino stands up and walks away, hitting the road without hesitation or fear in a shot that formally and tonally alludes to the endings of Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp (1915) and Modern Times (1936). A femme fatale, Giovanna allegorically indicates the tragic fate the nation will endure if it does not abandon its current way of living and loving. It is then expected that as soon as Gino cuts ties with her, his horizon dramatically changes. Now, the jobless hobo has an open road and a clear sky in front of him. There is a whole world waiting to be explored. The only thing he is missing is allies. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines queerness as the “open mesh of possibilities” exceeding traditional social relations and entailing an experimentation with modes of intimacy that challenge the models endorsed by dominant discourse.43 It is such a queer openness that Gino experiences in his oblique existence away from “home,” where he encounters Spagnolo and Anita—an openness the film mobilizes as foils to the Italian life embodied by Bragana and Giovanna.

Spagnolo in particular is crucial for the film’s political imaginary. This character was wholly invented by the Cinema team; he has no analogue in Cain’s novel. As Alicata would later explain, Spagnolo is a proletarian living as a street artist in order to disseminate communism across Italy; he got his nickname from enlisting with the anti-Francoist International during the Spanish Civil War.44 In the Ancona hotel room where they share their first night together, the camera follows Spagnolo’s eyes caressing Gino with affection and care. In this scene, one witnesses a coding of the male body that upsets state-sponsored machismo and heterosexuality (Figure 36). The tender intimacy here contrasts with the instinctual and animalistic passions that consume Gino and Giovanna, whether in the inn’s kitchen, surrounded by dirty dishes and leftovers, or—as Mira Liehm writes—“in the bedroom with the always unmade bed whose sheets seem to exhale the odor of unwashed bodies.”45 It is true, as Gilles Deleuze points out, that in Ossessione homosexuality arises as the chance of salvation from the weight of a stifling past. But it is not merely sex that drives Gino to Spagnolo. It is also that with his divergent lifestyle, this character displays a form of identity that was incompatible with fascist biopolitics. In this, one could find some resonances with the positions expressed in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” a short essay in which Foucault suggests that what is oppositional in same-sex practices is their potential to lead to new forms of relationality. By depicting Spagnolo as a model Italian who differs radically from that performed “offstage” by Benito Mussolini and onscreen by his less charismatic body doubles, Ossessione affectively mediates that a new future for Italy would remain foreclosed until the people reconsidered their limited conceptions of living and loving. Spagnolo, and in a less obvious way Anita, evokes all that the regime feared and disavowed: liminality, mobility, ephemerality, and disinterest in childbearing and reproductive futurity.

Away from closed-off and claustrophobic rural Italy, Gino experiments with a different form of existence: an existence in common where the poor look out for each other, that alternative life that Gino had dreamed about with Giovanna while listening to the sound of the ocean in a shell. In Spagnolo’s company, the sea—indeed a fluid mesh of possibilities—replaces the barren Po swamplands as background; the melodramatic gives way to a lyrical representation of the lifeworld that Gino has joined. In the most emblematic visualization of the message the Cinema cell sought to send to the nation, the camera portrays Gino and Spagnolo looking east toward the Adriatic Sea, beyond the space and time of a crumbling Italian empire, beyond the mare nostrum, silently pondering a horizon full of potentialities (Figure 37). The melody of a diegetic flute confirms a tonal shift introduced by the mise-en-scène, and the low-angle shot rockets Gino and Spagnolo toward the sky. They are propelled toward an open future, turning their back on the authority of tradition, figured here by the San Ciriaco Cathedral, and on the precariousness of labor, materialized in the background via the construction workers renovating the church’s cupola. A dog, a Blackshirt, two navy sailors, a young man napping on a bench, a man reading a book, a couple kissing: no one is doing anything even remotely productive in the square where Gino and Spagnolo are exploring their prospects. It is an open space filled only with light, the opposite of Bragana’s dark, cluttered inn.

Free from work and any social obligations, disconnected from the disciplined temporality of state racism, people are enjoying their time. In this landscape of potentialities and possibilities, Gino begins to smile—a smile that feels very different from the outbursts of laughter in Visconti’s other melodramas. Düttmann insists that in Visconti’s films the move beyond the present is effected by an intensification of longing and desire, which materializes in moments of uncontrollable jouissance. In Ossessione, on the contrary, the future is accessed through the deactivation of the overblown system of affectivity typical of the melodramatic mode: Gino smiles, for he is free from any form of operatic attachment or investment.

Deleuze’s discussion of the formal innovations introduced by Visconti’s film becomes relevant at this point.46 In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze claims that Ossessione subtly but radically transformed filmic realism. In the old realism, characters reacted almost automatically to the situations they face and to the passions they experience. With Ossessione, we encounter a new realism where characters do not act immediately on reality but rather take their time to consider the environs they encounter in their meandering. The “voyage-form,” Deleuze suggests, turns characters into voyants, into seers or clairvoyants, idle visionary beings who gaze upon reality in order to strategize possible new courses of action and systems of passion. This interruption of linear plot progression is a matter not only of film style but also of film politics. It constitutes, following David Martin-Jones, a challenge to the naturalized patterns of behavior that genre cinema, in its different national iterations, contributed to securing. In such a challenge one also needs to locate the disruptive charge of utopia. As José Esteban Muñoz suggests in his take on Giorgio Agamben, the désoeuvrement (unworking) of established ways of experiencing the world interrupts the “straight” flow of time and movement, opening up reality and the body to possible new uses.47

We are now in a position to appreciate the political relevance of the idleness of the lyrical interlude in Ancona. In this suspension of home life, in this shift away from the melodramatic, the still camera gives the spectator time to sense what Spagnolo is trying to make Gino see and hear. Spagnolo, a fortune teller by trade, is trying to make his travel companion realize that the future is right in front of him, in the “then and there.” What Spagnolo in fact manifests is the possibility of a happy life away from authority and the police, a life at sea and on the margins; this is also a life beyond the obsession with normality, a life lived on the basis of a different moral and sexual compass. It is a life beyond the affects of melodrama and the promises of Fascism; beyond the symbolic horizon of Italy’s racialized aspiration for a home, a family-owned business, a spouse, some children; beyond the relational system that undergirded twenty years of dictatorship. But, as Kadji Amin’s Disturbing Attachments reminds us, queer futurity—a life away from reassuring social forms—can also feel difficult and demanding.48 And Gino is not committed enough to want the future. When he accidentally runs into Bragana and Giovanna in Ancona, Gino gets pulled back to the inn and kills Bragana in a staged car crash. In the end, he will have Giovanna all for himself.

Bragana is the character most fond of melodrama in the film: he constantly sings opera and even wins, in a triumph of Italian flags, a talent competition with his performance of Verdi—a composer whose arias about lost homelands were paramount for the development of Italian nationalism. After Bragana’s death, Gino and Giovanna start living the existence he sang about, a life where radical change is constantly deferred in the illusory belief that one will eventually find reasons to smile. The longed-for home turns out to be a ghostly space, haunted by the crime committed and by the weight of domesticity. Gino and Giovanna do not have it particularly bad: unlike in De Sica’s postwar films such as Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), or Umberto D. (1952), they have a vehicle, a job, a steady income, and even a nice roof over their heads. Their problem is that by choosing a normal life, they have committed to a routine where one does nothing but work, eat, sleep, and wither away. In a revelatory sequence, the high-angle camera portrays Gino and Giovanna cleaning up after a hard day’s work. They appear nailed to the soil they tread on, barely able to lift their feet from the ground. Giovanna eats supper alone in a gloomy and untidy kitchen. The deep staging inventories the clutter surrounding her, conveying an airless atmosphere. Giovanna does realize that the fruit of her mind-numbing labor is not a good life but only more junk, more waste, more fatigue, and more exhaustion. But she has convinced herself, and Gino, that they need to endure the pain and stay at the inn, and keep working for a better future. And as Gino accepts his duty “guarding the house of a departed,” as he puts it, the grim reaper appears in the background in the guise of a peasant woman, foreshadowing that there will be no silver lining in the clichéd family melodrama that the couple has settled for. Present on the scene is also the child laborer whom Giovanna has taken in as housemaid. While in postwar neorealism children function as markers of hope—the precise trope that Lee Edelman protests—here the unnamed child who betrays her masters by setting the police on Gino and Giovanna’s trails figures the endless cycle of exploitation and revenge that the cult of the “home” conjures.49

With the police closing in on them, and the new knowledge that Giovanna is pregnant, the murderous couple finally decides to abandon the inn for good. This move away from their home is radically different from the flight toward utopia that Gino had earlier proposed to Giovanna and experienced with Spagnolo and Anita. The life that Giovanna and Gino are now seeking is not new but merely another iteration of the life they already have. The repetitive landscape Gino and Giovanna drive through and the slow-moving truck blocking their route signal that they are not going anywhere. It is too late for them. As Gino confessed to Spagnolo, he is tired of traveling, of exploring; he just wants a place to start a family and call home. And tragedy strikes precisely as the fantasy of a traditional nuclear family seduces Gino and Giovanna, when they get lost in what Lauren Berlant describes as a relation of “cruel optimism”—the blindly optimistic attachment to a way of living that has already proven itself unsustainable and destructive.50 As Gino reassures Giovanna, destiny is on their side; it cannot turn its back on soon-to-be parents. But Giovanna gets scared when the truck in front of them makes a sudden maneuver, and she grabs the steering wheel from Gino. Their car skids into the Po River, and Giovanna is killed in the crash. The police arrive on the scene. Ossessione comes to a close with a frontal medium shot of the man, in tears, as he is taken away by the police (Figure 38). This is the new Italian man Fascism made. The film began with a quote from Blasetti, and it ends with an allusion to the last frame of Rossellini’s Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942) (Figure 38), which confirms the effort of Ossessione to occupy and hijack the gaze of fascist realism.

William Van Watson has focused precisely on the system of looks that Ossessione sets up, analyzing how the camera—from the film’s beginning to its conclusion—establishes Gino as the object of everyone’s gaze. Bragana, Giovanna, Spagnolo, Anita: they all long for Gino’s body. Drawing upon the framework articulated by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Van Watson interprets Gino’s status as a body to be looked at as a manifestation of Visconti’s homosexuality.51 While the camera’s attraction to Gino is undeniable, it may be limiting to attribute the investment in his body to a displacement of the author’s sexual preference. An approach that reduces Ossessione to a voyeuristic homosexual spectacle and Gino to an objectified fetish risks overlooking the collaborative dimension of the film as well as the insurrectional moment to which it belonged. Alicata and one of the screenwriters, Gianni Puccini, were in jail when Ossessione was released; Visconti would be arrested shortly afterward, during the Nazi occupation of Rome, and only narrowly avoided execution. By then, De Santis had gone underground, abandoning his position as Rossellini’s assistant director on the later aborted Scalo merci (Freight Yard) to join the partisan uprising. In Ossessione, Gino is indeed a vexed figure caught between different gazes, horizons of desire, and systems of intimacy. But considering the film in the context of the looming antifascist uprising allows us to appreciate how the visual attachment to the tramp’s wavering body attests less to Visconti’s homosexual desires than to the Cinema cell’s anti-Fascism, its commitment to assembling a different form of body politic. In this regard, the gaze that the group chose to celebrate the regime’s collapse is significant.

After his father’s fall, Vittorio Mussolini was ousted from the editorial office of Cinema by the Ossessione team. At that point, the fringe group could come out of the closet, so to speak, and make explicit the coded nature of its early interventions: in a collective editorial note, they explain that “cautious and underground tactics” had guided their work in Cinema and national film, but now the time for secrets and conspiracies was over.52 In the celebratory issue following the September 8 armistice, when Italy surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, the group continued its coming out by featuring Spagnolo on the journal’s cover (Figure 39).

Spagnolo looks to an off-frame Gino for one last time, his eyes pleading with him to take charge of his own existence instead of remaining mired in destructive patterns of behavior. Spagnolo is about to leave for Naples and Genoa, two crucial hubs of the partisan insurrection against Nazi Fascism, and then for Sicily—the Sicily of the Cinema cell interventions on realism, which in September 1943 had already been liberated by the Allies. “I came by thinking that maybe you would join. I wanted to go to Sicily. Sicily is a beautiful paese, you know?” Spagnolo tries to entice Gino. But Gino does not have the courage to explore this emerging and oppositional paesaggio italiano, to echo the title of De Santis’s 1941 manifesto. From the Cinema cover, then, Spagnolo hails other comrades who might join him in his journey. His gaze directly addresses the public, which is put into Gino’s position and made to identify with him. Understanding this gaze purely as sublimated homosexual desire minimizes its force as a call to action and as a placeholder for a type of embodiment that exceeds the hegemonic social milieu. In fact, Gino’s diegetic failure puts spectators in the spotlight, awakening them to their extradiegetic responsibilities and turning them into historical actors at a moment when the old country has crumbled and a new one is being invented.53 Hijacking the cinematographic apparatus to denounce the toxicity of present Italian reality, the Cinema group urged a people caught between a stifling past and an unwritten future to make a decision: either kill the father and take his place at the head of the home, or understand that the only chance of moving past the evil of fascist normality was to respond to Spagnolo’s soft eyes and build a new Italian life together, a lyrical existence unburdened by the chronotopes of melodrama.

The problem is that Spagnolo’s address was never given the chance to reach the public. Substantially banned after its May 1943 premiere in Rome, Ossessione never enjoyed a proper theatrical release. Its impact on Italian popular culture cannot compare to that of the postwar neorealist films by De Sica or Rossellini. Catherine O’Rawe holds that the film’s marginalization in the country’s film canon is connected to its formal hybridity. Ossessione, she claims, could hardly fit in a mediascape hegemonized by neorealism’s pseudodocumentary style. The postwar reception of the film somehow echoed the reactions it had sparked under Fascism: Visconti’s debut was too French, too American, too melodramatic, not realistic or Italian enough. The treatment of Ossessione as stylistically foreign can also be considered in relation to the geopolitical context in which post-Mussolini Italy found itself—and hence approached as a disavowal of the Cinema cell’s representation of national life. With its pointed indictment of Fascism as a typically Italian phenomenon, how could Ossessione be taken seriously in a nation being urged to forget the past and promptly return to normal life? Given the “Latin repressive phallocracy” of both the Communist and Christian Democratic Parties, to echo Lino Miccichè, how could anyone take the film’s queer worldview seriously and follow its lead on the practices that authentic anti-Fascism entails? In this regard, it is important to recall, as Mira Liehm does, that no Italian scholar mentioned Spagnolo’s homosexuality until the cultural revolution of the 1960s.54

On the basis of Karl Schoonover’s reassessment of neorealism’s moral conservatism, as well as Giacomo Lichtner’s insights on the convenient amnesias that postwar national cinema enables, one could speculate that the failure of Ossessione and the success of, for example, Rossellini’s films were somehow overdetermined by the political juncture Italy faced in the aftermath of World War II: the ideological vectors of a film like Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) resonated better in a country pressured both domestically and internationally to archive Fascism as a momentary parenthesis in the country’s history, a temporary blunder rather than a phenomenon with profound roots in the body politic.55 If the mythos of “good people” that neorealism streamlined was to pass as the truth about the Italian people, Ossessione could not be accepted as an authoritative exposé of national life.

In 1945, Elio Marcuzzo, the actor who played Spagnolo, was buried alive by a group of partisan fighters, due to either a tragic mix-up or a personal vendetta. By then, Benito Mussolini had been hanged in Piazza Loreto, Italy had been liberated, and top-ranking members of the dissolved Fascist Party were being reinstated into key social roles. The utopia of the partisan uprising had already faded away. The insurrection against the regime did not bring about radical democracy, and the resistance did not culminate in a social revolution. The subaltern, revolutionary, transnational queer new realism found in Ossessione was to give way to “neorealism proper” and to a proper postfascist nation. Ossessione was not Italy, Vittorio Mussolini had apocryphally claimed. Nor was it going to be. Returning to the film and to the context from which it emerged, returning one more time to Gino’s contested body, thus remain important ways to bring to light the existence, in the archive of film history, of an unrealized future for both Italy and its cinema.