4
The Shame of Escapism
Camerini’s Anthropological Machines
While the 1920s were years of profound crisis for Italian film, the debate on how to effect its comeback was vibrant and energetic. The scene was divided into factions, each with its own project of cinema and idea of what had to happen for domestic production to become sustainable. Toward the end of the decade, two groups decided to take matters into their own hands and escalate the “culture war” (agitazione culturale) for a new Italian cinema to actual moviemaking.1 There were the crowdfunded pioneers led by Alessandro Blasetti, but there was also the more poised contingent that came together around Mario Camerini.
Camerini’s films about city life and Blasetti’s coeval movies set in the Italian countryside are commonly read in opposition. On the basis of the stracittà–strapaese rift, they are often presented as harnessing incompatible imaginaries that are expressions of, respectively, Fascism’s urbanist and ruralist models of economic development. Indeed, in a variation of the North–South racialized axiology, the strapaese movement defended as properly Italian the traditional values and religious zeal that supposedly were embedded in rural locations whereas the stracittà proponents insisted that the authentic Italy was the one found in the nation’s industrialized cityscapes.2 Yet in order to succeed, the regime had to appeal to town and country alike—swaying its way the salaried masses working in factories and in the service industries but also the rural petty bourgeoisie and subaltern peasants who were to support the growth of the ethno-nation’s biological body through produce and progeny. The fact that the regime could get behind a multiplicity of imaginaries and projects of being-together is thus not necessarily a sign of the presence of “competing fascisms” within Fascism, as Mark Antliff argues. The reliance on complementary discourses, styles, and registers can be seen as an attestation of the regime’s anti-ideological and nonconsensual approach to governing—of the trasformismo or, to use a more elegant category, “polyvalent mobility” through which Fascism commanded Italian labor.3
Throughout the 1920s, Gramsci had strategized about the necessity of unifying rural and urban workers into a class that could effectively challenge the capitalist block. In order to safeguard Italian capitalism and support its colonial ambitions, the regime had to transform Italian laborers from threats into resources, to evolve a conflictual multitude of subject positions into a race that would fight for and with Fascism. For this to happen, contrary to what consent-based explanations of state power posit, the regime didn’t necessarily have to impose one single common Weltanschauung upon the people. What mattered was that Fascism supplemented the repressive workings of violence with biopolitical weapons—including discursive apparatuses and filmic machines—that would enable the variegated forms of identities, the different kinds of authentic Italian men and women, necessary for the existence of a colonial, capitalist Italy. With this context in mind, in this chapter I approach Camerini’s depictions of urban underclasses tempted by deviant desires as part of the same race war as Blasetti’s ecofascist cinema, a war that sought to fashion national subjects amenable to fulfill the localized responsibilities Italy assigned them.
Although Camerini’s and Blasetti’s films might have been moved by analogous political urgencies, the way each functioned is quite different. Blasetti puts viewers in the position of the Blackshirt stock toiling to birth a better future for its motherland: it is by having the public experience the pride earned from participating in fascist worlding that Blasetti captures life in specific imposed courses of action. Camerini, instead, resorts to shame to make race.
A crucial theorization of shame’s impact on behaviors and identity formations was proposed by the French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas coevally with Camerini’s imposition in the Italian mediascape. In On Escape, written in 1935 in the wake of Hitler’s takeover of Germany, Levinas connects the feeling of shame with the experience of being riveted to oneself. What is oppressive in shame for Levinas are the constraints of embodiment; what causes shame for him is the perception of being the body that one is and the impossibility of becoming a body of a different kind. It is for this reason that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick assigns shame a central role in her politics of emotions, insisting that this profoundly intimate affect is the “place where the question of identity arises most originally and most relationally.” The deeply personal and intensely social dimension of shame was also emphasized in Being and Nothingness, in which Jean-Paul Sartre characterizes shame as a process involving a noncognitive, embodied, emotional recognition of what one is: in shame, I am ashamed of what I am, writes Sartre, specifying, however, that for shame to cut us to the quick, we must be in the presence of others.4 The fact that shame, unlike guilt, is an affect that requires the exposition of the self to others, that is, a system of gazes, transpires already in the example invoked by Levinas: Charlie Chaplin, who has swallowed a whistle that betrays his identity every time he breathes, in City Lights (1931). Not only is the tramp unable to hide from himself, but he is also unable to hide from the judgmental looks of upright citizens—meaning that in shame we are revealed both privately and publicly, to ourselves and society, as the embodied self that we cannot escape being.
In this regard, feminist philosopher Lisa Guenther has highlighted important resonances between, on the one hand, Levinas’s account of shame as an affect blocking the self into a limited set of life possibilities, and, on the other, his concurrent description of antisemitism and racism as biopolitical devices that suppress futurity by turning one’s identity into a destiny. Shame and racism both pin lives down. Guenther explains: to impose on human bodies an inviolable nature, a firm biological identity, is to chain them to their self in a way that suppresses their capacity to change. Reading together Levinas’s On Escape and his “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934), Guenther allows us to take notice of the fact that shame—insofar as it fixes one’s sense of self and silences the aspiration to take flight—can be redeployed as an apparatus of racialization; it can be weaponized to overwrite people’s sense of what is appropriate and possible for the species of bodies they are made to feel to be. Shame imposes burdens and borders on life, as Frantz Fanon perfectly explains in Black Skin, White Masks when recounting the nauseating experience of being glanced at and called a “negro” by a white child on a train, while only wanting to enjoy being a human among other humans. At the mercy of the white gaze, Fanon feels to have been imprisoned, fixed—“in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.”5 Recognizing the impossibility of sharing the same space, the same world, with the white man, Fanon writes that he subjected himself to an objective examination that turned his body into an overdetermined racial legacy: “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’.’”6
Drawing upon these phenomenologies of shaming, in the following pages I show how Camerini exploits shame so as to have the Italian body politic discover and assume the responsibilities connected to its own supposed ethnic identity. Even when apparently politically indifferent, Camerini’s films under Mussolini—this is my argument here—consistently work as devices of racial subjugation and subjectification that “fix” the population and neutralize the risk of class indiscipline.
Italy in Africa
From a wealthy and well-connected family, Camerini turned to filmmaking in the early 1920s, after fighting in World War I. In 1927, he leveraged the relative success of his Maciste contro lo sceicco (Maciste against the Sheik, 1926) to start the Attori e Direttori Italiani Associati (ADIA) consortium and produce the last big Italian colonial film of the silent era: Kif Tebbi (1928).
Set during the Italo-Turkish war of 1911–12 and shot mostly on location in Tripoli and the Libyan desert, Kif Tebbi features a Tripolitanian notable who, having traveled to Europe and discovered civilization there, can no longer tolerate the backward, violent, sexist Ottoman rule. In one of the most evocative sequences of the film, beautifully described by Alberto Farassino, Ismail (Marcello Spada) gazes meditatively at the desert, “and the stretches of sand transform into sea, which is crossed by boats that, through mental associations and montage, transform into construction sites, cranes, factories, trains, and tracks.”7
In the wake of this fantasy of colonial progress, the news arrives that the Italians have landed in Tripolitania, and Ismail is called to his duties. Instead of leading the resistance against the invaders, Ismail focuses on protecting his love interest, the young subaltern woman Mne (Donatella Neri), from the violent advances of Turkish soldiers and local notables. The Turks take notice and, growing suspicious of his pro-European and proto-feminist stances, sentence Ismail to death. The final sequences of Kif Tebbi are lost, but the Cineteca di Bologna, which curated the film’s restoration, pieced together its ending on the basis of reviews and plot summaries from the time of the film’s release. Ismail escapes prison just in time to reunite with Mne and celebrate the Italian flag waving over the Libyan desert. The Ottoman monsters have been defeated; women will be finally treated humanely; civilization can eventually be exported to Africa and make it less bleak, less Black.
Notwithstanding the plethora of Orientalist, anti-southern, anti-African, and anti-Muslim tropes, through its femonationalism Kif Tebbi makes a point to discriminate between those ethnicities that can be righted and those that are beyond saving. There is a sort of differential racism at work in this film that distinguishes a backward Hamitic South to be reclaimed from a monstrous Semitic East to be annihilated. Marcello Spada plays Ismail in blackface, but his character’s complexion is fair and his features are Mediterranean, signaling a biosomatic proximity with the West that the Turks—depicted with dark faces, hooked noses, frizzy hair, and beady eyes—cannot even aspire to. The Turk in Kif Tebbi is more than the enemy in the struggle over Libya: he is the embodiment of all that Italy shall not be.8 Yet Kif Tebbi is not preoccupied with projecting what Italy itself is or should be.
In the film’s eagerness to separate and hierarchize nonwhite peoples, Camerini neglects to differentiate between Italy’s racial character and northern European whiteness. Does being Italian coincide with smoking and wearing fancy suits, as Ismail does after coming back from his European escapades? The very fact that Ismail does not discriminate between European locations and that he holds souvenirs and women from all his foreign travels equally dear is an attestation of the film’s cosmopolitan attitude that is somehow at odds with the logic of fascist identity biopolitics. Kif Tebbi was made for the international market and in a moment when the regime was gearing up for its own colonial raids. In recounting the 1912 Italian invasion of Libya, the film sells Italian colonialism to the world by presenting it as a European phenomenon. However, in aligning Italy with European colonial modernity and characterizing it as a modern European “white” force, Kif Tebbi fails to articulate a discourse on national identity that could contribute to the effort of making real Italians, of making a Blackshirt race.
When Camerini returned to the colonies in 1935, this time to Eritrea to film Il grande appello (The Great Appeal), he corrected this stance, working hard to impose on the public a specific racial imaginary about Italy and Italians. In fact, the film, a celebration of the recent invasion of Ethiopia and of the birth of Italian Africa financed by the fascist war apparatus, strives to border the features of proper Italian masculinity by documenting the conversion of Giovanni Bertani / Jean Bertanì (Camillo Pilotto) from dissolute race traitor fraternizing with English, Spanish, Black, and anti-Fascist bodies in Djibouti to national hero. It is his son’s look of contempt that summons Giovanni to his responsibilities and shames him into embarking on a process of personal growth that will lead him to reconsider his priorities in life, eventually turning him into a patriot ready to kill and die for the imperial expansion of the homeland. With this tale of personal conversion and colonial deployment, Il grande appello bears witness to the structural complicity between Fascism’s biopolitics and its racism: the point of reclaiming an improper body is to create expendable subjects that will subdue human beings that are categorized as inferior. Living a good life, being an authentic Italian body, and reuniting with one’s race means, in Camerini’s diegetic universe, suppressing Black bodies while exposing oneself to the risk of early death.9
While the workings of racializing biopolitics are apparent in Il grande appello given the blatantly racist and colonial imaginaries it amplifies, they are no less significant in the seemingly apolitical films by Camerini, those that contribute to Blackshirt rule in more subtle and possibly more nefarious ways. Indeed, even in works that are not explicitly concerned with Italy’s racial identity or territorial expansion and that do not contain explicit political preoccupations, under the pretense of objectively capturing national reality, Camerini was still serving the regime’s logic of coloniality.10 For instance, films like Come le foglie (Like the Leaves, 1935), Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935, based on a scenario by Zavattini), and Ma non è una cosa seria (But It’s Nothing Serious, 1936, based on Pirandello’s play) are patronizing eulogies that idealize work ethic and resilience to hardships by staging spoiled elites that venture in the underclasses’ simple lifeworlds and learn from these “poveri ma belli” (poor but beautiful) Italians. Yet Camerini’s most unforgettable and impactful films under the regime are those that travel in the opposite direction, those that—with irony and a light touch—document the humiliating misadventures of humble Italian men and women breaching class lines that are racially transcribed and behaving as people they are not.
Breaches
A proletarian couple losing themselves in a casino (Rotaie [Rails, 1930]); a chauffeur posing as a car owner and a young salesgirl dreaming of living like the women she serves (Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . [What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932]); a news agent posing as a count and a nanny mingling with the haute bourgeoisie (Il signor Max [Mr. Max, 1937]); a young woman stealing commodities she cannot afford and a delivery boy living beyond his means (I grandi magazzini [Department Store, 1939]): the films from Camerini’s celebrated working-class tetralogy follow the same plotline. They are stories of common Italians who, according to the films’ value system, have fallen for vain fantasies of socioeconomic betterment and pretend to live lives that are not theirs to live in the first place. Building upon Judith Butler’s assertion that identities are produced iteratively, the repetitiveness of these films by Camerini should not be understood as redundancy but rather as a crucial feature of their race-making performances. By means of repetition and difference, this series of films rivets the spectatorial body to very precise commitments and obligations.11
Gian Piero Brunetta notes that the success of these films by Camerini was in great part due to the director’s creation of relatable characters with whom the urban masses could easily identify.12 Maurizio D’Ancora and Käthe von Nagy (Rotaie), Vittorio De Sica and Lia Franca (Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . .), and then De Sica and Assia Noris (Il signor Max and I grandi magazzini) play the part of young underclass Italians enticed by the goods, lifestyles, and experiences made possible by workers’ toil under capitalism, only to be reminded that those things are not for them—even if it is people like them who are making all of modernity’s wonders possible. For the success of what is, ultimately, a defense of a political economy based on intersectional class/gender exploitation, the fact that the national public identified with Camerini’s simple, troubled Italians is key. With thrilling montage techniques derived from the cinema of attraction, traveling sequences immersing us in the characters’ reality, point-of-view (POV) shots showing us reality from their perspective, and close-ups zooming in on their emotions, Camerini’s escapism makes the public experience what his protagonists are feeling—the jouissance ignited by evading their naturalized subject positions, the shame making them aware of the inviolable laws governing their embodied existence, the humbling that derives from being caught in their attempted escapes, and the positive reinforcement that ensues from getting involved in less-extravagant desires and pleasures. But by identifying with them, spectators themselves feel the shaming pressure to live heteronormative lives; they themselves are summoned to stop dreaming about a different existence and commit to a destiny of productive and reproductive labor.
Camerini’s cinematic devices might be considered examples of what Giorgio Agamben has dubbed “anthropological machines”—apparatuses that individuate specific forms of human embodiment and subjectivity by warning individuals about who they are not and should never become. As Sylvia Wynter argued in “Beyond the Word of Man,” human beings carry themselves in the world according to regulatory representations of that which constitutes the optimal model of the subject and of that which constitutes the Abject. For Wynter and Agamben, the production of Man—the ideal self—is an oppositional process, one that implies the degradation of certain forms of life into tropes of impropriety.13 After Charles Darwin, such an impropriety, originally framed as a question of original sin and thus deployed religiously, was translated in racial and/or biological terms: the Abject is the dysgenic Other. Wynter explains that this otherness is primarily embodied, outside Europe, by the native populations of Africa and the Americas with their nonwhite skin, while within the West it is the abnormal—the biologically compromised individual who yielded to different forms of sickness (from mental illness to communism to poverty to, in a certain sense, Jewishness)—who is cast as a fallen creature. The Black, the Native American, but also the poor, the queer, the rebel, the Jew, the Muslim: these are just some of the abject living beings that Western modernity has woven into existence to produce Man.
To produce a Blackshirt humanity, that is, properly Italian men and women who would do their part at home and in the colonies, Camerini, a scion of the high bourgeoisie who partook in the dolce vita of Via Veneto, instead abjectifies white elites. Through processes of othering, internalization, and shaming, he then incites the public to reject the hedonism presented as the mark of bourgeois whiteness. In populistically raising resentment against unproductive people rather than a whole mode of production, against the excesses of consumerism rather than commodity fetishism, this type of intervention ends up eliciting social compliance and pushing the body politic to work for Fascism’s corporatist, conflict-free version of reality. In the final instance, Camerini’s films amplify the feeling that challenging the subject position one occupies and evading the life one leads is both impossible and unappealing.
It is impossible because class differences are not merely a question of money: elites are a different species of people. In Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . and Il signor Max, set designer Gastone Medin underscores this difference chromatically and through decor. Thanks to an inheritance, Gianni (De Sica) in Il signor Max might have temporarily been able to pass for a count and breach into the “first-class” world, with its swan hats, fancy silks, cream-colored tablecloths, and shining white drapes. However, by the end he must admit that he still lacks some “sfumature” (shades), to become like the “signori di nascita” (gentlemen by birth). As his uncle warns Gianni—with Mussolini memorabilia in the background—those men, and especially those women, are not for him; people like him have nothing to do with that lifeworld and that lifestyle. By featuring a winding white road breaking through the Italian landscape and the tag line “a dangerous turn in a bachelor’s life,” the film’s poster already signaled that elite whiteness is not for everyone. It is thus not surprising that in the film Gianni ends up looking ridiculous while attempting to do “white people stuff”: he falls into the water while horseback riding; he is hit by his new friends’ tennis balls while playing tennis in an immaculate ivory outfit.
The work of Silvan Tomkins becomes relevant here, as it clarifies how shame emerges after an interest or enjoyment has been activated, and operates by inhibiting those engagements, directing individuals toward behaviors socially constructed as more suitable.14 Similar to Fanon’s experience during his train ride with white people, Gianni is eventually shamed into recognizing where, and with whom, he belongs. He is no sir, no mister, no Max, just a regular, humble Gianni. Hence, the right fit for him is a family-oriented nanny, not a high-society lady who dresses as scantily as the women in the movies. Gianni’s places in life are the lavoro and dopo-lavoro, work and the after-work clubs created by Fascism to keep the salaried city masses entertained in a healthy and monitored environment.15 It is important to pick up the presence of Blackness in a space where Italian labor belongs.
In the dopo-lavoro enjoyed by Gianni’s family, the Blackshirts have created a jazz orchestra. A Black man with exaggerated facial features is depicted on the drum set (Figure 14). Through this racist portrait, Camerini and Medin draw a visual connection between the workers living in fascist Italy and the formerly enslaved African Americans living in the segregated United States, racially profiling Italian labor and imposing upon them the same lower nature that Blackness has been burdened with. This passage could be considered an instance of “return of the repressed”—a moment when the true colors of fascist Italy are projected on the screen. The Black man represented on the drum set functions to all effects as a humbling memento of the fact that subaltern Italians will never whiten themselves enough to belong in upper-class spaces and to enjoy life.
But changing one’s position in society in Camerini’s films is not only impossible; it is also unappealing because the rich are presented—similarly to the visual rhetoric articulated in Terra madre (Mother Land, 1931)—as dissolute, vacuous, sick. By depicting them in extravagant staged interiors and under obvious studio lighting, Camerini emphasizes the artificiality and sterility of their existences as well as their detachment from, and thus lack of concern for, real Italians. Camerini’s films are replete with examples of higher classes’ disregard for lower folks. In Il signor Max, the teenaged tantrum-throwing countess treats her babysitter (Noris) like a home servant; in I grandi magazzini, a store manager tries to frame Lauretta (Noris) for the burglary ring he himself is running while simultaneously blackmailing her for sex; in Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . , a count and then an industrialist try to seduce lower-class salesgirls by means of expensive dinners and empty promises. However, Camerini does not blame the elites for their toxic behaviors, lies, and machinations. At fault are the naive Italians who should know better than to mix with people of that sort. In Il signor Max, for example, Gianni’s uncle mocks him for having wasted so much time and money unsuccessfully pursuing a high-society woman. Why would one even aspire to live a different life and become white, so to speak, when one has the opportunity to respond to Fascism’s great appeal and be a hardworking, childbearing Blackshirt Italian? That the “probleme global” of Camerini’s cinema is class/gender compliance is evident as early as his Rotaie, the film that marked the passage of Italian cinema from silence to sound: the film was distributed as a silent film in 1930 and then rereleased sonorized in 1931.16
Figure 14. A Blackshirt jazz orchestra playing in a workers’ club with a racist caricature of an African American man on the drum set in Il signor Max (Mario Camerini, 1937).
Gambling Life Away
A young couple. A shady hotel in a buzzing Italian city. Penniless, overwhelmed by preoccupations, shunned by their families, isolated and alienated, Giorgio (D’Ancora) and Maria (von Nagy) contemplate suicide in Rotaie. But a train passing by and then the shining lights emerging from the cityscape bear witness to the material wealth and adventures that the present has to offer. Giorgio and Maria reconsider their decision and flee the hotel, ending up in a train station. There, advertisements for beautiful locations to explore fuel their desire to leave everything behind and start afresh. Felicitously, Giorgio and Maria find a wallet full of cash and use this windfall to purchase first-class tickets to elsewhere: only a sort of miracle would allow a radical change in socioeconomic status. On the train, they meet the Marquis Mercier (Daniele Crespi), who seduces them into joining him at the grand hotel and indulging in a foreign life consisting of gambling, drinks, dancing, sports, and lax morals. It is important to notice that Camerini has a cameo as one of the habitués of this world, in a sort of metacinematic attestation of the position he and his cinema occupy—where they speak from and with whom they are affiliated.
After a few days of pure jouissance, the problems begin. Giorgio loses everything at the roulette table. Humiliated, defeated, with his head in his hands, he needs to reveal who he really is. The only way for the broke man to pay his gaming debts and hotel bill is for Maria to give in to the marquis’s indecent proposal. Close-ups on Maria and the Frenchman effectively communicate the nobleman’s abject inhumanity and Maria’s humiliation at being exchanged and exploited: But what can she do? Isn’t this what being a woman comes down to for Rotaie (Figure 15)? Giorgio, alone in his room, peeks into a nearby apartment complex and sees the lives of honest working people. The alternative is clear, and Camerini will reiterate the point throughout the film and in his later works: the shameful underclass bodies can be either put to work or violated. Giorgio rushes to the marquis’s room to stop Maria from giving herself up, and together they withdraw from a world where they don’t belong. Giorgio cleans his face in a public fountain, as if to wash away from his subaltern skin the elite mask he had put on. With the little money they have left, Maria and Giorgio buy a ticket to return home.
In the third-class train car in which they travel, they are reminded once again of the life course that is right for people like them. First, they feel humiliated to be among the poor, but slowly their attitude changes. Through Maria’s and Giorgio’s POV shots, Camerini offers us sympathetic portraits of the industrious Italian proletariat: the signs of hard work mark the dark faces of the humble travelers, yet they maintain a dignified demeanor.17 This is the perfect Italian humanity. After the temptation of social mobility and class flight, after the shame of having invested their bodies in racially inappropriate pleasures, in behaviors that are okay in France perhaps, Camerini foregrounds production and reproduction as the only possible routes to happiness. Maria and Giorgio are sitting with a family of four. They are poor but comfortable; the parents’ lifetime of hard labor has paid off. They have enough to feed themselves and their two children. The oldest, perhaps five or six, is munching on a piece of fruit; he offers some food to Maria and Giorgio, who look at him with hungry eyes. The youngest is breastfeeding. Maria leans forward and gazes at the mother nursing her baby. Eventually Maria smiles: she turns to Giorgio with a knowing look and is overjoyed when she is given the baby to cuddle (Figure 16). Life is back on track. The real pleasures of life are not to be found elsewhere; they are easily attainable by Maria and Giorgio as long as they stay in line, as long as they stay true to their working-class nature.
Figure 15. Working-class shame and elite abjection in Rotaie (Mario Camerini, 1929).
A series of fades move the film from the train car to the railroad, then to a factory’s gates—and the roar of the train’s engine is subsumed by the sounds of the industrial apparatus. An impressive traveling shot immerses the public in the factory’s interiors and then takes us back to Giorgio, who—his face covered in soot—is attending to the machines with pride. It’s hard work, but the reward is priceless: Giorgio’s shift is over and, in a scene reminiscent of a Lumière brothers film, he joins the crowd of workers leaving the factory; he has become part of something bigger than he is, and his acceptance of his lot in life has earned him the right to joy and futurity. Rotaie documents a journey similar to the one Walter Ruttmann recounts in Acciaio (Steel, 1933), but for Camerini the acceptance of work and factory life feels totally different, as it is accompanied by promises of belonging. While Acciaio reduces living to working, and thus accordingly ends with the protagonist caught by the industrial apparatus, in Rotaie work is the way out, the exit strategy that defeats the alienation and isolation that Giorgio and Maria were experiencing at the beginning of the film. At the end of the movie, Maria is waiting for Giorgio at the gates, like many other wives waiting for their husbands. While he eats the snack she has brought him, she knits—perhaps a romper for a baby on the way? They walk home and smile, with labor in the backdrop and a family in their horizon (Figure 16).
Set to be produced by Blasetti’s Augustus before the company went belly-up, Rotaie represents, with Sole! (Sun, 1929), a seminal moment for the remediation of realism into a crucial device for making and managing subjects in Italy. The very structure of the film contributes to projecting realism as an eminently biopolitical register. Rotaie is divided into three sections, each characterized by a different aesthetic, and with each aesthetics attributed a specific function.18 Maria and Giorgio’s existential crisis is represented through visuals indebted to German expressionism with its dark contrasts, accented shadows, and dramatic camera angles. The section in the casino and grand hotel, with its glossy interiors, sensual camera movements, and escape into dream worlds, is modeled after the French and American comedies of the 1920s. Finally, the train and factory sequences, through which Camerini renounces escapist cinema and wields the apparatus to show Italians who they really are, to show them the way home, are characterized by a quasi-documentarian gaze. In the film, expressionist aesthetics is highlighted as a means to produce anguish in the spectatorship, comedy as a genre that distracts and brings off-track, and realism as the cinema that leads back to the racially appropriate life path.
Figure 16. Gendered figurations of labor in Rotaie (Mario Camerini, 1929).
On Scoundrels and Mannequins
Camerini’s effort to remediate realism as a racializing apparatus extends beyond Rotaie and continues throughout the 1930s, reaching its artistic peak at the ten-year mark from the March on Rome, with Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932) possibly the most accomplished fascist movie from Mussolini’s Italy.19 A sensation when it came out, the film contributed to launching the talkies in Italy and constituted Vittorio De Sica’s breakthrough performance as a screen actor. It was produced by fascist-controlled Cines and written by Aldo De Benedetti, the prolific Italian screenwriter of Jewish descent who, under the gradual institutionalization of antisemitism, would be forced to work uncredited and at bargain prices to make ends meet.20
Vis-à-vis Rotaie, Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . drops any reference to the alienation and isolation experienced by Italian labor, and with it the reference to German expressionism, as if to scrub away any stain marring the fascist real. By resorting to a binary narratological and stylistic structure, the film is able to impose on the public a Manichean opposition between proper and improper, sane and abject, modes of Italianity. Camerini’s film was advertised as a story featuring love and labor: the taglines accompanying its release note that its romantic plot takes place within a “context of joyful labor” and that “the most meaningful and complex manifestation of labor” will function as the background to the romance. The film’s promotion thus effectively verbalizes and manifests the very performance of Camerini’s filmic machine: to romanticize work.
Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . starts with a shot in many aspects analogous to the one at the beginning of Blasetti’s Sole! In that case, we saw a wooden gate opening onto the Pontine Marshes; in this case a metal shutter rolls up and reveals Milan’s Piazza del Duomo in all its beauty. If Blasetti invited the public on a journey through the malarious swamplands about to be reclaimed, Camerini’s journey takes us to Milan. As critic Filippo Sacchi noted in a 1932 review of the film, this was the first time that Milan was featured on the screen, and “who could imagine that it could be so photogenic?”21 The apparent preoccupation of Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . is then to promote what Milan stands for, that is, “vital operosity,” to stay with Sacchi, and thus also sell to the spectatorship the industrious Blackshirt way of life that keeps Italian cities going day and night. From beginning to end, the film’s rhythm is incredibly quick; it is a sound film that unfolds with the gait of a silent one, Francesco Savio argues.22 There are no dull moments or descriptive sequences, and the fast pace as well as the dynamic tracking shots mediate Milan’s energy and entice the public to join in and contribute to its vitality.
It is dawn, and people are waking up. There are, however, people who have been up all night. Tadino (Cesare Zoppetti) is a taxi driver who has just clocked out. Before heading home to catch some sleep, he stops by a bar to pick up some milk and enjoy a well-deserved grappa. At the store, he crosses paths with an older couple consuming a leisurely breakfast. He taps on the man’s tuba hat and, in a thick Milanese accent, jokingly tells the other customers that these are the people who are taking away everyone else’s bread—but it is unclear who these people are: are they hoboes or elite? At the end, it does not really matter, since the populist stab at unproductive subjects who benefit from common Italians’ sacrifices—if we think about it—works even better in this way: elites and hoboes are the same; they are interchangeable in the joke because they are both cast as parasitic subjects.
At home, still covered in filth, Tadino wakes up his daughter Mariuccia (Franca). It is just the two of them; Tadino is a widower and has done his best as a single parent. Mariuccia borders, however, on spoiled and materialistic. “Rise and work,” Tadino lovingly encourages his little loafer as he heats up her milk, but she takes her time. Mariuccia’s immaculate white bedding, ivory nightgown, and cream leather slippers are in stark contrast with the dirt that covers Tadino’s existence. The shining white things we encounter in her room might attest, like so many Lacanian objets petit a, to Mariuccia’s unattainable desires—investments that are out of place given the subject she is and the family she belongs to. Their shoes especially reveal the different paths that Tadino and Mariuccia tread in life. Tadino’s worn-out leather boots bespeak a lifeworld very similar to that brought forth by Vincent Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes (1886): a reality made up of toilsome treading, tenacity, grit, and fear of not having enough. Mariuccia’s ivory high-heeled slippers, with their almost immaterial smoothness, are used by Camerini and set designer Medin to both introduce and denigrate the young woman’s dreams, her aspiration to live as the characters of the photonovels she is so fond of, or as the fancy women shopping in the exclusive perfume and jewelry store where she works.
This store is one of the few settings in Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . that was reconstructed in the studio, and Medin does not do anything to hide the artificiality of this environment. On the contrary, by emphasizing its fakeness by means of decor and lighting (everything is spotless, glossy, immaculate, well lit, but also flat), Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . signals the dangerousness of the place. Like other white spaces appearing in Camerini’s cinema and mapped so precisely by James Hay (such as the grand hotel in Rotaie, the cruise ship in Il signor Max, and the mall in I grandi magazzini, to name a few), the store where Mariuccia works is a zone of contact, where people from different classes meet and interact.23 While unavoidable, this intercourse between workers and consumers, poor and rich, can also cause contagion: the risk is that workers themselves will buy into the commodities, services, and lifestyles they are selling, and thus develop fantasies that might compromise the strict but unspoken class hierarchies along which Italian society ought to be organized.
The governmental quandary staged here by Camerini is not so dissimilar from the challenge European powers faced in the colonies: white people and their subaltern subjects could not be kept separate, and yet each had to persist as a segregated form of life to maintain the hierarchical stratification that made their exploitation possible. This led, Ben-Ghiat shows, to Italian cinema shifting its representation of the relations between colonized and colonizers to avoid enabling interracial intimacies and engagements through exotic portrayals of Black women. It also provoked a debate in fascist circles and in the press—I will return to this in chapter 7—on which kinds of films colonized Black people should be allowed to see.24 Races had to meet and yet could not mix; classes had to do the same to assure the stability of the capitalist mode of production under fascist rule. Camerini does not take away from the Italian public the escapist pleasure and distraction that characterize the genre that, with its decor and lighting style marking chic lifestyles, was known first as “white cinema” and then “white telephone cinema.” Yet in contrast to films such as Goffredo Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata (The Private Secretary, 1931), in which a humble private secretary marries into the ivory world of the elite, in Camerini the pleasure principle does not prevail; fantasies are followed by stern reality checks calling the public to order. Escapism is both denounced and redeployed in the service of Blackshirt supremacy on national life.
On her way to work, Mariuccia runs into Bruno (De Sica), who is captivated by her simple beauty. Bruno’s accent and features hint at the fact that he is not originally from Milan: might he be one of those southerner scoundrels who relocated from the countryside to cities in the great internal migration of the 1920s? (De Sica was born in southern Lazio, while Franca and Zoppetti were from northern Italy.) In lively sequences taking the spectator on a journey through Milan, Bruno follows Mariuccia on his bicycle, first as she walks to the bus stop and then on the bus to work. Mariuccia is intrigued but cannot help disdaining him as a lower kind of Italian vis-à-vis the men she might aspire to. As her friends comment when Bruno unsuccessfully tries to strike up a conversation with her, “We don’t like men on bikes.” Humbled but not defeated, Bruno promises he will need to buy a car then: he cannot admit to being poor; he cannot admit he is a worker. A salaried driver but also a bit of a rascal, Bruno borrows a car from his boss without asking, shows up when Mariuccia gets off work, pretends to be a wealthy man, and talks her into taking a ride with him. The POV shot from the car’s cabin, coupled with quick cuts and fast motion, communicates the jouissance of this evasion—a moment of de-subjugation and de-subjectification in which the two workers are able to transcend their positionality. On the Lago Maggiore, Mariuccia and Bruno enjoy a boat ride, a meal, some wine, and then they dance to the tune of “Parlami d’amore Mariù” (Little Mary, talk to me about love), a song written for the film that would soon become a hit as sung by De Sica himself, making the young performer a multimedia star.
The escapist fantasy, however, comes to an abrupt end when reality strikes back. Bruno is spotted by his boss and hurries back to work, abandoning Mariuccia at the lake. Humiliated and stranded, Mariuccia regrets this day off from real life. Bruno is fired and must find another occupation. He is hired as a personal chauffeur by a pale nobleman who has some peculiar demands: his car, Conte Piazzi explains, is the color of café latte, so the car’s driver needs to be café latte colored as well. Bruno is thus taken to a store and dressed in a mocha livery, turning him—much to the salesgirls’ amusement—into a perfect replica of the tanned mannequin they have on display (Figure 17). But there might be another layer to the joke the film plays on Bruno. When Piazzi states that he wants his driver to be the color of café latte, is he only referring to the color of the livery Bruno is given, or also his skin tone?
In the next scene, we discover that Conte Piazzi is courting Mariuccia. With his luxurious car and brand-new chauffeur, he is waiting for the young woman outside the profumeria (perfumery). Bruno tries to hide from her gaze: he does not want Mariuccia to find out he is of humble origins, since he is still convinced that she is a material girl who likes other kinds of men. Among the posters behind him, we see an ad featuring a smiling Black man (Figure 17). I want to pay attention to this background of Blackness looming over Bruno—considering that this is not the only time that Camerini deploys racist imaginaries of Black men in association with representations of working-class Italians. Moreover, De Sica’s own face in this sequence is made to appear particularly dark (Figure 17). Is Camerini again using the medium to profile, classify, “fix”—in the sense Fanon used the term in Black Skin, White Masks—Italian workers?
Stuart Hall famously commented that race is the way in which class is lived.25 I do wonder whether Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . might be mocking as self-delusional Bruno attempts to conceal who he really is, conveying that—no matter how hard they try—simple Italians cannot hide their true colors: they are dark-skinned mascalzoni, plebs who are the color of café latte. As such, they can smile and work, live in the fashion of the “good” Black man from the poster, or try to evade their identity, but things will end badly for them as they will fall into the hands of more exploitative masters who treat them how darker-skinned scoundrels are treated. Bruno decides to walk away from his new padrone (master), revealing himself to Mariuccia as he dramatically takes off his livery. “Ah, servants,” Conte Piazzi sighs to the young woman he is trying to seduce. But now that she knows who Bruno is, Mariuccia is eager to rekindle their connection—with the condition he accepts his working-class destiny.
Mariuccia finds Bruno a job at the Milan Fair but then goes out with the industrialist who gave him the job—to further secure Bruno’s position but possibly also to have some fun. The film’s implicit sexism becomes explicit at this point. After humbling Bruno for his attempts to evade his working-class status, to escape the foreclosed destiny that has been implanted in his dark skin, the film now “slut shames” Mariuccia. Bruno, who is himself out on a date, sees Mariuccia with the industrialist and berates her for enjoying his attentions. “Women are all the same,” Bruno comments, urging not just Mariuccia but also the women in the audience to engage in more appropriate pleasures. Similar to the scene from City Lights that Levinas cites to explain the workings of shame, Mariuccia tries and fails to hide (Figure 18). Bruno’s contemptuous gaze fixes her status as a sexed body that can either be enjoyed in exchange for favors or loved. The second scenario is clearly the superior one, insofar as it enables her to build a family and contribute to birthing Italy’s future. Filled with shame for compromising what Gayle Rubin has dubbed the “political economy of sex” that naturalizes women into the role of caretakers (wives and mothers) of labor power, Mariuccia runs away in tears from the temptation of being too modern and liberal, and it is precisely her contrition that makes Bruno want to marry her.26 Seeing her weep and discovering that she has given him the greatest gift in life, a good job, Bruno decides that Mariuccia is not like all other women; she is a “good girl” after all, and thus worthy of his commitment.
Figure 17. The color of the Italian working class in Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . (Mario Camerini, 1932). Top: Count Piazzi stresses to amused salesgirls that he likes his chauffeurs to be the same color as his car, mocha; Middle: Bruno at work in his mocha livery, a poster of a smiling Black man in the background establishing a visual connection between the worker’s identity and Blackness; Bottom: Camerini completes the racial profiling of the Italian working class by accenting the quasi-Blackness of Bruno’s phenotype.
Continuing in this conventionally sexist vein, Bruno half-jokingly lays down his conditions for marrying Mariuccia: she will no longer work; she will always be home, making risotto. Tadino, who has witnessed this reconciliation between Bruno and his daughter unobserved, takes them out for a quick celebratory toast and declares that it is time to get to work. He sends his daughter home, foreshadowing her future of domesticity and household labor, and brings Bruno with him in the cab to teach his future son-in-law the ropes. As they drive away in the night, the darkness that now absorbs Bruno marks the beginning of a brighter future, of an ordered heteronormative existence sheltered from the temptations of escape.
Figure 18. Bruno “slut shaming” Mariuccia in Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . (Mario Camerini, 1932).
And yet the ending of Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . feels anticlimactic and almost bleak compared to the pleasure and lightness that characterize the moments when Mariuccia and Bruno temporarily escape their destinies as workers. If escapism is shameful and ruinous, compliance reduces life to an already written narrative in which lives become facts and bodies have no room for action: no autonomy, agency, or freedom whatsoever. Whenever Camerini’s characters choose labor over enjoyment, as they always do, their lifeworld shrinks, their bodies stiffen, their existences become repetitive, and they themselves start appearing almost like things. In Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . , not only is Bruno restyled on the model of a mannequin; when he commits to work, his personhood becomes engrafted with technology and turns into a sort of mechanical apparatus busy performing the tasks assigned to it. It is as if, in deploying cinema as a technology of the self affectively coding into bodies strict commitments and obligations, Camerini cannot but turn these bodies into fascist technologies.
There is indeed very little vitality left in the operose modes of existence that Camerini’s cinema shames Italian men and women into embracing. This is the case because by imposing models upon the body politic, one ultimately produces mannequins, dolls, simulacra—as Camerini’s last major hit under Mussolini, I grandi magazzini, admits. The film is once again a tale of impropriety that naturalizes specific property relationships and the relations of power on which they are grounded. Lauretta (Nonis) and Bruno (De Sica) meet in the department store where they work and fall in love. Tempted by a femme fatale, Bruno buys into consumerism and neglects Lauretta, who is then tempted to steal commodities from work to match Bruno’s lavish new lifestyle. Accused of crimes she didn’t commit, Lauretta falls into despair, only to be saved by Bruno: the two stop messing around and eventually commit to a simple good life. Taking place almost exclusively within a grand department store, I grandi magazzini conjures a hyperstaged reality and features Italy’s transformation into a controlled environment, a supervised setting where everything is regulated and people are mere copies and duplicates. Although it abandons plein-air shooting for the brand-new sound stages of Cinecittà, in a sense I grandi magazzini might be Camerini’s most brutally honest and “realistic” work. Fascist modernity—to follow Ben-Ghiat—entailed a mass production not only of goods but also of existences.27 And through the pervasive presence of mannequins throughout the film, Camerini evokes precisely the unoriginal dimension of Fascism’s “created life,” to circle back to an expression by Pirandello.
The film’s opening titles run over a carousel of stylized mannequins that look like its characters. To avoid being caught stealing, Lauretta poses as a mannequin close to a mannequin modeled upon herself (Figure 19). But there are several apparitions of mannequins resembling De Sica throughout I grandi magazzini, and in an amusing scene Bruno feels uncanny in recognizing himself in one of them (Figure 19). Finally, at the end of the movie, accompanied by some friends, Lauretta and Bruno contemplate the future in a display window: they look at baby dolls slowly turning on a lazy Susan, but in the reverse shot they are the ones gazed at through the glass, made to look like mannequins on showcase. As Barbara Spackman brilliantly suggests, I grandi magazzini can be approached as a telling projection of the biopolitical fantasy—both Fascism’s and Camerini’s—of transforming a scoundrel people (as subaltern Italians had always been profiled to be) into a race of heteronormalized bodies completing tasks without any hesitations or second thoughts.28 But bodies that are all the same, bodies that lack vitality and the capacity to change, turn into bodies that do not matter. They are fungible bodies that can be disposed of as one wants, since they are not really alive and are easily replaceable. In this regard, there is a fleeting image from I grandi magazzini that is stuck in my mind: the dismembered body of the mannequin dressed like Bruno being discarded. What this corps morcellé manifests is nothing but the expendability of life under (fascist) capitalism.
We are far beyond the promises of nation building and reassurances of belonging that marked the years of the consensus. I grandi magazzini premiered at the 1939 Venice Film Festival with an enthusiastic Joseph Goebbels in the audience; Italy’s racial laws had been promulged the year before, and the fascist ethno-nation was preparing to enter World War II, in order to take the world after having occupied Ethiopia. The great Italian race had finally been made, and now it was time for it to make Italy greater. A transitional film, I grandi magazzini groomed the body politic for the work ahead. Men had to be ready to serve and protect, as attested by Bruno’s transformation in the film from roguish delivery boy into a brave, proud, black-coated guardian of the department store’s precious assets, a man eager to do whatever it takes to protect Italian goods and Italian women. As Karen Pinkus traces in Bodily Regimes, rubber trench coats in the fashion of the one Bruno is wearing in I grandi magazzini were introduced in the national market in the late 1920s by the Pirelli Tire Company in Milan, one’s of Italy’s key suppliers of arms and other material to the fascist war apparatus. They were designed for the harsh weather of northern Italy and advertised as a sort of peacetime armor that would protect Italian bodies from the elements. This very way of promoting them evoked the proximity between peace and war and affectively prepared men for the perspective of harsher environments and harsher work assignments.29
Figure 19. The indistinguishability of organic and inorganic bodies in I grandi magazzini (Mario Camerini, 1939).
But women had to do their part as well. Learning from Lauretta’s mistakes, they needed to consume wisely and autarkically, support “made in Italy” products, avoid despair, and become model employees until it was time to become model housewives who create more and more model lives for Fascism’s initiatives—little Italians who, similar to the dolls in the display window at the end of the film, are just puppets to play with.