Pirandello from Antiliberalism to State Capitalism

The city of Terni, in the central Italian region of Umbria, has a long history. Founded in the seventh century BCE, it was conquered by the Romans four hundred years later, and under their rule it became an important commercial hub—thanks to its strategic position on the Via Flaminia. Terni lost prominence with the barbarian invasions of Italy in the early Middle Ages, only to flourish again after it was incorporated into the Papal States during the Renaissance. The small city became renowned for metallurgy at the end of the sixteenth century, when its ironworks was founded to process the raw materials mined in the Monteleone caves seventy miles to the northeast.

Annexed to the Kingdom of Italy through a unanimous referendum in 1860, Terni—a painters’ favorite spot in the Grand Tour—became a paramount component of the young nation’s military-industrial complex due to the abundance of both cast iron and water sources that could generate the hydropower required to feed plants and factories. The Royal Arms Factory was established in 1875, and less than ten years later, thanks to a combination of public capital and investments from larger private financial institutions, the Terni acciaierie (steelworks) were born. The great manufacturing plant powered by the nearby Marmore Falls was primarily meant to provide Italian factories with the cast iron necessary for armoring battleships—a crucial asset for protecting the nation’s independence but also a fundamental weapon to fulfill Italy’s ambition to become a modern European nation-state and thus acquire colonial possessions. Yet the liquidity crisis that followed the 1929 global economic depression put the industrial complex, and with it many other Italian factories and businesses, on the brink of closure. Loans and investments from the private sector were simply not enough to keep the mill’s gates open. To prevent Italy from losing an invaluable resource for its national security and expansionist aspirations, in the early 1930s the Italian state—by then fully controlled by the Fascist Party—became the majority stakeholder in the company.3 Mussolini determined that the nationalization of the plant, as an emblem of the grandeur of Italy’s state capitalism, had to be celebrated with a film. He demanded that someone with an international reputation be involved in the project. Considering his outspoken support for the regime but also his long-standing engagement with the cinema, Pirandello—who would win a Nobel Prize in 1934—was the obvious choice. Pressed by the president of LUCE, Giacomo Paulucci de’ Calboli, Pirandello agreed to write, in collaboration with his son Stefano, the treatment for a feature film on Terni’s steelworks to be produced by Cines.4

Cines was Italy’s most prestigious and consequential production company. It was founded in 1908 and achieved success in the 1910s with silent classics such as Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1913) or Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia satanica (Satan’s Rhapsody, 1915). But Cines, and Italian cinema more broadly, had great difficulties navigating the economic crisis brought about by World War I and adapting to the changing consumption and production patterns conjured by sonorization. The company suspended activities until 1929, when its equipment and facilities were bought out by the dynamic film exhibitor Stefano Pittaluga, who already controlled about one hundred theaters throughout the country. With the purchase of Cines, Pittaluga vertically integrated production and distribution, securing a monopolistic position in the national market. In 1930, Cines released Italy’s first sound film—the sentimental comedy La canzone dell’amore (Love’s Song) by Gennaro Righelli—but not even such a milestone, or the fact that it was practically the only company producing movies in Italy at the time, was enough to make the operation viable. Even with some financial support from the state, the national market was just too small and the production costs too high to make cinema a financially sustainable business. When Pittaluga died in 1931, Cines was on the cusp of bankruptcy. By then, the regime had realized both that fiction film could become a weapon of government and that Italian cinema could not exist without the state’s logistical and economic support. Similar to the fate of the Terni steelworks and a host of industries deemed essential to Italy’s status and prestige, Cines was nationalized to prevent it from closing.5

Under Pittaluga, Cines had started to explore how the cinematographic apparatus might sustain government. This interest became more urgent as the fascist state involved itself more directly in the company’s activities. Cines’s direct connection with the regime propelled it to become an aesthetico-political laboratory for trying new technologies of sight and sound and for delivering on the new responsibilities with which the regime had charged sound film. While cinema unquestionably had to work for Fascism, it was still to be determined whether particular film forms were more suited to be deployed as biopolitical arms. Propaganda and creativity were thus not mutually exclusive, and this brought about the situation of aesthetic pluralism that Marla Stone reviews so precisely in The Patron State: indeed, the regime’s relative openness to a variety of art and film forms was less a matter of actual pluralism than a manifestation of what—through historian Emilio Gentile—we could describe as the experimental nature of fascist totalitarianism.6

The years 1932 and 1933 were particularly important for Cines. In conjunction with the tenth anniversary of Fascism’s rise to power, under the artistic direction of the pundit and literary critic Emilio Cecchi, the company developed prototypical film forms that aspired to have a decisive impact on Italian film language and Italian history. As Vincenzo Buccheri traces, although Cecchi never turned his back on genre fiction, he sought to move away from purely escapist cinema and instead have domestic production tackle national life. By involving artists and intellectuals in the film industry, the plan was to develop model films that would reconcile art, politics, and entertainment. There was a special investment in realism, as the register was considered the most effective for projecting how different Italian localities and constituencies fitted together in the larger scheme of things. The first years of Italian sound cinema at Cines were, Gian Piero Brunetta points out, characterized by an effort to forge a shared experience of national identity that mediated Italy as a united organism while at the same time respecting the regional and positional differences that characterized the country.7 It was the labor of articulation between the local and the national as well as between the different socioeconomic blocks that the production company had prominently taken up.

Pirandello was very familiar with Cines. Its studios had inspired the depiction of Kosmograph in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore.8 La canzone dell’amore—which Pirandello loathed—was a loose adaptation of one of his short stories. Yet Cecchi’s Cines was no longer the Cines that Pirandello used to know. It was a direct extension of the fascist state apparatus; it was the company that, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, with Blasetti’s Terra madre and Camerini’s Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . , revolutionized Italian sound cinema and showed how realism could bring together entertainment and race-making. In Quaderni, the Cines film studios had provided Pirandello with the ideal location to stage Italy’s decay under liberal modernity and stoke resentment against the ruling elites and their dissolute film culture. Now, in the 1930s, this collaboration with the Rome-based company gave the playwright the opportunity to tweak his earlier assessment of industrialization and celebrate the good that comes from serving and servicing the nationalized machines. The same venues and technologies that before, under Giolitti, Pirandello had presented as responsible for Italy’s mala vita, under a different political economy were cast in a new light, and their redeeming qualities were amplified. Gioca, Pietro! is in fact a hymn to the perfect symbiosis established between living and dead labor under fascist rule, which seeks to remediate how the people felt about both industrialization and state power. Pirandello had begun Quaderni with a bleak account of mechanized living. Gioca, Pietro! opens instead with a more reassuring and inspiring techno-human ensemble.

We are at the factory gates. It is early morning and the workshop is still sleeping. As the machines awaken and pick up speed, they sound like living, breathing creatures, their hearts pumping rhythmically.9 Human voices join the machinic riffs rising from the plant, and the laborers hum a song that builds on the tunes and cadences of the factory in motion. A perfect synchronicity is achieved between people and technology, and it is this very collaboration of steel and flesh that assures Terni’s vitality. Without work, without the steelworks, Terni would be a desolate, dead place, Gioca, Pietro! implies. Instead, thanks to the metallurgic complex and the massive workforce gathered there, the town’s existence is punctuated by a lively playfulness, mediated in Pirandello’s treatment by an allegro musical score.

Gioca, Pietro! does not overlook the brutal working conditions in the steel mills yet emphasizes that only in and through strenuous labor can men realize themselves. Filippo is a dignified foreman who, after giving forty years to steelmaking, can no longer keep up with the pace of the factory. He has no regrets and feels proud of what he has made of himself, but it is time to retire. Although Filippo will soon be awarded the coveted star of merit for labor, to him the biggest reward would be to see his son take up his leadership position in the plant. Giovanni is a brilliant young man who has not found his place in life yet and is wasting his acute intelligence. Filippo tries to convey to Giovanni that a man can only fulfill his truest potential by embracing rather than resisting hard work: it is on the factory floor that one learns discipline, esprit de corps, and moral sense; it is in the workshop that real men are made.

Notwithstanding social and familial pressures, Giovanni cannot relinquish his fantasies of independence and commit to the assembly line. He does not want to sacrifice his freedom, insofar as he fears that any definitive life choice will eventually feel like a prison. It is precisely this lack of direction in life that makes him restless. It is easy to recognize in Giovanni’s insatiable desire that constant hunger, that unhealthy frenzy for more that Quaderni had warned against and Giuseppe Sergi had recognized as an essential feature of the Italian race. Giovanni, in Pirandello’s scenario, functions as a powerful manifestation of the assumption that without rules, without guidance, individuals drift away from the common good. Pietro, Giovanni’s best friend, is the opposite. He has no complicated desires and is perfectly satisfied with the life he has: Terni, steelmaking, hopefully Chiara.

The day of the town fair, the plant workers rest to honor Filippo’s service. After a parade of Blackshirts and a speech delivered by a high-ranking member of the Fascist Party, Giovanni finds himself withdrawing from the festive crowd. What a man his father is! Staring at the mill’s gate, Giovanni reconsiders his priorities. A community, a job, a home, a family, and children one day: what more does a man need to be happy in this world? He understands, too, that he has always been in love with Chiara; he rushes off to her house to serenade and propose to her. But Pietro is already there, about to do the same. The two friends begin to argue. Since life is just a game, let’s play, Giovanni suggests: let’s both propose to Chiara and see what happens. Chiara is enraged by these childish antics and quickly dismisses both suitors. The next day at work, Pietro and Giovanni show off their masculinity, skills, and force, in a battle to prove to each other and to the factory at large who is the best mate for Chiara—the one who is more productive and thus more worthy to reproduce, to fare razza. A moment of distraction is enough to provoke a tragic accident: a white-hot ingot falls onto Giovanni, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

Giovanni’s disability and impotence do not compromise his lightheartedness. When Pietro comes to visit him in dismay, he offers a single piece of advice: Pietro should play, because he still can. Pietro picks up on his friend’s implicit blessing and proposes to Chiara. They talk and, the scenario specifies, they become one as they walk away toward their new life. Giovanni cannot move, but he is still going places. At the end of Gioca, Pietro!, the young man is content. His eyes twinkling with hope and faith, Giovanni is working on a small mechanical apparatus. He has had this idea for a new device in his mind for a while, and now that he can no longer trifle away his life through play, he has the opportunity to focus, to put his innate Italian ingenuity to good use. The sound of his metal file fades out and is subsumed by the music of the steel mill at work. Since he cannot birth a family anymore, since his impotence prevents him from biologically contributing to the making of an Italian race, he will produce new machines to support his country and his people. Maimed but happy, paralyzed in his wheelchair, Giovanni has embraced his lot in life.

With such an evident juxtaposition between physical/inauthentic and spiritual/authentic liberty, the finale of Gioca, Pietro! is far from subtle. Once his ability to move is compromised, the man who would have sacrificed everything to preserve his own social mobility accepts that true self-fulfillment can only come from a stable and industrious life, from discipline and compliance. He comes to terms with the fact that a community can overcome tensions and divisions, and thus prosper, only when its men become part of a larger assemblage, when—as Sergi’s advised—they restrain their individualism to concentrate their energy and ingenuity on something other than erratic cravings and desires.

To bring this romanticization of labor to the screens, Pirandello had approached Sergei Eisenstein: the script’s Stakhanovism seemed to resonate with the rhetoric of Stalinist U.S.S.R, and—besides—the director of Battleship Potemkin and Strike (both 1925) had many admirers in Italy, even within the regime. Such a fascist appreciation of Soviet film is less surprising than one might think.10 Given Fascism’s commitment to winning over the working class, it somehow made sense to take communist cinema as a model. Notwithstanding his respect for Pirandello, Eisenstein declined to be involved in the project after becoming aware of the film’s entanglement with the fascist war machine. Hitler’s power was on the rise in Germany, and fascist hierarchs had already started eyeing the first feature film sponsored by the regime as an opportunity to forge a cinematic axis between Rome and Berlin. Pressured by the fascist hierarchy, Cecchi connected with Walter Ruttmann. The subject of the film seemed like a perfect fit for the director of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), who had also worked as director of photography for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) before going on to make public hygiene documentaries for the Weimar Republic, including Enemy in the Blood (1931).11

Yet Cecchi and other key players at Cines feared that Ruttmann’s preference for avant-garde formalism and elaborate montage would be too foreign to Italy’s taste and sensibility. Consequently, they assigned novelist Mario Soldati to assist the director as a sort of native informant who could facilitate the translation of Ruttmann’s film language for national audiences. Soldati had just come back from a long stay in the United States, and his familiarity with American film was considered a great asset in light of Italian audiences’ fondness for Hollywood. The collaboration between Ruttmann and Soldati resulted in Acciaio. Buccheri cogently characterizes the film as an endeavor to find a fascist approach to sound cinema by juxtaposing two great traditions of European modernist film—formalism and documentary—in a sort of “abstract realism” in which the meaning of reality is conveyed through 1920s avant-garde techniques, insofar as these very techniques were considered the most appropriate to break through to the popular masses.12

In his 1929 think-piece “Se il film parlante abolirà il teatro?” (Will talkies abolish theater?), Pirandello insisted that, for the good of the nation, Italian sound cinematografia should avoid relying too heavily on narration and dialogue and instead become cine-melo-grafia: a language of “pure vision and pure music” that would move people’s hearts and make the strongest impression on their subconscious.13 In line with these insights, Ruttmann and Soldati reduce the narrative of Gioca, Pietro! to a minimum, disregard character development, and emphasize the spectacular rendition of Terni’s optical and aural grandeur. Siegfried Kracauer held that Ruttmann’s commitment to arranging audiovisual attractions for the spectators was the mark of a shallow cinematic intelligence. For Kracauer, Ruttmann—unlike Dziga Vertov—did not have anything meaningful to say about the real, and so was satisfied with transforming the landscapes his camera captured into a sublime show of sights and sounds.14 However, in Acciaio the transformation of the industrial present into a mighty audiovisual spectacle appears to be a conscious aesthetic decision that is the direct consequence of a precise political operation. In filming Pirandello’s treatment, Ruttmann focuses on capturing the forms, noises, and rhythms emerging from Terni as they are direct expressions of the powers commanding this Italian location, and thus the country more broadly. While on-location shooting and nonprofessional extras nestle fascist state capitalism in traditional Italian life, the film’s abstract style and editing techniques conjure the higher authority responsible for giving form to Italian reality. Realism and formalism coexist because the film is about both Terni’s material reality and the forces giving form to it. Acciaio is saturated with extras watching and listening in the background, signaling to the film’s viewers that they should pay attention (Figure 3).

Ultimately, the film’s public is made to occupy the same position as the spectators of the track cycle race and the visitors to the steel mill in the early scenes of the film: a sublime “eye-opening” audiovisual attraction is about to be exhibited before them.

Made in Fascist Italy

The plot and overall tone of Acciaio differ from Gioca, Pietro! in significant ways. Mario (Pietro Pastore) has just finished his military service. While in the army, he indulged in the company of sex workers, but now he is ready to settle down and marry the young laundress Gina (Isa Pola). Although his military fatigues are gone, the time to serve is not over: he will start wearing the “civilian uniform” and fulfill his duties to the nation in a manner appropriate to his new status, as a worker and a father. However, Mario’s homecoming to Terni does not goes as planned: Gina is now with Pietro (Vittorio Bellaccini). Mario tries to let it go. Mario, Gina, and Pietro spend a night at the fair, enjoying the rides in sequences nodding to Jean Epstein’s Faithful Heart (1923). But when a local politician, and with him all Terni, thanks Mario for all his service, Gina finds herself gazing at him with desire, gratitude, and admiration: serving Fascism is sexy, it appears. The two dance the night away, causing an enraged Pietro to attack Mario. The ensuing fight—the film audiovisually establishes—tears Terni apart: whereas the beginning of Acciaio was characterized by choral captures of the town assembled together and moving in unison to the same beat on either the factory or dance floor, after the fight we see individuals struggling against each other and hear a cacophony of screams, insults, and opinions. Shot-reverse-shot patterns take over long takes, and this stylistic shift emphasizes the feeling of a fractured community. The ominous consequences of this fragmentation and disaggregation manifest themselves the morning after.

As dawn approaches, the sound of the machines waking up first intercuts with and eventually silences the commotion coming from town. The urgencies of labor are making themselves heard, to the characters but also to the spectators. The factory siren demands Terni’s undivided attention and warns the people that the temporality of production dominates the town’s landscape. Reminded of their duties and of the temporal rules norming their lives, the workforce heads to the factory gates. But Pietro and Mario persist in their divisions even on the factory floor: instead of working together, they exchange angry looks and provocations, until Pietro gets so distracted by the dispute that he gets crushed by an ingot and dies on the job.

As was the case for Gioca, Pietro!, in Acciaio the dangers of factory work are simultaneously acknowledged and affectively foreclosed. Ruttmann’s expressionistic lightscape, Michael Cowan argues, silhouettes the blast furnaces, transforming them into giant monsters threatening the workers with fire, molten metal tongues, and mechanical arms (Figure 4).15 At the same time, the film insists that there is nothing structurally wrong with the safety protocols adopted in a fascist-owned factory. At fault are the individuals who infect the sanctity of the workplace with personal trifles and distractions, undermining the smooth functioning of the state’s military-industrial apparatus and putting national security at risk—ultimately thus compromising the future of the Italian ethno-nation.

Toward the beginning of Acciaio, the famous ten-minute “factory symphony” sequence dramatizing the steelmaking process comes to a sudden halt due to a workplace incident that silences the machines: a momentary distraction on the part of a laborer has almost cost him his life, but even more importantly, it has halted production. Coworkers use the racialized term macaco (ape, monkey) to shame the distracted laborer, and they blame the incident on his lack of work ethic. Adding injury to insult, they also call on the boss to give him a good beating to teach this irresponsible man not to come to work with girls on his mind. This insistence on the culpability of living labor and the innocence of the state and its mechanisms achieves two goals. On the one hand, it disallows imaginaries of class awareness and workers’ solidarity; on the other, by stressing authority’s capacity to redress what are projected as self-destructive behaviors, Acciaio metonymically builds up the necessity of the fascist state’s restraining presence in people’s lives. The boss who righteously disciplines the worker is in fact an employee of the fascist state, given that the plant has been nationalized.

Pietro’s death constitutes another powerful, and disempowering, memento of what happens to individual bodies and the body politic alike when individuals drift away from heteronormativity and state-sanctioned codes of conduct. If Pietro loses his life, Mario and Gina are sentenced by Terni to social death. Set designer Gastone Medin does an incredible job of turning the film’s background into a chorus condemning the outcast laundress and welder, turning the public against them. We catch glimpses of graffiti insulting Mario; we feel the eyes of a reunited community (played by local nonprofessional extras) on Gina as she walks through Terni; we hear the weight of the town’s moral condemnation in the comments whispered on the factory floor and on the streets. Children simulate a stoning by throwing rocks and dirt on Gina’s dress, which is hanging to dry in her courtyard.

Mario wastes time in the bar; he has lost interest in Terni, Gina, the future, everything. He sees a picture of racing cyclists in the newspaper and wishes that he had never returned to this “inferno.” The picture of the bicycle race comes to life, and Mario is now part of the action. He has climbed on his bike and is sprinting to catch up with the racers, leaving Terni farther and farther behind. But Mario cannot keep up with the group, and he gives up, dwarfed by the hydroelectric basin that powers both Terni and the acciaierie (Figure 5).

Alone, Mario catches a glimpse of the workforce biking into town. He follows with his eyes the ordered and poised journey of this perfectly harmonious and synchronized assemblage of Italian workers to the factory gates. The sounds of the steelworks make themselves heard again; they are summoning Mario, who cannot but respond to their call. No longer dreaming of being different, he will comply; through the toll of labor, he will atone. Gina, who is watching alone from a distance, is relieved that Mario has reckoned with his place in society. Mario races to the mill and crosses its threshold as the gates close behind him. At the end of the film, Mario—focused, serious, isolated, contained, dedicated, in a sort of grayscale rendition of a Kazimir Malevich painting—is working in a crane that, as it moves away from the camera, assumes the semblance of a suspended cage. Acciaio closes with a shot of the Marmore Falls’ powerful jets filling the screen with white. The purity of the laborious life has been restored.

Rossano Vittori writes that Acciaio betrayed both the spirit and the substance of Pirandello’s treatment.16 The betrayal here is not political: both film and scenario project an Italy without classes or class struggle, foreclose a structural gaze on labor issues, promote the same models of the good life, and flag personal aspirations as destructive and self-destructive desires. In both cases, what creates tensions and conflicts is resistance to the gendered behaviors required by state apparatuses and social institutions to work. Society is itself depicted as a human-machinic assemblage whose nexuses and automatisms should not be challenged. However, Gioca, Pietro! and Acciaio do strike different chords, deploy different affective registers, and rely on different imaginaries, in order to favor sociopolitical docility and boost (re)productivity.

Gioca, Pietro! projected the assimilation and subsumption of individuals within the collective as sacrifices worth making, insofar as they are the precondition for collective happiness and personal enrichment. Pirandello’s scenario does not instruct Italians to renounce what they are but to adapt; it does not prompt them to fuse with the military-industrial complex and submit to it but to collaborate with Fascism’s technologies for the greater good. The promise that Gioca, Pietro! makes to Italians is that if they remodulate their lives and synchronize them with the needs of the nationalized machines, they will thrive. However, given the genio e sregolatezza, genius and unruliness, proper to the Italian race, the fact that national subjects are pushed off the right track by naughty desires is not something that outrages Pirandello. Mediterranean men—we know this from Sergi—are exuberant beings by nature, and this unavoidable racial feature is what makes Italian men powerful and weak at the same time. Giovanni in Gioca, Pietro! is an improper state subject, yes, but he is also an inventor whose ingenuity will contribute to Italy’s fortunes after he is able to rein in his immoderate vitality. This forgiving attitude vis-à-vis what are presented as the excesses of Italian masculinity allows Gioca, Pietro! to close in a reassuring way, with a double happy ending.

Acciaio, by contrast, establishes that any violation of the status quo and of the normal ordering of things is a great offense to the powers that be, an outrageous provocation that will lead to a terrible reprisal. In Ruttmann’s and Soldati’s hands, Pirandello’s trivial moral parable turns into a brutalist cautionary tale about what is expected of national bodies under fascist state capitalism. The film demands that Italian subjects sacrifice everything—especially their own individuality and personhood. But this absolute surrender does not even come with the promise of a better life. Surrender only assures a body’s enhanced survival as an anonymous component of the workforce. No whitening is in sight. No one is happy in Terni’s hell: everyone is doing their job covered in sweat and soot. Appropriately, the sound score composed by Gian Francesco Malipiero for Acciaio lacks the allegro and cheerful movements that Pirandello originally suggested and is instead marked by a tragic aria and the deafening sounds of the factory and the falls calling the ethno-nation to its duties. In line with his earlier comments on Fascism, with Gioca, Pietro! Pirandello portrays the regime as a life-shaping authority, a saving power able to reconcile factory productivity, social reproductivity, and individual happiness—enabling in this way the fantasy of a good capitalism that, without changing property relations, could still eradicate the very social tensions and alienated behaviors that Pirandello had flagged in Quaderni. Ruttmann, conversely, implants into Italian reality and history a merciless conflict between private desires and the public interest, mediating the urgency to annihilate one’s own self in order to avoid retribution.

Acciaio was released in Germany with the ominous title Arbeit macht glücklich (Work makes one happy). However, the only instance of contentment one encounters in the film is that of the fascist industrial apparatus. There is nothing liberating about the final sequence of Mario’s surrender and his solitary confinement in a factory crane. Moreover, even if Pietro’s father appears to forgive Mario and Gina for what happened to his son, there is no indication that they will be welcomed back into the community or form a family. The fact that after Pietro’s death we always see them isolated, neither as a couple nor in a group setting, attests that their downfall in the film’s diegetic universe is irreversible: by isolating, by singling them out, Acciaio judges and bans them; Mario and Gina have proven unfit to reproduce and unworthy of being members of the community, and thus they can only belong to Italy as fungible bodies, in the guise of disposable labor power. Gina, marked by the indelible stigma of guilt, will keep toiling as a laundress, while Mario commits himself to the acciaierie. In retrospect, then, Acciaio might appear as a somber foreshadowing of the sort of happiness and freedom that working for Nazi Fascism entails. With the German title in mind, it is impossible not to think of the Arbeit macht frei sign looming over the entrance of Auschwitz when—over Malipiero’s musical contrapunto—the factory gates close behind Pietro. As Piero Garofalo notes, Ruttmann’s representation of Italian men and women at work is anything but consoling: whether through their sweat or through their blood, the workers ought to “keep the machinery of state capitalism running.”17

However, Garofalo is still able to find some harmony and lyricism in Acciaio, especially in the descriptive sequences capturing Terni’s surroundings and the Marmore Falls, which were probably shot by Soldati. To me, the depiction of nature and water in Acciaio feels very different from, say, that of Piccolo mondo antico (Small Ancient World), Soldati’s 1941 directorial debut. Drawing upon a long literary and pictorial tradition eulogizing Italy as a land blessed by nature, in Piccolo mondo antico Soldati stages the country’s environment as a model of harmony, and the calm lake waters at the beginning and end of the film signal that Italians can overcome divisions and find unity only by reconnecting with the law of their land. Soldati’s lifeworld is small and ancient: it is a misura d’uomo, “on a human scale.”

Such a lyrical celebration of perfect harmony between human beings and their environment appears absent from Acciaio. Something to keep in mind is that the Marmore Falls are not even natural but an artificial product of state intervention: they were created by the Romans in 271 BCE, when they diverted the Velino River toward the Marmore cliff in order to reclaim the malarious swamplands plaguing the city of Rieti. The water we see in Acciaio is therefore not a natural treasure but a danger to human life that state power alone (first the Roman Senate, now the fascist state) could redeem and transform into a resource for sustaining collective living. Without the salvific intervention of state authority, there would be no natural harmony or lyricism in Terni or elsewhere. Not only is it individuals’ nature to lose themselves and turn against each other when left alone by state power; nature itself would be a threat to human life were it not reclaimed by the state.

To evoke the presence of the higher force looming over Terni and its people, and by extension over the Italian nation as a whole, Ruttmann deploys different audiovisual strategies. High-angle shots of Gina, Mario, and the whole town dwarfed by the waterfalls and their hydroelectric basin; the rhythmic alternation between horizontal pans on living beings and vertical pans on the falls’ dam and the metallurgic hub; the frenetic intercutting of the subdued existences that people live in Terni with deafening scenes capturing the steelmaking process and the Marmore Falls’ imposing gorges: through these compositions, Ruttmann conjures the sense of a sublime imbalance of power. Acciaio is all about Terni’s material reality, yet such a reality owes its existence to the falls and to the factory, and above all to the state that owns them both.

Initially, through parallel editing, Acciaio highlights the similarities between Terni’s mundane reality and what happens in the falls-powered and state-run factory. For instance, we first see children playing with a press in a yard, and then we are transported to the steelworks floor, where a machine that looks like “a human limb with augmented power” is beating on an incandescent block of metal.18 The analogical relation between these two spheres—the private and the national(ized), the home and the workplace—is soon turned into a hierarchy. By means of sonic-photo montage, Ruttmann chases the forces giving form to private existences and guides the public from the concrete to the abstract, from the specific to the general, from the town to the factory to the falls and beyond—affectively mediating the state-industrial apparatus as an awe-inspiring power before which the people can only bow. Beyond the power of water and steel, the sublime authority of the fascist state looms large. Within the fires of steelmaking, it is Fascism that shines. The ultimate attraction is the regime itself. The cult of the machine paves the way for the fetish of the state and of its worldmaking power, which is simultaneously a power to harvest energy (water, labor) and weld forms (steel, identities). What the film therefore ultimately mythologizes is Fascism’s irresistible and terrible power to mass produce not only Italian goods but also a good Italian race. This is the mighty force with which Ruttmann’s film confronts the spectator, the power that shall break individuals’ will and assemble a collaborative collectivity. The terrible power to subject the living is a power that the cinematic apparatus also tries to wield.

Toward the end of Acciaio, in the sequence depicting Mario’s epiphany, we see the shadows of Terni’s men biking to work projected on the waterfalls and swallowed by the jets, and then, in the next scene, we see them reemerge in a single, synchronized, poised cluster as they are sucked in by the acciaierie (Figure 6). This is no longer a group of workers entering the factory on bikes but rather an alloy of flesh, metal, and Fascism, what Kracauer might define as a “mass ornament,” the artificial social machine created by stripping men and women of their very humanity (their desires, sexuality, sensuality) and dehumanizing them to the status of mere means. Since capitalist production is not natural, Kracauer explains, capitalism must destroy individual human beings and transform them into tiny parts, so that they can “effortlessly clamber up charts and service machines.”19

Thus, the scene in which the Italian workforce coalesces into a mass ornament devoured by the factory, intercut with shots of Mario alone and destroyed by his short-lived decision to hold on to his individual identity, does more than merely project the need to comply and conform. This moment pressures one to renounce everything to become a state asset. The film is an epic story whose hero is not a character but rather the state that shapes and puts to work even the most resistant matter. It is for this reason that throughout the film, the public is made to identify with dead labor, with the needs of a state-run factory, rather than sympathizing with the living laborers that struggle through Terni. In fact, in Acciaio, spectatorial pleasure comes from experiencing Mario’s transformation from feeling superior to and exempt from the toils of work, to accepting his subalternity relative to them and submitting to the demands of the state, these transcendental, sublime powers giving form to reality. Even Gina is ecstatic to see Mario succumb. We pity the wreckage of his life, but at the same time, experiencing his wreckage offers the public a feeling of relief and security. We are not him; we will not put ourselves in his situation. We have seen and heard and felt what he could not, and now we know the dreadful consequences of defiance and noncompliance.

Acciaio was highly appreciated in Germany, and an impressed Joseph Goebbels was especially eager to employ Ruttmann to advance Nazism’s steely romanticism and reactionary modernism.20 Ruttmann was commissioned to direct the opening montage sequence for Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1935) and then hired to shoot propaganda documentaries on Nazi industry. Ruttmann died in 1941 as a result of the injuries he suffered on the front, working for the Third Reich. In Italy, Ruttmann’s last feature film flopped; its performance at the box office was underwhelming, to say the least. Trying to make sense of the failure of Acciaio, a film critic commented in 1933:

Acciaio is a work which ought to have been better understood by the Italian public. . . . The epic character of the life in the workshop is shown with fascinating and mysterious symbols. Can it be that our public is so insensitive as not to feel the dominating power of machines with their monstrous and inexplicable vitality? The tongues of fire which Ruttmann sees shooting out in every direction through the smoky darkness as the workers toil belong to a new mythology.21

Possibly, the public could not connect with Acciaio because the generic conventions, dreadful mythology, and terrifying symbolism Ruttmann deployed in the service of “fascinating Fascism,” to use Susan Sontag’s expression, was too foreign, too new, to Italy.22 It is true, in fact, as Pirandello suggested, that the film ended up assembling a reality that felt quite different from the quaint national real conjured by so many concurrent Italian movies. Acciaio was indeed much closer to Weimar Republic films—Metropolis comes immediately to mind—than to the imaginary articulated by the Italian cinema of the era: the coeval Treno popolare (Tourist Train, 1933) captures the same localities featured in Acciaio, and yet the picturesque Terni countryside from Raffaello Matarazzo’s film feels likes a totally different reality vis-à-vis the one Ruttmann stages. James Hay comments that Acciaio emanates the “kind of sacred and mystical aura traditionally associated with ritual caves” (Figure 7).23 It might then be that the film’s lack of impact in Italy was determined by Ruttmann’s attempt to lionize Fascism by means of a sensibility and cultural tropes that were more German than Italian.

Furio Jesi, a cultural critic active in Italy in the 1970s, suggests in this regard that Nazism and Fascism appealed to very different genres of racial imaginaries and affective registers. According to Jesi, Nazism’s inception and success were connected with the fantasy of a “secret Germany,” with immemorial folk tales about dark forces to which the Teutonic peoples owed their existence.24 The monsters haunting the German cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s express precisely the perverse longing to connect with these mysterious powers and fuse with them, almost in an orgiastic fashion, to transmute into a new species of being: a race of masters and supermen. The Nazi state apparatus, Kracauer implies in From Caligari to Hitler, came to be perceived as the incarnation of a dreary higher power that the ethno-community should simultaneously fear and venerate, and to which it owed anything and everything. In order to really understand what’s going on in Acciaio, one would want to consider what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy dub the “Nazi myth”: the phantasmagoria of the state as a ruthless creature that can be appeased only through self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of the unworthy, a creature that—as Hitler threatened with the Nero Decree—can even order the total destruction of the very race it was ruling over when the people proved themselves unfit to be remade into Übermenschen.25 Except for liminal figures, such Massimo Scaligero or Julius Evola, Italian culture, and with it fascist racism, was generally insensible, if not averse, to this sublime mystique of fright and ecstatic transaction with prehistoric and superhuman forces.

Expanding on Gramsci’s interpretation of Fascism as the expression of petit bourgeois aspirations and fears, Jesi argues that the only quasi-mythology that the regime could rely on was that of the domus, the peace provided by a home and a family. “Home” is not a mere metaphor in fascist discourse, Jesi insists. It constitutes the Italian foundation of Mussolini’s myths of rebirth, healing, and security. Underlying pompous fascist rhetoric about empires and colonies, about destiny and Romanitas, about making the Mediterranean a mare nostrum again, Jesi highlights the securitarian fixation with constructing a microcosm in which social and property relations “reveal the presence of extremely solid walls: those of the home, the family-run company, the city.”26 For Jesi, Fascism presented itself as a collective endeavor that sprouted in an almost organic fashion from Italian land and history and captivated the population by promising a home and domestic peace at a juncture when Italians’ lives—as we saw in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore—were being destabilized by the transnational flow of goods, bodies, imaginaries, demands, desires, and forms of intimacy. Obviously, for the country to become a true homeland to its people after the liberal catastrophe and within the context of the Red Scare, sacrifices had to be made, people had to restrained, and violence had to be deployed. Yet, even in the infamous slogan Me ne frego (“I really don’t care,” as on Melania Trump’s notorious jacket), Jesi detects a promise of human happiness—a very specific form of happiness, no doubt—that was missing from Nazism’s inhuman mysticism. Under its benevolent totalitarian rule, the regime vowed, people would fare better, and the precondition of that betterment would be the ability to comply.

This precise promise is what disposed many Italians, including Pirandello, to embrace Fascism and to submit to its demands: the sense of a titanic contest between the state and the people that Acciaio materializes through its overbearing film forms was not central in the fascist imaginary. Fascism was not fighting the Italian race; it was fighting for and with them. Its war was a simpler one: a war for home, a war for safety and security, a war to make better persons, rather than one leading to orgies of feelings or to incredible transmutations of the living. If we think about it, the new Italian men and women that the regime promised to make were quite normal people after all; they were fathers and mothers, workers and caregivers, community members ready to serve. To make such a banal race, to contribute to Fascism’s race war efforts, one didn’t really need heavy editing and sublime overtones; pretty movies might have been enough to do the job. As I begin explaining in the next chapter, independent of the regime’s direct control but staying truer to the colors of Blackshirt racism, Blassetti and Camerini had since the end of the 1920s been relying on a much simpler cinematic language to promote fascist living as the trivial, banal solution to the big and small problems afflicting Italy. It is by considering the affects generated by the real that films like theirs staged, and not—as a journalist instead argues—the reality that Fascism created, that we can perhaps rationalize how and why Italy fell for Mussolini.27