Fascism on Film

Ever since the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s, artists have reflected on its unique horrors. From Picasso’s Guernica to Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, painters and writers have captured the struggle between the forces of fascism and those who fight against it or fall victim to it. Other artists depict, not the battles against fascism as such, but everyday life after fascism’s triumph. The Conformist and The Garden of Delights, two films released in 1970 by Italian and Spanish directors respectively, fall into the latter category. Their focus is not on those who resisted fascism, but on the functionaries and administrators who operated within it.

Life under fascism

After World War I, the Italian working class rose up in the biennio rosso (“two red years”) of 1919–20. In response, the bourgeoisie turned to Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF) to save Italian capitalism. Mussolini’s fascists mobilized reactionary petty-bourgeois forces to brutally crush the Italian workers’ organizations.

After the working-class movement was neutralized, the bourgeoisie demanded a period of stability. Mussolini sought to deliver this by bureaucratizing the PNF, transforming it from an organ of civil war into the stable base of a repressive capitalist dictatorship. As Trotsky described it, “after utilizing the onrushing forces of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism strangled it within the vise of the bourgeois state.” It is into this bureaucratized party that Marcello Clerici, the central character of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, is dropped.

Early in the film, Clerici decides to join the ranks of Mussolini’s secret police and receives an explanation as to why different people choose to collaborate with the fascists. A PNF member explains that, “some do it out of fear, most of them for the money.” He adds that very few join, “out of faith in fascism.” But Clerici fits into none of these categories. Uncovering why a man with a comfortable life and anti-establishment views has chosen to become a fascist lackey is the subject of the rest of the film.

For Antonio Cano, the main character of Carlos Saura’s The Garden of Delights, the motive to make money is paramount. He’s a businessman at the center of a rich but loveless family in Franco’s Spain, who’s lost his memory following a car crash. His family and friends seek to revive his memories by reenacting moments from his earlier life. Saura’s examination of Antonio unfolds through his reaction, or lack of reaction, to these insidious reenactments and the callousness with which he is treated by his own family. Most tellingly, the family’s motives for recovering Antonio’s memories are not tenderhearted; they only want to regain access to his safety deposit boxes and foreign bank accounts. The members of the Cano family have no emotional connection. As Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, there is no nexus between them other than “naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”

Antonio’s alienation is reproduced in the ambiguity that his uncommunicative state creates for the viewer. There is no certainty as to how Antonio feels about the real world around him nor the reenacted world he is subjected to. When his son yells at him about how useless he is—in a reversal of their father-son relationship before the accident—there is no indication of how Antonio feels. Has this been a moment of revelation about his personal relationships? Or has he not understood this exchange at all? His pathetic face is impenetrable.

Saura repeatedly allows the viewer to feel sorry for this helpless person only to cut across this sympathy with a reminder that Antonio is a cruel and despotic man. It’s not until the final sequences of the film that the director allows any indication that there is still some humanity behind the cold faces of Antonio’s family. Antonio’s father might be able to connect with him as a son and not as a business partner. His wife may realize she wants Antonio’s time and attention, not his money. However, by the time these cracks emerge, the audience is already aware that there is no humanity lingering inside of Antonio. Saura does not allow any possibility of emotional reconciliation. To the extent these people are still human at all, it is only enough to ensure they are able to keep harming one another.

Clerici’s personal relationships are also bleak and opaque. He states outright that he does not really care for his wife and only marries her out of a desire for normality. In flashbacks, he visits his drug-addicted mother, his sick father, and recalls some of the abuse he suffered as a child. But it’s not certain how he feels about these things, or if he feels anything at all. Bertolucci creates a distance between the audience and the characters whose lives he depicts. It is hard to know how to feel about any of the events unfolding onscreen when we don’t understand whether we’re watching a cold-blooded fascist killer or a desperate man trapped in a sick system he doesn’t know how to escape.

Frustrations of the artist and the middle class

The characters in these films do not embody the anger that communists and other opponents of fascism felt under Mussolini and Franco. But the films themselves capture the frustrated outlook of a social layer which desires change, but does not understand how to achieve it. Both directors were critics of capitalism. Bertolucci was a self-proclaimed communist, and Saura made many political, anti-establishment films despite having to work under Franco’s dictatorship. Both also grew up among the petty bourgeois, whom they frequently depict in their films. Trotsky explained that during the rise of capitalism, this class:

Marched obediently in the capitalist harness … But under the conditions of capitalist disintegration, and of the impasse in the economic situation, the petty bourgeoisie strives, seeks, attempts to tear itself loose from the fetters of the old masters and rulers of society.

As a relatively weak class with an ever decreasing economic role in society, the petty bourgeoisie cannot challenge capitalism on its own. It can do so only if it accepts the leadership of a genuinely revolutionary movement of the working class. Just as the petty bourgeois cannot independently challenge capitalism, artists are not able to take on capitalism, or its fascist variant, solely in their capacity as artists.

Without a worked-out Marxist perspective on what fascism is and how it can be defeated, both films lack any hope in meaningful social change. Even The Conformist, whose final scene takes place immediately after Mussolini’s resignation in 1943, ends pessimistically. Bertolucci chooses to leave the audience in a state of dull horror at what has been done and cannot be undone.

Nonetheless, despite their political limitations, both Bertolucci and Saura create a real sense of the oppressive atmosphere—political and emotional—that prevailed under fascism. The genius of each film consists in how effective they are in transmitting these feelings to the audience.

Expanding on montage

The best art can convey something that is inexpressible in any other form. The Conformist and The Garden of Delights have a lot to offer anyone interested in how film can communicate something beyond words, and all the more so because the films are political and are able to lend their artistic value to an anti-fascist, anti-capitalist message.

In an often-referenced episode of early film experimentation, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov showed that the meaning of an image was changed for the viewer depending on the images that preceded or followed it. Kuleshov’s experiments in montage demonstrated not only that meaning can be created or destroyed with simple editing, but that the meaning of a film is something that happens within the viewer. Interaction with the audience is an essential part of how montage works. It is not just stacking images next to each other to create meaning in the abstract. Montage consists of a give and take between what an image prompts the audience to feel and what feeling the audience then brings to the next image.

There is a wonderful push and pull between film and viewer in both The Conformist and The Garden of Delights, prompted by much more than shot juxtaposition. Bertolucci and Saura pull the viewer from scene to scene, each filled with cold and impersonal imagery, but without giving the audience a scene or an image that has a clear takeaway in itself. Every moment in these films exists for the impact it will have on the viewer, not for some abstract purpose of plot development or character psychology.

At the same time, this impact is complicated and obscured. These films shape what we see only by sparking contradictory feelings and raising unanswered questions, not by prompting anything known and familiar that can be comfortably set aside by the audience. In other words, the experience of watching these films is the message and the purpose of the films. Bertolucci and Saura were able to create, not snapshots of the mood in these moments in history, but vehicles to transfer this mood, this state of consciousness, to the viewers of their films.

The atmosphere created in these films is not impressive because it is complex, but because the confusion and complexity is an honest reflection on life. While Marxist theory can explain what fascism is, how it functions, and how to fight it much more concisely and coherently than any film, what The Conformist and The Garden of Delights show is the potential that art has to communicate some truths in a different way.