Fascism in the Years of Lead: Italian and German cinema remember the past

During the 1970s in Italy and West Germany, the "Years of Lead" symbolized by the advent of domestic terrorism, filmmakers sought answers to a culture of crisis by examining their nation's fascist histories. The result was a new cinematic subgenre that became most widely known for its Italian and German practitioners, for whom the issue of fascist memory held a deep cultural, sociological, and political significance. This dissertation explores this subgenre through close textual readings of a selection of films from Italy and West Germany, the first comparative study of cinematic production in these two countries. By highlighting formal and thematic similarities between these films, this work seeks to demonstrate the development of a shared language for examining fascism that transcended the specificity of either national cinema or national history.;The thematic consonances between these films are most deeply felt in their exploration of the conflict between the personal and the political. To begin this analysis Chapter 2 looks at Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973) and Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum (1979), two films that adopt a broadly satirical popular style that incorporates elements of humor and the carnivalesque as a means of destabilizing the effect of fascist aesthetics. Both films adopt the theme of "arrested adolescence" as a metaphor for the cultural environment that enabled the widespread appeal of fascism at the macro-level of petit-bourgeois society. Chapter 3 looks at two films that adopt and transform the critically devalued genre of the melodrama: Lina Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy (1973) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lili Marleen (1981). By looking at their ironic cooption of techniques associated with Hollywood "women's films," I analyze the way in which these directors are concerned with the notion of romantic love as it conflicts with political activity. Chapter 4 reflects upon two films that adopt a woman's perspective of everyday life under fascism: Ettore Scola's A Special Day (1977) and Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany, Pale Mother (1980). These two films relate to feminist debates on the politicization of the personal sphere and the role of women and the domestic in relation to the macrocosm of national politics. By adopting manipulations of aural and visual point-of-view these films implicate the cinematic apparatus itself as both an analogue to the invasion of the public in the personal sphere and as a vehicle for expressing female subjectivity. This parallel between cinema and the spectacular mechanisms of Italian Fascism and Nazism is present in all these films, and reveals an active questioning of the medium's power for harnessing individual desire and consensus.;Despite the multinational character of filmmaking in this period, there has been a surprising lack of comparative analyses of West German and Italian film culture. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate how film scholarship would benefit from expanding their analyses to acknowledge a wider sphere of influences, both in this specific case and beyond. This work contributes both to the study of fascist memory in Italy and West Germany and to the nascent practice of transnational readings of cinematic works;In order to provide a context for the close comparisons of these texts, Chapter 1 begins by examining the development of the subgenre of fascist-themed film and how it was inflected by the contrasting states of film production in West Germany and Italy. Each subsequent chapter compares one Italian and one German film with rigorous textual readings focusing upon both thematic and formal similarities. What these comparisons highlight is the way in which popular forms of filmmaking are combined with a tendency towards formal experimentation. The result is a hybrid cinematic style, which I argue is a deliberate strategy to balance spectator identification with distanciation, thus encouraging viewers to engage with a work in critically while still incorporating spectatorial pleasure. It is this combination of effects that links these films and points to an alternative method of political filmmaking, one which departs from the predominant Godardian exemplum of narrative rupture and signals a significant shift within art house cinema.