The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film

Radical Projection

Jennifer Lynde Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415899154
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136227448
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Through a series of detailed film case histories ranging from The Great Dictator to Hiroshima mon amour to The Lives of Others, The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection explores the genesis and recurrence of antifascist aesthetics as it manifests in the WWII, Cold War and Post-Wall historical periods.

Emerging during a critical moment in film history—1930s/1940s Hollywood— cinematic antifascism was representative of the international nature of antifascist alliances, with the amalgam of film styles generated in émigré Hollywood during the WWII period reflecting a dialogue between an urgent political commitment to antifascism and an equally intense commitment to aesthetic complexity. Opposed to a fascist aesthetics based on homogeneity, purity and spectacle, these antifascist films project a radical beauty of distortion, heterogeneity, fragmentation and loss. By juxtaposing documentation and the modernist techniques of surrealism and expressionism, the filmmakers were able to manifest a non-totalizing work of art that still had political impact.

Drawing on insights from film and cultural studies, aesthetic and ethical philosophy, and socio-political theory, this book argues that the artistic struggles with political commitment and modernist strategies of representation during the 1930s and 40s resulted in a distinctive, radical aesthetic form that represents an alternate strand of post-modernism.

1 Introduction

Face-To-Face with the Angel of History

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

–Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

“IMAGES TO RESPECT, IMAGES TO ADORE”

In 1943, the fascist author and journalist Robert Brasillach wrote in the collaborationist journal Je suis partout: “The calamity of democracy is to have deprived the nation of images, images to love, images to respect, images to adore—the Revolution of the twentieth century has given them back to the nation” (Carroll 712). With this comment, he identifies a rather frightening element of politics and nationalism that has become increasingly clear throughout the 20^th century: much of what influences and unites people in a political cause is aesthetic in nature and involves the desire to worship something, even if it is only an image. Brasillach’s statement identifies the key position of images, in particular an aesthetic vision of the nation, to the success of fascism in the early 20^th century, and to its continued appeal. His disparaging remarks about democracy also underscore an essential problem for populist democratic politics and art: how is it possible to balance heterogeneity with unity; and how can one encapsulate difference in a compelling image?¹ Is it possible to create a static image that embodies democracy and difference? Is it even desirable? Such an image would seem to run counter to the essential complexity of heterogeneity. Yet ignoring the widespread acceptance of aesthetic political representation in the 20^th century seems problematic for other reasons: fascist ideology suffers no such conflict of interests.

The depiction of heterogeneity during the WWII years was especially negative, with America being a target of derision for its mixture of cultures. For example, in a Norwegian propaganda poster from 1944, produced by the Nasjonal Samling (a fascist party), American heterogeneity is portrayed as a monstrous body constructed of body parts that represent different aspects of American “culture.” The poster, entitled “Kultur Terror,” features a monstrous figure—the Cultural Terror—which dominates the foreground, while to its left is the Statue of Liberty in the distance and to its right a city (Oslo perhaps). Almost under its feet stands a European whose ears are as big as his head, i.e. he is “all ears,” holding a placard, whose text translates: “The U.S.A. will save Europe’s culture from destruction.” Next to the placard is a question in bold print (the interrogating presence of the poster’s author): “With what right?” The figure is a mixture of violence and beauty: it is about to crush the city with one of its legs—a bloody bomb, while its other leg has a sash proclaiming it “the world’s most beautiful leg.” This doubleness is emphasized as a mish-mash of inconsistency. For example, although its upper body is black, the figure’s head is covered by a Ku Klux Klan hood. Two women sit on its shoulders—Miss Victory waving an American flag, and Miss America wearing a Native American headdress—functioning as propagandistic ideals to rally the potential troops. With its two black arms the figure waves a record (jazz no doubt) and a bag of money, to which a Jewish caricature clings, representing two cultural influences that fascists reviled. A Star of David flag flaps from its crotch, which further underscores the poster’s denigration of Jewish culture. Two additional arms represent a prisoner in handcuffs brandishing a pistol and a judge with a gavel, respectively. These arms emphasize the perceived hypocrisy of American posturing about justice. Instead of internal organs, its chest cavity is a cage inhabited by two black slaves dancing the jitterbug. A sign reads “Jitterbug—Triumph of Civilization,” implying that American “civilization” is jittery at best and a hypocritical nightmare at worst. It is an amalgam of stereotypes about America and suggests that a multi-cultural society is a monstrous, unnatural, destructive and ridiculous idea. The not-so-subtle implication is that America destroys culture in general, that heterogeneity is barbarism dressed up as civilization, and that Europe is in danger.

Figure 1.1 Kultur-terror: USA vil redde Europas kultur fra undergang. Med hvilken rett?, 1944.

But what are the alternatives? The images and metaphors that are used to describe a heterogeneous group tend to be unsuccessful even when they are meant to be positive. For example, the American “melting pot” is a murky image that hardly stirs the imagination. The inherent problem of reducing complexity to achieve a coherent image suggests that a static image may simply not have the ability to convey true depth of difference. In other words, a simple blending of elements fails to capture essential qualities of heterogeneity. One can see this dilemma even more clearly in an example from film. In Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, there is a memorable scene that features Chaplin dancing as Adenoid Hynkel with a large inflated globe. In the film, the dance is seductive, surprising and beautiful, but ends with the globe popping, leaving him crying over a deflated balloon. Framed within the vast, aesthetically impressive room that Hynkel rules from, his dance with the globe perfectly encapsulates the power and ambition of the Nazis. The sequence also transmits their pomposity and egomania, and the bursting of the “bubble” provides a final critique of the entire sequence. If one isolates still images in this sequence, however, there is a marked difference between an image from the dance and the final image. The qualities of power and beauty are still apparent when observing a still image from the first part of the scene; i.e. the aestheticization of politics works just as well as a singular image. If, on the other hand, one sees only an image of Hynkel with the deflated balloon in his hands, Chaplin’s satire on power falls flat and his critique remains unintelligible. The significance of that final moment depends entirely on the moments leading up to it. In order to truly convey the satirical impact of the film sequence in a single image, one must construct it in relation to other moments and images.

Figure 1.2 Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator, 1940.

Figure 1.3 Chaplin and the deflated globe in The Great Dictator, 1940.

Thus, it would seem that an overlay of elements on a formal level is necessary to a clear portrayal and understanding of the differences involved in terms of content. In visual representation this effect can best be achieved by means of juxtaposing images in a state of dissonance; such juxtaposition allows distinction to exist simultaneously with union. This practice had two important innovators in the 1920s and 1930s: the European modernist avant-garde, with collage, expressionism, surrealism and Marxist realism and montage (coincidentally, this was also the formational period for standard Hollywood narrative melodrama). Modernist artistic culture produced art that experimented with conveying the enigmatic real, while socialist culture produced forms of expression—montage and Soviet real-ism—that strove to provoke and control meaning as a form of political liberation. Both montage and collage pit images against each other in order to deconstruct the idea that a work of art can project a complete view of reality. They also create varied emotional and intellectual meanings through contrast, encouraging the dialectical generation of new ideas and even ironic juxtapositions that redefine old material in new contexts. Generally, Soviet montage refers to the technique of placing independent, seemingly unrelated images in conflict with each other, while collage further qualifies this process by including disparate materials and emphasizing discontinuity. Or, as Brian Henderson asserts, montage “fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly organized, synthetic emotional and intellectual patterns,” and “collects or creates its pieces to fill out on a preexistent plan” (5). In distinction, collage “sticks its fragments together in a way that does not entirely overcome their fragmentation” (5), while referencing historical realities beyond the boundaries of the aesthetic form.

In film this strategy is also tied to the progression and compression of time—of the creation of a sense of history inherent in the movement of images, whether or not such a sequence is tied to a standard narrative. Interestingly, the combination of progression and compression of time in film is so swift that it creates its own juxtaposition of perception. In the 1920s Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein insisted that this process should not be considered primarily an “unrolling of an idea with the help of single shots,” but rather one shot “on top of the other” (“Dialectic” 49). In other words, collage and montage function diachronically in concept but synchronically in effect and in substance. The work of both Eisenstein and another Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, proved to be very influential regarding the development of filmic antifascism. They developed ideas and techniques about montage as a pedagogical device for building a universal socialist film language that would help the proletariat to “understand the phenomena of life around them” (49). Vertov also made an early connection between filmed documentation as a realist tendency with surreal potential: “Kino-eye is the documentary cinematic decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye” (87). In fact, his ideas on documentary, along with work by British filmmakers in the 1930s, were also highly influential on filmic antifascism.

The failure of the second still image from The Great Dictator to adequately convey a heterogeneous reality or critique also indicates that an effective resistance to the seductive beauty of an aestheticized politics requires contextual awareness. It entails not just documentation of history, but documentation of the fragments of history, which gesture toward “the real”—that which resists language and symbolization, communicating instead a traumatic and dissonant awareness that cannot be assimilated—in distinction to the tyranny of images generated by aestheticized politics. This is particularly true for any antifascist aesthetic that hopes to oppose fascism’s insistence on an aesthetic simplification of reality. The multiplicity and nuance implicit in collage and montage might produce a vision that is messy and contingent, and even bizarre, but it has the benefit of acknowledging that knowing and representation are incomplete. For example, a still image from Orson Welles’ The Stranger demonstrates how such a montage image works. The still image shows Mr. Wilson (from the War Crimes Commission) as he explains the nature of concentration camps to Mary Longstreet (who is married to the Nazi he wants to indict). He talks to her while he screens footage of the concentration camp on the wall, and then steps in front of the film. The figures of dead bodies in a mass grave are projected onto his face as he gives her details about the Holocaust. This montage layers images on top of each other, and suggests multiple levels of meaning. It contains fragments of history that reference a specific moment in time, but the effect of the collage of bodies and face introduces a more multifaceted relationship between a past and present. Even without knowing the plot of the movie, the image of a man with the shadows of dead bodies engraved on his face gives rise to questions and reflection, and leads to a more complex appreciation of the ineffable real.

Figure 1.4 Screening the Holocaust in The Stranger, 1946.

Walter Benjamin’s angel of history fits beautifully as a model for this kind of montage image, both in terms of Benjamin’s verbal image and the visual illustration by Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus,” that inspired it. Benjamin’s well-known figure of the angel of history embodies a point of view that is independent of human perspective but also falls short of omniscient knowing. He is an exile from Paradise—“a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught up in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them”—and seems thus to be caught between heaven and earth. He is caught in the flux of time yet perceives a unity of action that escapes us: “His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” This ever-increasing pile of rubble that the storm of progress hurls ever higher is for him a mountain of disembodied waste that he cannot make whole: “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” The storm that blows out of paradise is binary. On the one hand it is what we call “progress”—a term that could apply to any number of methods of modernization and utopian political “improvement”—the storm of fascism, for example. But from the perspective of the angel of history this storm is responsible for creating the mountain of debris that he knows is a singular catastrophe of destruction. He cannot communicate his vision to us easily because he is caught in the flux of time, but he is clearly trying. “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, and his wings are spread. . . . The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” He communicates, therefore, in fragments of vision, sometimes visual, sometimes bodily and sometimes aural. These attempts convey to us what must always remain the ineffable real: the catastrophe of events and the storm of progress.

Klee’s painting, on the other hand, presents a surprising, fragmentary, almost distorted image. It is surprising because it is unlike what one would expect an angel to look like and because the connection between the image and Benjamin’s interpretation of it is not intuitive. One could call the image anti-heroic, and the figure at first appears helpless. His wings are open and raised, and he looks warily to the side, behind us. His face is roughly equivalent to the rest of his body in size, and he appears flimsy, insubstantial, comprised of intersecting lines and faded ink. Yet one can also see a captivating quality, particularly as one looks more closely at the face. His eyes gesture towards an unseen presence, his hair unrolls from his head like a riot of scrolls (or film), and he seems to be saying something. Interestingly, Benjamin asserts that the angel is looking towards the past, into the eye of the storm and cannot see the future. As a figure that resonates for the antifascist aesthetic, this suggests a necessary connection with the past. Benjamin’s reading also indicates that the angel is able to synthesize the fragments that we see—the “chain of events”—into a “single catastrophe”; in other words, that he perceives the real in a way that we cannot. In the painting the angel opens his senses to grasp and communicate what he sees; foremost the face and eyes, then the open wings, and finally the voice which we can only imagine. He reinterprets the significance of the fragments of history to us through his visage, his embrace, and his song. In doing so he passes on the desire to heal, even if it is an impossible task.

Figure 1.5 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.

This image of the “new angel” is also an example of “degenerate art” from a fascist perspective. As such, the figure of the angel of history proves to be a model, both aesthetic and philosophical, for antifascist resistance. The angel does not function as a myth like the dictator or swastika, and is too complex and strange to clearly symbolize one thing at a glance. Rather, it is a connotative icon that encourages contemplation and intuitive reflection in order to interpret it. In addition, it does not blend heterogeneous culture into one image, like Kultur Terror, which relies on a series of stereotypes and simplifications. Nor does it attempt to portray heterogeneity in a literal way. Rather, it offers a starting point for thinking about the complex interplay between static images and heterogeneous reality, and more particularly, between aesthetic resistance and antifascism.

FASCINATING FASCISM

Antifascism begins with fascism, and when writing of fascism, contamination is not only a central metaphor, it is a methodology. Few who write about it are indifferent; either one is for or against fascism. Critics are constantly faced with the fear of contamination: there is a desire to differentiate oneself from the subject at hand, to clearly demarcate here I am from there you are, fascism. Thus, almost all definitions of fascism are either by fascists or antifascists. For to attempt an “objective” assessment is already running the risk of seeming too sympathetic, and by the illogic of contamination, too fascist. This need for distance has been replicated in the assessment of individual works; criticism written on fascist and so-called proto-fascist writers, artists and filmmakers has often enacted a desire to separate out, to extricate and sever the politics from the aesthetic, what is perceived of as “corrupt” or unhealthy political beliefs or desires from what has been determined to have enduring or “pure” beauty or value. Such critical language at times even replicates the language of contamination fascism is accused of promoting, revealing a fear that any supposedly diseased part of a work will inescapably contaminate the whole. There is also anxiety about just how far the boundaries of fascism extend, and whether an artist is fascist because they write about sadistic blond men or something equally “fascist” in the popular or academic mind. For example, Susan Sontag’s influential article “Fascinating Fascism” sparked controversies in the 1970s that are still at play in critical writing about fascism and representation. There has, however, been a good deal of excellent scholarship on fascist film, filmmakers and aesthetic...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Film Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Face-to-Face with the Angel of History
• PART I Murderers Among Us: WWII, Antifascism and Film
• PART II Global Exiles During the Cold War
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index