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Projections of epic: Spatial transformations and narrative revisions in Italian and European modernism

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Projections of epic: Spatial transformations and narrative revisions in Italian and European modernism

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Content PROJECTIONS OF EPIC: SPATIAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND NARRATIVE REVISIONS IN ITALIAN AND EUROPEAN MODERNISM Copyright 2003 by Cecilia Boggio A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) August 2003 Cecilia Boggio Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3116669 Copyright 2003 by Boggio, Cecilia All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 3116669 Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695 This dissertation, written by _______ (BC,IUA 10__________ under the direction o f h M > dissertation committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the D irector o f Graduate and Professional Programs, in partial fulfillm ent o f the requirements fo r the degree o f DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DWector Date { q ' P q 'CF} Dissertation Committee Chair Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DEDICATION To Ermanno and Mirella, my parents Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii I owe personal thanks to my advisor, Professor Karen Pinkus, for her encouragement, advice, and friendship. I am very grateful to the other members of my Ph.D. committee, Professors Peggy Kamuf, Dana Polan, and Daniel Tiffany, who have read my project at various stages and provided invaluable input. I also would like to thank Professors Andrew Hewitt and Barbara Spackman for their comments in the early stages of the project, and Professor Peter Starr for being a great and helpful department chairman for most of my stay at USC. Ms. Lauralynn Smith deserves special thanks for assisting me, always with grace and efficiency, in navigating the University’s bureaucracy. I wish to thank my numerous friends -Claudia, Jorge, Ilaria, and Susan in particular— who have offered intellectual and emotional support throughout this enriching, and sometimes stressful, period of my life. A warm grazie to my parents, who believed in me, and, in Italy, awaited patiently the end of this epic journey. Finally, my deepest gratitude is reserved to Paolo who has been a source of unflagging support, and whose generosity and love gave meaning to the journey. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: THE DESERT 1. Introduction: The Desert in Lo squadrone bianco as the Location for an Italian-African Epic Space 18 2. A Personal Spatial Story of Colonization: a Reinterpretation of the Main Character’s “Conversion” in Lo squadrone bianco 32 3. A National Spatial Story of Colonization: The Rural Italians and the Agrarian Colonization of the African Desert 43 3.1. D’Annunzio’s Prophesy of an Epic Space in Africa 3.2. The Desert in Italian Colonization CHAPTER II: THE MOUNTAIN 1. Introduction: The Alps, from No Man’s Land to Mountainscape to Mountaineering 97 2. Mountain Films and Cinematic Space 107 2.1. Siegfried Kracauer’ s Legacy 2.2. The Bergfilm: Neither a Romantic Revival nor Primitive Cinema 2.3. The Bergfilm as “Cinema of Attractions” 2.4. The Cinematic Space of Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palti 3. The Alps: A Bourgeois Epic Space 144 3.1. The Bergfilm as Documentary Film 3.2. South: A Horizontal White Hell 3.3. An Epic Space ... In Your Backyard Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. V CHAPTER III: THE METROPOLIS 1. Introduction: An Epic New City? 174 2. Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova and Circulation 2.1. The Images versus the Text(s) 2.3. A Panorama of the Citta Nuova 178 3. A Theory of Circulation 191 3.1. Between Myth and Enlightenment: Epic and the Birth of the Bourgeois Subject 3.2. “More haste, less speed” 3.3. Circulation in the Citta Nuova 4. The Mythologization of Technology: The Cinematic Metropolis as Mechanism 203 4.1. The Citta Nuova as First Step Toward a Cinematic Metropolis 4.2. The Cinematic Metropolis 4.3. Metropolis: the Machine-City 4.4. The Epic Dimension of Space in Metropolis BIBLIOGRAPHY 245 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vi ABSTRACT This dissertation addresses a notion of epic space that draws on topoi from ancient epic narratives but reflects the cultural, social, and technological changes of the early twentieth century. In the essay “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” Goethe maintains that an epic poem describes man “as he acts outwardly: battles, travels, any kind of enterprise that requires some sensuous breadth.” In other words, “epic” requires space. My purpose is to examine the transformation of the term “epic” in the modem context through specific revisionings of patterns of epic snace. Although informed by interpretations of “epic” as literary form, my treatment of modem epic is not confined to literature. It dwells significantly on cinema and focuses on “epic” from the point of view of space. It is precisely the inherent connection of cinema and space that distances my project from modem interpretations of “epic” as literary or cinematic form or genre. My study is organized according to three different “locations” of cultural change. Chapter I analyzes the production of an Italian-African epic space in the narrative film Lo squadrone bianco, in the poetry of D ’Annunzio, and in images from colonial and propaganda magazines. Chapter II promotes a spatial, rather than thematic or aesthetic, approach to the Alps through early mountain films. I argue that the film Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palti reveals spatial practices that not only produced the Alps as space rather than landscape, but also gave an epic dimension to it. Chapter III focuses on the epic dimension of space in the Futurist-ic city as represented by two specific works within the early twentieth-century avant-garde: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sant’Elia’s drawings of the Citta Nuova and Lang’s urban film Metropolis. While the first two chapters explore natural environments and remain related to literary epic, the third chapter of my study explores a totally artificial space. Most important, this chapter elaborates a notion of epic space that breaks loose from the mold of literary epic and allows for a redefinition of “epic” in modernity. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION: The critics say that epics have died out With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods; I’1 1 not believe it. . 1 — E. Barrett Browning “Epic” (Gr. epikos) comes from epos, which in Greek means “word, utterance, or hymn.” Throughout history, the association of “epic” with the literary seems deeply influenced by the root of the term. The written texts of The Odyssey and The Iliad that have come down to us blend myths and legends of gods, heroes, wars, and adventures that had their origin in popular tradition and were once orally 2 narrated from generation to generation by bards and rhapsodes. As Adorno and Horkheimer have pointed out in the essay “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Homeric spirit appropriated the diffuse myths and organized them (43) in the thematic layers of The Odyssey (46). In other words, the editorial work that surrounds the “Homeric spirit” gives form to the subject matter (the myths) and thus places epic at the root of literature. The etymology reveals that literature is first and foremost written word(s); that is, writing. “Literature” derives from the Latin littera, “a letter of the alphabet.” However, already with Homer, the term “literature” comes to signify writing(s) whose value lies in the form. Cicero uses the adjective epicus with the meaning of “worthy of being treated in lyric verses.” This definition further highlights “epic” as an originary moment of literature. Since antiquity, “epic” has been a form of value and praise that has served the purpose of elevating the status of that which is being described or told. In the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 3 Western world, following Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, “epic” has come to mean a long poetic narrative of length and complexity, written in elevated style. Generally speaking, “epic” -th e longest-lived and most widely diffused literary genre— is characterized by the narrative mode, the verse form, a certain length, and the celebration of heroic deeds or successful struggles. Throughout the centuries, the literary genre of epic has undergone substantial changes and renewals. Attempts to revive and redefine it have continued up to the present. James Joyce rewrites the The Odyssey in his Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound uses The Odyssey as his point of departure in The Cantos (1917-69).4 In 1926, Bertolt Brecht begins to define his highly experimental and polemic plays “epic theater.”5 More recently, in his analysis of the novel in Italian literature, Giacomo Debenedetti has distinguished within the “bourgeois epic” — a term first introduced by G.W.F. Hegel— an “epic of reality” (“epica della realta”) and an “epic of existence” (“epica dell’esistenza”).6 In II romanzo del ‘900 (1971), Debenedetti maintains that whereas in the “epic of reality” the characters identify with their own actions and recognize themselves in their actions, in the “epic of existence” the characters become estranged from themselves and their actions.7 The first emerges with the establishment of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie (represented by novels such as Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. Nievo’s Le confessioni di un italiano. and De Roberto’s I vicere), whereas the latter emerges in the early twentieth century when the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie enters a critical phase (represented by novels such as Pirandello’s II fu Mattia Pascal and Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno). Along these Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 lines, Franco Moretti has attempted to define “modem epic” as a literary genre. In Modem Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (1996), he maintains that literary works such as Goethe’s Faust Melville’s Moby Dick. Joyce’s Ulysses, and Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude are modem epics. “Epic” because these texts share with classical epics both the totalizing will and the bond to a distant past. But “modem” because they reveal the subdivided reality of the modem world and because of the supranational dimension of the space they represent. In fact, under the genre of “modem epic” Moretti attempts to classify nineteenth- and twentieth-century canonical works of Western literature that, according to him, literary history treats as “prominent anomalies” (2) or “flawed masterpieces” (5) due to their narrative complexity and encyclopedic nature. My study does not aim to trace the historical development of the literary genre of epic. Nor is it an interpretative analysis of the change or renewal of the genre in a specific period (Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, or Modem) or literary tradition (Greek, Roman, or Germanic epic). Rather, it treats key moments of epic out of their historical contexts in order to highlight some formal elements of both classical and modem epic. Therefore, throughout my discussion, I employ the term “epic” in a non-rigorous but at the same time, non-generic manner. Non-rigorous because I do not use the term “epic” (as a noun; that is, as “epos”) to mean a specific literary form or the most elevated literary genre; non-generic because I do not use the adjective “epic” as a term of praise or simply to mean “vast” or “astounding.” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 Although informed by interpretations of epic as literary form, such as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Odysseus essay, my treatment of modem epic is not confined to literature. It dwells significantly on cinema and focuses on epic from the point of view of space. It is precisely the inherent connection of cinema and space that distances my project from modem interpretations of epic as cinematic form or genre. In other words, I do not treat film epics, renditions of classical or Medieval epic narratives such as Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) or Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938). On the contrary, borrowing terminology from the field of post-modem geographies, I consider cinema as being, among other things, a “spatial practice.” Acknowledging his indebtedness to Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja describes spatial practice as the process of producing the material form of social spatiality — that is, the materialized, socially produced, empirical space (Thirdspace g 66). From this viewpoint, cinema is not only a spatial practice in itself, but it is also a medium that reveals spatial practices — human activities that produce space. Since my notion of space clearly relies on new theories of space as a social construction, my study skirts the borders of post-modern geographical studies. A fundamental characteristic of epic that is usually underestimated is the spatial dimension. In the essay “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” Goethe maintains that an epic poem describes man “as he acts outwardly: battles, travels, any kind of enterprise that requires some sensuous breadth.” In other words, epic requires space. However, traditional studies of epic have usually underestimated the fundamental question of space. They usually focus on questions of genre, narrative, or on the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 9 characteristics of the heroic figures. It is precisely the question of space that will govern my reading of modem epic. In the essay “Epic and Novel,” M. M. Bakhtin contrasts the “historical time” of the novel to “epic time.” He describes epic time as one in which, from the perspective of both the epic singer and listener, all of the really important events are over. Adapting Goethe’s and Schiller’s idea of the “absolute past,” Bakhtin describes the time of epic as remote not just quantitatively - -it is not just a long time ago— but also, and more important, qualitatively. It is a different kind of time from the one in which the epic singer and his audience live: “The epic past lacks any gradual, purely temporal progression that might connect it with the present. It is walled off absolutely from all subsequent times” (The Dialogic Imagination 15). At some point, lost beyond recovery, the very nature of time changed. The constitutive feature of the epic, according to Bakhtin, is the transference of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginning and peak times. In the historical time of the novel, the nature of time has never changed and every past moment is just another present. In the epic, by contrast, the represented world of the heroes stands on an utterly different and inaccessible “time- and-value plane” (14). In a loose analogy with Georg Lukacs and M. M. Bakhtin’s definitions of enic time in their respective theories of the novel, I will speak of epic space. In his analysis of the figure of the hero in Western classical and Medieval literary epic, Dean A. Miller defines “epic space” as the environment in which any epic hero acts. From his perspective, the spatial dimension of heroic adventures can Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6 be visualized as a horizontal plane (extension), a natural or untamed space (wilderness), an intrinsically “other” plane or extension (such as the sea), an enclosed or cultural space (city or center), as liminal space (defined or identified in 10 boundaries, and borders), or even as an interior-psychic or mental space. This view, however, presupposes that 1) epic is exclusively about heroic deeds and 2) epic space is the framework of these deeds. Such a definition of epic space is problematic for two different reasons: it conflates epic and res gestae and is based on the idea of space as an inert container of action. Originating in the Res gestae divi Augusti (14 CE), the genre of res gestae (“deeds done, achievements”) includes writings that record the accomplishments, mostly military but also political and social, of either a group or an individual who represents the group during a specific period of time. These important deeds are recorded from the viewpoint of a person who directly lived or witnessed those events and in a language that serves as a mere utility medium. Epic differs from res gestae precisely because the subject matter is as important as the form, the language used to narrate it. In other words, epic is about narration; the form elevates the subject and turns it into a narrative of value. Moreover, particularly in The Odyssey, the space of Odysseus’s wanderings around the Mediterranean Sea in the attempt to reach Ithaca -th e native island he left to go to war against Troy— is more than just a framework for his adventures. It is the space in which Odysseus’s long and difficult nostos takes place. Throughout all his adventures in lands known and unknown, Odysseus desires only one thing: to return home. Insofar as his return home is a return to the point of departure, one can argue Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 that Odysseus circulates, since the original meaning of “to circulate” (from the Latin circulare) is precisely to form a circle — that is, to return to the point of departure. As a consequence, epic is not so much about heroic deeds and adventures but, rather, about the circularity of the journey. Therefore, I argue that circulation is precisely what gives an epic dimension to the terrestrial space in which Odysseus wanders. For this reason, circulation is central to my rethinking of epic space in a modem context that, in turn, is of fundamental importance for a meaningful and productive rehabilitation of the concept of epic in modernity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, epic -as opposed to the realist novel— was considered by many an artificial and anti-modem genre. The uselessness of the literary form of epic to narrate the ordinary lives of middle class individuals can be found, for instance, in George Eliot’s prelude to Middlemarch (1872). In describing Saint Theresa of Avila as a passionate young woman who was forced to choose the convent over a life devoted to fighting for national ideals, Eliot states that many women have shared her destiny: Many Theresas have been bom who found themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill- matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. (7) Besides being a critique of the status of women (as both authors and characters) in literature and, more generally, in a male-dominated world, this key passage in Eliot’s prelude lends itself to at least another interpretation. It can be taken as an example of contemporary perceptions of the nature, function, and use of the epic genre. These Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 perspectives viewed epic, a genre that prioritizes the public sphere in the shape of wars and large actions, as inadequate to describe the modem human subject and the unheroic world in which he/she lives. In other words, epic is not suited to narrate private or ordinary lives, real human experiences, and dramas of selfhood. If epic is often perceived as an irretrievable literary form in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century “epic” becomes a reactionary term. This is so in virtue of the association of the term with the narrative/aesthetic schemes of totalitarian political systems. Totalitarian regimes such as Fascism, National Socialism or Stalinism have often aimed at displacing importance away from ordinary experience in order to exalt specific political and cultural events as unique and eternal moments in the history of their nations. These intentions have been described, in retrospective, as attempts to “epicize” history and politics. Jeffrey Schnapp, for instance, defines the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome - a mass spectacle meant to celebrate the first ten years of Fascism’s achievements- as a “collectivist epos.”1 1 But the early twentieth century is also a time that witnesses great technological innovations, rapid urban development, the growth of industrial production, colonial expansion, and exploration. My purpose is to understand the meaning of the term “epic” in this modem context through specific revisionings or evocations (conscious or not) of patterns of epic space. This dissertation is organized according to three different “locations” of cultural and social changes: the desert, the mountain, and the metropolis. By “locations” I intend to stress the specificity of the spaces of my analysis as well as Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 the perspective from which I approach the analysis. As I have previously mentioned, the ideas about space that lie at the foundation of my discourse are indebted to the discipline of post-modern geographies. Although they do not directly or explicitly appear in my discussion of epic space, works such as Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” and “Questions on Geography,” Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies and Thirdspace. and Kristin Ross’s The Emergence of Social Space have strongly influenced my thinking about space. It was the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre who first challenged the absolute nature of 12 space in Kantian thought to demonstrate that space is a social production. In The Production of Space (1974), he explores space not as a homogeneous, static, and empty container for human life but, instead, as organic, fluid, alive, and actively produced by human beings as either single individuals or collectivity. Lefebvre’s argument stems from the assumption that the production of space is linked to the rise of capitalism. Space is a product, and its production can be likened to the production of any other sort of merchandise, to any other sort of commodity. A pivotal moment in his theorization of space as “social practice” (14) is the reconciliation between spaces that have been traditionally apprehended as separate domains: physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space), and social space (the space of human action and conflict, and also sensory phenomena). These different “fields” (11) into which spatial knowledge has historically been broken overlap to create a 13 present space. It is with Lefebvre’s theory of space in mind that I have chosen three Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10 different “locations” of cultural and social changes as exemplary for a discussion of epic space. The first chapter of my study, “The Desert,” focuses on the production of the space of Italy’s Africa during the Italian colonial period (1869-1943). An important characteristic of epic is its inclusiveness, the tendency to present an encyclopedic account of the culture, or the Volkgeist. that produces it. A vision of epic as the story of a hero who is a “culture bearer” explains the intense reimagining of epic undertaken by the young Italian nation in the late nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century as a means of coming to self-knowledge as a unified or powerful nation or empire. Through Aeneas’s wanderings, for instance, Virgil creates an imaginary space in The Aeneid. a circumscribed, enclosed, circular space within the Mediterranean Sea formed by the shores of North Africa and the south of Italy. Precisely at the beginning of the twentieth century that imaginary circle became the cultural and geographical myth of “a cradle for the sea” (Pinkus 29) 14 whose blue-green color became a sign of Italy’s land, Italy’s national color. This geographical myth seems to have its roots in the shield that the Cyclops shaped for Aeneas before the outburst of the war in Latium. As Virgil describes it, among prophetic images of the Roman Empire there runs a representation of a broad sea expanse with dolphins swimming around it to form a circular and well-delimited space: .. . Mid-shield The pictured sea flowed surging, all of gold, As whitecaps foamed on the blue waves, and dolphins Shining in silver round and round the scene Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11 Propelled themselves with flukes and cut through billows. (The Aeneid. VIII.907-11) The Aeneid claims to narrate the recovery of an originary identity of a group bound by an empire, namely, the Roman Empire. For the young Italian nation, Trojan Aeneas’s wanderings around the Mediterranean in his attempt to reach the Italian peninsula, conquer Latium, and found the Roman race — which will later reign on an imperium sine fine- have a specific meaning. They serve as a national myth that legitimates the modem nation’s colonialist impulse in North and East Africa. Indeed, Italy’s colonial dreams and fantasies are strongly based on the Northern Mediterranean epic model. The conquest of Libya in 1911 first, and then the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, were considered the beginning of the constmction of a new Italian epic space to follow in the footsteps — though in the opposite direction as if to bring to a conclusion his nostos- of Italy’s founding father, Aeneas. My discussion builds on an interpretation of the desert as a colonial space that is specifically Italian in the narrative film Lo squadrone bianco (1936), in the poetry of Gabriele D’Annunzio, and in images from colonial and propaganda magazines. The first part of the chapter, a reinterpretation of the main character’s “conversion” in Lo squadrone bianco, shows how the desert is part of a personal spatial story of colonization. The second part of the chapter is an analysis of the way in which the Italian colonial rhetoric, throughout the entire colonial period — from D’Annunzio’s late nineteenth-century prophesy of a return to Africa to the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the Italian Empire in 1936— turned the African desert into an epic space. From this perspective, the desert is part of a national spatial Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 12 story of colonization in which Mario Ludovici, the main character in Lo squadrone bianco, represents the quintessential Italian rural colonist. Ultimately, my analysis of filmic, literary, and visual images demonstrates a consistency in the treatment of the desert in Italian colonization. Fascist colonialism merely absorbed and elaborated themes and symbols about the space of Italy’s Africa that already belonged to the colonial rhetoric of Liberal Italy and the Italian collective imagination. The second chapter of my study, “The Mountain,” intends to promote a spatial approach rather than a thematic or aesthetic approach to the Alps through early mountain films. Cinema is, I believe, an authoritative medium for making sense of the Alps as space and of mountaineering as spatial practice. Therefore, mountain films, as visual narratives or reports, reveal and portray the space of the Alps in concrete and practical terms. Film scholars and critics dealing with mountain films have generally not considered the practice of mountaineering in the Alps or what it meant to explore and climb the Alps in the early twentieth century. Conversely, scholars of mountaineering have never seriously engaged mountain films in their written narratives or reports of the “conquest” of the space of the Alps. Following Siegfried Kracauer’s study of German cinema up to the advent of National Socialism in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), the critical condemnation of the genre of the mountain film -- and the Bergfilm of the 1920s and 1930s in particular— focuses exclusively on the study of thematic codes, such as the glorification of myth, monumental nature, and heroism. Kracauer’s diegetic analysis -a n analysis of the fictional world in which Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13 the narrated events occur— has highly influenced criticism of mountain films since then. I focus on the German mountain film Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii (1929) by Arnold Fanck. I begin by looking at this film as partaking of the tradition of what Tom Gunning defined as the “cinema of attractions,” thus demonstrating how it reveals the spatial possibilities of cinema. This film can also be understood as a documentary film of exploration. As documentary, it presents spatial practices that not only produced the Alps as space (as opposed to landscape), but also gave an epic dimension to that space. However, I do not consider the Alps as portrayed in Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii as an epic space in a traditional sense. It is tempting to see the extreme environment of the high mountains as the perfect ground and scenery for heroic — i.e., epic— adventures. Indeed, in mountaineering narratives, the mountain walls are often depicted as the site of a titanic struggle performed by a heroic, exceptional individual and, thus, a sort of quintessential epic space. My perspective on Fanck’s film demonstrates, quite to the contrary, that the Alps of the early twentieth century are a bourgeois epic space. They are a territory of exploration that, different from the exploration of distant lands, is accessible to a large number of people. Moreover, the exploration of the Alps, mountaineering, is a spatial practice that shares many characteristics with the individualistic model of life of the bourgeois society. The third and final chapter of my study, “The Metropolis,” analyzes the epic dimension of space in the Futurist-ic metropolis as represented by two specific texts within the early twentieth-century European avant-garde: Antonio Sant’Elia’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 drawings of the Citta Nuova (1914) and Fritz Lang’s early urban film Metropolis (1926). In 1914, shortly before the beginning of World War I, Sant’Elia produced a number of drawings in which he envisioned the metropolis of the future. His enthusiasm for modem technology is evident in his “architettura disegnata,” which depicts a compact urban space whose main characteristic is a highly developed network of arteries for vehicular traffic. Later in 1914, some of his drawings accompanied the words of the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” signed by Sant’Elia himself. With this gesture he officially joined the Futurist movement, and his Citta Nuova became the Futurist metropolis. The contradictions or differences between the written and visual texts reveal an urban “reality” where the traffic network completely overshadows all the other structures and functions of the city, to such an extent that one could legitimately argue that, in Sant’Elia’s metropolis, circulation is the only thing that exists. It is precisely in the lacunae between text and image where I build my theory of circulation. Borrowing from cultural critics such as Theodor Adomo, Max Horkheimer, and Henri Lefebvre, I demonstrate that the space of the Citta Nuova can be considered an epic space precisely because of the central role played by circulation. In fact, as it is developed in Sant’Elia’s metropolis, circulation points back toward a mythic or epic form of human locomotion; in other words, human locomotion is physically re-mythologized. Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova was influenced by the development of cinematic techniques and specifically by early urban films. Sant’Elia envisioned a technological city of mechanical speed and movement, but through cinema — a technological medium that can reproduce Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15 movement— Lang was able to go further. My discussion of Lang’s Metropolis explores how the mythologization of technology manifested itself more generally in the metropolis as machine-city. The Citta Nuova and Metropolis are exemplary for a discussion of epic space because they help me bring together epic, circulation, and cinema to elaborate an original modem notion of epic space. While the first two chapters explore natural environments — the desert and the mountain- and remain to some extent related to literary epic or traditional meanings of the term “epic,” the third and last chapter of my study explores a totally artificial space, the technological city. Most important, this chapter elaborates a notion of epic space that breaks loose from the mold of literary epic and allows for a redefinition of epic in modernity. Notes 1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. V. 140-42. 2 Most civilizations are, at their inception, oral civilizations. An oral civilization is one in which writing does not exist, and, if it exists, it is not an instmment through which culture is transmitted. The transmission of culture depends on oral language, on speech. In the pre-literate period of ancient Greek civilization, the bards and rhapsodes were not simply entertaining audiences throughout Greece. They were also handing down from generation to generation a cultural heritage that people preserved and respected. Moreover, by listening to those poets, ordinary people used to leam the moral values in which they were supposed to believe, and the physical and ethical role models they were supposed to imitate (Cantarella, Itaca 20-1). 3 In the Western world, the predominant epic model has been the Graeco-Roman model (Mediterranean); that is, Homeric and post-Homeric epic, or secondary epic, such as Virgil’s The Aeneid. in other words, classical epic. There is, however, at least another important epic model: the North European model, the Northern sagas. The ancient Scandinavian (Norse) Eddaic songs form an early epic of Icelandic origins that later supplied material for the development of Northern European epics, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16 such as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the Volsung Saga (and the medieval Germanic epic poem The NibelungenliedV 4 For an overview on the history of response to Homer’s The Odvssev. see William G. Thalmann, “Critical Reception,” The Odvssev: An Epic of Return 15-27. For a more detailed investigation of epic practice and interpretation from Homer to Modernism, see Steven M. Oberhelman, Van Kelly, and Richard J. Golsan, eds., Epic and Epoch. 5 As early as 1914, the German theater director Erwin Piscator had used the expression “epic play” to describe his highly experimental stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Bertolt Brecht borrowed the expression “epic theater” and its most substantial characteristics from Piscator and used it for the first time in 1926. From then on, the term is generally applied to his work. For more on Brecht’s epic theater, see Sarah Bryant-Bertail, Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy. Michael Seidel and Edward Mendelson, eds., Homer to Brecht: The European Enic and Dramatic Tradition. Styan, J.L., Modem Drama in Theory and Practice, Vol.3, and Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater?”, Illuminations 147- 54. 6 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts.Vol. 2, 1044. 7 II romanzo del ‘900 is a posthumous volume that collects the detailed notes of the courses Debenedetti taught at the University of Rome between 1960 and 1966. 8 “Spatial practice or perceived space” (espace percu) is one of the “three moments of social space” according to Lefebvre’s “unitary theory of space” (The Production of Spacel. The other two moments are: “Representations of space or conceived space” (espace concu) and “Spaces of representation or lived space” (espace vecu). See Edward W. Soja, “The Trialectics of Spatiality,” Thirdspace 53-82. 9 Examples of influential studies of epic, to give only a few examples, are: J.B. Hainsworth’s The Idea of Epic. Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, Harry Levin’s The Gates of Horn, G.B. Conte’s The Rhetoric of Imitation. 1 ^ Dean A. Miller, “The Framework of Adventure,” The Epic Hero 131. In Epic Space: Toward the Roots of Western Architecture (1992), Anthony Antoniades uses “epic space” to refer to the architectural spaces encountered in epic poems. His basic assumption is that if an epic narrative is a distillation of a culture, then the epic space can tell one a lot about the roots of the architecture of each people, “perhaps even more than archeology and the survey of monuments, because a space described in an epic is much older than the period it is used to describe” (xi). Starting from this Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 assumption, he analysis the spaces of a number of epic narratives from the epic of Gilgamesh to Milton’s Paradise Lost. 11 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations,” Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism. Aesthetics, and Culture 10. See also Schnapp’s reconstruction of another Fascist mass spectacle, the “18 BL,” staged in Florence in the summer of 1934. 12 The Kantian notion of space as absolute or a priori category was put into question for the very first time in the late nineteenth century by non-Euclidean geometries. At the time, mathematicians began to argue that Euclid’s geometry — whose five postulates were considered to be the science of space from the Middle Ages o n - was not the only valid one, as Kant had assumed. By first weakening and, later, substituting Euclid’s Fifth Postulate (which states that through a point in a plane it is possible to draw only one straight line parallel to a given straight in the same plane) with others, mathematicians (such as Nicholai Lobatchewsky and Bernhard Riemann) began to develop non-Euclidean geometries that allowed them to devise many spaces different from the space formulated by Euclid. For a comprehensive account of the transformation of the notion of space in both sciences and the arts, see Stephen Kern, “The Nature of Space,” The Culture of Time and Space. 1880-1918 131-80. 13 Contemporary theorists of space who work in and around the discipline of geography are Edward Soja, David Harvey, Derek Gregory, Neil Smith, John Urry, Liz Bondi, and Mona Domosh, among numerous others. While there are significant differences of approach and emphasis among them, they are linked through their interest in analyzing the material histories of the production of space in modernity and postmodemity. For an introduction to the role played by the new ideas about space in social critical theories, see Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space. It ought to be pointed out here that Lefebvre’s The Production of Space was misunderstood and overlooked when it was first published in French in 1974. It was David Harvey who first brought Lefebvre to attention in the Anglophone world. Nowadays, his spatial book is considered his magnum opus by many contemporary Anglo-American geographers, urbanists, and social scientists in general, and it is also well-known in the field of humanities. 14 The image of “a cradle for the sea” is created by the south shores of the Libyan Gulf and the opposite north shores of the Italian southern regions of Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata, and Apulia, which face the Ionian Sea. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 CHAPTER I: THE DESERT 1. Introduction: The Desert in Lo sauadrone bianco as the Location for an Italian-African Epic Space Lo squadrone bianco (White Squadron) is neither a canonical film nor a masterpiece of Italian cinema but a minor film representative of a specific genre: the “African film,” authorized and sponsored by the Fascist regime. The film, directed by Augusto Genina, was released in 1936, the year of the conquest of Ethiopia and the birth of the Italian Empire, and won the “Coppa Mussolini” as best Italian film at the Venice Arts Festival. The film’s narrative can be divided into three sections: the bourgeois prologue, the colonial segment, and the epilogue. The character of Mario Ludovici is the trait d’union among them. The prologue involves a traditional troubled love story set in an urban environment (in interiors, mostly) between Mario Ludovici (Antonio Centa) and his cruel lover, Cristiana (Fulvia Lanzi), which ends in a violent quarrel. The colonial segment begins with Ludovici, a cavalry lieutenant, arriving at an Italian military outpost in the middle of the Libyan Desert and ends with the Lieutenant returning from a victorious mission in which the White Squadron defeated the indigenous rebels. Finally, the epilogue shows Mario’s confrontation with Cristiana, who has come to the fort with a group o f tourists. By confronting his former lover, he confronts the bourgeois world he left behind. It is during this final meeting that Mario announces his decision to assume the command of the White Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19 Squadron and replace Captain Sant’Elia (Fosco Giachetti), the Fascist hero, who was 2 killed during the final battle. If compared to a film such as Scipione l’africano by Carmine Gallone (1937) - a grandiose pageant of famous historical events, namely the Roman and Fascist colonial successes in Africa- Lo squadrone bianco appears, nowadays, more a mixture of colonial melodrama and mundane comedy in the style of the telefoni bianchi genre than a Fascist propaganda film, that is, a film that tends to reproduce common techniques of persuasion used by the regime to propagate, regulate, and 3 impose political consensus. In the most obvious sense, Lo squadrone bianco appears as a Fascist drama of male conversion that hinges on the antagonism between Captain Sant’Elia, the psychological “surrogate father,” and Lieutenant Ludovici, the “prodigal son,” and the triumph of Fascist homosocial relations founded on the exclusion of the 4 feminine figure, in this film represented by Mario’s lover, Cristiana. This interpretation is corroborated by the fact that there is only one substantial difference between the plot of the film and the plot of the novel by the French writer Joseph 5 Peyre, L’escadron blanc. on which the film is based. Whereas in the novel the young lieutenant dies, in Genina’s film it is the captain who dies in the end. Clearly, the opposing destinies of the two male protagonists reveal different ideologies. If the drama of conversion and the fact that the film was released in 1936, the year of the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the Italian Empire, make Lo squadrone bianco a Fascist film, the fundamental role played by the desert make the film first and foremost a colonial film. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 Lo squadrone bianco is the only “African film” of the 1930s filmed on location in the Libyan Desert. Thus, the setting of the colonial segment of the film — the captain and lieutenant’s expedition to locate and exterminate the African rebels 6 and the unfolding of the drama of conversion— is the sandy Sahara desert. In critical writing on the film, the desert exudes either a religious symbolism or an atmosphere . 7 of exoticism, but either way it is a background to the diegesis. James Hay, for instance, sees a biblical reference in the lieutenant’s trials in the desert: “[the lieutenant’s] suffering is an almost biblical penitence for his former narcissism as well as a testament to his romantic unfulfillment and his desire for acceptance by the captain” (190). As a consequence, for Lieutenant Ludovici the desert is both the wilderness, that is, a place of suffering, punishment, and penitence (supposedly for his former dissipated bourgeois, urban life), and a place of spiritual enlightenment. Gian Piero Brunetta, on the other hand, focuses his attention on the exotic atmosphere created by the White Squadron’s procession in the desert. The slow pace of the camel-riding troops marching across the dunes is accompanied by the music of bagpipes and intercut with backlit images of the sky and the horizon. According to Brunetta, “The entire narrative of Captain Sant’Elia’s mission is subordinated to the visual representation of the squadron’s journey through the desert.. . . The strength of the film is precisely in this part, which neutralizes the ideology and frees the fascination exerted by the backlit march of both the camels and the men. By continuously changing the trajectories of their movement and their arrangement, they g fill the image.” Whether Brunetta is trying to free Lo squadrone bianco from the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 21 “burden” of Fascist ideology or not, his brief description of the setting and editing of the colonial segment of the film suggests the fascination that the sand of the desert holds for the viewers. In a similar way, Marcia Landy describes Lo squadrone bianco as a film that exemplifies the lure of the empire and heroic action “where the exoticism of Africa symbolizes adventure and the rewards of travel and conquest” (Fascism in Film 26). Even the poster that first advertised the film conveys this 9 exotic atmosphere. At the center of the image above the title and occupying the whole vertical space towers an unnaturally lit veiled figure riding a camel. In the dark background other members of the Squadron are sketched. The image of Africa chosen to stimulate the potential spectators’ imagination focuses on the mysterious and exotic aspects of the land, the sand of the Sahara desert blown by the wind, and the desert’s most representative inhabitants, the Tuareg nomads, who wore veils as protection against desert sands and whose history was rewritten to conform to mythology, and ideology, during the heyday of the European colonization of Africa.1 0 The central image of Lo squadrone bianco, the desert, is far from a mere metaphor for a spiritual pilgrimage or simply an exotic setting. My reading of the film shows that the images of the African desert one sees on screen convey an ideology that, far from being exclusively or specifically Fascist, permeated the entire Italian colonial period (1869-1943).1 1 By shaping the African desert according to the needs of the masses and the desires of the ruling class, the colonial ideology turned it into an epic space that is specifically Italian. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 This epic space is an African space that was mainly determined by default by the areas already cut out and assigned to other colonizing European nations: England, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. More importantly, it is an African space that Italy, a young nation, needed in order to acquire international prestige, to catch up with its neighbors (in particular France which had gotten its hands on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and to end its inferiority complex resulting from its lack of colonies. Furthermore, Italy needed a space in Africa to stop the mass emigration overseas and to be able to promise colonies to the unemployed Italian population. Finally, this epic space is a desert space. Indeed, Libya was often referred to as “the big box of sand” (“lo scatolone di sabbia”). At the beginning of the twentieth century, and until the early 1950s when oil was discovered, Libya was probably the poorest country among those bordering on the Mediterranean Sea. The great majority of the Libyan territory (which is six times bigger than Italy) is either sand or barren steppe. In the case of Ethiopia, the Italian space is a desert in a figurative sense. Apart from the fact that at the time of the Italian conquest Ethiopia had several malarian regions, the Abyssinian plateau can be considered a fertile land only if one compares it to the semi-desert steppe that surrounds it. Thus, the land of East Africa is not desert in a practical sense; what Italy found in Ethiopia was a rather unproductive desert state. On a map, Ethiopia is not contiguous to Libya. However, the intense desire to create an Italian-African space, led the colonial rhetoric to speak of two different and afar lands/colonies as if they were contiguous 12 and shared the same characteristics. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23 Generally speaking, in European culture, the desert is a land that is particularly suited to be filled with ideological and cultural desires such as those of Italian pre-fascist and Fascist colonialism. Only the areas of Africa that lay along the coast were mapped until the end of the eighteenth century. The vast expanses of the hinterland were largely terra incognita and, thus, cartographers used to draw the great majority of the “dark continent” as a blank space. It was only in the nineteenth century, the great age of European exploration and expansion in Africa, that the 13 central part of the continent began to be mapped. However, long before explorers were able to realize the vastness of the Sahara desert and it became truly synonymous with Africa, the representation of Africa as a blank space enhanced the belief that the continent was indeed a void, an empty space, a desertum according to 14 its original Latin meaning of “abandoned, desolate.” Thus, the most obvious characteristics of the desert — its dryness, harshness and immensity— are qualities 15 ascribed to it in contrast to Europe. If Africa is a void, it is also a no-man’s land. The notion of absence can easily be complemented by the doctrine of terra nullius. which translates into a failure to acknowledge the presence of (hostile and primitive) indigenous people. If the absence of any form of life turns the desert into a useless, 16 inhospitable and often even terrifying space, the perception of the desert as an enormous absence and a visual non-entity was also used to provide convenient justifications for conquest: a vast tabula rasa asleep for centuries, awaiting only the arrival of Europeans to awaken it into activity, progress, and civilization. Framed by Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 this discourse of negation, the land cries out for the European colonizer to give it identity, meaning, and legitimacy. The characteristics of emptiness, vastness, aridity, and sterility attributed to the Saharan desert assume specific and interesting connotations in the case of Italy’s Africa. As a contributor to La difesa della razza writes, “It is inevitable that the exuberant energy of our [Italian] race should irresistibly aim at this void - today and 17 tomorrow, as we did in the past.” On the one hand, the main features of the desert obviously become solid cultural justifications for colonial expansion and conquest. On the other hand, these features turn Italian colonialism into a spectacular enterprise that combines the desire for power — of the young democratic nation first, and of Fascist Italy later- with the legitimate needs for land and space of the Italian population and, significantly, the creation of a heroic and patriotic class of “rural Italians” (“i rurali Italiani”). In fact, colonial propaganda stresses the importance of “demographic colonization” (defined “colonizzazione di popolamento” during the Liberal period and “colonizzazione demografica” during the Fascist period), the transmigration of entire families of rural Italians to the overseas territories. Within the rhetoric of “demographic colonization” special emphasis was put on “rural 18 patriotism” (“patriottismo rurale”) especially embodied in the figure of the soldato- colono (“soldier-colonist”) or fante-contadino (“infantryman-peasant”), who first fights to conquer the desert with weapons and later settles in and continues the conquest with the plow. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25 In the European, and more generally Western, collective imagination, the desert represents the opposite of agri-culture, that is, of fertile and cultivated land. However, the desert as arid and unproductive land that cannot be cultivated, is, surprisingly, very much part of the rhetoric and semiotics used to address the Italian colonial adventure in Africa both during the 1910-20s and during the Fascist ventennio with the spectacular creation of the Italian Empire. Already in Genesis, the desert (the wilderness) stands in contrast to the garden (the earthly paradise) and, by extension, to the fertile land and the cultivation that both sustains and emanates from civilization (Haynes 26). In this respect, it is interesting to observe that even etymology sustains the program of Italian colonization. Cultivation, civilization, and colonization are etymologically, as well as historically, related. They derive from the Latin verb colere which means both “to cultivate” (coltivare in Italian) and “to colonize” (colonizzare in Italian, that is to inhabit, to take care of a place). From colere with the meaning of “to cultivate” derives the Latin noun cultura that refers both to the tilling of the soil (coltura in Italian), and thus agriculture (agricoltura in Italian), the cultivation of the land, and to refinement in education and civilization, that is culture (cultura in Italian). The Latin noun colonus (colono in Italian) designates both a farm worker, or husbandman, and a member of a settlement of 19 Roman citizens in a newly conquered country, or colony (coloma m Italian). Returning to Lo squadrone bianco, since the Italian conquest of Libya happened in 1911, why shoot a film in the Libyan Desert in the heyday of the Ethiopian campaign? The choice of filming in Libya may have been determined for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26 practical reasons. From the proclamation of the Italian Empire of Ethiopia in 1936 to its end in 1941, the Ethiopians were in a state of constant revolt. The insurgent populace led Mussolini to practice a “policy of terror” (“una politica del terrore”; Rochat 168), to which the indigenous populations often responded by massacring the Italian settlers. Thus, it would have been too dangerous to film in Ethiopia. Moreover, the decision to film in Libya could also be related to notions of “blackness” --as opposed to Italy’s “whiteness”— that were circulating in Italian culture in the early twentieth century. The Africans that one sees in the film are Libyans, light-skinned African Arabs with more “Aryan” bodies than the Ethiopians, dark-skinned Sub-Saharans. From a cultural point of view as well, Libyans were considered “whiter,” that is, more civilized, than Ethiopians and Sub-Saharan Africans in general, because they had been heavily influenced by Arabic (Mediterranean) culture. This distinction was considered important, to the point that it was one of the reasons why the Fascist regime granted the Libyans, but not the Ethiopians, citizenship in the Italian Empire, even though they enjoyed fewer rights (they were defined as “cittadini di minor diritto”) than Italian citizens. The title of the film, Lo squadrone bianco, reflects the importance given by Augusto Genina, the director, and the Fascist producers of the film to the ideas of blackness circulating in Italy at the time. This army of exotically dressed (to Italian eyes) “white” soldiers help in the aestheticization for the Italian genteel public of what was considered most attractive about blackness for white colonizers, namely, the fact that the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 representation of the black body before a white public contributed to normalize white domination (Pinkus 37). Indeed, the most explicit meaning of the title of the film comes from the white uniforms worn by the ascari. the indigenous soldiers in the Italian colonial troops in Eritrea, Somaliland, and Libya. Particularly during the Fascist era, it is in the image of the exotic ascaro (“soldier” in Arabic) that Italy celebrates its colonial authority and its civilizing capacity. This image often appears in colonial political journalism and documentary images such as newsreels, photo essays and ethnographic exhibits. In the transformation of the semi-naked savage warrior, primitively armed and cruel, into a soldier wearing a uniform, a white uniform, subject to discipline and fighting in the service of “civilization,” Italy celebrates with paternalistic superiority its capacity not so much to dominate but to “elevate” uncivilized people. It uses, then, the image of this “white” soldier to justify and legitimize its expansionistic campaign in Africa. The ascaro. in other words, fits Homi Bhabha’s idea of “colonial mimicry,” an action of reform, regulation, and discipline. Mimicry, as an effect of persuasion through prestige exercised by the colonizers on the colonized is one of the most effective strategies of colonial authority. As Bhabha points out in “Of Mimicry and Man,” colonial mimicry is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” to which I would also add “not white.” Colonial mimicry, as a consequence, appropriates the Other while pointing at it as the locus of the inappropriate because its is “the representation of a difference that is itself a process Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 28 of disavowal” (86). Thus, mimicry, while constructing a fantasy of incorporation, that is, a collective experience of “nation-ness” (Anderson 4), at the same time visualizes power. In Lo squadrone bianco the ambivalence of colonial mimicry is . 20 acted out by the White Squadron, which is a troop of ascan. The decision to shoot a film in and about the Libyan Desert could have also been determined by the fact that in the eyes of the Italian colonizers, the desert, as illogical, unfathomable, indefinite, uncontrollable and unproductive, as it may be, is also a vast and empty space, a “void” that could be filled with Italian colonists. From this perspective, the vast desert space of Lo squadrone bianco appears as a promise, a vast resource to be harnessed. Thus, it becomes the setting of a national spatial story of colonization: the Italian hunger for land can be satisfied by conquering and colonizing the hard desert and offering it to the Italian peasants who will cultivate 21 it. Within this implicit logic of Italian colonization, Mario Ludovici can be seen as the quintessential Italian colonist whom the colonial propaganda of both Liberal and Fascist Italy wanted to portray in order to convince the Italian peasant population to move to territories overseas. After the political Unification of Italy (1861), expansionist ideas rapidly gained ground as Italian politicians started to perceive the African continent as both a way to come into line with the rest of Europe, and a solution to social problems within the peninsula, such as unemployment and emigration. In post-Unification Italy, the rate of emigration became the chief measure of social distress. Just after the Risorgimento, emigrants averaged 100,000 a year; by the turn of the century, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29 millions had had already abandoned the new nation, and a massive emigration 22 continued until World War I. As early as the 1870s, there were proposals for a colonial policy that would redirect the flow of emigrants from foreign parts (like the Americas) toward colonies held by the mother country fmadrep atria). As Italy started to extend its influence in Africa toward the end of the century, the idea of healing social wounds at home by channeling surplus population into colonies was repeatedly heard. For more than half a century, Italian expansionism, during democratic Liberal Italy first and Fascist Italy later, consistently placed on top of its justifications for colonial campaigns the hunger for land and space of a population that could no longer live and produce within the 23 increasingly narrow boundaries of the peninsula. As Angelo Del Boca writes, from the very beginning the Italian colonization of North and East Africa was intended to be an “agrarian colonization” (“una colonizzazione agraria”; Cresti 192). The most significant and striking characteristic of Italian colonization within mass culture is the perception of the African space as land to be appropriated and mastered through agriculture, by the heroism of the Italian peasants who conquer the African territory with weapons and then with their plows. The African space comes into discursive existence as agrarian space in the colonial rhetoric, and this is what renders Italian colonization unique and different from other forms of colonization in Africa. For instance, Italy always resented the fact that France sent only soldiers to its African colonies and later used the native 24 inhabitants as French soldiers (the corps etrangers) to fight wars in Europe. For this Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30 reason, as the colonial propaganda put it, France was a country with colonies but without colonists. While the rhetorical image of the African space as agrarian space reaches the climax of its popularity with the coming of the Fascist regime in 1922, it is indeed remarkable that the practice of labeling Italian colonization in agrarian terms, both in “the Fourth Shore” (“la Quarta Sponda”) and in Italian East Africa, the 25 so-called A.O.I. (“Africa Orientale Italiana”), dates back to a time before the nation could have foretold a dictatorial regime. The adoption of the same rhetoric signals a clear continuity between the colonial politics of Liberal (democratic) Italy and those of Fascist Italy. Fascist politics could not stop supporting the land reclamation and rural life of the Italian colonists (coloni), which were an integral part of a pre-fascist problem: the necessity to “colonize” whole parts of the nation — both within the peninsula and in the overseas territories- in order to make up for post-war 26 unemployment and emigration. Italian colonial ideology was first shaped in the literary sphere and Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) had a fundamental role in crafting this ideology. One could indeed argue that it was D’Annunzio that foresaw the African desert as the space for a modem Italian epic. More than any other producer of culture in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, he was responsible for bringing back to life old patriotic themes and myths, which, later on, the Fascist regime exploited to manipulate the 27 Italian masses. Without any doubt, this poet, novelist, playwright, World War I hero, and political activist was the most influential writer to appear in Italy between the nation’s mid-nineteenth-century Unification and the Fascist regime. He may be Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 considered one of the inventors of the novel political communication that became an essential ingredient of the aggressive nationalism that surfaced in Europe during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. D’Annunzio was able to strongly influence the mood of national expansion, expressed in various ways by Crispi and the Africanisti. Marinetti and the Futuristi. and, finally, years later, by Mussolini and the Fascisti (Rhodes 65). Beginning in the late 1880s, D’Annunzio offered the hope of an “epic return” to Africa to his at last unified but allegedly debilitated new nation. D’Annunzio the patriot proposed African adventures as a way to rejuvenate the Italian people in the cultural and political stagnation of post-Risorgimento Italy. D ’Annunzio the poet based his program of “national regeneration” (Becker 3) on a “Latin Renaissance” (“Rinascenza Latina”). D’Annunzio expanded the scope of this Latin Renaissance promised by the Risorgimento from nation building to empire building. In fact, he reoriented nineteenth-century political classicism in Italy, shifting its purpose from the incitement of national feelings -this was how Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient Mediterranean epic was used by the poets Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, as well as later by Giosue Carducci— toward the advocacy of colonialism (Becker 85). In his yearning for a Latin Renaissance, D’Annunzio connects modem imperialism, ancient epic, and Roman antiquity. The colonial rhetoric originating in D’Annunzio’s poetry of the late nineteenth century started to convey the African desert as the space Italy needed to solve its problems. From that moment on, the desert turned into an epic space where Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32 the debilitated Italian race could return to a heroic, rural state. In the Laudi del cielo, 2 8 del mare, della terra e degli eroi (Praise of Skv. Sea. Earth, and Heroes). D’Annunzio fueled and celebrated Italian expansionism by resuscitating ancient themes, myths, and symbols that define the space of Italian colonialism in Africa and, more generally, characterize Italian colonial ideology from the late nineteenth century until the dawn of World War II. Within this national spatial story of colonization, Mario Ludovici, the main character o fLo squadrone bianco, represents the quintessential Italian rural colonist. In the end, he chooses to inhabit the desert, a space that is far from urban and industrial Italian culture, as the Captain of an Italian- Saharan troop guarding a military outpost in the Libyan Desert. His choice — the central narrative element of the film— is the consequence of the production of a space that is both external and internal. Thus, the desert is also part of a personal spatial story of colonization in which the young lieutenant is “a builder of dams, a constructor of space” (Theweleit 6), someone who tries to construct a stable colonial “outer” space in addition to his own “inner” space. Ludovici’s psychological transformation throughout the film shows that the desert is an internal space to which 29 he has to impose boundaries. 2. A Personal Spatial Story of Colonization: a Reinterpretation of the Main Character’s “Conversion” in Lo squadrone bianco The first futurist/ic sequence of Lo squadrone bianco is of fundamental importance not only for the economy of the film but particularly for my reading of Lieutenant Mario Ludovici’s colonial adventure in the Libyan Desert as a “spatial Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 30 story.” The film begins with a shot of a speeding car in the darkness from the driver’s point of view, which, incidentally, invites the spectators to fully involve themselves in what they are going to watch. Then, there is a close-up shot of the driver, Mario, hurtling forward. He seems trapped not only by the rigorous framing of the camera but also by the frame created by the windscreen of his car. Trapped by whom or by what? One sees the road, the headlights in the foggy night and a level crossing. Then an abrupt break and suddenly Mario’s situation becomes perfectly clear: he is entrapped in a glamorous bourgeois world and in a relationship with a well-to-do woman, Cristiana, who plays with him according to her moods. At times she seeks him out and at times she sends him away. Another abrupt break and now Mario, his image in a series of alternating cuts and then superimposed first on a speed indicator and then a clock, is once again in his car racing in the darkness. Mario’s race will take him to the Libyan Desert, where, interestingly enough, he arrives at night and gets out of a truck, as if he had been taken there instantaneously rather than as someone who requested a transfer to a camel unit in the new Italian colony of Libya. Later in the film, Captain Sant’Elia will confirm this hypothesis when he angrily says of Mario: “These people tormented by who knows what. These people who jump into the water without being able to swim. What does he think he 31 has come here for? To be an officer or a man fallen from the moon?” The pace of the editing of the colonial segment of the film is considerably different from that of the prologue. Both the sequences of the White Squadron’s procession in the desert on the rebels’ trail and the life of the soldiers at the Libyan Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 34 fort are edited according to a very slow rhythm, with long takes. The prologue, on the other hand, set in Italy and depicting a bourgeois and urban life, is rapidly edited with many quick cuts and brief shots. If both Mario’s agitated behavior and the fast editing of the opening sequence provoke a certain degree of disorientation in the viewers, it is because the film begins to portray the main character’s uneasiness and anxiety about the space in which he finds himself trapped. To begin untangling Mario’s anxiety I borrow Kathleen Kirby’s inherently spatial notion of “disassociation” which she believes refers . . . not only to a detachment of subject from the world, but also to the deterioration of the internal ordering of subjectivity. . . . The internal- external relation breaks down, resulting in a degeneration of interior organization, and finally — one could imagine, in advanced stages— in a confusion of the external order to o .. . . Foundations and frameworks crumble and things loop and circle and shift and spin: the inside flies to pieces and explodes outward, the outside melts and fragments, and elements from both sides drift freely across an indifferent boundary. (101-2) This definition of disassociation is an interesting starting point. It suggests the necessity of an imbalance between internal and external space or, more specifically, between the internal space of the subject and the external space that the subject occupies. Indeed, Kirby’s definition of disassociation seems to perfectly summarize Mario Ludovici’s spatial story. In the crucial scene of the prologue, Mario bursts into Cristiana’s house and, after a short and very intense quarrel, he almost strangles her. After that, one sees Mario racing in his car into the darkness and then suddenly arriving at the fort in Libya in the middle of the night. It is precisely at this point of the narrative that the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35 sand of the desert, as well as the African rebels, turn into an embodiment of Mario’s erupted “interior.” The pivotal moment of the transformation is indeed the aforementioned violent confrontation between the two lovers in Cristiana’s apartment. In contrast to the traditional interpretation of this film, which sees the beginning of Mario’s “conversion” when he starts to become sick and loses consciousness in the middle of the desert, my reading of the quarreling scene in psychoanalytic/cinematic terms is that Mario’s so-called conversion happens precisely at this point of the narrative. Kirby suggests that a subject’s disassociation from the outside may well come from being stuck in a situation or place that is at odds, sometimes violently, with the subject. I argue that it is during the violent confrontation with Cristiana that Mario, the subject, starts to disassociate himself from a hostile environment -th e bourgeois world with strictly assigned social rules- in which he feels out of place. In psychoanalytic terms, this disassociation results in Mario’s unconscious bursting the banks of the bourgeois encoded forms of desires and fears. The products of the unconscious emerge no longer in the form of compromise formations but as “a product of the body, a substance which, once released, becomes ungovernable, combining itself with uncontrollable external masses and laying waste the boundaries of the body” (Theweleit 7). Not only does the internal space of the subject degenerate, break its boundaries, and explode outward but it also blends with the external space so that the distinction between inside and outside ceases to exist. As a consequence, Mario begins to perceive the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36 repressed production of his unconscious in a thoroughly objectified form: the colonial space. What I have just described can be seen very clearly in cinematic terms beginning with the violent confrontation between Mario and Cristiana. When the quarrel between the lovers reaches its climax, Mario aggressively warns Cristiana that he will soon no longer be able to control his actions: “Be careful, Cristiana. I 32 feel that I could do anything. Do you understand? Anything! I’m afraid of myself.” At this point the camera moves away from the lovers and focuses on the shadows on the wall behind them created by the African objects elegantly displayed in Cristiana’s living room. These shadows are magnified to cover almost the whole wall. The walls of the room serve as the screen for the projection of a different story from the one that is told in Cristiana’s living room. The “external” story shows that the love relationship between Mario and Cristiana is coming to an end. The gigantic shadows on the wall, on the contrary, serve the purpose of telling Mario’s “internal” story. Since in the next scene Mario will be arriving in Africa, the shadows seem to entice him away from the closed space of the bourgeois world out into the exterior, the colonial space. The boundaries that encode the bourgeois forms of desires can no longer accommodate Mario’s unconscious and consequently they erupt beyond his , 3 3 control. The black shadows on the wall can be perceived as Mario’s “primitive” force that erupts from within and expresses itself as a separable entity completely divorced from his consciousness or interiority. At this point, however, Mario has not yet Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 realized what is happening. During the whole scene the shadows are behind him: he cannot see them. From my perspective, the need of Mario’s inner drives to express themselves as an entity separate from the body becomes the first and foremost justification to see both the display of primitive art in Cristiana’s living room and the “primitive” African crowds in the “primitive” colonial territory of Libya/Ethiopia as an embodiment of the young lieutenant’s interior. In a previous scene, Cristiana describes Mario as someone “exasperating” (“esasperante”) and who has “no limits” — or boundaries— because “he is too much in love” (“E troppo innamorato”). Her language of excess seems to signal to the viewer that Mario’s unconscious threatens to burst out. Immediately afterwards, at the climax of the quarrel, one sees this happening but Mario will fully realize it only after his arrival in Libya. There, he will perceive his “inner life” reified in the dangerous savage rebels and the ungovernable space of the desert. Once at the fort, the young lieutenant starts to hear other officers talking about the “damned rebels” but neither Mario nor the viewers see them. The crowd of African rebels in this film is not really a collection of human faces and forms but, rather, a sort of crowd-effect created by the sand of the Sahara. This could be seen as an addendum to Elias Canetti’s observations about “crowd symbols.” Sand, according to Canetti, is a “crowd symbol,” a collective unit, which is not made up of men but is felt to be a crowd (75). In other words, one can argue that Mario’s unconscious undergoes a further transformation — or conversion— as he physically engages with the geography of the colony. The colonial territory becomes a corporeal territory formed by Mario’s erupted interior. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38 The sand of the desert is a “crowd symbol” because it shares many characteristics with a crowd of enemies. These common traits illuminate the development of the narrative in Lo squadrone bianco. The sand of the desert, similar to the crowd of indigenous rebels, is hostile and aggressive. This is so not only because of its vastness and apparent boundlessness, but also because it consists of innumerable, small homogeneous particles that present to man an almost unbeatable power. According to Canetti, “sand suffocates man as the sea does, but more maliciously because more slowly” (87). During the first of the two sandstorms that complicate the White Squadron’s pursuit of the rebels, El Fennek, the young 34 lieutenant’s orderly, tells Mario of the dangerousness of the sand. In broken Italian, he advises Mario not to open his mouth until the end of the storm in order not to be consumed by the sand: “Close your lips, do not breathe sand. Sand consumes man as 35 it consumes stones.” Mario’s relationship to the sand of the desert anticipates, in a sense, the struggle he will wage against the rebels in the only battle scene of the film, when the Squadron finally has to confront the rebels. Moreover, the sand, specifically in the form of a storm, creates, throughout the White Squadron’s mission in the desert, an atmosphere that is typical of guerrilla warfare. Traces of the rebels appear and disappear, tracks shift constantly and sometimes are lost in the sand, and the fear of an uncontrollable and unexpected encounter with the enemy never leaves the soldiers. The qualities that I have attributed to both the enemy and the landscape in guerrilla warfare correspond to the qualities of Mario’s erupted interior. By remaining almost invisible and, at the same time, by moving in the desert in an Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 unpredictable and apparently confused way, the armed enemies, together with the (outer) space that they occupy, become a particularly intense embodiment of the inner space of lieutenant Ludovici. Mario constructs the external world -the space to be colonized— in the image of his own inner body. Viewed in this way, the battlefield, the place of violence and the site of direct confrontation with the rebels, becomes the locus of the reconstruction of Mario’s inner body’s boundaries. This explains why after recovering from a fever Mario no longer behaves as a novice at the mercy of his superior, Captain Sant’Elia, but suddenly becomes eager to fight. When Captain Sant’Elia announces that the Squadron is finally getting close and will soon reach the 36 rebels, Mario enthusiastically says: “So we will fight!” He has come to realize that he needs to rebuild the “dams” for his inner body and in order to do it, must confront the “mass” of his erupted interior. This is the same logic that propels the fascist male soldier, according to Theweleit, to seek actively proximity to the “mass” of enemies (33). Immediately after the beginning of the battle, a sandstorm arises so that, once again, the rebels are hardly visible. The camera shoots close-ups of individual soldiers firing their rifles so that not only are the rebels not portrayed as a crowd but, moreover, as a result of the blinding sandstorm, one is not able to clearly discern the rebels from the White Squadron soldiers. This is the ultimate example of what I have earlier described as the breaking down of the boundaries between internal and external space. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 40 During the battle, one sees Mario courageously helping the wounded soldiers and firing against the rebels. Then, abruptly the scene shifts to the tranquil life at the fort where soldiers and tourists are anxiously awaiting the return of the missing squadron. During the battle scene, the camera seems to convey the idea that Mario is not only at the center of the fight but that he is also at the center of his erupted unconscious. It is not so much the mass of dead enemies that he wants to see, but rather the mass of his dead desires, that is of life that has died within his own body (Theweleit 14). He exterminates the crowd of dangerous rebels and in so doing he creates an empty space: the colonial space is clean, whole, and so is his interiority. It should now be clear that my interest does not lie in what causes Mario’s unconscious to burst the banks. What is crucial is the breaking down of the boundaries between inner and outer space. This breakdown occurs when the order of the external — the bourgeois, urban space— can no longer be accepted by the internal space of the subject. Moreover, the failure to recognize the separation between inner and outer space could result in the disintegration of the subject in the same way as the breakdown of the stable and fixed boundaries of the colony could result in the disintegration of the colony. Because Mario experiences the outer space as his inner space, to reconstruct the dams of his interiority, and consequently experience it again as separate from the external space, Mario needs either to restore the order of the external space or construct a new space. The final aerial view of the desert in Lo squadrone bianco has precisely the function of showing the restoration of order, and the reconstruction of the colonial space (and of the Italian colonial dream). The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 defeat of the indigenous rebels symbolizes the restoration of fixed and stable boundaries that separate the territory of the colony from the terra infirma. In a similar way, Mario’s last words to Cristiana after his return to the fort reveal that he has managed to re-build the dams of his inner space by killing the “mass” of bourgeois forms of desires, which first erupted in Cristiana’s apartment, and leaving them behind him. He left them on the battlefield together with or, better, as the corpses of his enemies, the crowd of rebels, and of Captain Sant’Elia, who was killed “heroically” fighting in the battle. In so doing, Mario constructs a new inner space for himself. In the film, Cristiana has come to the fort with the group of tourists to look for Mario but when they meet, the two former lovers hardly recognize each other. This is because, as Mario tells Cristiana before bidding her farewell, “Mario 37 doesn’t exist anymore. He was left down there, under the sand, like Sant’Elia.” In destroying the mass of desires that erupted from his unconscious, and re building the boundaries of his inner space, Mario has undergone a visible transformation. In the narrative of the film, his last words explain perfectly his transformation: the experience in the desert has changed him, he no longer tolerates Cristiana. He has buried not only the person that he once was but also the body of the heroic captain Sant’Elia, and is now ready to take his place as leader of the White Squadron and as commander of the Italian outpost in the Libyan Desert. In the common interpretation of the film, the choice of a colonial military life over a bourgeois life in the city would be viewed as Mario moving away from patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity (i.e. marriage and family) and embracing a life of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 42 homosocial bonding and of total dedication to the fatherland as a real Fascist soldier, and as the Fascist hero Sant’Elia. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, Mario’s last words, the statement that he managed to bury his own body, becomes more problematic. This is because Mario has performed the impossible. In psychoanalysis, to “bury the body” is the equivalent of repression. What is repressed, however, does not disappear from one’s psychic life because it still exists in the unconscious and always threatens to “return.” Mario only represses the bourgeois forms of his desires but cannot “kill” them; he makes them disappear but this does not mean that they no longer exist. On the contrary, it is as if he has run away from them and pretended that they were “dead.” Moreover, if one attempts to escape the repressed, what is repressed becomes the very motive behind one’s action. Thus, Mario’s attempt to escape the repressed by building strong boundaries for his internal space is self-defeating. Inevitably, those same boundaries will limit his freedom of operation and movement and, more specifically, of desiring because they are construed as a denial of desire. In conclusion, Mario will always face the threat of being “engulfed by the desert,” the objectified form of his erupted inner space. Mario Ludovici’s psychological transformation can be read as an “internal” colonization that presents deep structural parallels with the “external” historical event of colonization. Like Captain Bettini and Captain Sant’Elia, his predecessors at the head of the White Squadron, he becomes a part of the sacred lineage of heroes 38 who are ready to “give [their] life for [their] passion for the land.” In the film’s epilogue Ludovici returns to the fort and his solemn countenance signals his new Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 sense of determination and conviction. He bears with him a letter wherein Captain Sant’Elia has expressed his last wishes to die in “his” land (Hay 191). Ludovici has decided to do the same. By choosing not to abandon the land that he conquered he becomes an Italian colonist and his personal spatial story of colonization becomes also part of a national spatial story of colonization. But the latter colonization does not end with the conquest of the Libyan Desert and the creation of a colony with stable boundaries, as the last scene of the film shows. With the end of the film, only the first stage of colonial conquest ends, and the second stage begins: the agrarian colonization. Ludovici chooses to stay in the land he conquered, a land that agrarian work can one day turn fertile. Thus, according to the colonial rhetoric, he becomes a soldato-colono. 3. A National Spatial Story of Colonization: the Rural Italians and the Agrarian Colonization of the African Desert 3.1. D’Annunzio’s Prophesy of an Epic Space in Africa From the early days of Italian colonial expansion, the African space acquires an epic dimension that serves the young nation’s desires, aspirations and needs. Not long after the political Unification of the 1860’s and early 1870’s, Italy started to foresee the possibility of an epic return to Africa, from whose shores Aeneas had sailed to reach Latium, conquer it, and found the city of Rome and the Latin race. Italy was still in the process of completing the defense of the peninsula when, at the Congress of Berlin in 1879, the African continent was divided up among the European powers. Italy was given an opportunity to occupy Tunis, but chose not to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 for fear of antagonizing France. As a consequence, Tunisia was assigned to France, which soon invaded it. Many Italian politicians felt cheated and thought that France had “stolen” Tunisia from them. However, they never lost hope that it was only a matter of time before the colony became Italian, as Tunisia was already Italian “by right.” The Italians inhabited Tunisia long before the French arrived in 1881. From ancient times, only Italians, amid dangers, with sacrifices, hardships, struggles and by hard work and tenacity, have realized the potential of this land.. . . Spade and plow, which are the shining symbols of our race, unceasingly expand our borders; it is spade and 39 plow that consecrated Tunisia to Italy. Although this excerpt from an article entitled “The spade, the plow, and the race” (“La vanga, Taratro e la razza”) is highly rhetorical as it is derived from La difesa della razza. an Italian bi-weekly periodical devoted to the cultivation of a racial consciousness, it shows how the “problem of Tunis” (“il problema di Tunisi”) truly haunted the whole period of Italian colonization in Africa, even after the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the Italian empire in 1936. Tunisia was viewed as a natural extension of the Italian peninsula, as it occupies the extremity of so-called Africa Minor (roughly speaking today’s Maghreb: Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) 40 and it had been an African province of the Roman Empire. By 1870s there were already ten thousand Italians working the Tunisian land and their numbers continued to grow. Italians believed themselves the first to “realize the productive value” of its 41 soil, and they had been there for centuries. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45 As Italy saw it, the African space belonged to those who first “realized its productive value” from an agricultural point of view. This idea, first elaborated with the emergence of “the problem of Tunis,” informs the entire Italian colonial enterprise and its major craftsman is, no doubt, Gabriele D’Annunzio. The so-called “problem of Tunis” constitutes the historico-political foundation of the production of an epic space in Africa by Italian colonial ideology. Specifically, the perceived “loss” of Tunisia motivates the return to Africa, a space that comes to be seen as Italy’s “promised land.” This epic space, first prophesize by D’Annunzio and formed by a blend of myths and reality, hardens into a colonial ideology, strongly based on Mediterranean epic and Roman antiquity, which will exercise a powerful influence on the nation well into the twentieth century. Udite, udite, o figli della terra, udite il grande annunzio ch’io vi reco sopra il vento palpitante con la mia bocca forte! Udite, o agricoltori, alzati nei diritti solchi, e voi che contro la possa dei giovenchi, o bifolchi, tendete le corde ritorte come quelle del suono tese nelle antiche lire,. . . Cantero l’uomo che ara, che naviga, che combatte, [cantero] la guerra delle stirpi,. . . (1-6, 143-47) “L’Annunzio” (“The Announcement”), a poem D ’Annunzio first published in Nuova Antologia in 1899 and eventually set as the general introduction to the Laudi, pledges that the massive collection of poems will give a prominent place to the “men who plow, who sail, who fight.” In linking the peasant, the seafarer, and the warrior, D’Annunzio, as the “announcer” (“annunziatore”; Valesio 114), foresees that the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 Italian peasants will be needed as soldiers in the armed forces of imperial Italy and, thus, lays the foundation for re-directing the Italian peasant masses (“figli della terra,” “agricoltori”) to foreign wars and territories (“la guerra delle stirpi”). As early as 1899, D’Annunzio exalts the Italian peasant masses as “the genuine and immutable expression of the pure values of the race and of the nation” (Ricciardi 83) and depicts peasants as major enlistees in an Italian expansion overseas. Moreover, this rhetorical gesture contributes to the transformation of the peasant masses into an ahistorical or mythical entity that serves the purpose of linking the aspirations and necessities of contemporary Italy with the ancient Roman world. In other words, D ’Annunzio recaptures Roman values of rurality and military spirit and plans to revive them as the very foundations of his colonial program. Even though the D’Annunzian-style colonial ideology has been perceived as based more on cultural and emotional claims than economic and strategic interests, it is undeniable that it was partly spurred by real and impending social and political problems that the young Italian nation was facing. Besides overpopulation, unemployment, and emigration, another “factual datum” (“dato del reale,” Ricciardi 83) was the industrial backwardness of Italy in relation to other European countries. Therefore, the celebration of masses of peasants rather than workers might be interpreted also as a reading of Italian political and economic reality in the late nineteenth century, a reality which, as Barbara Spackman points out, “did not correspond to that of the more advanced industrial societies of France and England” (Decadent Genealogies 50). As a consequence, one could argue that D’Annunzio’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 first step toward the preparation of the mythopoeic program of a Latin Renaissance that will fuel Italian expansionism in Africa consists precisely in the juxtaposition between the pure and natural peasant world and the corrupt and artificial world of the 42 industrial city and the urban proletariat. The “men who plow, who sail, who fight” first praised in “L’ Annunzio,” are also the modem generation of Italian explorers and pioneers lured by the vast spaces of Africa. In Maia. the first book of the Laudi, D’Annunzio describes this new generation of Italians as a migrant breed, unable to stay home, who work and fight hard (“una stirpe migrante . . . dura in oprare e combattere”; XV.474-78). He dubs them Ulissidi, Ulysses’s progeny, and sings of their exploits in distant lands, particularly Africa. He seems to suggest that these descendants of Ulysses (the Latin name of Odysseus) have resurrected another quintessential characteristic of the Italian race: a “perpetual desire of unknown lands, a desire to wander in ever bigger spaces, to encounter new experiences of people, and dangers, and odors of the earth” (“Perpetuo desio della terra/ incognita. . . desio/d’errare in sempre piu grande/spazio, di compiere nuova/esperienza di genti/e di perigli e di odori/terrestri”; Maia, XIV.359-66). Similar to the hero of the Homeric epic, the Ulissidi possess wisdom, cunning, and, above all, the desire for knowledge. However, D ’Annunzio’s vision of Ulysses, and especially his progeny, does not merely reiterate the classical one. It is overlaid with Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. The poet’s description of his friend Guido Boggiani, one of the descendants of Ulysses, described in Maia. makes clear that more than the desire for knowledge, it is the Faustian streben. the desire to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48 transcend limits, to push on toward power, conquest, and glory which drives the Ulissidi on: . . . E amava d’amore anch’egli una terra lontana, la terra ignita ove la Sfinge all’urto dell’uomo ritratta s’e dalle sabbie del Nilo ad altre piagge crudeli e in silenzio attende l’audace per farsi alia gola una torque di candidi ossi novella. E certo anch’egli in quel punto travagliato era dal suo grande amor periglioso; che tutti avevamo una febbre di sogni nel sangue e donata l’anima a grandezze lontane. ardentemente protesi verso primavere ed estati future, avidi di dominio e di gloria, pel nostro amore pronti ad ogni piu disperato combattimento,. . . (XV.490-504, 540-46) D’Annunzio acknowledges that there is an entire generation of young or, better, “new” Italians who, like Boggiani, have a burning desire to dedicate their souls to bringing back to life past glories in distant lands. By imposing heroic poetics on actual Italian upper-class men, D’Annunzio seems to suggest that the return to Africa will depend on “heroes,” exceptional individuals like Ulysses, who showed the way to us, ordinary people. But, most important, the juxtaposition of poetic language on Italian colonial adventures serves the purpose of elevating their status. In other words, D’Annunzio’s high language turns the event of colonialism into a colonial Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49 Only two years later, in the play Piu che l’amore (More than Love, 1905), D’Annunzio will introduce another Ulisside, Corrado Brando, whose life is, as the character himself says, “a means of experience and knowledge, an event of risks and victories” (“un mezzo di esperimento e di conoscimento, una vicenda di rischi e di 43 vittorie”; 61-2). Brando claims to be a descendant of the Caboto brothers, the famous Italian explorers, and, like them, his greatest desire is to extend the boundaries of Rome and to stamp his Latin footprint in a virgin land, a land where no white man has ever been: Africa. Tu mandami la dove io ho lasciato la mia virtu, e poi dammi da compiere quel che e piu difficile e piu atroce: io lo compiro senza mai volgermi indietro ne mai mettermi a giacere. Quel che non mi fa morire mi rende piu forte. Ma pur mandami e dimmi che io vado a morire, che avro il mio tumulo in una regione non mai calpesta da uomo bianco. Andro senza esitare, cantando.. . . Ho il mio pensiero, anzi ho il mio impero, una parola romana da rendere italica: Teneo te, Africa. Ah, se tu potessi comprendere! Ah, se tu avessi provato una volta quel che io provai quando di la da Imi entrammo nella regione ignota, quando stampai nel suolo vergine Forma latina! (34-6) Brando wants to have his empire and, thus, be able to translate the Latin words 44 “Teneo te, Africa” into Italian. Moreover, while recalling with Rudu, his Sardinian servant, their “conquest over the brutes and destiny” at Olda, where they both fought and outwitted a tribe, Corrado shows Rudu the Roman colonial coin found there which he always carries with him (223), a sign that their particular exploits have deeper roots in Rome’s imperial destiny. Not only is D’Annunzio’s Ulisside a hero whose characteristics are those of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch and the Homeric hero, but D’Annunzio also transforms the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 Greek hero into a Roman hero. The transformation of the Greek Ulysses into a Roman Ulysses is initially suggested by the motto D’ Annunzio uses in the first triplet of the hymn “Alle Pleiadi e ai fati” (“To the Pleiades and Fates”), the poem that serves as a preface to Maia: Gloria al Latin che disse: ‘Navigare e necessario; non e necessario Vivere.’ A lui sia gloria in tutto il Mare! (1-3) The same motto serves as the close of Maia: . . . Su! Sciogli! Allarga! Riprendi il timone e la scotta; che necessario e navigare, Vivere non e necessario.’ (XXI.123-26) The Latin motto is “Navigare necesse est!” and Plutarch attributes it to Pompeius. From D’Annunzio’s perspective, “it is necessary to sail, not to live” both recycles the Homeric myth of the hero-sailor and it also and, more importantly for my discussion, justifies the new myth of Latin expansionism within the Latin Mediterranean Sea. In other words, Pompeius’s motto, in the Dannunzian transposition, is a prelude to the romanization of the myth of Ulysses. One realizes that D’Annunzio’s Ulysses is definitely a Latin hero when, later in the poem “Alle Pleiadi e ai fati,” he directly connects Ulysses to the poet Dante, who describes his encounter with Ulysses in 45 Inferno. Canto XXVI. According to D’Annunzio, Dante, a poet of “Latin blood” was the one who “worthily praised” Ulysses (the “Pelasgian king”) and gave him “broader wings, so he could fly farther.” Di latin sangue sorse la parola Degna del Re pelasgo; e il sacro Dante Le diede piu grand’ala, onde piu vola. (43-5) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51 So far I have pointed out that D’Annunzio first expresses his intention to praise “the men who plow, sail, and fight.” Then, he frames the long poem Maia with the Roman motto “navigare necesse est.” But what does “navigare” mean for D’Annunzio? As Lorenzo Braccesi argues, it means “to fight at sea” (“combattere per mare”; 112). It is the roar of the cannon resounding on the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea that makes the reader realize the meaning D ’Annunzio attributes to “navigare”: L’odono i popoli forti: cantando l’inno dei Padri, spingon rivali nel flutto ruggente le navi di ferro; che necessario e navigare, vivere non e necessario. (IX.286-90) What the “strong races” (“popoli forti”) hear is the roar of the cannon. The “iron ships” (“navi di ferro”) are the modem battleships. The image heralds a battle at sea. What pushes the action is the emulative example set by the Latin forefathers (“i Padri”). To sail, thus, expresses the desire to expand the borders of their country, but also the willingness to fight in order to accomplish it. From this viewpoint, to sail and to fight are the same actions. Finally, the “men who plow, sail, and fight” are nothing else but D’Annunzio’s “new myths” (“miti novelli”) that he describes as “Divine transfigurations of the forces working in the secret depths of the dominating race” (“Divine/trasfigurazioni/delle forze operanti/nella profondita segreta/della stirpe dominatrice!”; XVIII. 485-89). The way I read it, the rural Italians, because of the internal driving forces that are characteristic of their race, are warriors (i.e., Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 soldiers). Whether they plow (fight against the land with plows) or fight against an enemy they never cease to be warriors. Agricultural work is a war against the land because, as Virgil explains in Book I of the Georgies, for all of Italy’s potential wealth, farming remained a perpetual challenge that needed all possible energy and skill in the same way as an actual war does. For the Father of agriculture Gave us a hard calling: he first decreed it an art To work in the fields, sent worries to sharpen our Mortal wits, And would not allow his realm to grow listless From lethargy. (531-34) For this reason, in times past, a chosen and skillful class of agricultural workers had emerged and perpetuated itself, generation after generation. As a consequence, the Roman race was and still is a rural race and its imperialism had and has peasant-like characteristics (Cagnetta 37). D’Annunzio’s Laudi are, indeed, a prophetic celebration of Italian expansionism in which he adapts classical epic and Roman antiquity to a contemporary imperialistic context. Maia, the first book of the Laudi. not only constitutes D ’Annunzio’s attempt to revive epic poetry and themes. It also lays the foundations of Italian colonial rhetoric. A true prophecy of empire, Maia. already contains all the themes that will later characterize Italian colonial ideology. Most important for my discussion, Maia connects the idea of epic and desert. Indeed, it can be said that the desert becomes the epic space of Italy beginning with Maia. This long poem is usually considered D’Annunzio’s poetic rendition of his discovery of Hellenism. This interpretation is justified by the fact that the first part of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 this vast poem is an idealized version of Greece (“Ellade divina”) in the form of an itinerary from the moment when he and four of his friends set out, in July 1895, from Apulia, in the yacht Fantasia, until he left them in Athens two months later. It is at once a display of Greek mythology and a comprehensive portrait of ancient Greece, its men, heroes, mountains, museums, statues, air, sea, and sky. D’Annunzio seems to argue that it is only after having known the classical Greek world, having “drunk at its ancient, but still full, breast” (“all’antica mammella/ci abbeverammo, ancor piena”; XIV. 186-87), having being inspired by its past, that man can be regenerated. In the second part of the poem, D’Annunzio shows how, after returning from Greece purified and rejuvenated, he is assailed in Rome by the stench of modem corruption and politics. Up to this point it really seems that D ’Annunzio considered ancient Greece as the perfect and ideal motherland (“patria”) which contrasts with “the other motherland” (“l’altra patria”; Braccesi 103), the real and far from perfect motherland, the decayed Rome of his time where no man can live heroically. However, D’Annunzio’s ancient Greece is not simply a moment of aesthetic evasion, but bears a political connotation only if considered as correlated with his political motherland, Rome, and the evocation of romanitas. Ancient Greece and Rome, Hellenism and romanitas co-penetrate in the lines of Maia, more precisely, one motherland begins where the other motherland ends. Ultimately, Maia narrates that Hellenism created indestructible myths (“tutta l’Ellade santa/era invisibile ai nostri/occhi ma presente in etemo”; XV.521-23) but their strength is alive and at work because Rome keeps these myths alive. Not ancient Greece but, rather, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 contemporary Rome — the site where romanita (Romanness, reverence for Italian tradition) meets italianita (Italianness, the uniting of Italians into a nation)— has yet a civilizing mission to accomplish. Contemporary Rome connects past and present, ancient Rome and modem Italy. Once back in Rome, the poet asks himself how he can escape the contagion of human foolishness and anguish (“Manie, Manie silenziose,/erranti nell’infemo/della citta canicolare”; XVI.64-6). Contemporary Rome represents “the tragedy of modernity” (Witt 87), the bourgeois mediocrity of the Liberal Italietta of Giolitti which traps -b u t not for much longer- the emerging virile, heroic, 46 imperialist, and neo-Roman Italy. D’Annunzio finds the answer by again turning to the past, this time the Sistine Chapel and its Michelangelo frescoes. Here, not only the Sibyls and Prophets of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the very Winds of Heaven depicted on the ceiling, encourage the poet to overcome present adversities and not give up hope that soon the “Latin Renaissance” will happen. The poem ends with a praise of the “solar poet” (“vate solare”), Giosue Carducci, who, during the Risorgimento, never lost hope about the fate of his country, and with his patriotic songs kept alive the “fire of ancient Rome” that one day will ignite into the “third life” of Italy (Maia. XX.188-89).4 7 O padre, verra quel gran giomo che ci promise il tuo canto! E gli Archi, ecco, aspettano i nuovi trionfi, perche tu cantasti: ‘O Italia, o Roma! quel giomo tonera il cielo sul Foro. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tonera il cielo sul Foro liberato d’ogni congerie vile, d’ogni cenere e polve, restituito per sempre nella maesta de’ suoi segni; e dal fonte pio di Giutuma scoppieranno le acque lustrali, e da ogni luogo arido vene di acque, e torrenti di vita nelle solitudini prone dell’Agro, nell’imperiale deserto, da tutte le tombe; e tutte le vertebre fosche degli acquedotti saranno Archi di Trionfo per mille Volonta erette su carri;. . (XX. 190-226) Here, the triumphal arches in Rome (“Archi di Trionfo”) are juxtaposed to the arches of the Roman aqueducts. “All the dark vertebrae of the aqueducts” (“tutte le vertebre fosche degli acquedotti”) will be like the triumphal arches the ancient Romans built to remember and celebrate their victories and conquests. Through this juxtaposition, the Roman arches -imperial symbols— are inserted squarely into a paean to Italy’s colonialist mission across the Mediterranean. Roman arches can be seen in the “prone solitudes of the Roman plain” (“nelle solitudini prone/dell’ Agro”) as well as in the African “imperial desert.” This means that both territories were, and will soon be again, under the dominion of Rome. Moreover, the fact that the arches of the aqueducts built in ancient times span the “desert of Latium” (“laziale deserto”; XIII. 127), as D ’Annunzio defines the Roman plain, as well as the imperial desert, means that the ancient Romans irrigated, and thus made fertile, both territories. This is further stated as the poet compares the victories-to-be of the “new” Rome to the water that gives life back to arid territories such as the Roman plain (the Latin Ager Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56 Romanus), the rural territory attached to the urban agglomeration of Rome (Urbs Roma), and the “imperial desert” in Africa. Why “imperial desert”? Not only because it bears the signs of imperial Rome (i.e. the Roman arches). D ’Annunzio specifically has in mind his 1898-99 trip to Egypt where he visited the cities of Alexandria, Cairo, and Sakkarah. D’Annunzio’s Egyptian impressions seem to be mainly linked to Alexander the great, who founded the port city of Alexandria (332-331 CE) with the intention of “binding the Egyptian people to the Great Empire” (“allacciare il popolo egizio al Grande Impero”; Taccuini. XXIV.292). Obviously the “Great Empire” is the Macedonian Empire but, within the Dannunzian elaboration of a prophesy of an Italian Empire, the abovementioned sentence cannot but lead one to think that the “imperial desert” of Egypt is posited as also once a Roman territory. In fact, the Romans ruled Egypt from 30 BCE to 641 CE. Egypt became a Roman province after the reign of the Ptolemaic Dynasty ended in 30 BCE, when the Pharaoh Cleopatra lost the battle of Actium in the Adriatic Sea. The Egyptian desert, therefore, is three times “imperial”: Egyptian, Macedonian, and Roman. In addition, given Nietzsche’s influence on D’Annunzio, the desert is also the heroic place of Zarathustra and, therefore, the site of the greatest action(s). Zarathustra talks about the desert in the first of his discourses, entitled “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” with the intention of drawing away from a general audience the few suited to be his companions, his followers. The three states of spirit Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 necessary for Zarathustra’s companions are the camel, the lion, and the child. The transformation of the spirit from camel to lion takes place in the desert. The weight-bearing spirit takes upon itself all [the] heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert, thus it hurries into its desert. But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert. (54) The camel spirit is noble and heroic. It takes upon itself what is most difficult and renounces both the comforts of any traditional wisdom and the comfort of any community. Why is the reverent spirit that would bear much not enough? Why must it flee into the desert and be transformed into its seeming opposite, a destructive lion? Zarathustra’s answer to his own question is that the camel must become a lion precisely because the spirit that would bear much must bear the heaviest burden of destroying what it is, what it has come to revere. For this reason, the desert is where the most heroic action is performed, where the camel spirit must destroy itself and 48 become a lion spirit. In Piu che l’amore. Corrado Brando, previously described as a descendant of Ulysses who has a burning desire to return to Africa, describes the African desert as his heroic place, in terms that remind one of Zarathustra. He tells his lover, Maria, that he always has in his mind the image of the “vast oceanic dune” (“l’immensa duna oceanica”) that bears, as if it were an inscription (“chiara come una lapide incisa”), his heroic prophesy (“la [mia] profezia eroica”; 189). Later, he tells his friend Virginio Vesta, Maria’s brother, that he has gotten to know the splendor and the excitement of the greater glory (“lo splendore e l’ebrezza di un’altra Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58 gloria”) when he was “on his own, silent, with only himself and the Desert as witnesses” (“in disparte, in silenzio, con la testimonianza di me solo e del Deserto”; 289-90). The desert also recalls the atmosphere of oppressive heat that characterizes the island of Delos in Maia. as the poet-Ulisside describes it: Morta era Delo su l’acque, deserta, nuda, affocata dal meridiano furore. . . . Deserta e nuda l’isola ardeva, come oggi al meriggio d’estate. E venne TElleno e le disse: “Perche tu sei sterile, o figlia del ponto, io t’eleggo e ti sposo. Trarre sapra dal tuo grembo aspro le abondanze e le gioie il fecondatore di rupi. (XIV.46-84) Here, the summer heat does not produce weariness and depression, as one would tend to think. On the contrary, for D’Annunzio it takes on the meaning of a primitive strength that wakes up the internal fire of the Ulisside and his ardor. Thus, it symbolizes rebirth and regeneration. Ulysses and his progeny are attracted by Delos, despite her sterility, precisely because of the burning heat she emanates in the summer afternoons. This heat wakes up Ulysses’s seminal power to the point that he claims to be the “fecundator of rocks” (“il fecondatore di rupi”) and, thus, is ready to challenge the sterility of Delos. He is sure he will fecundate Delos and turn it fertile. Turning from classical myth to the Sistine Chapel frescoes, Maia seems to prophesize future Italian colonies in North and East Africa as it focuses on the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59 Libyan and the Eritrean sibyls. As the rhetorical questions that the poet asks them demonstrate, the Libyan and Eritrean sibyls are very attractive figures — and lands- for the Italian imperialist. Ma il tuo seno, che tu mi celi, non e forse profondo come un fior numeroso? E il tuo fianco fecondo non e fatto pel seme del vincitore? Ah chi mai sapra il colore degli occhi tuoi sotto le palpebre chine? Quando mi guarderai? Che mai raccoglie il tuo braccio con la man cava che mai raccoglie il tuo braccio dall’ombra di quella gran piega che ti fa nel manto il ginocchio sovrapposto all’altro in riposo? Le pieghe del tuo spazioso vestimento son piene d’invisibili tesori e di mistero infinito. E, se tu volgi col dito il foglio del libro verace or che il Genio con la sua face t’accende la lucema, qual tirannide crolla, nasce qual novo mito, qual puro eroe s’etema? (XVII.589-603, 631-51) At the time D’Annunzio wrote these lines (1903) Libya was not yet an Italian colony (it will become Italian only eight years later, in 1911). However, it was a potential territory of conquest as one of the few “pieces” of Africa not yet assigned to, or conquered by, any other European country. In the lines above, Libya is a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 metaphorical female land that hides from the poet. She conceals the beauty of her body, and even the color of her eyes. However, the poet’s last question - “When will you look at me?”— seems to imply that she will not be able to hide forever. It is only a matter of time before she will fully reveal herself to her (Italian) conqueror. On the other hand, Eritrea became an Italian colony in 1890 and, thus, it already belonged to Italy when D ’Annunzio wrote Maia. But Eritrea alone, a small country in the Horn of Africa, did not fulfill the Italian imperial-istic dream. Moreover, D ’Annunzio’s description of the “spacious dress” of the Eritrean sibyl stresses the fact that the “treasures” of that land are still “invisible” and surrounded by an “infinite mystery.” He seems to suggest that Italy has only begun to “cast light” on the extraordinary resources of the Eritrean land. Needless to say, D’Annunzio does not mention the real reason (the disastrous defeat at Adwa in 1896) why Eritrea was still mostly “hidden” to Italian colonizers and, once again, portrays this “female” land as veiled and virginal.4 9 D’Annunzio’s Maia already sums up the program of Italian expansionism. The young Italian nation, for reasons of prestige and necessity, wanted to win back the African space first conquered by its Latin forefathers. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary to rejuvenate the Italian people by making them aware of the greatest characteristics of their race: the desire to experience new lands, the values of rurality and the military spirit. However, differently from the poems that I will analyze in the next section of the chapter, Maia. written eight years before the Libyan campaign, truly sounds like a prophesy. In Maia. the characteristics of the Italian race and the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 inevitable return to Africa are expressed in mild and non-flamboyant tones (uncharacteristic of D’Annunzio) and above all suspicion, as the poem appears to be, at first sight, an aesthetic escape into an idealized ancient Greece. In other words, in D’Annunzio’s Maia (1903) the colonial themes are still imbued with nationalism and post-Risorgimento ideals and, thus, devoid of propaganda and war mongering. Nonetheless, Maia clearly sets the tone and the images for both D ’Annunzio’s bombastic celebration of Italian colonialism in later books of the Laudi. such as Elettra (1904), Merope (1911-12) and Canti della guerra latina (1914-181. and the Italian colonial ideology during the Libyan campaign and Fascist colonialism in East Africa. 3.2. The Desert in Italian Colonization The extremely close connection, both etymologically and historically, of cultivation, civilization, and colonization is very often implied in the propaganda images during the entire period of Italian colonial expansion in Africa. Many colonial exhibitions and celebrations contributed to creating and consolidating the space of Italy’s Africa and, consequently, a colonial consciousness that many leaders thought the Italian masses lacked. An image from the Esnosizione di Tripoli of early 1926 portrays an allegorical figure of Rome, the core of both the Roman Empire and 50 the young Italian (Liberal and Fascist) nation. She is a “civilized” (patrician) 5 1 woman, which is emphasized by her erect Roman/Fascist saluting posture. She appears to signify, as Mussolini often repeated in his speeches in order to suggestively weave together the long-standing theme of romanita (Romanness) with Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62 Fascist italianita (Italianness), that the aim of the Fascist regime was not to create a 52 new Italy but to build on the ancient Italy. In other words, the regime asked Italians to identify the Rome of Augustus with the Italy of Mussolini. But, as should by now be clear, the attempt to weave together Romanness and Italianness was certainly not a prerogative of the Fascist regime. In fact, besides being the allegorical figure of Rome, and consequently of Italy, the Roman woman portrayed in the image reminds one of the Vittoria ostiense. an ancient Roman statue allegorizing Victory found at Ostia (at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea, where it had been buried for thousands of years), at the mouth of the Tiber river, in 1910, and celebrated by Gabriele D’Annunzio in several poems of the Laudi. The discovery of the statue, became for D’Annunzio a premonition of the marvelous imperial future in Africa that was 53 awaiting the “elected nation.” I miei lauri gettai sotto i tuoi piedi, o Vittoria senz’ali. E giunta l’ora. Tu sorridi alia terra che tu prendi. (1-3) The image may well portray the statue of the “wingless Victory” in D’Annunzio’s poem “La canzone d’oltremare” (“The Song of Overseas”), which is the opening poem of Merope. the fourth book of the Laudi. It was first published on October 8,1911 in the newspaper Corriere della sera, only five days after Italy began to bomb the city of Tripoli, Libya. The statue, a wingless Nike, represents Italy’s mutilated victory as the country still lacks a “fourth shore.” However, finally freed from the mud that kept her trapped at the bottom of the sea for almost two thousand Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 63 years, she is determined to return to the territories of North Africa that once belonged to her and win them back. Troppo vegliai, avverso la minaccia del sonno e della febbre, in Ostia morta, volta al limo del Tevere la faccia, tra gli stipiti alzati della Porta Marina dove a vespero s’aduna Luce fatale dalle pietre assorta, io sola con l’anelito, se alcuna ombra d’iddio scorgessi o udissi entrare nella foce la Nave e la Fortuna. Ah, se tanto vegliai sul limitare terribile, ch’io dorma un sonno lene e breve, sotto l’Arco d’oltremare! Ch’io sogni il greco sogno di Cirene, sotto l’Arco del savio Imperatore sgombro della barbarie e delle arene, schiuso al Trionfo, mentre dalle prore splende la pace in Tripoli latina, recando I dromedarii un sacro odore. (97-114) In D’Annunzio’s poem, Victory complains that she has laid too long at the bottom of the sea at “Porta Marina,” the threshold of the Roman harbor of Ostia Antica, at the mouth of the Tiber. With her face in the mud, she continuously struggled against sleep and fever while longing for either a ship or Fortune to rescue her. After having stayed awake for such a long time at that fearful threshold, she thinks she deserves to rest under the Arch that the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius had built in present day Tripoli. Under the arch of that sage emperor, which will finally be free from Ottoman barbarity and the sand that threatens to bury it, she is hoping to have the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64 Greek dream of Cyrene. This dream refers to the myth the Greek poet Pindar sang: Cyrene is a beautiful nymph with whom Apollo falls in love and makes the goddess of fertility. The triumph of Rome over Tripolitania and Cirenaica, and over the sand of the desert, would then be acknowledged and peace restored in Libya, the reconquered colony. Whether the image represents the allegory of Italy itself or of the Roman/Italian Victory, the Roman woman towers disproportionately over the surrounding landscape. What kind of landscape? In the background one can see on the left Roman ruins, as if to stress once again that the strongest claims the young Italian nation felt it could make to superior civilization (“civilta”) — and consequently to a legitimate conquest and colonization of African territories— was on the basis of its ancient Empire, whose remains were visible throughout the peninsula and in Africa. Once again, D ’Annunzio’s lines in “La canzone d’oltremare” confirm this. The wingless Victory, once landed on the “fourth shore,” wishes to stop where there are signs of the ancient Roman/Italian civilization. ‘. .. ch’io mi discalzi presso la fiumana di Rumia bella, dove il suo meandro nutre l’olivo a Pallade romana. Ch’io pieghi e chiuda un ramo d’oleandro In Lebda, nella cuna di colui Che suggello la tomba d’Alessandro. Ch’io m’abbeveri la dove gia fui, Non per l’umide argille alia cavema onde il Lete discende i regni bui, Ma per l’aride sabbie alia cistema di Roma, che nell’ombra una silente Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 linfa conserva e una memoria etema.’ (70-81) According to D ’Annunzio, the wingless Victory wants to stop by the raging flood of the fons Rumiae. in Tripolitania, whose waters feed ancient olive groves planted there a long time ago in honor of the Roman goddess Pallas. Then, she wants to bend into a crown a branch of oleander in Lebda, the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna. Finally, she wants to go back to the Roman reservoir and quench her thirst. This reservoir, which is apparently dried up, can only be reached by crossing the arid and sandy desert. The reservoir still hides “life blood,” that is water, and preserves the eternal memory of those who once built it and used it. As he also mentions in the poem “Ode pour la resurrection latine,” for D’Annunzio, the Roman ruins transform the sandy and arid African desert into a “Roman desert” (“desert romain”; 65) so that 54 it becomes a “sublime dryness” (“aridite sublime”; 68). D ’Annunzio is not alone in perceiving the Libyan Desert scattered with Roman ruins as a land that belongs to Italy. As early as 1909, Enrico Corradini, the head of the Italian nationalist party, which was in favor of the military conquest of Libya, recalls that while he was horse back riding from Dema to Cyrene, in the Libyan Desert, he saw the signs of romanitas everywhere: We found the Roman wells. And the Roman roadbeds, the dams made of stones down the slopes of the uadi built to hold back the good soil. And the Roman water reservoirs and the other hydraulic works. Finally, the Roman castle that protected the agricultural fields from above. The whole skeleton, so to speak, of the marvelous Roman 55 administration is still there, in the wilderness of the Cyrenaica. These words by Corradini clearly imply that what was culturally, and agri-culturally, notable (i.e. the only signs of civilization) in Libya was Roman, and thus Italian, in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66 origin. Moreover, as these words were uttered well before a dictatorial regime in Italy, they can also be taken as evidence of my fundamental premise: the perfect continuity between the colonial politics of Liberal Italy and that of Fascist Italy. Returning to the image portraying the allegory of Italy, a few palm trees on the right are the only elements that seem to evoke Africa, counterbalancing the Roman ruins on the left. Palm trees, however, are an element common to many colonial images. The palms, almost always to the side or in a comer of the pictures, most probably stand not so much as a recognizable symbol of Africa but, rather, as a sign of Mediterraneanism, of the revival of the Roman Empire whose center was the 56 Mediterranean sea, the mare nostrum. In other words, the palm trees (common on all the Mediterranean shores) are a reminder of the wish to situate Italy in relation to Africa, to create a territorial extension into the African continent, or to transform the African territory into an Italian one, that is, into the “fourth shore” of Italy. If the concept of Mediterraneanism had to make the overseas territories look like Italy at a cultural and propagandists level, at a practical level the same purpose was achieved by carrying out in Africa the same form of territorial administration and control that was being carried out within the peninsula. That form of territorial control was centered on the ideal of “ruralization” (“ruralizzazione”). “Ruralization” -simply put, the return to the land, the practice of agriculture- meant, first of all, an ideological defense of rurality, of the superiority of rural life and its conservative values. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67 The exercise of agriculture bends a man toward the alma parens frugum. gives him the serenity of a sage, and a religious feeling for life and human dignity (in short, the Roman humanitas). True agriculture means first of all love for the land. This love manifests itself in the choice of a stable home, and working the land with sweat and hope. But the love of the land also expresses itself in an infinite number of manifestations of the rural life, which separate agricultural individuals, families and populations from those who are 57 less or not at all agricultural. Within the Italian peninsula, “ruralization” was a policy sustained by Liberal Italy, and since the early days of the dictatorial regime, by initiatives such as the “battle of the grain” (“battaglia del grano”) or the “total land reclamation” (“bonifica 58 integrale”). The objective of the policy of ruralization was to prevent the emigration of Italian citizens to foreign countries, as well as the abandonment of rural areas for cities within the peninsula. Rapid industrial expansion had generated the worrisome phenomenon of a growing urban and suburban proletariat due to the emigration of peasants. Yet the government did not want to invest in building adequate infrastructures in the major Italian cities. As Victoria de Grazia puts it, “a growing urban population called for costly investments in housing and social services that the government had no intention of undertaking. On the contrary: to restrict the consumption, it deliberately sought to confine the reserve labor force in the impoverished rural areas where it could be maintained at the least social cost” (98).5 9 The “rural” space of the peninsula, however, had always been insufficient to absorb the Italian masses. The need for space forced Italian politicians, since the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 68 period of post-Unification, to look overseas with great interest. Thus, the empty African space depicted in the poster can be interpreted as the very “vital space” (“spazio vitale”) that both pre-fascist and Fascist Italy were looking for. With the emigration of part of the Italian population to the African colonies the government could achieve the twofold result of political and social stability within the peninsula, and international prestige. Many political leaders believed that the main cause of general malaise in Italy (social instability, unemployment, and so on) was the lack of space, in particular agrarian space: “Italy did the impossible. It gave Italians the last national lands which could be cultivated; lands that emerged from swamps or from the scorching heat of dry regions.”6 0 Still on the eve of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in 1936, Mussolini proclaimed that “a population cannot live without space. A population that is the bearer of an ancient and glorious civilization, like the Italian population, has rights on the face of the earth.”6 1 Thus, the Italian colonists were asked to emigrate to “empty” African lands in order to “widen” their fatherland, to expand the borders of their nation by turning “abroad” into “home.” This need of space or expansion was meant to be a regulated migration movement according to a preordained plan closely tied to the ideal of “ruralization.” But the allegory of Rome in the image from the Esposizione di Tripoli leads to yet another consideration. The landscape is flat and arid. It seems that the Roman woman, by walking toward the foreground is (miraculously) transforming the arid, hard desert into a fertile field, “reclaimed” (“bonificato”) and ready to be sown. This is the first step toward the “realization of the value” of the African soil. In denial of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69 the fact that one of the most important reasons for the present aridity of the soil was the heavy exploitation by the Roman Empire, the colonial rhetoric often repeats that 62 the African space is hard desert only because nobody took care of it for centuries. But the desert could be won back from the millennial action of the sand and the carelessness of the indigenous populations (i.e. brought back to cultivation, and civilization) in a reasonable span of time through the hard work of the Italian , . 63 colonists. The Roman woman carries the fasces (“fascio littorio”), in addition to the Roman salute, the only element that truly links this image to a specific Fascist propaganda campaign. A symbol of authority in ancient Rome, the Roman fasces is a bundle of grains wrapped around an ax or sword. They were carried by “lictors” (“littori”), officials who escorted the most influential Roman authorities, as a show of power. Not only is the Roman fasces the emblem of the Fascist regime itself but it is also the emblem of fertility since in Italian bundles of grain are called “fasci di grano” (wheat “fasci”). As a consequence, the Roman fasces are also the emblem of “ruralization.” By carrying the Roman fasces, the Roman woman in the image demonstrates that carrying out the agrarian colonization is the goal of Fascist Italy’s expansion in Africa. Even from this perspective, the Roman woman seems to contain yet another of the meanings given by D ’Annunzio to the Vittoria ostiense in the poem “La canzone d’oltremare.” ‘Ch’io mi discalzi’ dice la Vittoria, simile a grande mietitrice albana, fosca sotto la fronda imperatoria . . . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 70 ‘Con me, con me verso il Deserto ardente, con me verso il deserto senza sfingi, che aspetta l’orma il solco e la semente; con me, stirpe ferace che t’accingi nova a riprofondar la traccia antica in cui te stessa ed il tuo fato attingi, con me la dove chi combatte abbica, perche nella corona io ti connetta la foglia della quercia con la spica! ’ (67-69, 82-90) The poet portrays Victory as a great reaper of Alba Longa (i.e. pre-Roman Italy) who incites Italians to follow her toward the sizzling Desert (“il Deserto ardente”), ripe for footprints, plows and seeds (“che aspetta form a il solco e la semente”). She asks the fertile Italian race (“stirpe ferace”) to follow her to her origins, the place where those who fight arrange the wheat “fasci” (“la dove chi combatte abbica”) so that wheat (“la spica”) will be added to the oak-leaf crown of the victors. The Italian soldiers are, thus, transformed into colonists in a heroic-rural African context. Picking up on these themes, there is another image from the celebration of La 64 giomata coloniale (“Colonial Day”) on the Fourth Shore on May 24,1927. This image, like the previous one, shows a view through a Moorish-style window. Both images were created for colonial celebrations, whose purpose was to “open a window” on past, present and, most importantly, future colonial life. However, this window has another meaning. The Italian viewer, perhaps colonist-to-be, looks through the Moorish-style window not on to an exotic setting, as one might expect, but, rather, on to a vast open space from which all signs of life of the contemporary inhabitants of Libya have been erased. Libya is not only a deserto ‘desert’ but also Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 71 deserta ‘deserted.’ Moreover, the window can mean that the viewer who takes in the scene is absent from the visual field, as he/she is inside a house or even a palace. This conveys a sense of protection, as if to say : your (mother) country will provide you with a house and protect you. The perspective is also that of a (civilized or white) person who has a (socially and racially) privileged point of view over the vast yellow emptiness that represents Africa. The surveyors of this landscape, in other words, are inscribed in positions of power and prominence, contemplating and conquering the Libyan Desert in the name of -and as part of— Italy. Conversely, to be protected inside a house or a palace means also to have a limited perspective. It is one thing to look at what is happening outside from a window, but it is another thing to get out of the house, in the field, and experience directly the event of colonization. From this perspective, I believe this image involuntarily reveals a contradiction or, better, a mechanism of deceit within colonial propaganda and the program of Italian colonization in Africa. The only exception to the erasure of contemporary Libyan life is an Arab standing still while holding the reins of a camel. Upon closer examination, what is most striking is the passivity of the left side of the image versus the activity of the right side. On the right side of the image, once again, are the palm trees, the only element that evokes a Mediterranean landscape and, thus, situates Africa in relation to Italy. The Arab standing still, as merely an element of the landscape, might hint at what the Italians believed was the indigenous population’s attitude toward their land: a failure to recognize the material wealth of their land and consequently a failure to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72 realize its value. As a consequence, the Arab could be seen as watching the Italian colonist at work. The failure of the natives to realize the value of the land, its “undeveloped” character, is paradoxically what makes it so valuable, so ripe for appropriation (Mitchell, “Holy Landscape” 198). The tractor (a motorized plow) stands for the activity of the Italian colonists who are able to realize the value of the desert and to “break the very hard, millennial crust put there by the desert winds but, above anything else, by the inactivity of the inhabitants and by the inactivity of the 65 ancient rulers.” In other words, the desert in Africa is the result of its inhabitants’ total incapacity to logically and rationally realize the potential of the many natural resources of the their land and exploit them to their advantage. For this reason, Africans are destined to decline because “the civilization that turns its fields into 66 desert is a suicidal civilization.” In order to stress this point, the colonial propaganda does not hesitate to call into question the reasons for the fall of the great Roman civilization and Empire: “Once the worship of Ceres was extinguished and 67 the demographic power turned barren, empires fell into decline, too.” Or, as Virginio Gayda, editor of the newspaper II giomale d’Italia, a major publication of the Fascist regime, maintains, “Empires waver when they are not sustained by the work of the national masses, who identify their reason for living with the land they 68 cultivate and love.” These themes return in yet another image created for the Fiera di Tripoli, and reproduced on the cover of the February 1930 issue of L’ltalia coloniale.6 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In the foreground of this image, the viewer notices half of an Arab woman in a long black robe with a white veil covering the lower half of her face. Only one of her eyes can be seen. She turns her back on the fertile hill with its wheat field and vegetation, and on the fort flying the Italian flag in the background. Could this mean that she, representing the Africans, has never thought about what her country could be if only her people had realized the value of the soil? Or that they have accepted their colonizers, their “destiny”? She is certainly the exotic element of the image but because her body is hidden under robes and veils she certainly does not emerge as a sexualized type of African woman such as the “smiling Negress” with exposed skin. At the time of the colonization of Somaliland (1905-1908) postcards of the “smiling Negress” — the legendary Somali beauty known as “little black face” (“faccetta nera”)— were distributed to entice Italian soldiers to go to Africa. Already with the beginning of the colonization of Libya (1911), however, the Italian government adopted a policy of preventing miscegenation by every possible means in order to 70 promote a “demographic colonization.” What emerges from this image is an element that occurs in many images of Italian colonization in Africa: what is most attractive about Africa is not the women, but the land. In contrast with the luxurious hill, the Arab woman looks unattractive. At the same time, the woman and the land are conflated since both are made to invite the same kind of observation. The shape of the hill echoes the silhouette of the Arab woman’s robe to suggest that like the woman’s role, the land’s role is to reproduce. Both the land and the woman, in other words, are associated with reproduction, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 74 fertility, and sexuality; they share the same passivity and stillness. The woman, half her face covered by a veil, offers no resistance to the gaze of the viewer. Like the land, she is vulnerable to the desires of men: she permits her body to be plowed and seeded. The colonial rhetoric extends Plato’s familiar mind-matter pluralism to the land: a female land (physical matter, nature) versus male land (mind, rationality, and 71 culture). As I have already mentioned in relation to D’Annunzio’s description of the Libyan and Eritrean sibyls/lands in Maia, implicit in the metaphor of a gendered land, which identifies an alien (i.e. colonial) terrain with the alien sex, first of all, is the notion of conquest and possession. Furthermore, it implies that the desert is the “primal” virgin land, unattractive, passive but potentially fertile, receptive and seed sheltering, awaiting the cultivator (and the civilizer). Hence, if the desert turns fertile, it is because the Italian colonist is, to put it in D’Annunzio’s terms, a fecondatore di rupi. an excellent inseminator of the soil, making the wheat blossom and the vegetation grow anywhere, even in the most arid desert. If, on the one hand, the desert is an unattractive, passive but potentially fertile land, on the other hand it is a dangerous female land, as it is an insidious, aggressive, inhospitable, and primitive environment. From this perspective, the desert has all the characteristics of a fierce enemy and, thus, offers the perfect and ultimate retreat to men in search of individual heroism (such as Mario Ludovici in Lo squadrone bianco, or the Ulissidi sang by D’Annunzio) and countries in search of national heroism. In order to create a myth of national heroism to feed the popular imaginary, the pre-fascist and Fascist colonial rhetoric fabricates the exemplary “solid race” of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rural Italians, highly praised for its innate ability to agriculturally realize the value of any land on the face of the earth. Our solid, peasant race has colonized all the lands of the world in all the different latitudes and has turned the loneliness of the deserts into 72 flowering gardens and rich, cultivated fields. Wherever there is land that can be fertilized by human sweat and seeds, wherever there is earth to be redeemed, rarely does our race fail. Everywhere we see all the passion of our peasants, who quickly transform their plots of land into pieces of the motherland, into an oasis of Italianness for themselves, their families and all those who join them afterwards. Together with love for weapons, love for agriculture has profound roots in the prehistory of the Italian race.... since prehistory these two passions have been intimately connected in our spiritual substratum. Within this heroic class of citizens, the peasants, who can fertilize even the most arid desert, stands an even more heroic, patriotic and virile figure, the soldato-colono (“soldier-colonist”), whose main characteristics are the love for weapons (i.e. war) and the love for agriculture, the two primeval passions of the Italian race. This myth within the myth, so to speak, the soldier who is also a peasant and a member of a colony, fuels a rhetoric that aims at presenting to the Italian people the African desert as an epic space. This epic space is both the theater of great national feats and a sort of last frontier, a land of expansion, which can be turned into “a farmer’s paradise” because it is a potentially fertile land able to feed a large population, if only its value 74 is wisely realized. The incorporation of the desert into a regimented extension of the fatherland combines the individual and national needs for work and sustenance with the quest for fame and, thus, fosters fantasies of national heroism. While conquering a piece of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76 land for both his fatherland and himself, the soldato-colono fulfills the “noble” cause of Italian colonialism, namely, the need of extension, of widening the motherland and the borders of Italian civilization. Moreover, this incorporation also fosters fantasies of heroic individuality because the soldato-colono. who fights for his country overseas, is given a farm and a piece of land in the conquered territory so that he becomes both an agricultural worker and a landowner. This land that the heroic rural Italians conquer with their proverbial ardua fatica ‘difficult toil’ and then designate as their place of residence is variably defined as “the vast white oasis in the 75 dark continent,” “the new Italian land,” “our new world,” or “a place in the sun.” In his book devoted to the construction of the new Italian Empire and the development of “imperial agriculture,” Virginio Gayda describes the soldati-coloni: [They are] volunteers who left (Italy) dreaming of a land to colonize and win by risking their lives. Now, having laid down their arms, they resume their agricultural work in the land they have conquered. [They] automatically pass from military service to civil service and, thus, transform themselves from soldiers into colonists. Although soldato-colono is not a Dannunzian expression, the union of farmer and warrior for an Italian expansion overseas is first evoked in “L’Annunzio.” Later in the Laudi, D ’Annunzio persistently works with this theme in relation to Italian colonialism. An analysis of D’Annunzio’s “vision of the ploughman” in “Canto augurale per la nazione eletta,” the closing poem of Elettra. the second book of the Laudi. will show how D ’Annunzio’s words fueled the colonial rhetoric of the soldato-colono by targeting the innate rural character of the Italian people, and by drawing from the colonial ideology of ancient Rome. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 77 Lungo il patemo fiume arava un uom libero i suoi pingui iugeri, in pace. Sotto il pungolo dura anelava la forza dei buoi. Grande era l’uomo all’opra, fratello degli incliti eroi, col piede nel solco ferace. Italia! Italia! La Vittoria piego verso le glebe fendute il suo volo, sfioro con le sue palme la nuda fronte umana, la stiva inflessibile, il giogo ondante. E risalia. II vomere attrito nel suolo baleno come un’arme. Italia! Italia! Parvero l’uomo, il rude stromento, i giovenchi indefessi nel bronzo trionfale etemati dal cenno divino. Dei beni inespressi gonfia esulto la terra satumia nutrice di messi. O madre di tutte le biade, Italia! Italia! Una nave construtta ingombrava il bacino profondo, irta de l’ultime opere. Tutta la gran carena sfavillava al rosso tramonto; e la prora terribile, rivolta al dominio del mondo, aveva la forma del vomere. Italia! Italia! (22-39, 52-7) The pivotal figures of the poem are the “ship’s prow” (“prora”) and the “ploughshare” (“aratro”) which highlight the analogy between military and agricultural work. The divine touch of the goddess Victory consecrates and reveals in the agricultural work the same heroism one finds in war. As soon as Victory brushes with her hands the foreheads of the Italian people at work in the fields, the ploughshare (“vomere”), worn (“consumato”) and polished (“forbito”) by the friction with the soil, suddenly flashes (“baleno”) like a sword. In the same way, the fearful prow (“la prora terribile”) of the ship, symbolizing the Italian (future) dominion over Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 78 the world, has the shape of a ploughshare. The ploughshare “ploughs” the waves (i.e. the Mediterranean sea) and leads to the conquest of new overseas lands. Since in English to plough means both “arare” and “solcare,” the future greatness of the Italian race will come from agricultural work and from the ship’s fervent wake in the sea, which is sailing toward new overseas lands to be conquered. It is worth mentioning that the poem begins and ends with the same three lines (“Italia, Italia,/sacra alia nuova Aurora/con l’aratro e la prora!”) which stress that Italy’s imperial greatness is reborn and the ploughshare and the prow of the ship symbolize the activities of the Italian people in both peacetime and wartime: the agricultural work in the free fields strengthens the productive energy whereas the activity at sea ensures expansionism. This is the main argument developed throughout the poem. It is restated in at least one other poem of the Laudi. “Vergilia Anceps” (in Alcyone, the third book of the Laudi). a poem dedicated to Vergilia, the Pleiad who looks after agricultural work (“O duro suol discisso!”; 29) and activity at sea (“Lungo solco navale!”; 30). In this poem, D’Annunzio defines the prow and the ploughshare as the “twin arts” (“la duplice arte”; 27). The two aspects, agricultural work and activity at sea, explain the same necessary virtue, or art, which has always been the main characteristic of the Italian race and is now also the main symbol of colonial Italy. The Italian infantrymen of World War I (“fanti”) were thought to have a special and close relation with the land, the soil. This is true to the extent that, in the colonial writings, the expression soldato-colono ‘soldier-colonist’ is very often used Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 79 interchangeably with the expression fante-contadino ‘infantryman-peasant.’ The interchangeability of these two expressions, promised a form of national heroism that 77 naturally appealed to the self-image Italian peasant. Starting from the end of World War I and well into the ventennio. as the article “Fanti e contadini nerbo dell’esercito” (“Infantrymen and Peasants, the Backbone of the Army”) from La difesa della razza makes clear, the celebration of the peasant classes helped them forget their understandable resentment of their wartime sacrifices. Moreover, since the majority of Italians at that time were peasants, their celebration could result in another general mobilization, this time a mobilization in view of the conquest of new land in Africa. Infantrymen have built the trenches with spades, mines and patience. The infantrymen’s heroism is not self-evident. They are not garibaldini. bersaglieri or arditi (i.e. bold, dashing and impudent)... The infantrymen curse, but they do what they have to do. They curse and resist, they curse and don’t give up, they curse and advance. They curse and take it. Their capacity to withstand goes beyond every human limit, it is frightening. [The infantry are] the masses of the army and of the nation. With the infantry it is the masses themselves who wage war. Thus they wage a national war as even the art of war, like all the 78 other arts, calls for the masses’ strength. Similarly, within the colonial rhetoric, rural Italians were praised for their physical resistance, moral simplicity, the possession of concrete knowledge of the land, attitudes for manual labor, great adaptability, and endurance. With the heroism that they had shown during the war, what was particularly exploited for the sake of the colonial enterprise, however, was the peasants’ knowledge of the land, the fact that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 80 during the war the land was their “familiar ally,” because “they had mingled with it as peasants.” Thus, they could go to Africa and conquer new territories, making good use of their thorough knowledge of the land in the same way as they had done during the war. From here, one can easily close the circle by going back to where the rhetoric of the soldato-colono had started, namely, the close relationship among past and present inhabitants of the Italian peninsula. The infantrymen were all peasants. They were peasants like their forefathers, who belong to the tribes of the peligni. equi, marsi. vestini. marracini. Their forefathers were both infantrymen and peasants, like those from Latium, like the sanniti. like the warriors of the Italic League, like Ceasar’s soldiers, like the marrow and the reservoir of our race still are. The Italian physiognomy is rural. The noblest faces that you see still smell of earth. Our purest race is peasant-like, and every Italian peasant has the genealogy of a 79 patriarch. Every Italian peasant is a king. This emphasis on rurality is often found in narratives describing the early days of Rome. It is remarkable that since the very beginning, the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula did not look to the open sea for their destiny. As Virgil in Book II of the Georgies maintains, the origins of Roman greatness are deeply rooted in the cultivation of the soil, in the unprivileged but reliable soil of Latium (Grant 254). The Roman dislike of the sea also finds expression in the first half of the Aeneid. where Aeneas, driven by the jealous hatred of Juno, wanders around the Mediterranean trying to discover where to found a new city. Significantly, he chooses as the site of Rome, an area upstream at a safe remove from the mouth of the Tiber and the sea. In fact, Rome seems to have deliberately refused the destiny of a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 81 great port city and sought the shelter of the land. Its people eventually crossed the seas and conquered the world, but its trunk remained rooted in a single place: the land of Latium (Harrison 53). After all, the true Romans have always had only three activities; namely, agriculture, war and the administration of the res publica. They scorned commerce and left it to the freedmen and the foreigners. .. . and they had a wonderful religion [which was] public and devoted 80 to the gods of war, the gods of the people, and the gods of the land. A photograph from the cover of a 1933 issue of L’ltalia coloniale. figures the 81 “resurrection” of the ancient Roman legionary. This image establishes a link between the Roman colonial ideology and the colonial agricultural policy of pre fascist and Fascist Italy. In Africa, the Romans were constantly trying to move south the borders (limes) of the African territory under their control. Far from being a mere defensive measure, this strategy was a system of expansion and stabilization. Its chief purpose may well have been to prepare soldiers for their future life as colonists. This is so because once they had conquered a new piece of (desert) land, and thus moved the borders southward, the soldiers became veterans and as such were entitled to settle in the colony and exploit a piece of land granted to them by the state (Laroui 32). The Roman agrarian colonization was, thus, based on the expropriation of the land from the local populations in order to give it to Roman citizens and legionaries who had contributed to the conquest of that same land. In the Italian colonial period of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the “old” Roman colonial ideology undoubtedly retained its influence. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 82 As the photograph’s caption explains, the miles, who is wearing Roman footwear, has “taken up” the spade and is now tilling the hard Libyan land, saluting the inevitable fortunes of the Fourth Shore of Italy. His right arm raised in the Roman salute, he is carrying the spade as if it were a rifle during a march. A dark silhouette against a light background, he perfectly combines the traditional representation of an agrarian body with the representation of the “true” Fascist body. According to the codes employed in Fascist propaganda, bodies associated with agriculture tended to draw on a conventional and realistic visual language. In fact, this is not a drawing of a stylized, sketched or symbolic body but a “realistic,” though manipulative, photograph exhibiting a “real” male body. Fascist advertisement and propaganda in other sectors of the Italian economy, and life in general, usually portray either faceless, slimmed-down, geometricized bodies or 82 reduced bodies, that is humanoid-type cartoons such as the white homunculus. The posture assumed by the Italian legionary leaves hardly any doubt that he is the “true” Fascist body, that is, the stiffened, resistant, phallic body, existing in a state of readiness for war. This soldato-colono is indeed a “true,” if redundant, Fascist body as he is a phallic soldier who has an “erect” right arm, carries an “erect” spade on his left shoulder and is ready and prepared to start tilling the Libyan soil. Mussolini himself promoted his own body in this context as the duce-contadino or the primo rurale d’Italia (or, as Carlo Emilio Gadda caustically defines him in a passage from 83 Eros e Priano. il Trebbiatore) the prototype for all Italian males. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 83 Expressions such as “soldier-colonist,” as well as “the superb phalanx of Italian agricultural workers” (“la superba falange degli agricoltori italiani”; Gayda 62), “armed agricultural legions” (“legioni agricole annate”; Gayda 66), “the force of penetration” (“forza di penetrazione”), “to attack the land” (“aggredire la terra”), “the battle of the grain,” and “to take up the plow or the spade” further confirm the continuous and constant association of war and agricultural work within the Italian colonial context. Fueled by ancient and modem patriotic themes and ideals, Italy’s desperate need and desire for space produced an epic space in Africa where military and agricultural life, colonization and cultivation are inseparable. Notes: 1 1 use the term “genre” to refer to the colonial films sponsored by the Fascist regime following the critic Jean Gili. He organizes these films into a critical category because they all share the same themes and were shot in the span of only three years: 1936-39. The genre of the “African film” is normally considered to consist of eight narrative films: Lo squadrone bianco (1936) by Augusto Genina, II grande appello (1936) by Mario Camerini, Scinione l’africano (1937) by Carmine Gallone, Sentinelle di bronzo (1937) by Romolo Marcellini, Luciano Serra. pilota (1938) by Goffredo Alessandrini, Sotto la croce del sud (1938) by Guido Brignone, Piccoli naufraghi (1939) by Flavio Calzavara, Abuna Messias (1939) by Goffredo Alessandrini, and one documentary film: II cammino degli eroi (1937) by Corrado D’Errico. See Jean A. Gili, “Les films ‘Africans’ et l’exaltation du colonialism,” L’ltalie de Mussolini et son cinema 112-119. 2 Although, as Giorgio Bertellini has pointed out in “Colonial Autism: Whitened Heroes, Auditory and National Identity in Interwar Italian Cinema” (A Place in the Sun. Patrizia Palumbo, ed.), the name Sant’Elia bears a religious connotation, I believe that there is another referent for the character of Captain Sant’Elia in the film: Antonio Sant’Elia, the author of the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” (1914). Much praised by Futurists and later by Fascists as the “inventor” of modem Italian architecture and urbanism, during the ventennio Antonio Sant’Elia, who had died before Mussolini came to power, was virtually transformed into a fascist hero.This happened not so much because he had changed the direction of the Italian Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 84 architecture but because he had sacrificed his life to the fatherland. Sant’Elia died on October 10, 1916 fighting against the Austrians in the offensive against Trieste during World War I. For his heroism and sacrificial death he became a precursor of the legendary arditi ‘shock troops,’ who had formed the original nucleus of Fascism and to which various futurists had belonged. In Lo squadrone bianco. Captain Sant’Elia, who clearly represents the Fascist soldier and hero, is modelled after Antonio Sant’Elia. Like Antonio Sant’Elia, Captain Sant’Elia dies fighting for Italy’s terre irredente (“unredeemed territories”). For more on the “legend” of Antonio Sant’Elia, see Esther Da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia 196-99. 3 The telefoni bianchi ‘white telephones’ was a cinematic genre of upper-class comedies produced during the inter-war period, named for their inclusion of a white telephone in the boudoir. The identifying features of these films were the evocation of a world of wealth and luxury and main characters whose greatest problem was marital infidelity. For a discussion of the white telephones films, see Marcia Landy. “Husbands and Lovers,” Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema. 1931- 1943. 4 For a thorough explanation of this traditional approach to the film, see Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus. 5 On Joseph Peyre’s novel L’ecadron blanc. see Pierre Boulanger, Le cinema colonial: de l’‘Atlantide’ a ‘Lawrence d’Arabie’ 94-7, and also the proceedings of the conference Joseph Pevre: l’homme de ses livres. 6 The colonial segment of the film is commonly interpreted as “the African story” or “the colonial dream” because, as Vito Zagarrio has suggested, the prologue and the epilogue can be seen as the “real” film whereas the central part of the film (which differs completely from the images of the urban culture of the prologue and epilogue) can be seen as Mario Ludovici’s dream about “broad deserts and empty silences” (162). Moreover, the slow and endless procession of the camels in the desert has a sort of dream-like atmosphere. 7 According to Roslynn Haynes, these are two of the most important characteristics attributed to the desert in European, and more generally Western, culture. Haynes gives a compelling account of the notion of “desert” in European culture in Seeking the Center: The Australian Desert in Literature. Art, and Film. 8 “Tutto il racconto della missione del capitano Sant’Elia e subordinato alia rappresentazione figurativa del viaggio dello squadrone nel deserto.. . . II vero punto di forza del film e tutto in questa parte che neutralizza il discorso ideologico e libera il fascino delle figure di cammelli e uomini che marciano in controluce e riempiono Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 85 l’immagine cambiando di continuo linee di movimento e disposizioni” (Brunetta 140). Unless otherwise noted, all English translations from Italian books, poems, journals, and films in this chapter are mine. 9 The advertising poster of Lo squadrone bianco can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 10 As David Slavin has pointed out, the history of the Tuareg, the nomads who ruled the inner Sahara, was turned into “mythistory” to justify Europe’s imperialist position on the nature of colonial rule in Africa. According to this “mythistory,” the Tuareg nomads were the last claimants to the Berber myth. This myth considered the Berbers, one of the ethnic groups populating North Africa, as “imperfectly islamicized” because descendants of Europeans. Because of their ethnic origins, they would ally with the Europeans against the Arabs (Colonial Cinema and Imperial France. 1919-1939 35-48). 11 Following Giorgio Rochat’s chronology, I consider Italy’s colonial period the span of time that begins with the acquisition of the rights to the Bay of Assab on the Red Sea (a strip of land six kilometers long) by the Rubattino Shipping Company from Genoa on November 15, 1869 and ends with the siege of Tripoli, the last bulwark of the Italian Empire in Africa, by the British troops, which had already taken possession of the rest of Libya on January 23,1943. 12 a visual representation of the utopian Italian-African space, one in which all Italian colonies in Africa are contiguous and unified, can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 13 For a thorough treatment of the European exploration of the African territory beyond the coastal regions, see Cristopher Hibbert, Africa Explored: Europeans in the Dark Continent. 1769-1889. 14 Here I rely in particular on Edward Said’s notion of “imaginative geography” and W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of “landscape.” Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are based on the notion of “imaginative geography” as the invention and construction of a geographical space -such as the Orient or the Desert— with little attention paid to the actuality of the geography and its inhabitants. In a similar way, Mitchell’s notion of “landscape” in his essays “Imperial Landscape” and “Holy Landscape” as something to be seen and not touched deals with the reduction of a territory or site to a mere visual image. I discuss in more details Mitchell’s notion of landscape in the Introduction to Chapter II of this study. For a discussion of “landscape imagery” as a powerful mode of knowledge and social engagements, see also Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 86 15 For an understanding of how the nomads who live in the desert perceive and define it, see Khaldun, Ibn, “Bedouin civilization, savage nations and tribes and their condiitons of life, including several basic and explanatory statements,” The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History 91-122, and Julia Clancy-Smith, “A Desert Civilization: The Pre-Sahara of Algeria and Tunisia, c. 1800-1830,” Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables. Populist Protest. Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia. 1800- 1904111-32. Moreover, a compelling exploration of the desert in relation to nomadism is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizofrenia 351-423. 16 The desert interpreted as a terrifying void can be one of the settings for the Gothic. For a further account on this issue, see Roslynn Haynes “A Gothic Desert,” Seeking the Center 184-208. The vast expance of apparently empty space was frequently described by European explorers in Gothic terms of enclosure and entrapment, as Haynes maintains, “by the physical barriers erected by a seemingly hostile Nature, and by the equally effective detention produced by drought, heat, thirst, and the legitimate fear of being lost, both physically and spiritually. Like the horrors of the Gothic novel, these naturally produced terrors mocked the failure of European rationality to exert control” (Haynes 77). 17 “E fatale che verso questo vuoto debbano irresistibilmente tendere, domani, come oggi, come nel passato — le energie rigogliose della nostra razza” (“La vanga, Taratro e la razza.” La difesa della razza. 20 febbraio 1939: 26; emphasis mine). 18 Benito Mussolini’s speech “II Fascismo ai rurali,” 25 maggio 1922 (published in La difesa della razza. 5 agosto 1939: 8). 19 My etymological explanation of the words “cultivation,” “civilization,” and “colonization” stems from David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism. Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration 5. For another definition of “culture,” see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature 11-20. 20 The ambivalence of colonial mimicry is also acted out by the ascaro El Fennek, a character in the film that I describe later in this chapter. 2 1 1 use here the expression “spatial story” both with the meaning of “a story about space “ and with the meaning that Michel de Certeau assigns to it. Stories, maintains de Certeau, are “metaphors,” that is a means of transportation, as metaphorai. the Greek meaning of the word reminds one, because “every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 87 itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.” In this sense, de Certeau adds, “every story is a travel story --a spatial practice” (115). 22 For an analysis of Italian emigration to the Americas --the primary destinations of migrant flows from Italy, see Emilio Franzina, Italiani al Nuovo Mondo: L’emigrazione italiana in America, 1492-1942. 23 “Per piu di mezzo secolo l’espansionismo italiano, di stampo liberaldemocratico e poi fascista, ha sempre posto in cima a tutte le giustificazioni delle campagne coloniali la fame di terra e di spazio di un popolo ormai incapace di vivere e di produrre entro i confini troppo angusti della penisola” (Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale. Vol. 3, 192; emphasis mine). 24 In fact, the French adopted the “Roman model” of land exploitation but, differently from Italy, they also sent African soldiers to fight wars for France in Europe. For a general sense of the role played by the corps etrangers in fighting wars alongside French soldiers starting from World War I, see Panivong Norindr, “Mourning, Memorials, and Filmic Traces: Reinscribing the Corps etrangers and Unknown soldiers in Bertrand Tavemier’s Films.” 25 The A.O.I. (Africa Orientale Italiana) was constituted by Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Italian Somaliland. These last two colonies, much smaller than Libya and Ethiopia, are not mentioned directly in the present discussion. However, they are part of the u- topian Italian-African space that the colonial rhetoric attempted to shape, as explained in footnote 12. 26 For a brief but exhaustive discussion of further reasons for the similarity between the colonial politics of Liberal Italy and Fascist Italy, see Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale.Vol. 2, 3-8. Moreover, an excellent example of how this colonial rhetoric was already an integral part of Liberal (democratic) Italy is Giovanni Pascoli’s famous article “La grande Proletaria si e mossa” in the newspaper La Tribuna, 27 novembre 1911 (published in Rochat, II colonialismo italiano 87-90). 27 For more on the role that Gabriele D’Annunzio played in this respect see my article “Giving Power to the Masses: Pastrone’s Cabiria Revisited Through its Crowd Scenes.” 28 The original project of the Laudi del cielo. del mare, della guerra e degli eroi had foreseen seven books. Each book had to be dedicated to one of the Pleiades, the seven sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, who Zeus turned into constellations after their death. However, D’Annunzio wrote only five books of Laudi: Maia or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Laus vitae (1903), Alcyone (1903), Elettra (1904), Merope (1911-12), and Canti della guerra latina (1914-18). 29 An earlier version of Section 2 of this chapter entitled “Black Shirts/Black Skins: Fascist Italy’s Colonial Anxieties and Lo Squadrone Bianco” appears in Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (forthcoming in 2003). 30 For an account of the influence of the Futurist movement on Lo squadrone bianco, see Vito Zagarrio, “Ideology Elsewhere: Contradictory Models of Italian Fascist Cinema,” Robert Sklar and Charles Musser, eds., Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History 149-172. Zagarrio provides also an interesting analysis of Lo squadrone bianco in relation to the Hollywood film Morocco by Joseph von Sternberg (1930), and the French novel l’Escadron blanc by Joseph Peyre, which inspired the film Lo squadrone bianco. 31 “Questi tormentati da chissa che. Questi che si buttano nell’acqua senza saper nuotare. Che cosa crede di essere venuto a fare qui? L’ufficiale o l’uomo della luna?” 32 “Bada, Cristiana, mi sento capace di tutto. Capisci? Di tutto! Fo’ paura a me stesso.” 33 a still frame capture of this scene can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 34 El Fennek is the only Libyan character that actually communicates with the white (Italian) officers. Played by the Italian actor Cesare Polacco whose face is painted, speaks Italian like a stereotypical African, that is by using only verbs in the infinitive mood. In the film, Captain Sant’Elia appoints the “civilized” El Fennek as the young lieutenant’s orderly (“attendente”) because he is the only Libyan soldier who speaks “an understandable Italian” (“un italiano possibile”). El Fennek is a soldier who, when it is needed, also serves cups of coffee in the morning and often reassures the Italian soldiers that they are all “in the hands of God” (“siamo nelle mani di Dio”). The character of El Fennek in the film cannot be overlooked. To the contrary, he should be given particular consideration because he represents one of the stereo typical (to such an extent that he becomes ridiculous) images of Italian colonialism in Africa: the ascaro. 35 “Chiudi labbra, no respirare sabbia. Sabbia consumare uomini come consumare pietre.” 36 “Allora ci batteremo!” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 89 37 “Mario non esiste piu. E rimasto laggiu sotto la sabbia come Sant’Elia.” 38 “Coloro che sono pronti a dare la vita per la passione che nutrono per questa terra.” Captain Bettini is not a character in the film because he has already died when the narrative starts. He is mentioned several times by the people who live at the fort who knew him. Moreover, he is highly praised by Captain Sant’Elia, who has a picture of him on his office desk. 39 “Gli italiani gia andavano popolando la Tunisia prima che vi arrivassero — nel 1881— i ffancesi e da antichi tempi avevano avviato la valorizzazione di quelle terre soli e da soli, in mezzo a pericoli sacrifici stenti e lotte, e col piu duro e tenace lavoro.. . . Vanga e aratro possono essere presi a simbolo luminoso della nostra [razza], perche sono essi che ne dilatano ininterrottamente i confini: sono la vanga e l’aratro che hanno consacrato all’Italia la Tunisia” (“La vanga, l’aratro e la razza.” La difesa della razza. 20 febbraio 1939: 25). See also “Tunisia: colonia franco- italiana.” (L’ltalia coloniale. XVI. 1,15 gennaio 1939: 6). 40 Interesting enough, the ancient Romans severely exploited the soil of the Maghrebian territory, which two thousand years ago had a climate more favorable to agriculture than today, for the purpose of producing wheat. As the Tunisian historian Abdallah Laroui points out, Africa interested the Romans exclusively as a producer of wheat. In the first century BCE wheat was the only crop encouraged in the African territories, since the Italian peninsula was still capable of growing the other foodstuffs it needed. Not until the second century BCE does one find, hand in hand with the extension of the growing wheat to the high plateaus in the south, a return to the intensive cultivation of olive trees and vineyards (Laroui, The History of the Maghrib 33). 41 The Italian verb valorizzare applied to agriculture does not have an equivalent in English. For this reason, I decided to translate the Italian expression valorizzare il terreno into the circumlocution “to realize the value (or the potential) of the land.” 42 D’Annunzio’s position is ambivalent in this respect as he sometimes presents the peasant world as sickness and degeneration and, at other times, praises the qualities and values of agricultural workers. For a discussion of D’Annunzio position vis-a-vis the peasant world, see Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies, and Jared Becker, “A Spiritual Socialism,” Nationalism and Culture 35-73. 43 In D ’Annunzio’s colonial drama, Corrado Brando, the protagonist, organizes a colonial expedition in Africa. Mocked or at best ignored by the governmental organizations he addresses for funds, Brando decides to act on his own. He thus robs Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 90 and kills an usurer, is discovered, and ultimately kills himself before he can be arrested. For an analysis of Piu che l’amore. see Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Gifts, Sex, and Guns: Italian Explorers in Africa, 1860-1910,” Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, and Mary Ann Witt, The Search for Modem Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. 44 Corrado Brando’s Latin line Teneo te, Africa will be the title of D’Annunzio’s book defending Mussolini’s campaign in Abyssinia. This book is also D’Annunzio’s last book (1936). 45 It is Dante that first attributes to Ulysses the Faustian characteristic of streben in Inferno. Canto XXVI. 46 One of D’Annunzio’s famous denrecatio temporum is delivered by Claudio Cantelmo, the main character of the novel Le vergini delle rocce (1896). 47 The patriotic songs by Giosue Carducci are the Odi barbare. 48 For a Dannunzian description of the desert clearly and unmistakably influenced by Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. see Maia. XIX.22-122. 49 The most important “real” reason is that the Italian defeat at Adua (1896), the most devastating defeat suffered by a European power on African soil, had a dramatic impact on Italian public opinion and in the Parliament that forced the Italian government to consider seriously the possibility of putting an end to colonial adventures in Africa. For an account of the Italian colony of Eritrea, see Giulia Barrera, “The Construction of Racial Hierarchies in Colonial Eritrea (1897-1934),” Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun. 50 This image is included in an issue of the publication L’ltalia coloniale (III. 12. 1926), a monthly supplement to the magazine L’Hlustrazione italiana.The frontispice on the cover of each issue of L’ltalia coloniale specifies that the publication is intended to be “the organ of both the Italian colonies of direct dominion and of the Italian people abroad” (“organo delle nostre colonie di diretto dominio e della gente italiana negli altri paesi;” translation mine). It seems that even through magazines they were trying to channel Italians who were emigrating to the African colonies and to give a sense of identity to the Italians who had already emigrated in other countries so that Italy could check what had been in the past a disorganized and dispersed emigration. The image can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 91 Moreover, for a discussion on the representation of places or social groups (such as nations) by allegorical women, see Gillian Rose, “Place as Womanf’ Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge 56-61. 51 Fascists used the so-called Roman salute, that is, the imperial Roman gesture of salutation, whose reintroduction seems to originate in the film Cabiria by Giovanni Pastrone and its diffusion is due to Gabriele D’Annunzio, who wrote the intertitles for the film. 52 Mussolini proclaimed that the regime’s intention was not to create a “new Italy” but, rather, “to make ancient Italy work” (“Noi non creiamo una Italia nuova, mettiamo l’antica in marcia”; “Caratteri della romanita.” La difesa della razza. 5 agosto 1938:23). 53 From “Canto augurale per la nazione eletta.” It is the closing poem of Elettra. the second book of the Laudi. It was first published on November 16,1899 in the journal Nuova Antologia. 54 “Ode pour la resurrection latine” is the opening poem of Canti della guerra latina. the fifth book of the Laudi.This poem was first published in the French newspaper Figaro on August 13, 1914. From the early 1910 to June 1914, when World War I began, D ’Annunzio lived in Paris. He had left Italy to flee from his debts and later used to call the period of time he spent in Paris his “golden exile” (“l’esilio dorato”), clearly a self-imposed exile. 55 “Trovammo i pozzi romani. E le massicciate romane, le dighe di sassi giu per i pendii degli uadi per trattenere il terreno buono. Ed i serbatoi romani e le altre opere idrauliche. E finalmente il castello romano che proteggeva dalle cime i lavori agricoli. Tutto, per cosi dire, lo scheletro della stupenda amministrazione romana sta ancora nelle solitudini della Cirenaica” (Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia 54). 56 Although a consciousness of the Mediterranean as a cultural unity existed long before the nineteenth century, woven through centuries of commerce and communication, the concept of Mediterraneanism began to emerge in Italian political culture in the late nineteenth century precisely with the first attempts at colonial expansion. For a brief but compelling discussion on the concept of Mediterraneanism, see Mia Fuller, “Mediterraneanism,” Environmental Design 8-9. For the revival of the concept of mare nostrum in post-Unification Italy, see also Lorenzo Braccesi, L’antichita aggredita 19-89. 57 “[...] l’esercizio dell’agricoltura, il quale piega l’uomo verso Talma parens frugum. gli da la serenita del saggio, il senso religioso della vita e della dignita Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 92 umana (in sintesi l’humanitas romana)” (“Coltivare nell’infanzia l’orgoglio di razza.” La difesa della razza. 5 febbraio 1939: 14). “Agricoltura vera significa innanzi tutto amore per la terra, amore che si manifesta nell’eleggere un domicilio stabile, nel lavorare la terra, e su di questa sudare e sperare, ma che si manifesta altresi con infinite altre espressioni di vita rurale che distinguono gli individui, le famiglie, i popoli agricoltori da quelli che lo sono meno o che non lo sono affatto” (“Ambiente naturale e caratteri biopsichici della razza italiana.” La difesa della razza. 5 agosto 1938: 21). 58 The Italian verb bonificare ‘to reclaim the land’ comes from the Medieval Latin bonificare composed of bonus ‘good’ and facere ‘make, render.’ It means to clear a land from the causes that hinder its cultivation. As a consequence, bonifica ‘land reclamation’ is the collection of projects undertaken to reclaim the swampy regions and turn them into cultivable land. The bonifica integrate ‘total land reclamation’ undertaken by the Fascist regime was the total reclamation of a territory so that besides hydraulic and agrarian works, they were also building roads, waterworks, houses, and so on. In other words, the regime built towns ex novo on the reclaimed territories. To give only an example, the citta nuove ‘new towns’ that were built between 1932 and 1939 on the reclaimed land of the Agro Pontino, near Rome, were Littoria (nowadays Latina), Sabaudia, Pontinia, Aprilia, and Pomezia. For a discussion of the Fascist “new towns,” see Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities. Renato Besana, Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Leonardo Devoti, and Luigi Prisco, Metafisica costruita. and Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, Architettura italiana d’oltremare. 1870-1940. 59 On “ruralization” and Fascism’s anti-urbanization campaign see Victoria de Grazia, “The Penetration of the Countryside,” The Culture of Consent 94-126, and Anna Treves, “La politica antiurbana del fascismo e un secolo di resistenza all’urbanizzazione industriale in Italia,” Umberto Mioni, ed., Urbanistica Fascista. On a different note, for a very interesting discussion of the place of agriculture in a modem nation and in colonial and nationalist discourses of progress, see Akhil Gupta, “Agrarian Populism in the Development of a Modem Nation,” Postcolonial Developments 33-105. Moreover, at the risk of stating the obvious, within the context of ruralization, Antonio Gramsci’s Southern Question cannot be forgotten, since it provides a discussion of the actual reasons why the Italian government promoted ruralization. 60 “. . . s’e fatto in italia tutto quanto era possibile per dare agli italiani le ultime terre nazionali utili al lavoro, emerse dalla palude o sottratte all’arsura delle regioni senz’acqua” (Gayda 70). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 93 61 “Un popolo senza spazio non pud vivere; un popolo portatore di una antica e magnifica civilta come il popolo italiano ha dei diritti sulla faccia della terra” (L’ltalia coloniale. XI.5. 1934: 15). 62 David Attenborough describes the ecological legacy of the Roman Empire in these terms: “The insatiable mouth of the Roman Empire devoured the land, clearing it for the extensive cultivation of wheat and leading to irreversible erosion in regions that were once fertile.. . . The provinces of North Africa were, originally, among the richest in all the Empire. Six hundred cities flourished along the African shore between Egypt and Morocco .... By the end of the first century A.D., North Africa was producing half a million tons of grain every year and suplying the huge city of Rome, which had outstripped its own agricultural resources, with two-thirds of its wheat. The end was not long in coming. There is still argument as to how much a change in climate contributed to the final collapse. The balance of opinion seems to be that, though rainfall did diminish, the crucial blow was the stripping away of trees and the relentless ploughing and reploughing to extract maximum tonnage of crops. Year after year the soil of the fields was lost. In summer it was baked by the sun and blown away by the hot winds. In the winter, rain storms swilled away and rivers carried it down to the coast and deposited it in their deltas . . . All along the African coast, the land dried out. Wheat could no longer be grown; olives, which had once been prohibited by law lest they should displace the more highly valued wheat, were the only crops that would grow. Then even they began to fail. The human population dwindled. Sand blew through the stony fields and the grandiose buildings tumbled into ruins. Today, the harbor at Leptis, where once great ships came to fill their holds with grain, is buried beneath sand dunes” (The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man 117-181. 63 A graphic representation of how much desert had already be brought back to cultivation in just a few years of hard work by the Italian colonists can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 64 This image can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 65 “. . . rompere il durissimo, millenario copertone messovi dai venti del deserto ma soprattutto lasciatovi mettere dall’inerzia degli abitanti e degli antichi dominatori.” (L’Italia coloniale. X.2. 1929: 24). 66 “La civilta che fa dei campi un deserto e una civilta suicida” (“Terra e razza.” La difesa della razza. 20 agosto 1939: 12). 67 “[Sjpento il culto di Cerere, isterilita la potenza demografica, anche gli Imperi si dissolsero” (“Terra e razza.” La difesa della razza. 20 agosto 1939: 11). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 94 68 “Gli imperi vacillano quando non li sostiene il lavoro delle masse nazionali le quali identifichino nelle terre che coltivano e amano la ragione stessa della loro vita” (Gayda 66). 69 This image can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 70 For a discussion on the “smiling negress,” see Karen Pinkus, Bodily regime 50-8, and also Klau Theweleit, “Woman: Territory of Desire,” Male Fantasies. Vol.l, 294- 300. 71 For a further discussion of Fascism’s treatment of crowds and mind-matter pluralism of crowds see Barbara Spademan. “Rhetoric of Virility: D ’Annunzio, Marinetti, Mussolini, Benjamin” (Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric. Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy 1-33). 72 “Questa nostra solida razza di contadini, che ha colonizzato tutte le terre del mondo sotto le piu diverse latitudini, ed ha trasformato in fiorenti giardini e in opulenti campi coltivati la solitudine dei deserti” (Gayda 53). 73 “Dovunque vi sia della terra da fecondare col sudore umano e colie sementi, dovunque vi siano zolle da redimere, ben di rado vediamo mancare l’affermazione della nostra razza; quasi sempre la vediamo spiegata tutta la passione del nostro contadino che in breve volgere di tempo trasforma la sua sede di elezione, come in un lembo della sua Patria: in un’oasi di italianita per se e per la propria famiglia, e per tutti coloro che vi sopraggiungono. L’amore per l’agricoltura ha profonde radici nella preistoria presso la razza italiana, insieme con 1 ’amore per le arm i;. . . tali due passioni sono state fin d’allora intimamente collegate sul nostro substrato spirituale” (“La razza italiana nella preistoria.” La difesa della razza. 20 luglio 1939: 10). 74 From this perspective, Italy’s African colonies can be compared to the American West. Although developed on a much bigger scale, the concept of the American West was all the same invented, defined and then instilled into national consciousness. See William H. Truettner. The West as America: Interpreting Images of the Frontier. 1820-1920. and John Henry Smith. Virgin Land. 75 “Una vasta oasi bianca nel continente nero” (Gayda 71), “la nuova terra italiana” (Gayda 9), “il nostro nuovo mondo,” or “un posto al sole.” 76 “. . . partiti volontari con il sogno di una terra da colonizzare e da guadagnare con il rischio della vita. Ora, deposte le armi, riprenderanno sulla terra che hanno conquistato, il loro lavoro agricolo. [Essi] sono passati automaticamente dal servizio militare al servizio civile e si sono trasformati da soldati in coloni” (Gayda 50, 54). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 95 77 The image of the fante-contadino came into verbal and visual existence during World War I. In 1911, about 50 years after its political unification, 58% of Italy’s population (which amounted to 36 millions) were peasants. This meant that about 50% of the total of Italians who were recalled to arms during World War I (1915- 1918) were agricultural workers. They were usually enlisted as infantrymen. Without any doubt, the infantry was the army corps which, during the war, suffered the heaviest losses. The proof of what I have just stated is the fact that, at the end of the war, 64% of the war orphans were peasants’ children. Thus, one can definitely say that the Italian social stratum who left the most striking social mark to the mobilization and the bloodshed of the Great War was the rural population. On the basis of this reality, a great deal of rhetoric was fabricated both during the war and in the years following it. The opposition between fanti-contadini and onerai-imboscati. for instance, is an example of the rhetorical exploitation of the class of Italians who had suffered the greatest losses during the war. With the contrapposition fanti- contadini/onerai-imboscati Liberal (and pre-fascist) Italy exalted the patient sacrifice and the resigned submission of the agricultural workers mainly to censor the fighting attitude of the urban proletariat (at the time, the factory workers were attempting, for the first time in Italian history, to organize themselves in order to fight for better working and living conditions). For more on the figure of the fante contadino. see Antonio Gibelli, “Da contadini a italiani,” La grande guerra degli italiani 85-170. 78 “I fanti hanno costruito le trincee con la zappa, le mine, la pazienza.. . . la fanteria ha un eroismo non evidente. Non garibaldina, bersagliera, ardita.. . . II fante maledice e fa quel che deve fare. Maledice e sta, maledice e non molla, maledice e avanza. Maledice e incassa. La sua capacita di incassare va oltre il limite umano, e paurosa.” “[La fanteria e] il popolo dell’esercito, della nazione; con essa sono i popoli stessi che fanno la guerra, e cosi la fanno nazionale, che anche l’arte della guerra vuole temperamento di popolo, come tutte le altre” (“Fanti e contadini nerbo dell’esercito.” La difesa della razza. 5 novembre 1939:15). 79 “I fanti erano tutti contadini. Erano contadini, come i loro progenitori peligni, equi, marsi, vestini, marracini; erano fanti e contadini, come quelli del Lazio, come i sanniti, come i guerrieri della lega italica, come i soldati di Cesare, com’e ancora la midolla, il serbatoio della nostra razza. II carattere dei nostri volti italiani e rurale. Quelli piu nobili che vedi, sanno ancora di terra. E’ contadina la nostra razza piu pura, e ogni contadino italiano ha una genealogia da patriarca, e un re” (“Fanti e contadini nerbo dell’esercito.” La difesa della razza. 5 novembre 1939: 15). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 96 80 “Del resto i veri romani ebbero sempre tre sole occupazioni: l’agricoltura, la guerra, il govemo della cosa pubblica. Sdegnarono il commercio e lo lasciarono ai liberti e ai forestieri;. . . e ebbero una meravigliosa religione . . . pubblica e devota agli dei della guerra, del popolo e della terra” (“Virtu guerriere della razza italiana.” La difesa della razza. 5 Nov. 1939: 9). 81 The photograph can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 82 See Karen Pinkus, “The Fascist Body as Producer and Consumer,” Bodily Regimes 82-149. 83 In truth, Mussolini often visited agricultural fields while vacationing in the Italian countryside. In these occasions, he never forgot to have himself photographed, always rigorously bare-chested (to stress the association between agriculture and the “healthiness” of the Italian race), either working the land with a plow or atop a tractor pulled by oxen or driving a motorplough (usually branded with the name “Italia”) through the fields. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 97 CHAPTER II: THE MOUNTAIN 1. Introduction: TheAlps, from No Man’s Land to Mountainscape to Mountaineering The Alps are Europe’s most majestic mountain range. Springing in the West from the Tenda Pass above Nice, the Alps’ main chain of summits runs in a 700-mile arc to the south-west of Vienna and enters the morphological configuration of six European countries: France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.1 Lesser offshoots of the Alpine range stretch southward to the Adriatic and the Balkans. The Alps are tremendously high, rough and cold. Within the central range, which in places is 120 miles (200 kilometers) wide, there are hundreds of peaks higher than 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), a dozen higher than 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) and one, Mont Blanc, which at 15,771 feet (4,807 meters) is the highest in western Europe. So high are the mountains that they form one of the continent’s great climatic barriers, absorbing the moisture from prevailing winds to divide Europe into two climate regions: the cold, wet north, and the warm, dry south. They are rough as well as high. Thrust up by the tectonic collision that welded the Italian peninsula onto mainland Europe, they display the earth’s crust in all its rawness. Above all, however, the Alps are cold. For most of the year the high peaks are covered with snow, and between them lay glaciers, fields of year-round ice whose offshoots dribble menacingly into the valleys below. Although they lie at the cultural crossroads of Europe, where French, Italian and Germanic influences meet, the Alps were with a few exceptions a blank on the map until the nineteenth century. They are Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 98 neither distant nor foreign (the two most important characteristics of a land fit for exploration) but they share with the North and South Poles and the African continent (the nineteenth century’s most prominent territories of exploration) the same aura of inaccessibility. Apart from a few pockets of civilization such as Geneva or Berne and some well-trodden passes that mainly pilgrims traveling to Rome and young aristocrats on their Grand Tour had to overcome, the Alps were a much feared alien world for many centuries. Scattered agricultural communities, inbred and disease-ridden, grazed livestock on the upper pastures but human beings rarely ventured in the extremely cold and icy world above those pastures. Thus, like all things unknown and unexplained, the Alps were a great source of terror and superstition. Until the late eighteenth century scientists believed that humans could not survive at such high 2 altitude, and that monsters and dragons lived in those mountains. Thus, when people approached the Alps, it was only to cross their passes as hastily as they could, alert for impending danger. Many travelers crossed the Alps blindfolded for fear that they would be overwhelmed by the view. Such was the ignorance surrounding the Alps that most of their mountains did not have a name and, if they did, they were called “the Accursed,” “the Unapproachable,” “the Devil’s Pinnacle,” “Mount Misfortune,” or by similar names. Moreover, the very word “alp” was itself a misnomer. When early geographers had pointed at the peaks and asked what they were called, local mountain dwellers had replied alpes. But alp was literally a field. It was the name given to the high-level meadows on which they grazed their stock in the summer (i.e. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 99 alpine pasture); they had no words for the mountains themselves. Thus, the name “Alps” became yet another reminder of how little Europeans knew of the wilderness in the middle of their continent. Only starting in the second half of the nineteenth century the Alps developed meaning through spatial practices of new social groups. Exploration was fuelled by their stunning views and later by the desire to climb their peaks. Leslie Stephen (Virginia W oolfs father) summarizes well the general and deep-rooted opinion about the Alps when he states that the Alpine region remained for many centuries a mystery comprising “great excrescences of earth, which to outward appearance indeed have neither use nor comeliness” (2). Stephen’s statement highlights one of the hardest obstacles that not only mankind but also any cosmology or geological theory had to overcome for centuries: the imperfections of the crust of the earth we call mountains. Generally speaking, pagan antiquity did not give any cognitive or aesthetic value to natural phenomena that were considered 3 hindrances to any kind of human activity. Later, Christianity only confirmed this perception of the mountains by fostering an interpretation of Genesis that saw the mountains as the result of the original sin. Because of human corruption, God punished all of nature with the Flood. In other words, the Flood, the curse of God upon two millennia of human sin, was thought to have affected not only human nature but also external nature, including the topography of the terrestrial globe. In fact, in the Bible, mountains appear only after the Flood. According to Christian theology, Nature suffered from mankind’s moral corruption and for this reason it Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 100 now presents itself as flawed and messy. Thus, the blemishes on nature (i.e. 4 mountains) are both a consequence and physical evidence of human depravity. It was not until the eighteenth century that a Christian notion of “mountain gloom” was supplanted by “mountain glory” (Nicolson). In the light of the new mechanicist science bom out of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century, many scientists were determined to find a way to explain the origin and the development of the universe. In particular, scientists began to talk about the flaws of the earth’s surface with a new language purged of pathological anatomy. They began to feel the need to experience nature first hand. Thus, they started to travel and physically explore the most problematic natural phenomena, the irregularities of nature, the inequalities of the earth’s morphology such as mountains, which, until that time had been avoided as both uninteresting and frightful. A new paradigm would be substituted in toto for the Aristotelian and Biblical paradigm which was based on the belief that the universe was orderly, uniform, geometrically perfect, and mirroring the divinity that created and gave order to it. The change in basic conceptions of the structure of the earth in which mankind lived and the structure of the universe of which the earth is a part involved a reversal of human attitudes toward mountains, both from a cognitive and an aesthetic viewpoint. Most important for my study, this change in attitude marked the beginning of the perception of mountains as an epic space. Whether arousing scientific or artistic interest or strong aesthetic emotions, from now on mountains in general, and the Alps in particular, are no longer a space of repression, evasion, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 101 a meaningless space but, rather, a meaningful space worth investigating and exploring. In order for mountains to become a meaningful space, their origin had to be established. Thomas Burnet, a philosopher, scientist of Cartesian training, and churchman played an essential role in providing mountains a past. He crossed the Alps in 1672 while guiding a young English aristocrat on his Grand Tour. The direct experience of the Alpine landscape provoked in Burnet’s mind a sudden theoretical collapse: There is nothing doth more awaken our thoughts or excite our minds to enquire into the causes of such things, than the actual view of them; as I have had experience my self when it was my fortune to cross the Alps and Apennine Mountains; for the sight of those wild, vast and undigested heaps of Stones and Earth, did so deeply strike my fancy, that I was not ease till I could give my self some tolerable account how that confusion came in Nature. At the sight of the Alps he was forced to put into question a whole worldview. He became convinced that the biblical account of Creation as it was at that time understood could not explain the appearance of the world (Macfarlane 26). In particular, he puzzled over the creation of mountains and felt the need to formulate a “sacred theory” of the earth in order to try to understand the origin of this chaotic, alien landscape. His reflections and research were published in 1681 in Latin with the title Telluris theoria sacra, and translated into English in 1684 with the title The Sacred Theory of the Earth. The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 102 look upon with more pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things, that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions; We do naturally, upon such occasions, think of God and his greatness: and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and over-bear the mind with their Excess, 6 and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration. In formulating his own theory of the origin of the earth, he also expressed in nuce the aesthetic concept of the sublime which will be thoroughly theorized by Burke and Kant. In the above passage Burnet compares the mountains to the sky and the sea. Seeing them, his mind is overwhelmed by something so powerful that it cannot be comprehended or mastered from an intellectual point of view but generates a new and strange pleasure which fills the mind with wonder and even horror. It is the irregular, irrational, asymmetric, and monstrous vastness of the scene, comparable to the starry sky and the ocean, that generates this new feeling of pleasure in a nature that is rationally abhorred precisely because of its lack of order. Later, Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) will maintain that it is sublime “terror” prompted by the strange verticality of the Alps that is most capable of producing what the first-century Greek philosopher Longinus had called hvnsos, ecstasy or transport. This became the foundation of an entire aesthetic of mountains that Romantic writers, by elaborating, interpreting, and transforming this notion of the sublime, will develop into a literature that represented mountains within the realm 7 of immaterial spirituality. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 103 Although scientists had known that the Alps were a unique environment for almost two hundred years and despite the change in the aesthetic attitude toward the Alps around mid-eighteenth century, nobody wanted to climb them. The first ascension of Mont Blanc, the highest alpine peak, dates to 1786. However, mostly for historic-political reasons, it was not until 1815, at the beginning of the post- 8 Napoleonic era, that the British “conquest” of the Alps began. Even though the first reports on the Alps were written by scientists, the real “propagandists” of the Alps were writers and artists. Indeed, those who made the Alps an attractive space 9 to explore were the Romantic writers. They offer one of the first examples of commercial writers and producers of culture. The reception of their writings, in many interesting ways, parallels the reception of works of art, such as films, in contemporary mass culture. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and other Romantic writers and artists were inpired by the view of the Alps. They did not look beyond the view. Yet they definitely encouraged a shift in attitude towards the Alps. Their perception of the Alps was part of a trend which writers such as Albrecht von Haller and Jean- Jacques Rousseau had started in the eighteenth century, but now, thanks to growing populations and increased prosperity, more people heard it.1 0 Or, perhaps, the way in which people received it was different. The Alps entered every literate person’s vocabulary and many readers were passionately stirred by the imagery and the language used to describe them. Far, from above, piercing the infinite sky, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 104 Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene— Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desert peopled by the storm alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone, And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously Its shapes are heaped around! Rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. -Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? Or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. (“Mont Blanc,” 60-75) The result of Percy B. Shelley’s reflections on the highest Alpine peak -a t whose sudden sight he felt an “esthetic wonder not unallied to madness,” as he wrote from Chamonix in a letter to his friend Thomas Peacock— is the poem “Mont Blanc.” Lord Byron was equally inspired by the sight of both Mont Blanc and the Bernese Alps. Some of his most famous works - Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The Prisoner of Chillon. a fable set in the castle of Chillon overlooking the Lake of Geneva and surrounded by the Swiss Alps, and Manfred, a dramatic poem set on the Jungfrau in the Bernese A lps- treat the subject. Once more upon the woody Apennine, The infant Alps, which - had I not before Gazed on their mightier parents, where the pine Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar The thundering lauwine - might be worshipped more; But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear Her never trodden snow, and seen the hoar Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both far and near, And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear. (Child Harold’s Pilgrimage. IV.LXXIII) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 105 Some years later, another prominent propagandist of the Alps, Albert Smith, changed the British view of these mountains. Indeed, it was thanks to him that people began to venture on the slopes of the Alps with the help of local guides. They wanted to experience the sublime sensation of “delightful terror” caused not only by the Alpine landscape but also by putting themselves at risk. Over the course of eight years he promoted them so successfully that hardly a soul in Britain remained unaware of their beauties and their hazards. In the early 1850s Albert Smith, “a Victorian showman” (Fleming 145), set off what The Times in 1857 described as “a perfect Mont Blanc mania” (159). He climbed Mont Blanc in 1851 and then put on a show and panorama The Ascent of Mont Blanc that opened on March 15,1852 at the Egyptian Hall in London. After watching or hearing about the show, many people wanted to experience Mont Blanc first hand and, for a decade and a half ~ what is now called the “golden age” of mountaineering— many members of the British liberal bourgeoisie vacationed in the Western Alps and climbed their peaks. Thus, mountaineering (in Italian, alpinismo) was originally associated with the spiritual and aesthetic transport of Romantic writers. However, by the early 1850s, mountaineering had become not simply a leisure sport but also a form of exploration. Smith greatly helped in the production of a territory of exploration accessible to many. By that time, mountaineering in the Alps had become so popular within the British bourgeoisie that, in the Western Alpine region, “English” was used as the generic adjective to describe anybody who loved to climb mountains. In was only by the turn of the century that European Alpine Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 106 countries, such as France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, started to claim the space of their mountains. The period following the Italian and German unification under Bismarck was one of increasing rivalry among imperial European states. In part this was expressed in open hostility but more frequently in a shifting, overlapping grid of initiatives, treaties, and alliances. For Britain, Bismarck’s goal of a continental league, which took partial shape in the Triple Alliance of 1882, began a process of increasing diplomatic isolation that culminated in the period immediately before and after the Boer War of 1898-1902 (Ellis 44-3). For these reasons, the British bourgeoisie, after having “conquered” most of the Alpine peaks in about two decades, left the Alps. Mountaineering became a spatial practice in need of definition and the Alps a topic of debate and a space of exploration by the so-called Alpine nations. While the attention shifted from the Western to the Eastern Alps (the Dolomites), they remained, as I will demonstrate, a bourgeois epic space. My discussion, then, focuses on the Alps as space and mountaineering as spatial practice. I do not intend to treat the Alps as theme since, when examined purely thematically, they lose their spatiality and are reduced to mere landscape. By landscape I mean to stress the representational qualities of the mountains as space whether this representation takes to form of discourse (as in poetry, fiction, travel literature) or a two-dimensional image (as in painting, photography, cinema) or three-dimensional image (as created by the human eye’s direct perception of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107 nature). As W.J.T. Mitchell has suggested, landscape is the visual or pictorial representation of the superficial face presented by natural terrain: Landscape is something to be see, not touched. It is an abstraction from place (i.e. site) and a reification of space (a practiced place), a reduction of it to what can be seen from a distant point of view, a prospect that dominates, frames, and codifies the landscape in terms of a set of fairly predictable conventions - poetic, picturesque, sublime, pastoral, and so on. (“Holy Landscape,” 197-98) A landscape, in other words, portrays an artificial space as if it were simply given and inevitable. Regardless of the emotions that is engendered, the Alps as landscape are assumed to be there, a deadened, immutable container or setting. Thus, “landscape” reinforces the traditional notion of space as absolute category that this dissertation as a whole attempts to undermine. 2. Mountain Films and Cinematic Space 2.1. Siegfried Kracauer’s Legacy Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) established criteria to analyze German films that became hegemonic and was adopted by many critics in subsequent years. Kracauer’s position still influences how current film critics and scholars approach much of classical German cinema (1918-40). In particular, his severe judgement regarding the Bergfilm has had the effect of preventing further discussion on this prominent film genre and has led to the postwar condemnation of the mountain film in general as a precursor of fascist ideals such as the glorification of myth, monumental nature, and heroism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 108 From Caligari to Hitler, a seminal and controversial work, focuses on the socio-psychological history of German cinema by analyzing films as the reflection of historical events from, roughly speaking, World War I to Hitler’s rise to power.1 ' Kracauer strives to illuminate what he considers “deep psychological dispositions” (5) prevalent in Germans, particularly Germans of the Weimar period (1919-1933). He believes that there are three main reasons why the “medium of the screen” reflects the mentality of a nation in a more direct way than other artistic media. First of all, films are not the product of an individual but, rather, of a collectivity: “Since any film production unit embodies a mixture of heterogeneous interests and inclinations, teamwork in this field tends to exclude arbitrary handling of screen material, suppressing individual peculiarities in favor of traits common to many people” (5). Second, films address themselves and appeal to the anonymous multitude. Therefore, “popular screen motifs can . . . be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires” (5). Finally, cinema exceeds other artistic media (such as popular magazines, radio broadcasts, bestsellers and ads) in reflecting the deep layers of collective mentality because films are able to scan and record the whole “visible world” (7). Thus, cinema — through camera movements, editing, and many special devices— exceeds other “sedimentary products,” that is, sources, of people’s cultural life in inclusiveness (16). It is Kracauer’s conviction that the economic, social, and political conditions resulting from Germany’s defeat in World War I do not suffice to explain “Hitler’s ascent and ascendancy” (11). For Kracauer, it is mainly the inner “psychological Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 109 dispositions” of the German people that offered fertile ground for the growing success of fascism. According to his study, the outward manifestations of these inner psychological configurations find expression in the films of the period. Kracauer spins a narrative out of the films he discusses — from the “archaic period” (1895- 1918) to the “pre-Hitler period” (1930-33) of German cinema— which mirrors German history’s descent to Hitler. Indeed, as Ellen M. Risholm has pointed out, the Germans’ predisposition to surrender to tyrannical authority figures can be read into virtually all the films Kracauer discusses (52). From Caligari to Hitler does recognize the importance of the Bergfilm within Weimar cinema and it is, without any doubts, the most influential critical account of the genre. At first, Kracauer sees mountain films as manifesting a desire to find a way out of the “crucial dilemma” between tyrannical rule and instinct-governed chaos that characterizes post-World War I German films in the wake of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920). He intends to analyze the genre of the Bergfilm as one of the endeavors by the cinematic medium to discover and offer a “modus vivendi, a tenable pattern of inner existence” (107) able to counter-balance the traumatic experience of World War I, its chaotic aftermath, and the everyday reality of the Weimar Republic characterized by a high degree of social, political, and economic instability. To this purpose, Kracauer praises the “discoverer” of the genre, Dr. Arnold Fanck, “a geologist infatuated with mountain climbing.” He admires Fanck as a film director for relying “on actors and technicians who were, or became, outstanding alpinists and skiers” (110). He also praises the Bergfilm as Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 110 genre for its rejection of the studio setting (typical of contemporary Expressionist cinema) in favor of authentic locations, and its documentary-style exploration of mountain peaks: These films were extraordinary in that they captured the most grandiose aspects of nature at a time when the German screen in general offered nothing but studio-made scenery.. . . As documents these films were incomparable achievements. Whoever saw them will remember the glittering white of glaciers against a sky dark in contrast, the magnificent play of clouds forming mountains above the mountains, the ice stalactites hanging down from roofs and windowsills of some small chalet, and, inside, crevasses, weird ice structures awakened to iridescent life by the torchlights of a nocturnal rescue party. (110-11) Even though the popularity of this genre soon led filmmakers to combine “precipices and passions, inaccessible steeps and insoluble human conflicts” (110), the fictional element did not interfere with the abundance of documentary shots of the silent world of high altitudes. As Eric Rentschler has rightly noticed, after this initial moment of “lyrical effusion,” of positive evaluation and praise of the genre, an abrupt change of tone occurs (“Mountains and Modernity” 139). Kracauer seems suddenly to shrug his shoulders and deny what he had just affirmed. He now claims that the splendid and exciting documentary images of the mountain films do not offer a way out of the “crucial dilemma,” or a “modus vivendi” as he had previously stated. On the contrary, these images reflect and popularize the rarefied sensibilities of the university students and the intellectuals who would travel to the mountains of Southern Germany on weekends: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I l l Long before World War I, groups of Munich students left the dull capital every weekend for the nearby Bavarian Alps, and there indulged their passions. Nothing seemed sweeter to them than the bare cold rock in the dim light of dawn. Full of Promethean promptings, they would climb up some dangerous ‘chimney,’ then quietly smoke their pipes on the summit, and with infinite pride look down on what they called ‘valley-pigs’ - those plebeian crowds who never made an effort to elevate themselves to lofty heights. Far from being plain sportsmen or impetuous lovers of majestic panoramas, these mountain climbers were devotees performing the rites of a cult. (Kracauer 111) Three elements can be singled out in the attitude Kracauer ascribes to these mountain climbers. First of all, he points out their longing to forget harsh reality by immersing themselves in the silent world of high mountains. Hence, the inevitable escapist character of these films: the cinematic images of a pristine world of snow-covered mountain peaks and overpowering elements naturalize and mythify economic and social inequity and pose an identical, timeless nature, a place beyond history, politics, crisis, and contradiction. Kracauer also stresses the fact that the narratives of the mountain films culminate in acts of heroism and self-sacrifice “rooted in a mentality kindred to the Nazi spirit” (112), an attitude that reveals itself as an “outlet for existing authoritarian tendencies” (251). Moreover, the glorification of glaciers and peaks demonstrates the climbers’ belief in the laws of the mighty and inscrutable nature and, as a consequence, their disdain for the statutes of civilization and urban life. These attitudes, Kracauer concludes, are “symptomatic of an antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize” (112). To demonstrate the ritual inclination of these mountain climbers Kracauer offers as examples two narrative films by Arnold Fanck. In both Per Berg des Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 112 Schicksals (The Mountain of Destiny. 1924) and Per Heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain. 1926), the main character is a fanatical mountain climber who performs a heroic deed by risking his own life. In the former, the male protagonist must climb, amidst a terrific storm, the impregnable Guglia del Diavolo to rescue his sweetheart, knowing that his father had died in the last of his many attempts to conquer that peak. In the latter, the male protagonist recognizes that Vigo, the friend with whom he is ascending a mountain, has feelings for the very young woman with whom he himself is in love. At the climax of the film, the protagonist angrily and suddenly turns to Vigo who involuntarily moves backward, loses his foothold and falls off the cliff. With his companion hanging in mid-air on the rope that connects them, the jealous protagonist, at first, seems to be determined to kill Vigo. In the end, however, he manages to master his fiery instincts and reconsiders. His attempt to rescue his friend Vigo is unsuccessful, however, and they both lose their lives. Commenting on a later film by Arnold Fanck, Kracauer goes even further with his accusations. He maintains that a film such as Sturme tiber dem Montblanc (Avalanche. 1930), besides picturing the horrors and beauties of the high mountains, emphasizes “majestic cloud displays” (257) that could perfectly serve as a prologue to Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the 1934 National Socialist Party Congress in 12 Nuremberg, the “definitive Nazi self-portrait.” Riefenstahl’s Per Triumph des Widens (The Triumph of the Will. 1935) begins with similar cloud masses surrounding Hitler’s airplane on its flight to Nuremberg. For Kracauer, this stunning similarity reveals the “ultimate fusion of the mountain cult and the Hitler cult” (258). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 113 The fact that Leni Riefestahl not only starred in many mountain films by Fanck but also directed one herself, Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light. 1932), only confirms, from Kracauer’s viewpoint, that the Bergfilme conformed to “a political regime which relies on intuition, worships nature and cultivates myths” (259). Although mountain films were thought of as apolitical when they were made, in retrospect, Kracauer, and other critics in his wake, considered the genre of the mountain film as a precursor of National Socialism, an “anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments” (Sontag 76). They appear as reactionary fantasies, anti-modem narratives that glorify submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might, anticipating fascist surrender to irrationalism and bmte force (Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity” 137). Kracauer’s work pointed out salient features of the Bergfilm, and thus defined it, but also limited comprehension of these films. In recent years, Eric Rentschler, without discarding Kracauer’s judgment, has tried to widen the perspectives on the Bergfilm by analyzing how this genre functioned within the Weimar Republic rather than within the Third Reich. From this perspective, Kracauer certainly left cmcial elements of these films uncharted such as, for instance, the wide acclaim the genre received from one end of the political spectmm to the other. In the essay “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm.” Rentschler writes: “Not only venerated by reactionary and nationalistic sectors, the Bergfilm engaged a host of supporters from the Left, indeed finding some of its most ardent partisans there” (143). Moreover, Kracauer had very little to say about the unbalanced relation between the stunning images of nature and the poor narratives, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 114 usually consisting of the typical romantic triangles of melodrama: the rivalry of two men over a woman. Together with the important fact that the genre of the mountain film is present in national cinemas other than German, these are only some of the issues that should be taken into consideration in order to complete Kracauer’s justifiable but partial discussion of the Bergfilm as reactionary or regressive parables. His circular project — the truth he seeks he finds clearly inscribed in the narrative— must be viewed in the context of its historical setting. From Caligari to Hitler was published in 1947, and therefore Kracauer did not have the advantage of distance to evaluate these film documents from the Weimar period. It was understandably difficult at this juncture in history to explore these films as perhaps something more than merely a passive showcase for the rising tide of “Hitlerism” (10). Siegfried Kracauer was caught up in the whirlwind of the horror of National Socialism and its aftermath, and his work was necessarily determined by that historical moment. Far from invalidating Kracauer’s argument, it is important to disengage the Bergfilm from this dominant model. Kracauer’s early view of the Bergfilm in From Caligari to Hitler demonstrates his appreciation of the genre for its reliance on non-actors, its documentary-style exploration of mountain peaks and, thus, the rejection of studio setting in favor of authentic location. What makes these films valuable to Kracauer is their exploration and recording of the physical, external, visible reality. In other words, Kracauer stresses the non-narrative aspects and the documentary-style photography of these films. Although he abruptly returns Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 115 to his preoccupation with the cinema’s relation to social and political reality, his initial praise of the Bergfilm provides a link with his other canonical work, Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) in which he elevates realism in cinema. In this text, Kracauer develops a theory of film based on the photographic nature of the cinematic medium. He conceives of film as a medium of representation whose realistic potential is grounded in photographic technology: Film is essentially an extension of photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked affinity for the visible world around us. Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality. Now this reality includes many phenomena which would hardly be perceived were it not for the motion picture camera’s ability to catch them on the wing, (xlix) This is the key assumption underlying the “material aesthetic” he elaborates. An aesthetic primarily based on content rather than form and on questions regarding the medium’s “specificity,” what film can do that traditional arts cannot, and what kind of film practice best succeeds in utilizing the aesthetic possibilities of the cinematic medium (Hansen viii). For Kracauer, the specificity of film is rooted emphatically in its photographically based ability to record and reveal — i.e. redeem— physical reality. also referred to as “material reality,” the visible world,” “nature,” “life,” “camera- reality,” or “the transitory world we live in.” To this purpose, he offers a vast catalogue of functions, “inherent affinities,” objects and films.1 3 2.2. The Bergfilm: Neither Romantic Revival nor Primitive Cinema Although mountain films are found early on in different national cinemas, it is the Bergfilm that acquired the greatest popularity and attracted mass audiences not only in Germany but also in many European countries (some were also released in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 116 14 North America and Japan). With a few exceptions, most notably Ench von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), the genre developed around the directorial work 15 of Arnold Fanck. He was originally a geologist and a mountaineering and photography enthusiast who with several friends, after World War I, started up in Germany the “Freiburg Mountain and Sport Film Company.” Then, between 1920 and 1934 he turned to narrative and his films enjoyed critical and public success, 16 even more so than Expressionist films of the era. Fanck, along with his cameramen (Hans Schneeberger, Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst, Hans Ertl, and others) and his actors were all excellent mountain climbers and skiers. Often one of the cameramen worked as an actor in climbing scenes whereas an actor did the camera work. Indeed, two of Fanck’s actors, Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker, are strongly identified with the genre. Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palu (1929) is Fanck’s strongest attempt to fill the gap between the stunning climbing scenes and nature shots on the one hand, and the weak plot and character development on the other, that, according to contemporary 17 critics, characterized his films. In Leni Riefenstahl’s opinion — but her words need to be taken cum grano salis— this is the reason why the producer of the film, Harry Sokal, asked one of the most prominent film-makers of the time, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, to co-direct the film. Pabst directed the acting scenes whereas Fanck wrote the 1 8 screenplay and directed the outdoor and climbing sequences. The plot of the film builds around the character of Doctor Johannes Krafft (Gustav Diessl) and his obsession with the mountain that killed his wife. Doctor Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 117 19 Krafft lost his young wife, Maria, while they were ascending the Piz Palii. Consumed by his failure to rescue her, he compulsively wanders through the ice and snow of the mountain, as if hoping to find his wife alive. Ten years after the terrible accident, a young couple, Hans Brandt (Ernst Petersen) and Maria Majoni (Leni Riefenstahl), come across Johannes Krafft. Soon, the news that a group of Swiss university students is going to attempt to “conquer” the north face of the Palii reaches them. Johannes Krafft decides that he must precede the group of students to the summit and the following day at dawn, he, followed by Hans and Maria, starts the ascension. They are challenged by the difficult endeavor. The group of students led by the Alpine guide Andermatten is not too far behind them. Suddenly, half way to the summit, an avalanche sweeps away the students killing all of them. Doctor Krafft, Hans and Maria do not have much better luck. All of a sudden, Hans loses his foothold and falls off a cliff. In the fall, he hits his head and remains hanging in mid air on the rope that connects the three of them. Doctor Krafft manages to rescue him but, while he is climbing back up to where Hans and Maria are, he is hit by a block of falling ice and breaks his leg. Their ascent is over and, while the fohn wind begins to blow, they have no other choice but wait for the rescuers to find them. The doctor does all he can to prevent Hans and Maria from freezing to death. When, finally, a group of Alpine guides, with the help of Udet the acrobatic pilot, finds them, Hans and Maria are still alive but Johannes Krafft is not. Christian (the Alpine guide Spring, a non-actor), the Alpine guide who was climbing with the doctor and his wife the day of the accident, ten years earlier, finds a notebook in which Johannes Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 118 Krafft has written his last wishes. He asks to be left among the ice of the Piz Palii where he feels he belongs. While the opening credit titles roll, one hears in the background the wind blowing. It is still blowing when the first intertitle announces that “The warm fohn 20 wind is pounding the faces of the Piz Palii.” The sound produced by the wind blowing on the mountain peaks precedes both the words describing it and the images depicting it. Hence, even before the opening shot, the viewer is fully immersed in the setting of the film. Then, the noise of the pounding wind fades into a music that perfectly coincides with the weather and the environment one now finally sees on the screen. The music becomes the background to alternate medium shots and long shots of the Piz Palii where a snow storm is raging. The opening of the film I have just described, dominated by untamed nature, could serve as the quintessential example of how mountain films attempt to revive Romantic motifs, within the realm of modem mass culture, by showing how inherent in the sublime experience of Alpine reaches rests a simultaneity of beauty and terror, fascination and horror. As I have earlier pointed out, it is precisely the resurfacing of Romantic codes that led Kracauer to conclude that mountain films are a paradigm for proto-fascist sentiments in Weimar culture and provide additional evidence for what Lotte Eisner has perceived as the fatal entanglement between German Romanticism and the fascist attempt to aestheticize politics. In a recent essay reexamining the connection between romantic imagery and Nazi aesthetics through the Weimar mountain film, Carsten Strathausen elaborates a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 119 notion of the “cinematic sublime” that moves Kracauer’s “romantic” perspective from the level of the thematic codes to the level of the structure of the cinematic 21 apparatus. He also associates Fanck’s mountain films, which he defines as early “action films,” to the tradition of the “cinema of attractions” first theorized by Tom 22 Gunning. According to Strathausen, the intertwining of Romanticism and the mountain film is not primarily located at the diegetic level but, rather, built into the mountain film’s formal structure (Strat 181). In other words, Romanticism and the mountains come together not in the images of sublime landscapes or the protagonist’s return to untamed nature but because of the use of cinematic techniques. This take on the connection between Romantic images and Bergfilme. shifts Kracauer’s perspective from the level of the thematic codes to the level of the structure of the cinematic apparatus. However, it is not Strathausen’s intention to redeem mountain cinema from the Romantic tradition and Nazi aesthetics, far from it. He writes: “I want to suggest a theoretical framework that allows us to discern how Nazism exploited an aesthetics already prominent in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Germany” (172). Whereas Strathausen suggests the connection between mountain films and the “cinema of attractions,” Sabine Hake’s brief discussion of the Bergfilm in German National Cinema hints at another way of moving away from traditional analyses of this film genre. She begins by stating that the genre is often identified with a cult of heroic masculinity, the glorification of primordial nature as archetypal landscape, and the idealization of pre-industrial communities that fuelled discourses Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of right-wing nostalgia. However, she has to admit that in terms of aesthetic sensibilities these films occupy a much more important place than that they were assigned for decades: The genre’s leading practitioners stand closer to the realist aesthetic of New Objectivity, the documentary tendencies in New Vision photography, and, of course, the non-narrative ethos of the cultural film. All influences find expression in the remarkable technical tricks and physical stunts performed by the genre’s leading cinematographer, Hans Schneeberger. The enthusiastic embrace of cinema as a technology of conquest and discovery and the preference of a camera aesthetic determined by the pro-filmic event confirm these films as modernist works, whereas the glorification of primordial nature, the metaphysics of place and belonging, and the idealization of pre-industrial communities reveal the genre’s debts to the discourses of right-wing nostalgia and negative utopianism. (42-3) Hake’s comment strongly problematizes the position of the Bergfilme. Although these film have to be seen as reactionary parables on the one hand, on the other hand they show the progressive tendencies that characterized avant-garde cinema and photography of the Weimar Republic. In other words, these films are perfect examples of “reactionary modernism,” the combination of political reaction with technological advance that, according to Jeffrey Herf, constitutes the cultural paradox of German modernity. More significant for my discussion, Hake associates them with the Kulturfilme of the stabilized period of the Weimar Republic (1924-29) that supplanted expressionist films in favor of objectivity, realism and matter-of- factness. These cultural films were concerned with the depiction of social reality and real-life incidents and, for this reason, they had a non-narrative ethos. To put it in Kracauer’s terms, they are documentary films, that is, “films of facts [that] shun fiction in favor of unmanipulated materials” (Theory of Film 180). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 121 Critics of different generations have generally failed to realize that, in developing the mountain film genre, Fanck was the initiator of one of the earliest realist movements in cinema history. He believed that cinema had to be different from the theater and regarded contemporary German cinema as non-cinematic. He wanted his films to be realistic in showing the beauty of nature, particularly the beauty of the Alps. Fanck was a pioneer in using cinematic devices, physical stunts and innovative photography to render realistically the gathering of storm clouds, the intensity of sunlight, the shadows falling across precipices and mountain tops. Fanck also reacted against the unnatural, expressionistic school of acting predominant in so many German films of the day. He wanted natural movements, and he was above all concerned with his actors’ athletic abilities and how they performed from a distance, not with their acting abilities in close-up (Hinton 2). It becomes clear, at this point, that the criticism of the Bergfilme as “seriously inept — and misguided— in their negotiation of narrative terrain” (Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity” 143) is valid only if one looks at them from the point of view of narrative or fictional cinema. But can we look at them from a different angle? Drawing from Strathausen’s and Hake’s suggestions, I propose a way of reading mountain films that moves away from Siegfried Kracauer’s highly influential reading of the Bergfilm as precursors of Fascist ideals, lacking plot and character development. At the same time, however, I build on Kracauer’s elevation of realism and non-narrative cinema in his other major work on cinema, Theory of Film. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 122 2.3. The Bergfilm as “Cinema of Attractions” The first step toward an analysis of early mountain films as non-narrative films is to go back to the distinction between actuality and non-actuality films. This distinction is central to the emergence of cinema and in recent years Tom Gunning and other scholars have emphasized its importance. Actuality films formed a strand of early cinema that was well developed and coherent between 1896 and 1907 before cinema turned to narrative as its main form of textual and ideological support. When non-actuality films prevailed and invisible editing became the editing of classical (i.e. Hollywood) cinema, the former began to be considered as a “primitive” or 23 “deviant” strand of cinema. I argue that, in a similar way, Fanck’s films, and the Bergfilme in general, were perceived as “primitive” precisely because they lacked some of the important characteristics of narrative cinema, which, in the 1920s, had already established itself as the dominant film form. Paradoxically, it is precisely the lack of a coherent and continuous narrative that makes these films relevant for my study of modem epic. Actuality films analyze both movement and the spatial structure of cinema. This type of cinema wants to be a series of displays, of magical attractions, rather than a primitive sketch of narrative continuity. It is characterized by a lack of concern with creating a self-sufficient narrative world upon the screen: [T]he cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle - a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself. The attraction to be displayed may also be of cinematic nature, such as the early... trick films in which a cinematic manipulation (slow motion, reverse motion, substitution, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 123 multiple exposure) provides the film’s novelty. Fictional situations tend to be restricted to gags, vaudeville numbers or recreations of shocking or curious incidents (executions, current events). It is the direct address to the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman that defines this approach to film 24 making. Gunning borrows the term “attraction” from Sergei Eisenstein. In his attempt to find a new direction for his theater work, early in his career Eisenstein expressed a need for a “montage of attractions” based on the reaction of the audience rather than on 25 the craftmanship of the performers. The relationship between the theater (Eisenstein) or early cinema (Gunning) and the spectator is based on exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption. Furthermore, the context from which Eisenstein selects the term “attraction” is mentioned also by Gunning: the fairground. An exhibitionist quality combined with an aesthetic of astonishment and direct stimulation characterize tum-of-the-century popular art and entertainment (such as wax museums, the morgue, panoramas and dioramas, phantasmagorias, vaudevilles, music halls, circuses, amusement parks and fairground attractions) from which cinema emerged. Indeed, screen projections first appeared as one attraction on the vaudeville program, surrounded by a mass of unrelated acts and performances in a non-narrative succession of performances (Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions” 60). Because of the close tie between early film projections and fairground attractions, when one reads mountain films as “cinema of attractions” what inevitably comes to mind is the most popular and favorite fairground attraction of all times, roller coasters, or “Russian mountains,” as they are known in Europe. What is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 124 most interesting from my perspective is that the roller coaster as popular entertainment resulted from a combination of the thrills provided by sliding on snow 26 and ice and the desire for panoramic and aerial views. There is, then, an early connection between cinema and mountains through the roller coaster. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), a veritable catalogue of cinematic prophecies, also points to a possible association between popular attractions and mountain films. This film is a historical pageant or “superspectacle” about the 27 Roman conquest of Carthage during the third century BCE. The beginning of the third episode of the film shows the Carthaginian Hannibal crossing the Alps with his troops and elephants in the attempt to invade the Italian peninsula. Within a film that, in its original version, lasted more than three hours, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps constitutes a two-minute sequence. For the economy and the diegesis of the film, the sequence is unnecessary since Gabriele D’Annunzio’s grandiloquent intertitles are more than enough to advance the story by explaining that Italy has come unexpectedly and dangerously under attack not only from the South (the sea) but also from the North (the mountains): Meanwhile Hannibal, the ‘sword of Carthage,’ follows his destiny through the sacred mountains that rise to the sky like an impenetrable wall. With extraordinary persistence and strength, Hannibal crosses the Alps. The thrust of his advance threatens Rome. The soul of Carthage is inebriated with victory at the great news. The 28 city praises its son. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 125 Why did Pastrone decide to show this event instead of simply letting D’Annunzio’s intertitles narrate it? And, given the extreme difficulties and hardships they had to endure, why shoot it on location? The Hannibal sequence, shot on location at Moncenisio in the Lanzo Valley in Piedmont, is composed of only a few fixed shots. One sees Hannibal surrounded by the Alps with two soldiers at his side, followed by a long line of soldiers marching with difficulty in the snow up the mountain, and finally soldiers leading elephants, sheep, and other animals. The history of the filming of this first shot, Hannibal surrounded by the Alps, is highly revealing of Pastrone’s efforts to portray the space of the Alps with as much realism as possible. As Dagrada, Gaudreault and Gunning have pointed out in the article “Lo spazio mobile del montaggio e del carrello in Cabiria.” Pastrone chose this specific shot from three different shots of the same subject. One is a medium close-up shot of Hannibal alone surrounded by Alpine peaks. The mountains are a mere background and the towering body of Hannibal dominates the frame. The second shot shows Hannibal at the center of an ideal diagonal trajectory. He stands between two soldiers positioned in such a way as to look smaller than he does but the three bodies render the mountains in the background almost imperceptible. The third shot, the one Pastrone chose, is a long shot of Hannibal from the front. Hannibal’s body dominates the two soldiers at his side. Their position makes them only partially visible and, thus, lacking identity. Hannibal’s body is at the center of a hypothetical “sinusoidal” (as Pastrone himself defined it) trajectory, whose two extreme points are what is visible of the two Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 126 soldiers. Thus, the soldiers trace the lines of an oblique trajectory that emphasizes both the depth of field and the tridimensionality of the space, even though 29 Hannibal’s body is still towering at the center. As a result of Pastrone’s studies, the Alps in the film are not simply a background for the human figures. On the contrary, they are three-dimensional space that provoked excitement and thrills in the viewers. At the time of the shooting of Cabiria the camera was fixed and, thus, did not allow for changes in angles to create a “mobile” space. Moreover, editing could do nothing to create depth of field. Nonetheless, Pastrone succeeded in creating a “mobile” space and great depth of ■ . 30 field mainly by positioning the actors according to three-dimensional trajectories. Can the Hannibal scene in Cabiria result in an experience similar to a roller coaster ride? What is certain is that it was one of the attractions provided by the film. As narrated in Livy’s account of the Second Punic War, Hannibal’s passage over the Alps with his elephants (a very popular circus attraction) was the most famous disaster of antiquity. This two-minute sequence is given prominence, for instance, in the French poster advertising the film. Indeed, the poster depicts two of the major attractions of the film: the gigantic and monstrous statue of the god Moloch to whom the Carthaginians sacrifice children and, in the upper right side, Hannibal crossing 31 the Alps. Attractions such as the one I have just described did not disappear from film history with the advent of narrative cinema. They persisted, so to speak, underground, for instance, in the tradition of avant-garde filmmaking and as a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 127 component of certain film genres, such as mountain films. One can argue, therefore, that mountain films of the 1920s kept alive the fascination with the potential of the medium and with a cinema that displays rather than articulates a story. 2.4. The Cinematic Space of Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii No doubt one way of reading a representative Bergfilm such as Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palii is to place it in the tradition of the “cinema of attraction” and, therefore, analyze it as a documentary film on cinematic space, on the spatial possibilities of the cinematic medium. From this perspective, one can argue that in this film the story simply provides a frame upon which to string a demonstration of the “magical” potential of cinema. However, the very first intertitle of the film declares that the film will show a real event. In the tradition of actuality film and, anachronistic ally speaking, in a quasi-Neorealist style, the film begins by stating: “The scenario by Dr. Fanck was inspired by a newspaper article about the seven-day struggle to survive of a few young mountaineers who ran into difficulties on a cliff 32 face near Innsbruck.” This desire to tie the images on the screen with a real-life story is further emphasized later in the film during the only scene set in an urban environment. In that scene, a man attending an elegant party reads a newspaper article about some mountaineers lost on the Piz Palii. To put it in Kracauer’s terms, the film claims that what the viewer is watching on the screen is a “found storv’YTheory of Film 245). Being discovered rather than invented, found stories are inseparable from films animated by documentary intentions, that is, films that show real life events or aspects of physical reality that only the camera is capable of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 128 revealing. The “found story” is the opposite, for Kracauer, of the “theatrical story,” which invents a plot to make reality palatable or spectacular and, thus, it is a flight from the richness of real life. Although a film that strives for realism at many different levels, I am particularly interested in the way it documents the spatial potentials of cinema. In Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palii there is a constant dialectic between destruction and confirmation of cinematic space both at the diegetic level and at the level of the formal structure. In other words, this dialectic is perceivable both in the portrayal of the alpine landscape and in the cinematic techniques utilized to narrate the attempt to ascend the North face of the Piz Palii by two different groups of people. At a diegetic level, this film very often creates a sense of disorientation in the viewers through the alternation of peaceful and dangerous images. The viewers experience the shock of suddenly losing perspective and orientation as nature destroys the space provided by the camera. A clear example is the scene of the arrival of the young happy couple, Maria and Heinz, in the Alpine shelter hut at the foot of the Piz Palii. It is a beautiful day, the sun is shining over the mountains, and the newly wed couple starts to tidy up the hut and do household chores. This scene of intimacy and domesticity contrasts with the following one, a recollection of the accident that killed Doctor Krafft’s wife ten years earlier. Likewise, Fanck often sets up a contrast between, on the one hand, long shots with a great depth of field that emphasize perspective and, on the other hand, the annihilation of perspective in moments of natural catastrophe that destroy any sense of spatial organization. For Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 129 instance, he shows the ascent of the Swiss students led by the Alpine guide Andermatten within the breathtaking high mountains of the Engadine, which seem inert and immutable. Suddenly, however, a gigantic avalanche buries all the members of the Swiss roped-party. This sequence is particularly disorienting since the take is completely out of focus. Moreover, a sense of spatial disorientation for the fictional characters as well as for the audience is created by the experience of drifting clouds, roaring storms, thundering avalanches, and vast ice fields. The film shows this type of disorientation, to give only one example, during the simultaneous ascents of Johannes, Maria, and Heinz, and the Swiss students, filmed in parallel editing. Finally, equally disorienting are the panoramic and aerial shots of snow-covered mountain peaks and moving clouds melting together into a vast, amorphous field of white, a space without center or points of reference. Not to mention the fact that the loopings performed by Ernst Udet, the famous German acrobatic pilot (who plays himself in the film), also signify the loss of direction in a space that can no longer be quantified or measured in terms of ups and downs, left or right (Strat 176). During the attempts to locate the three climbers stranded on an isolated ledge on the Palii, there are many aerial views from Udet’s tiny monoplane Motte (“Moth”). Their cries for help can be heard but nobody can locate them. Udet is their last chance. He flies over the snow-covered range of the Palii and along the North face of the mountain. The camera peers down at the glaciers and into the immeasurably deep crevasses in search of the missing climbers. Sometimes a second plane with a camera trails him 33 and shoots Udet performing his stunts and loops over the mountains. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130 The destruction and confirmation of cinematic space is also created by the alternation of night and day. The alternation of dark and light signals not only the passing of time but also yet another way of creating a feeling of disorientation. Similar to the sequence of the ascent of the North face of the Palii by the two roped parties, the night scenes consist of parallel editing. By intertwining two lines of action, parallel editing literally suspends the outcome of each one, creating the effect of an omniscient point of view on the action and a narrative delay or suspense. Once both the German and the Swiss expeditions are missing, the search and rescue team works day and night without interruption in the attempt to find the climbers. They soon realize that there is no survivor from the Swiss group. However, though unable to locate them, they hear voices coming from the Palii, which leads them to think that the German group could still be alive. Whereas on the first and second nights the search is paralleled by Johannes Krafft’s attempt to attract attention by swinging a torch, on the third night the search is paralleled by Heinz’s delirium from exposure. After three days and three nights spent at freezing temperature on an isolated ledge and with his head wounded by a previous fall, Heinz is losing is mind. One sees him walking back and forth on the narrow ledge, and soothing his pain by putting his head in the ice. Suddenly, he moves to the rim of the ledge where the three are trapped, takes off his hat in a liberating gesture and is about to throw himself off. Hannes Krafft tries to stop him but Heinz seems very determined and the two get into a desperate fight. Maria seems unable to react but, finally, when she realizes that Heinz is trying to kill Hannes, picks up a rope and throws it around Heinz’s body and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 131 the two of them manage to forcibly restrain Heinz. They tie him up and then secure him to an icy rock so that he can no longer move. Even though he runs the risk of freezing to death, it is the only way to prevent him from a desperate gesture. Immobilized, with bandages around his head and only part of his face visible, Heinz truly looks like a mummy. Interestingly enough, the French poster advertising the film with the title L’Enfer blanc depicts precisely the scene that I have just 34 described. To the viewers that have not yet seen the film, the body tied up and covered with snow could indeed look embalmed. The striking resemblance between a hibernating body and a mummy sends us back to the inception of cinema when the 35 relation between the new medium and ancient Egypt was often noted. The high mountain environment parallels ancient Egypt in providing attractions that can be related to the cinematic-aesthetic experience. Andre Bazin has argued that at the origin of cinema might lie the trope of the “mummy complex” (9), the practice of embalming the dead. There is, thus, a parallel between mummification as preservation for a life beyond life and cinema as preservation of life by representing it on the screen. If cinema creates ghostly images that live forever, the ice produces the same result; it preserves dead bodies and prevents their decomposition. Perhaps for this reason, in almost all mountain films, even the most recent ones, there is at least one mummy. Although Heinz is not yet a dead body, he looks like one in this scene, one of the most spectacular of the film. Two other hibernated bodies appear in the film. At the beginning, there is a superimposed image of Krafft’s wife underneath a layer of ice. Although she has been buried under the ice Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 132 of the glacier for ten years, it looks like she is simply resting and waiting for her husband to rescue her. At the end of the film we see Krafft himself as a preserved dead body beneath the ice. His endless and compulsive wandering on the Palii is spurred by the fact that he is hoping to recover the body of his wife. After three days spent in the open amid snow storms, strong winds, and freezing temperatures, he loses hope in the chances that three of them will survive. Thus, he decides to sacrifice his life to save the young lives of Heinz and Maria (in whom he obviously sees himself and his wife years earlier). He takes off his jacket and wraps it around Heinz who is freezing to death. Now wearing only a shirt he tries to keep his body warm by slapping his back and chest with his hands. After a while, however, he realizes that he will not be able to survive long under these conditions. After making sure that Maria and Heinz are as warm as possible, he climbs to a higher ledge, curls up and let himself die of exposure. The next scene shows the rescue team finally arriving at the ledge where the three had been trapped for days. However, Johannes Krafft is nowhere to be found; he seems to have been swallowed by the ice. In the very last scene of the film, Maria regains consciousness after being rescued and transported back to the Diavolezza shelter hut. When she opens her eyes she sees Heinz, who is being treated for hypothermia, but realizes that Hannes is not there. She asks Christian where he is. Christian reads to her Hannes’s last note from the notebook he had found on the ledge: “... Leave me be where I belong. As you 36 know, the ice and I have always been very close.” It is at this point that the camera Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 133 cuts to the superimposed image of the dead body of doctor Krafft underneath the ice of the Palii where he has joined his wife. The description of mountaineers wrapped up like mummies to protect themselves from the harsh temperatures is a recurrent one in mountaineering literature. Henriette d’Angeville, the first woman to climb Mont Blanc in 1838, so describes the Alpine guides who accompany her to the top of the highest Alpine peak: Ho detto che il vento ci aveva impedito di piantare le tende e che le guide s’erano avvolte teste e corpi in lenzuola e coperte. Quelle mummie messe Tuna di franco all’altra davano abbastanza bene Tidea di un obitorio. Era veramente spaventoso! E quando venne il momento in cui cominciarono ad agitarsi e a tirar fuori in successione dal loro involucro prima la testa e poi le braccia, le gambe, ad alzarsi e a sbarazzarsi di quella specie di coltre funebre, credetti di vedere una scena della risurrezione! . . . Mancava soltanto la tromba. (La mia scalata al Monte Bianco. 135) The recovery of a body lost in the snow and ice many years before is a recurrent attraction in mountain films, even today. One of the most famous mountain “mummies” appears in Five Days One Summer (1982) by Fred Zinneman, a film 37 often praised for the extreme realism of the climbing sequences. Set in 1932 in the Swiss Alps, the film pays great attention to details of equipment, clothing, techniques, and practices. During an ascent, the Scottish doctor Douglas Meredith (Sean Connery), his niece Kate (Betsy Brantly), and Johann Biari (Lambert Wilson), a local guide, find a man buried inside the ice of the glacier they are climbing. The guide immediately thinks that the body could be that of his grandfather’s brother, who has been missing for forty years. The man went hunting up high the day before Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 134 his wedding and never returned to his village. He probably slipped and fell into a crevasse but the search party never found him. The guide goes back to the village to fetch some Alpine guides who soon recover the body of the man from the ice. They wrap him in a blanket and take him down the mountains and to the village. When the women of the village take the now seventy years old bride-to-be to see the man’s corpse, one sees, as they unwrap him, the contrast of her aged face with his much 38 younger face, who was preserved from aging by the ice. Hibernation, like mummification, can be seen as a mode of expressing the experience of film and giving it a concrete referent. As soon as the great discoveries in the excavations began to be exhibited in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, the culture of ancient Egypt began to be associated with magic, 39 preservation, and silent, visual power. These are all qualities that certainly anticipate the character of cinema but, for this reason, also characterize pre-cinematic illusory forms of visual representation (such as lantern shows, panoramas, dioramas, phantasmagorias, and even photography). However, the arrival of cinema further consolidated this alliance. In particular, it became more and more evident that an association could be made between the blackened enclosure of silent cinema and that of the Egyptian tomb. Like the tombs of the pharaohs first discovered by Champollion, cinema is a darkened and silent world — and thus mysterious and frightening— that speaks through a pictorial language (Lant 90). As a consequence, one can indeed perceive cinema as a necropolis in which a secret, and perhaps accursed, language is revealed through light projections. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 135 The first proto-cinematic popular attraction that links the Egyptian tomb with entertainment is most probably the Phantasmagoria. Phantasmagorias were magic lantern projections of glass slides with images on to columns of smoke or screens made of very light fabrics. Projected in dark spaces, the slides were moved forward and backward in relation to the receiving surfaces so as to vary the scales of the projected shapes. Many of these shows centered on satanic and macabre topics, such as the opening of tombs and graves or people haunted by ghosts and specters. In Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palti. what the viewers experience in watching the scene of the night rescue of the Swiss students’ bodies is not that unlike a phantasmagoria. Indeed, once again, a parallel between Egyptian tombs and icy caves, in relation to the sphere of cinema, can be drawn. Members of the rescue team descend into the crevasse and find themselves in a pitch-dark subterranean world: the icy cave at the bottom of the crevasse. The magnesium torches they carry produce effects of light and shadow, and reflections on the ice of the cave. These effects combined with the smoke from the torches create an extremely eerie atmosphere. While the rescuers are exploring and searching the depth of the glacial cave for signs of the mountaineers, the phantasmagoria suddenly turns into a necropolis — an “Inferno” as the intertitle announces— as they begin to find the corpses of the unfortunate mountaineers. This “phantasmagoria on ice” is undoubtedly one of the most visually impressive scenes in all of Fanck’s films. It activates the thrill and the curiosity of the exhibitionist cinema while bringing to the fore the artificiality of its own projection and emphasizing an awareness of the space produced by the cinematic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 136 apparatus. In this film, however, there are other formal devices that produce similar results. They can be related to the films of “non-continuity,” another genre of early cinema. This genre indicates a particular approach to the joining of shots, namely, a 40 desire to emphasize the junctions between rather than the action across cuts. Usually, the disruption caused by the move from one shot to another is actually emphasized (and explained) by a discontinuity or disruption on the level of the story. In the following pages I consider three different techniques used by Fanck in Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii: the accentuation of off-screen space, the creation of trick effects, and the spatial illusion of depth created by the “vertical” camera. In cinema, the frame (i.e. the borders of the image within which the subject is composed) is the equivalent of the proscenium arch that contains the classical theatrical scene and forces the viewers to see the action from a single angle and from an unchanging distance in space. In Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii, the shots of skiers skiing down the mountains particularly underline the disruption of this kind of perspective. Maria wakes up in the early morning in the hut to find out that she has been left alone. She immediately checks the hut log and reads that Johannes and Heinz have already left to attempt to climb the North face of the Palii. She does not want to be left behind so rushes outside and skies down the slopes to try to reach the two men. While the location of the camera remains fixed, Maria, racing on her skis, suddenly emerges out of nowhere, rushes by the camera, and disappears again into the “off-screen,” without being pursued by the camera. In a similar way, at the end of the film some members of the rescue team race on their skis down to the village to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 137 announce that two of the mountaineers lost on the Piz Palii have been found alive. Like Maria, they ski off and on screen several times while the camera remains fixed and shoots them both from the front and from behind. The exploitation of off-screen space is quite common in Fanck’s films, particularly in his early films about ski races such as Per grosse Sprung (The Great Leap), Per weisse Rausch (The White Frenzy) and in the documentary film Eine Fuchsiagd auf Skiem durchs Engadin (A Foxhunt on Skis through Engadineh in both sequences and single shots. But in Pie Weisse Holle vom Piz Palii there are other examples of exploitation of off-screen space. While climbing a glacier on the Palii, Krafft’s wife slips, the rope that ties her to her husband breaks and she falls into a crevasse. She emerges out of nowhere and falls off-screen several times. Off-screen space is also emphasized by continuous movement toward the camera as in the daring shooting of the avalanche that kills all the members of the Swiss roped-party. The mass of snow detaching from the mountain moves toward the camera and literally buries it. Apart from being an example of disruption of perspectival space, this avalanche scene, with its exaggerated movement toward the stationary camera, can also be taken as an example of the trick effects that were part of the “aesthetic of 41 attraction” in early cinema. Within a cinema that was more presentational than representational, trick effects expressed an essential element and were meant to present the shock and wonder of the medium in an exaggerated form. Through a variety of formal means, the images on the screen rush forward to meet their viewers. It is one of the ways in which the “aesthetic of attraction” addresses the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 138 audience directly, often by exaggerating this confrontation in an experience of assault. Both the avalanche scene and the scene in which Maria and Heinz play in the snow are filmed with a series of shots-reverse shots. The snow veers directly at the camera threatening a collision with its fixed viewpoint. In other words, the snow engulfs the viewers’ field of vision so that they, too, feel part of the collision with the snow. Such framing and motion contrast sharply with the ffontality and distance that typify the theatrical scene. However, in spite of its non-theatrical movement, the film employs a fixed framing for its trick effect, a viewpoint that is maintained until it is literally untenable, pushing the unity of point of view to a reductio ad absurdum. which bares the device (Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema” 100). As a result, one can say that it is not the spectator who is introduced into the space of the film (i.e. the spectator does not get lost in the fictional world of the drama as typically happens in classical narrative cinema) but, rather, it is the space that comes forward to present itself to the spectator. Once again, this recalls proto-cinematic attractions, such as panoramas and lantern shows, when a showman presented views to the audience in order to stimulate their curiosity. There is a scene in the film that exemplifies how the 42 director of early films is less a narrator than a “monstrator.” Heinz and Maria play in the snow for a while and then receive a bottle of champagne from the sky. It is dropped by parachute by Udet while he is flying over the Diavolezza hut. When it begins to get cold, Heinz tells Maria to close her eyes and wait outside the hut until he is ready to show her his surprise. He goes inside the hut and puts candles on a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 139 cake to celebrate the first day of their honeymoon. Even though Maria is explicitly told not to watch, she cheats and secretly follows the scene by peeking through the fingers that cover her eyes. Her eyes, however, have been replaced by the eye of the camera, so that Maria’s hands function like a veil or curtain in front of the spectator. Gradually extending and separating her hands as she walks toward Heinz, Maria moves away from the camera and enters the scene that slowly takes shape. Maria’s movement leads the spectator into the “picture” of an intimate domestic space thus created. In other words, the spectator leaves the real space and is introduced by Maria into a fictional space. Maria functions here as the “monstrator” who mediates between the audience and the film and stresses the actual act of display. Early cinema also lies at the intersection between the entertainment and curiosity of popular culture, on the one hand, and scientific investigation on the other. As Gunning has pointed out, in its early stages cinema was perceived also as a new scientific tool, as a new instrument of knowledge. The motion picture camera was seen as having the ability not only to capture reality but also to penetrate and investigate it, thus, as a new instrument of the visible that had a revelatory mission. As the last of a long line of instruments for uncovering new visual knowledge, cinema was seen as a scientific tool like a microscope, having thus a “gnostic mission” (Gunning, “In your Face” 17). From this perspective, Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii. read as successor of early actuality films, uses cinematic devices, such as the close-up and the quick montage, to create reality-effects that go beyond the possibility of the human eye. Cinema can reproduce the experience of the normal eye Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 140 witness — such as the melting of the snow in a heated pan to produce hot water, a typical practice of mountaineers— but it can also fix and analyze temporal processes, by breaking them down and thereby revealing phenomena otherwise difficult to perceive by the human eye, discemable only by the dominating eye of the scientist. The use of these devices stimulates curiosity about a scientific phenomenon but also clearly underscores the illusionary potential of cinema. The shots showing the formation of ice on the window of the hut when the cold wind rises in the evening are realized by using a rapid montage. The result is an image that appears very familiar but yet is also uncanny as it show the process of ice formation on a glass as happening in a few seconds. It is a process not easily discemable by human eyes — human eyes can only see the result of the process— even if one observes it closely. Nonetheless, it constitutes an attraction as it allows one to view a physical process from the privileged perspective of a scientist. In this respect these shots partake in the fascination provided by close-ups of human faces in early cinema. Many of the close-ups in early films differ from later uses of the technique, as Gunning has observed, precisely because they do not use enlargement for narrative punctuation, but as an attraction in its own right (“The Cinema of Attractions” 58). In the era of exhibitionist cinema, facial close-ups often display monsters and giants before viewers who are fascinated (and sometimes repulsed) by the new revelations of such unusual sights. In Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palii. Pabst, who had been hired to direct those scenes in which emotion rather than action dominated, did shoot in close-up. Fanck, however, set the mles and insisted that his performers had to do Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 141 without make-up. He wanted to have natural faces, not film-star glamour. According to Leni Riefenstahl, because of Fanck’s striving for extreme realism, it took Pabst a month to complete the shooting of close-ups for the film (69). Because of the presence of Pabst, in charge of meeting some of the requirements of dramatic films, Fanck agreed to violate his strict naturalistic principles by allowing a sort of set for the shooting of close-ups of faces trapped in the snow storm. Instead of asking the actors to climb for several hours in order to reach the shooting location, as he would normally do, they built a ledge of rock covered with deep snow not far from the Diavolezza hut where they were staying. However, the actors still had to sit in the grim cold and snow for hours until their faces were almost paralyzed and icicles hung from their hair. The result is that most close-ups of this film emanate a physicality and a lack of aesthetic sublimation that make them closer to the images of scientific facial photography than to the romantic close-ups of shimmering movie 43 stars. In truth, the two tendencies seem to coexist in this film. There are, for instance, many close-ups of Maria (Riefenstahl). Some of the close-ups, particularly those inside the hut while she is listening to Rrafft’s narration of the accident, are there to invite emotional intimacy. On the contrary, other close-ups -such as her frozen face on which even her tears become ice- are not simply reaction shots but seem to confront the spectator with their physical closeness, so that the resulting emotions are wonder and fear. Viewers had never seen anything like this before. Another technique used by Fanck that results in a trick effect is the long shot with a great depth of field combined with the use of a “vertical” camera (Strat 175). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 142 In mountain films, the depth of field is of fundamental importance at least since Cabiria as it allows the viewers to experience a realistic and thrilling view of mountain peaks. Fanck exploits the illusion of three-dimensionality by providing a great depth of field as the camera enters crevasses and penetrates into mountains. Generally speaking, the depth of field maximizes the space that can be kept in focus both in front and behind the main subject or between the closest and farthest objects in focus within a scene. This illusion of depth frightens or thrills the spectator with potentially dangerous images. The spectator is stunned by the abyss opening up before his/her eyes and by the illusion of sinking into it. Heinz and Maria are puzzled by Johannes Krafft’s strange behavior. Something is bothering him, to say the least. Heinz tells Maria about the accident that happened ten years earlier. He explains to her that since then Krafft lives the life of a crazed hermit haunted by feelings of guilt because he was not able to save his wife from death. Maria is profoundly touched by Krafft’s sad story and, once alone with him inside the hut, she convinces him to talk about the accident. He at first hesitates but then begins to tell her what happened ten years earlier: “It was a very 44 narrow crevasse of the Palii glacier — but she slipped to the very bottom of it.” At this point the images replace Krafft’s narration and Fanck’s “vertical” camera slowly enters the crevasse, moving down to the bottom where the body of Krafft’s wife can be seen. Then the camera cuts to Krafft who, at the edge of the crevasse, is desperately waiting for Christian to come back with the rescue team. Suddenly he hears a voice coming from down below: “A desperate cry for help came up from the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 143 45 darkness. Maria was still alive!” Here, the images take over once again and a low angle shot from inside the crevasse (the camera is positioned below the subject) shows in a medium shot Krafft peering down into the crevasse trying to understand where the cry comes from. The camera moves further down and with a long shot frames his head looking down into the crevasse (now just a crack). Another cut and we see the opening of the crevasse from a high angle (the camera is positioned above the subject and shoots down at it) and then a close-up of Krafft’s hands tightening the rope around the ice axe he had previously driven into the ice. His wife is still alive and he intends to let himself down into the crevasse to look for her. There is again a cut to a low angle take from inside the crevasse while Krafft is descending with the help of a rope. In this specific shot, the depth of field is used to convey the size of the crevasse. In the next shot, the camera is at an eye level angle to show that the rope is not long enough for Krafft to reach the bottom. Now the camera takes Krafft’s point of view and looks down to show that the crevasse is much deeper and he cannot reach the bottom. Moreover, because of the low temperature the water at the bottom of the crevasse is turning into ice. There is little chance at this point to find his wife. The depth of field combined with the alternation of high and low angles also characterize the filming of the ascent of the icy rock face by Johannes Krafft, Heinz and Maria. Indeed, Fanck’s favorite composition seems to be precisely low-angle 46 shots of the mountain peaks with a backdrop of white, drifting clouds. Hannes Krafft is roped-party leader and at times the camera is above him, shooting the three Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 144 of them from the ledge they are trying to reach as if there were a fourth person already waiting for them. At other times the camera takes the point of view of the roped-party leader, looking both up and down, and at yet other times a low angle shot frames the rock face with the three climbers on the rope to emphasize their smallness in the face of the immensity of the mountains. Similar to the low angle shots of the wall of ice, where members of the rescue team walk on the rim, these images thrill and frighten the viewers at the same time. From this viewpoint, the film creates suspense on so many levels that it can definitely be considered a model for 47 future action films. I have so far argued that mountain films developed out of early actuality films and thus share many characteristics with the “cinema of attractions.” Indeed, it is possible to trace a trajectory from pre-cinematic techniques, such as the panorama and the lantern slide shows, to travelogues to documentaires of travel and exploration to mountain films. I want now to demonstrate how they also grew out of documentary films of exploration. Regardless of the viewpoint from which one sees them, as both cinema of attractions and documentary films mountain films reveal and record, in Kracauer’s terms, the space of the Alps. 3. The Alps: A Bourgeois Epic Space 3.1. The Bergfilm as Documentary Film Views of foreign places reached great popularity particularly in Britain and France precisely through pre-cinematic forms of entertainment. In the nineteenth century, escalating horizons of expansionism and imperialism provoked a popular Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 145 demand for images and attractions. Fueled by this “popular imperialism,” hundreds of landscape-oriented panoramic representations of China, Japan, India, the Middle 48 East, North Africa, and North America were produced. The “panorama effect” marshaled vision to transport spectators in space through the illusion of realistic representation. As the etymology of the word explains, a “panorama” is a “total view” (from the Greek pan meaning “all” and horama meaning “view”). Generally speaking, a panorama was an enormous circular painting, lighted with natural light 49 through slits m the ceiling that were meant to give the illusion of nature. Spectators entered a darkened passageway that led to a platform on which they stood in the center of the room, where they were enveloped by the tableau whose borders were invisible. Thus, the panorama prescribed the spectator’s viewing position. The removal of all other points of visual reference outside the panorama made it difficult for spectators to judge size and distance. In other words, the “panorama-effecf ’ essentially relied on two visual tricks that, as I have demonstrated in my analysis of Fanck’s Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palu, are very important in early cinema. The first visual trick is the erasure of the spectator’s point of reference thereby facilitating the sense that the panorama, a representation that effaces its status as representation, becomes a substitute reality (Schwartz 150). The second visual trick is achieved by the circularity of the tableau that produced the illusion of depth. Moreover, panorama spectators were often given bird’s eye views, or they were placed as though standing on a hill or a mountain overlooking the scene. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 146 As I have already pointed out, the success of Albert Smith’s panorama of Mont Blanc explains the fascination suddenly exerted by the Alps in the second half of the nineteenth century. Usually panoramas served as early form of armchair tourism. But for the British and the French they also helped visualize the spaces of their colonial empires around the world. In the case of Smith’s panorama, the narration and description of his own ascent of Mont Blanc actually pulled many people out of their armchairs and drew them to the Alps to at least admire, if not climb, Mont Blanc at close range. Smith’s show The Ascent of Mont Blanc ran for eight consecutive years (1852-1860) at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, in London. A pasteboard Swiss chalet announced the show. Girls in Swiss costumes showed the public to their seats. While the images rolled by and Smith narrated and explained them, the audience could see on stage a pair of chamois (and smell their authentic odor), St. Bernard dogs and even chamoniardes guides. Moreover, special music was composed for the show, the “Chamonix polka” and the “Mont Blanc quadrille.” As a corollary to his very successful show, Smith also published an illustrated guide, a 50 souvenir fan, and a board game. Smith’s show demonstrates how landscape-oriented panoramas throughout the nineteenth century marched toward ever more perfectly realistic reproductions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, panoramas juxtaposed multiple forms: paintings, photographs, moving pictures, and live performers. Panoramas were still flourishing in the 1880s and 1890s and had been modified and improved to capture and re-present reality both visually and physically. Realism was no longer simply an Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 147 effect of visual representation. Late nineteenth-century panoramas witnessed a proliferation of realistic details and their technology aimed at simulating vicarious experience. At times the spectators were even made to experience the actual weather conditions of the land on display. Apart from mixing three-dimensional objects with the painted canvas to improve the display’s realism, panoramas began to incorporate motion into the spectacle. With the emergence of screen projections, panoramas gradually developed into travelogues. Travelogues were lantern lectures that offered authoritative descriptions of an aspect or a part of the world and became very popular around the turn of the century. These lectures used photographic slides. Because of the public’s interest in this type of attraction, pioneer filmmakers started to provide authentic live action footage shot in faraway and unfamiliar places around the world. Their main purpose was to provide facts more than fantasy and the faithful visual depiction of foreign places. For this reason, these short reels of travel and exploration began to be called documentaires (documentary films) and they became part of early non-fiction cinema, in other words actualites (actuality films). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the public’s interest in factual films of foreign lands was particularly fueled by exploration, particularly of the North and South Poles. The expansionist exploration that had served the cause of European colonialism and commerce throughout the nineteenth century had shifted toward geographical investigation rather than discovery. This shift in the goals of exploration marked the beginning of the era of “neo-imperialism” (Ellis 21). Imperial powers like Britain and France, as well as the more novice United States, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 148 gradually shifted from acquiring new territories to consolidating control of the overseas conquests that they had already made, increasingly through economic means. But exploration still carried with it — in its ideology, organization, and even terminology— the impetus of imperial conquest, which in many ways reached its peak during the early years of the twentieth century. Photography and cinema became essential instruments for documenting exploration in the era of neo imperialism, particularly the highly publicized expeditions of Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica. There is thus a legitimate parallel to be made between Arnold Fanck’s Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palii and Frank Hurley’s South, the original documentary film of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to cross the Antarctic continent 5 1 overland from west to east, that is, via the South Pole. The British record for exploration was unparalleled, but they had been beaten to both the North Pole and 52 the South Pole. Although ultimately unsuccessful, Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition turned out to be the greatest and most popular of all the Antarctic adventures. Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men became castaways for seventeenth months in the frozen Antarctic seas after their ship, the Endurance. was crushed by the ice floes and sunk. What made this failed expedition extraordinary is that the entire crew was rescued. South bolsters my discussion of mountain films because, as a documentary, it underscores intrinsic connections between cinema and exploration and develops the question of filming on snow and ice. My ultimate goal is to demonstrate that early mountain films, though Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 149 considered narrative rather than documentary, reveal and record the space of exploration, the Alps, more than a documentary film such as South. Even though the South Pole is not a mountainous environment, the comparison with winter Alpine exploration, and with winter mountaineering in general, is valid in a general sense. In both cases the terrain is composed of snow and ice. Contrary to common belief, no dangerous beasts or savage natives barred the explorations. In these extremely harsh environments, the essential competition was pure and uncomplicated. It was solely between man and the unrestrained forces of raw nature, between man and the limits of his own endurance. The exploration of these territories did not have the goal of colonizing (i.e. exploiting) them. Finally, as no indigenous people have ever lived there, both the alpine peaks and Antarctica can be said to have been genuinely discovered by the people who climbed and explored them first. 3.2. South: A Horizontal White Hell In her memoir, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir. Riefenstahl recounts that working with and for Arnold Fanck meant working very often under conditions of unendurable cold in “an almost Arctic landscape” (82). A comparison between mountain exploration and polar exploration was first suggested by Marc-Theodore Bourrit, one of the first humans to attempt to ascend Mont Blanc. In 1803, after climbing the Aguille du Brevent, one of the mountains surrounding the Chamonix valley, he makes a comparison between the Alps and the Arctic: “Everything was 53 amazing here, no less frightening than were the icy Poles to the bold navigators.” A Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 150 decade later, in the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley, together with her husband, Lord Byron and his physician Polidori, made a trip to Switzerland. As is well known, the two poets were greatly inspired by the Western Alps. Mary Shelley discovered an infatuation with ice that would later produce the story of Frankenstein. Her descriptions of the wintery emptiness of the Arctic in her highly influential novel suggests that Mary Shelley must have met similar conditions in the Alps to those described by Bourrit in his reports. She did not make any climbs of note, but one can infer from the descriptions of the Arctic Pole in her novel that she would have agreed with Bourrit’s view from the Brevent: “you look [at the mountains] as if they were a wasteland, seeing nothing to suggest that it is a known world.. . . You would think yourself on an uninhabited planet” (Bourrit 112). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818. In this novel, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster is framed by the epistolary story of the arctic explorer Robert Walton. At the beginning of the novel, Walton is in St. Petersburg getting ready for a lengthy arctic expedition. At the end of the novel Walton finds Frankenstein near death in the arctic regions in desperate pursuit of his monster. Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather. . . . About two hours after.. .we heard the ground sea, and before night the ice broke and freed our ship. We, however, lay to until morning, fearing to encounter in the dark those large loose masses which float about after the breaking up of the ice. (Frankenstein. 22-3) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 151 Walton’s description of the Arctic environment matches those of the winter Alpine environment and of the Antarctic in Frank Hurley’s South. Although Fanck and Hurley depict similar geographical environments, I will stress the differences between the two films. Exploration was first driven by the desire and the necessity to acquire geographical and geological information about our planet. The development of photography greatly helped in this regard. At first, photography had the goal of gaining information for the exploration or it was part of a broader scientific survey of the land. Later, beginning with the pioneering work of Vittorio Sella, photography emerged as the conventional way of marking personal and group achievement in the 54 mountains. One has only to think of the ritual “summit photograph” to understand the genre. It is precisely the tension created by the encounter of the empirical (scientific) and the subjective in exploration that started to fuel visual accounts of expeditions. Interestingly enough, in order to make possible his third polar expedition — the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, better known as the Endurance Expedition- - Shackleton developed a yet more pragmatic conception of what photography could be. With the costs of the expedition far outplacing his resources, he came to regard still and cinematic photography as much a promotional tool and saleable product as a scientific geographic record. In the end, a substantial source of money for his expedition came from the advance sale of all news and pictorial rights to the 55 expedition. Moreover, after his return to England at the end of World War I, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 152 Shackleton found himself broke once again and was forced to hit the lecture circuit. Thus, he told the story of the thwarted Endurance Expedition while behind him Frank Hurley’s luminous lantern slides evoked Shackleton’s haunting memories. By using a method of composite image-making, Hurley’s slides consisted of stretches of empty ice on which photographs of wildlife had been superimposed, or else scenes were set against spectacularly back-lit clouds. In sum, Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition is a perfect example of how photographic records of explorations shifted from producing factual records to promoting trade or increasing the profits of the organization that sponsored them (Barsam 42). South — first released in 1919, after the Great War, with the title In the Grip of the Polar Ice— is the commercial documentary film about the Endurance Expedition. It was made by Frank Hurley with footage and photographic material he managed to 56 save from the wreckage of the ship. Hurley, an Australian photographer, did not take simply routine photos and footage of the explorers posing in the snow, as was customary. Instead, he often focused on the snow itself or on grim snowscapes that become extraordinarily beautiful and suggestive in his compositions. At the same time, however, he integrated these scenic studies into the documentation of the expedition. He filmed the daily lives of both the twenty-eight men and the sixty-nine dogs on board. He also showed how they were supplying food and water and he even focused on the work of Clark, the expedition’s biologist, whose task was to collect deep sea specimens from the depth of the Antarctic sea to be analyzed later. As if to confer a subjective tone to his work, Hurley at times interpolated his visual records Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 153 with written material, actual entries from his diary and those of other members of the expedition, including Shackleton himself. South reveals the complexity of the act of film making, showing the work of Hurley as he records both empirical and subjective representations but also as he fulfills the vision of exploration as a collective endeavor. Above all, the Endurance Expedition had as its goal to regain the prestige Britain had lost by failing to conquer the North Pole, and by taking a humiliating second best to Norway in the conquest of the South Pole. Indeed, Shackleton made this matter of prestige his primary argument for the expedition: From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made. It will be a greater journey than the journey to the Pole and back, and I feel it is up to the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the first conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest and most striking of all journeys — the crossing of the ^ . 57 Continent. However, both the restoration of Britain’s prestige and Shackleton’s venture were 58 threatened by the tragic political events of the summer of 1914. As it became clear that a war was inevitable, those members of the expedition who were army officers declared themselves ready to do their part in the war. However, the British government, after a short hesitation, told Shackleton that the nation wanted the expedition to go on. Five days after Britain declared war on Germany, the Endurance sailed from Plymouth with the Union Jack heaved on its mast. Hurley’s account, conjoining exploration with commentary, undoubtedly also responds to British public awareness of the status of imperial British interests during World War I. The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 154 Endurance expedition was a large expedition with a military flavor about it, which the first intertitle of the film conveys quite clearly: Presenting a wonderful and true story of British pluck, self-sacrifice and indomitable courage displayed by a small party of men who set forth on a voyage of discovery into the hitherto unexplored lands and uncharted seas of the great Antarctic Continent. The little ship of the expedition, the “Endurance,” with commander Sir Ernest Shackleton, and a crew of 28 men on board, left England during the fateful month of July 1914, after Shackleton had offered his ship, stores and all personnel to the cause of his country, only to be told that the authorities desired that the Expedition, which had the full support of the Government, should proceed. This introduction is accompanied by shots of Shackleton, the leader of the expedition, Captain F. Worsley, the captain of the ship, Lieutenant J. Stenhouse, the first officer, and Captain L. Hussey, the meteorologist, wearing their army uniforms, followed by Shackleton and Worsley in their Antarctic dress. War-exploration metaphors are recurrent in Hurley’s account. To give only one example, a beautiful close-up shot of the prow of the ship, taken by Hurley from the jibboom, is accompanied by the explanation that the rapid change in the weather conditions turned the sea into an immense icy expanse. The ship was “successfully” used as “battering ram” for clearing a way through the ice floes that at times were as much as four feet thick. In presenting the Endurance Expedition to the British, Frank Hurley the objective observer is often overtaken by Frank Hurley the storyteller. In this role, he places himself in an intermediary position between viewers and events. He functions as a kind of preliminary reader of the “text” of the exploration, filtering and refining material for those who read after him. South is, therefore, an after-the-fact Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 155 reconstruction of the events that displays Hurley’s authoritative knowledge of even those events in which he did not take part. He presents events about which he has been told in the same terms as those in which he participates. At one point, after the group reaches Elephant Island, his version of events abruptly shifts from actions and experiences in which he participated to the account of the five men who, led by Shackleton, left on board the open boat “James Caird” in the desperate attempt to reach South Georgia Island (the closest inhabited island, 800 miles away from where they were) to seek help. To this he adds shots of wildlife (penguins and other animals running around like slapstick comedians) on the island. Hurley was one of the twenty-three men who stayed at Elephant Island, a deserted, barren and windblasted rock where they lived in a shelter made by two boats overturned on stone walls for four months. Thus, he did not experience first hand what happened to those who left on the James Caird. Moreover, Hurley cleverly hides the hardship, the bitter disappointment, and the despair of the group in many situations, beginning with their stay at Ocean Camp, a mile and a half from the wreck of the Endurance, right after they lose the ship and realize the impossibility of continuing the expedition by marching in the snow and dragging some lifeboats with basic supplies. It is at this point that Shackleton decides that the only way of surviving is to go back. Interestingly enough, this is the end of film footage. In the second half of the film, Hurley uses only still photographs, a series of drawings, and excerpts from the diaries of different members of the expedition as intertitles. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 156 South shows an endeavor strictly linked to its historical and political context. It presents a heady mixture of patriotic heroism and dangerous, far-away settings that captivated British public opinion. In fact, this aspect of the documentary overshadows every other, including Hurley’s personal experiences in the icy South Pole as both explorer and filmmaker. South clearly narrates two parallel events, but the realistic and more objective one, constituted by the factual, visual records of the expedition, is obscured by the dramatized one, that is, “Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic,” as the original subtitle of the film demonstrates. The closing intertitle does not leave any doubt as to which of the two accounts prevails: Thus ends the story of the Shackleton Expedition to the Antarctic — a story of British heroism, valour and self-sacrifice in the name and in the cause of a country’s honour. The doings of these men will be written in history as a glorious epic of the great ice-fields of the South, and will be remembered as long as our Empire exists. Upon careful examination of South, one can see emerging between the lines of the collective exploration narrative an individual account of the same event, a first- person narrative in which the explorer and the filmmaker coincide. From this latter viewpoint, Hurley’s documentary film is a visual first person exploration narrative, but also a film production narrative, intertwining his efforts as one of the members of the expedition through the ice of Antarctica with his own cinematic efforts. Hurley would go anywhere and do anything to get a picture. He climbed masts, trekked across quivering ice, and ventured into the frigid night to take his indeed remarkable pictures and shoot his footage. He even dove into icy waters to retrieve his glass- plate negatives after the ship sank. Experimenting under conditions no expedition Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 157 photographer has ever faced, he used new color techniques and created panoramic scenes by taking photographs in a series. However, Hurley’s personal narrative (as a member of the expedition) is a failed attempt to cross Antarctica whereas Hurley’s collective narrative is a successful one, and the one he was asked to show the world. 3.3. An Epic Space ... In Your Backyard Like the Endurance. Frank Hurley’s personal narrative as both explorer and filmmaker disappears in the ice of Antarctica. The documentary footage is relegated to a perfunctory role in favor of a purportedly documentary film that ultimately shows that exploration is never an innocent endeavor. Rather, it is a complex mixture of individual and social motivations, cultural contexts and geophysical and political projects. Moreover, Hurley’s South presents Antarctica as an epic space like those portrayed in traditional literary epic. It is a space of exploration and, thus, a space of heroic adventures. If taken at face value, the notion of exploration simply means to go where nobody has ever gone before. Therefore, it conjures the image of endless voyaging and wandering in unknown lands that characterizes many classical epic narratives. Second, the space produced by South is also a space that requires extraordinary endurance, both psychologically and physically. From this viewpoint, a parallel between the adventures of Shackleton and his crew and those of Odysseus and his companions is inevitable. After only a few months of navigation, Shackleton’s Endurance remained trapped in the ice pack for ten months. Then it was crushed by the ice floes. Upon abandoning the ship, Shackleton and his crew became castaways — first drifting on the ice pack and then on the stormiest seas of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 158 earth— for seventeen months. They had to endure extreme weather conditions, eternal polar nights, lack of sleep, insufficient clothing, lack of shelter, hunger, seasickness, illnesses, and frostbite. They also had to battle hopelessness, restlessness, disaffection, resentment, and discontent. Finally, the space produced by South is the space of a collective endeavor that acquires great significance for a specific group of people. The expedition leader and his crew embody both the demographics (the crew was composed of English, Irish, Scottish and Australian sailors and navy officers), ideals, and the Volkgeist of the British nation and Empire. In sum, Shackleton’s “glorious epic of the Antarctic” expresses an inclusive, collective, and culturally determined (Western) way of understanding geography and adventures in distant lands that is, indeed, related to a traditional notion of epic. When contrasted with South. Arnold Fanck’s Bergfilm Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii appears as a documentary that portrays the space of the Alps in concrete terms. It is a first-person account of a vertical exploration. The failed attempt to ascent the North face of the Palii mountain by two different groups of mountaineers portrays a space that is epic in an altogether different fashion than the more traditional epic space of South. Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii demonstrates that cinema is a most authoritative medium for exploring mountain geography (space) and making sense of mountain experience (spatial practices), for in it the doing (the actual ascent) and the telling (the ex-post-facto account of the ascent) coincide. In fact, while filming, Fanck and his cameramen also describe their ascent, clearly showing their extraordinary abilities as mountain climbers. Insofar as late nineteenth- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 159 century mountaineering narratives portray the space of the Alps in non-metaphysical terms, often in first person, mountain films can be read as their successors. They are truly first-person accounts of vertical explorations. From the second half of the nineteenth century these narratives contributed to making the mountains increasingly 59 readable by adopting the concrete language of exploration. It is precisely through these narratives that the Alps began to be perceived as space rather than as part of a landscape that can only be read according to philosophical and aesthetic principles. They soon became a sub-genre of exploration literature and, thus, gained the status of popular literature within modem mass culture. Mountaineering in the Alps is a combination of spatial practices that results from the affirmation of the liberal bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Imbued with positivistic ideas, this social class dispels the ancestral fears and atavistic terrors, such as the dragons and monsters that the inhabitants of the Alpine valleys believed to dwell on the mountain tops, or the supposed impossibility that humans can survive above the glaciers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, mountaineering became very popular in the most progressive European bourgeois societies like Britain, and later spread to the Alpine countries (France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany). As a bourgeois practice, mountaineering was associated with three different dimensions: it was at once a technical sport, a scientific exploration, and an appropriation of the Alpine territories. It was considered part of the scientific discoveries made by the educated bourgeoisie in the name of positivism, and it channeled the impulse to both exploration and expansion. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 160 Mountaineering as spatial practice began to be recognized as a modem form of exploration that was easily accessible to a larger number of people than traditional exploration of distant lands. This modem and accessible form of exploration conferred a new dimension on the feat of reaching the summit, producing a modem epic space. Unlike traditional horizontal exploration that requires a fight between an individual and the limits of his/her own endurance, mountaineering, a vertical exploration, tests an individual’s strength and is related to risk. Even in roped-party ascents, climbing is basically a solitary endeavor. The roped party is merely a form of insurance. The fight against harsh weather, natural obstacles, and the dangers of high mountains require vigorous physical activity, sheer strength, dynamism, speed, and coordination. Moreover, risk management is of fundamental importance as crucial decisions have to be made in a split-second. Mistakes can be very costly. From this perspective, mountaineering shares a number of features with modem economic entrepreneurship, which also involves high personal risks for the entrepreneur and requires the same qualities necessary to climb a mountain. Besides a correspondence between mountaineering and modem entrepreneurship, there is also a correspondence between mountaineering and the bourgeois ideal of an anti-aristocratic way of life that refuses otium and elevates qualities such as the duty to work and to perform, to improve and perfect oneself continuously, to develop as much as possible one’s spiritual, moral, and physical capacities in the personal and public interests. Thus, mountaineering appears as a projection in the leisure time of the individualistic model of life of the bourgeois Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 161 society, the exemplification of its values and rules. In other words, the bourgeois principle of performance is very well exemplified in the mountains and in mountaineering. Indeed, even the strong emotions that accompanied the climbing of a mountain can be related to the euphoria that is the product of the individual achievement within the codes of bourgeois life. Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palti makes clear that the space of the Alps is a bourgeois epic space in a number of ways. With the exception of the Alpine guides, the mountaineers in the films are middle-class Germans and Swiss. One of the main characters of the film and the leader of one of the two roped-parties is Doctor Johannes Krafft, a German physician or scientist. The other roped party is formed by Swiss university students from Zurich led by the Alpine guide Andermatten. Johannes Krafft’s accidental companions, Maria and Heinz, are a young couple whose bourgeois social status is emphasized by contrasting their clothing and countenance with those of Christian, the Alpine guide who is in charge of the Diavolezza Hut. Every evening, Christian brings food to the mountaineers staying at the shelter hut and checks the log to make sure that all the climbers have safely returned to the “base” at the end of the day. Although Heinz is his age, and perhaps even younger, Christian addresses him as Herr. He has a less formal relationship with Hannes Krafft because Christian was Krafft’s guide in the ascent during which his wife died. Moreover, the contrast between Maria and Heinz’s fair city-dweller complexions (even though they are mountaineers) and Christian’s tanned, wrinkled mountain-dweller complexion is striking. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 162 The scene at the Diavolezza shelter hut, which I have previously described, begins with a quasi-ethnographic display of its objects and tools and the Spartan living conditions. One sees the mountaineers gathering firewood to warm the shelter and cook, collecting buckets of snow to be melted on the stove for preparing hot drinks, eating and living frugally. Although the scene in the shelter emphasizes that mountaineering also requires the endurance that is linked to more traditional epic feats, there are many diegetic and filmic elements that stress individual perspectives and performance. As I have already pointed out, in the climbing sequences the camera often takes a subjective point of view, in particular that of Doctor Krafft. Moreover, close-up and medium close-up shots emphasize the intensity of the effort. When Hannes Krafft finds out from Christian that Andermatten will attempt to climb the North face of the Palii the following morning, he almost loses his temper and becomes determined to reach the top first. He has already tried to climb the face twice but, because of sudden weather changes, he was never able to “conquer” it. Christian believes that this time Andermatten will make it to the top because he is bringing very good mountaineers with him. When Heinz and Maria ask Christian why it is so important for Krafft to be the first one to climb the North face of the Palii, he replies that “it is the last unconquered face.”6 0 Nobody has ever reached the top of the Palii from the North face during the winter. Furthermore, Krafft intends to do it fiihrerlos. that is, without a guide.6 1 Christian, who shares a special bond with Krafft and thus knows him well, realizes that he has already made up his mind and before skiing back to his village advises him to be very careful: “The fohn wind is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 163 rising. There’ll be a lot of ice on Palii. Keep your mind steady Hannes. Leave your 62 pride behind here.” Clearly, the competition between the two groups of mountaineers, which is one of the driving forces behind Krafft’s choices, is an important factor in the eventual outcome of his roped-party expedition. One could not be farther from Leslie Stephen well-known definition of the Alps as “the playground of Europe.” Rather than an arena of recreation in which mountaineers could leisurely wander among rocks and snow and admire the unspeakably beautiful landscape, the Alps of the early twentieth century are the veritable epic space of the European bourgeoisie. Notes: 1 These are the six major Alpine countries in Europe. The Alpine mountain complex is divided from east to west into Maritime Alps, Cottian Alps, hautes Alps (Alps of Dauphine), Graian Alps, Aosta Valley and the Range of Mont Blanc, Swiss Alps (around the Lake Geneva), Bernese Alps, the Alps of Northeast Switzerland, Pennine Alps, East Swiss-Italian Alps, Austro-Bavarian Alps, West Austrian main Crest, Tauems Peaks, Dolomites, Slavic Alps. My brief summary of the geographical and morphological configuration of the Alps is indebted to Nicholas and Nina Shoumanoff, The Alps: Europe’s Mountain Heart. 2 For instance, in the eighteenth century the Swiss scientist Johann Jacob Scheuchzer (1672-1733) quite seriously enumerated the different species of dragon to be found in the Alps in the account of several of his trips in the Swiss Alps published in 1723 with the title Itinera per Helvetiae Alpinas Regiones. 2 To give only one example, Pliny the Elder, in the section of his Natural History dedicated to cosmology only briefly mentions the earth’s mountains. His lack of interest in the mountains is evident as he considers them useful elements of defense and nothing more. He extensively discusses and describes rivers, coasts, and seas for the many human activities associated with them. The ancient Greeks and Romans gradually develop a sensibility toward nature that has all the qualities and characteristics of the locus amoenus. a relaxing and pleasant pastoral country which bears the signs of mankind’s “civilizing” activity. In Greek mythology, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 164 mountains such as Mount Olympus, Helicon, or Parnassus become the abode of the gods or the Muses not because their height makes them purer or nobler but because they are mysterious and unknown places. Since no man has ever ventured there, they are believed to be accessible only to super-human beings. In the ancient world, as a consequence, a mountain inspires awe either as a place of absence, a non-place inhabited by more than human beings or as a locus horridus. the opposite of the locus amoenus: a place of fear or terror. In both instances, mountains are inaccessible. Clearly, the ancient world is not fascinated by the sublime, by what is represented as aesthetically exciting through fear or horror. Nature is a restful and tranquil shelter rather than a place to look for strong emotions (Giacomoni 8-9). 4 An excellent example of how Genesis ended up governing cosmology and later geology is, as Fergus Fleming points out, the longstanding misconception about glaciers. Glaciers are monstrous seas of ice constantly sliding downhill. For many centuries, dwellers of the Alpine valleys believed glaciers to be agents of the devil. For this reason, they often summoned priests to exorcise the glaciers whose “tongues” threatened to obliterate alpine villages (Killing Dragons 15). 5 Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, I.XI, 110. The foundation of Burnet’s “sacred theory of the earth” is the hypothesis that immediately after the Creation the earth had been a smooth oviform spheroid that he called the “Mundane Egg.” For a more detailed analysis of Burnet’s theory, see Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind 22-31. 6 Burnet, 109-110. 7 For a comprehensive account of how romantic aesthetics incorporated the imagery of mountains, see Maijorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. 8 In 1796 Napoleon had formed the Ligurian and Cisalpine Republics and the Helvetic Republic in Switzerland and, thus, conquered almost all the Alps. After his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Alpine nations, which had hitherto been under French control, reverted more or less smoothly to their previous status: Savoy, Haugsburg and the Swiss confederation were reestablished. Britain had been at war for almost a generation and with the arrival of peace, and of the realization that it controlled most of the globe, a spirit of enquiry pervaded British national consciousness. Under the direction of John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, naval expeditions started to stream out of the Thames seeking now the route of the River Niger in Africa, now the North Pole, now the South Pole, now the North-West Passage. However, these explorations were not for just anybody. The Royal Geographical Society, which was Britain’s prime mover in the field of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 165 exploration, had paid scant attention to the Alps. However, some people decided that the Alps, for the most part still undiscovered, were worthy of exploration. 9 Detailed accounts on the relationship between Romantic artists and the Alps can be read in Fergus Fleming’s Killing Dragons and Robert Mac Farlane’s Mountains of the Mind. An important Romantic writer and critic that I do not treat is John Ruskin. His Modem Painters (a work in 5 volumes published between 1843 and 1860) contributed enormously to shape the Romantic perception of the Alps and mountain scenery in general. Since I am only providing an introductory overview of the changes in the way humans have felt about mountains over the centuries, a discussion of Ruskin’s writings is outside the scope of my study. Albrecht von Haller’s long poem The Alps was first published in German in 1732 and rapidly translated into all the major European languages. It is considered the founding text of the Helvetic myth of liberty which sees in the Swiss Alps and its inhabitants the bearers of the best democratic ideals and virtues. However, the classical expression of the virtues of the Alpine Swiss is the twenty-third letter of the lovelorn tutor Saint-Preux to his forbidden love, Julie, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or. The New Heloise (1760). See Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory 478- 490. 11 The other seminal work on this era in German film is Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (1969). Although she shares Kracauer’s interest in the psychological component of these texts, her study is more art-historical in focus and comparative in intent, drawing upon German Romanticism. 12 Eric Rentschler, “A Legend for Modem Times: The Blue Light.” The Ministry of Illusion 28. 13 Although published 1960, Theory of Film was first conceived by Kracauer in 1940, before the writing and publication of From Caligari to Hitler. In fact, The beginning of Theory of Film dates back to 1940-41 in Marseille (now known as the ‘Marseille notebooks’) but Kracauer did not return to the project until November 1948, after he escaped to the United States and the publication of From Caligari to Hitler (1947). The history of its writing and the fact that the book opens with a chapter entitled “Photography” demonstrates that, contrary to what many critics have claimed, history does not disappear from Theory of Film. The first chapter of the book, “Photography,” furnishes a bridge between Theory of Film and Kracauer’s great 1927 Weimar essay with the same title (the Weimar essays were written between 1920s and 1933, the year of his forced exile from Germany). His emphasis on “physical reality” clearly stems from his analysis of the role played by Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 166 photography in modernity in that essay. Kracauer sees in photography the matrix of a specifically modem episteme, at once an expression of and a medium for the experience of a disintegrating world. In fact, in the essay, Kracauer credits the medium with having provoked the confrontation of consciousness with nature: “The turn to photography is the go-for-broke game of history” (“Photography,” The Mass Ornament 62). Kracauer’s insistence on the “photographic approach,” is often misread as ordaining a “naively realist” theory of film. If Kracauer seeks to ground his film aesthetics in the medium of photography, it is because photographic representation has the perplexing ability not only to resemble the world it depicts but also to render it strange, to destroy habitual fictions of self-identity and familiarity. It is in this sense that, as Hansen has noted in her excellent Introduction to Theory of Film, the slippery term “affinity” (of the medium with material reality) includes both film’s ability to record and its potential to reveal something in relation to the world (Hansen ix). 14 Among mountain films made before 1920 were: Cervino (1901) probably by Burlingham, Cervino (1911) by Mario Piacenza, Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908) by Griffith, L’enfant du montagnard (1908) by Cinema Pathe, Pauvre aveugle (1908) by Cinema Pathe, Spedizione di S.A.R. il duca degli Abruzzi al K2 (1909) by Vittorio Sella, Les chercheurs d’or (1909) by Cinema Pathe, L’auberge de la montagne (1910) by Cinema Pathe, Ascensione al dente del Gigante (1911) by Mario Piacenza, L’escarpolette tragique (1913) by Films Valetta, Cabiria (1913) by Giovanni Pastrone, and Maciste alpino (1916) by Romano Borgnetto. Although an American production (Universal), Blind Husbands can be considered a Bergfilm because it is directed by the Austrian bom Erich von Stroheim (Vienna, 1885) and it is set in the mountains of South Tyrol, more specifically Cortina d’Ampezzo. Although the location scenes of the film were shot in California, at Big bear Lake and at Idlewild, Von Stroheim clearly had in mind the Alps that he had visited in his youth. The title that von Stroheim had chosen for the film was The Pinnacle, but it was released as Blind Husbands for commercial reasons. For analyses of the film and biographical information on the director see Nora Henry, “Erich von Stroheim,” Arthur Lenning, “Blind Husbands,” and Richard Koszarski, Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim. 16 The films that Fanck shot between 1920 and 1934 are: Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs (Marvels of Ski. 19201: Im Kampf mit dem Berge. 1. Teil: In Sturm und Eis - Eine Alnensvmphonie in Bildem (The Fight with the Mountain. 19211: Fuchsiagd im Engadin (The Foxhunt in Engadine. 1923); Per Berg der Schicksal (The Mountain of Destiny. 1924); Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain. 1926); Der grosse Sprung (1927); Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palti (1929):Stiirme tiber dem Montblanc (Avalanche. 1930); Der weisse Rausch (1931); Der ewige Traum (1934). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 167 17 The film reached great popularity in Germany and was distributed in many other European countries such as Italy, where it was released as La tragedia di Pizzo Palu, France as L’Enfer Blanc, and Sweden as Lavinen. 1^ Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967) was one of the most important and successful German director of the 1920s and 1930s. His films, such as Per Schatz (The Treasure. 1924) and Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street. 1925), are praised by Siegfried Kracauer for their very realistic rendering of contemporary social reality (From Caligari to Hitler 165-180). 19 The film was shot entirely on location in the Engadine Valley, at the Morteratsch Glacier and at the Diavolezza Shelter Hut which faces the Piz Palii in the Engadine valley. The Piz Palii is close to the Bemina Pass and not far from the town of Sant Moritz, Switzerland. 20 “Fohn peitscht die Wande des Piz Palii.” All translations of the intertitles of this film are mine. 21 Carsten Strathausen, “The Image and the Abyss: The Mountain Film and the Cinematic Sublime,” Kenneth Calhoon, ed., Peripheral Visions 181. Henceforth cited as Strat. 22 Strat, 173. All the action scenes of the film were under Fanck’s direction. He was a master at constructing action and building it to such dramatic crescendos that the audience was propelled along by the action alone. 23 It is called invisible or continuity editing because it creates the illusion of reality. It is the editing style that follows a chronological movement forward, as if the image is simply recording the action. 24 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema 58-9. 25 Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions” (1923), Film Sense 230-33. 26 The origin of the modem roller coaster was the “Russian ice slides.” These structures first appeared during the sixteenth century throughout Russia and they were built out of lumber with a sheet of ice several inches thick covering the surface. Riders climbed the stairs attached to the back of the slide, sped down the 50 degree drop and ascend the stairs of the slide that lay parallel (and opposite) to the first one. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 168 Although there is some dispute as to who first added wheels to the sleds to create rolling coasters, by 1817 two coasters were built in Paris, namely, “Les montagnes russes a Belleville” and “Promenades aeriennes,” both of which featured cars that locked to the tracks in some manner. For a discussion of the origin of the roller coaster as popular entertainment, see David Bennett, Roller Coaster: Wooden and Steel Coasters. Twisters, and Corkscrews, and Robert Cartmell, The Incredible Screen Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster. 27 For a discussion of Pastrone’s Cabiria see my article, “Giving Power to the Masses: Pastrone’s Cabiria Revisited Through its Crowd Scenes.” 28 “Intanto Annibale la ‘spada di Cartagine’, cerca la via del suo fato tra i monti sacri che si levano al cielo come una muraglia impenetrabile.” ('Cabiria 17) “Con un prodigio di pazienza e di forza, Annibale valica le Alpi; ed ecco, la sua celerita minaccia Roma.” (Cabiria 17) “II grande messaggio inebria di vittoria l’anima di Karthada che esalta il suo figlio.” (Cabiria 17) 29 The article “Lo spazio mobile del montaggio e del carrello in Cabiria” by Elena Degrada, Andre Gaudreault and Tom Gunning is in the proceedings (151-183) of the conference “I giomi di Cabiria” (Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Torino, Italy. 20-23 Oct. 1997) published with the title Cabiria e il suo tempo. 20 Interesting enough, Giovanni Pastrone is known as the director who invented the tracking shot and, indeed, he used it for the first time precisely in the filming of Cabiria. However, because of the roughness and steepness of the location, it would have been too difficult to use a camera “travelling” on the set to shoot the Hannibal sequence. 21 The French poster advertising the film Cabiria can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 22 “Das Manuskript wurde von Dr. Fanck unter dem Eindruck einer Zeitungsnotiz geschrieben, die in durren Worten von dem 7 tagigen Kampf um das Leben einiger junger Bergsteiger berichtete, die sich in einer Wand bei Innsbruck verstiegen hatten.” 22 Ernst Udet was a renowned German stunt pilot and war hero. He had been a fighter pilot, member of the Richthofen Squadron in World War I. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 169 34 The advertising poster of L’Enfer blanc can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 35 Among others, Antonia Lant has extensively illustrated, in her article “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” different ways in which ancient Egypt has been seen as related to cinema. For the sake of my argument, I consider only two major attractions (to Western eyes) of that ancient civilization: the mummy and the pharaoh’s tomb. 36 .. Lass mich wo ich hingehore. Du weisst ja, ich war immer gut Freund mit dem Eis.” 37 Five Days One Summer is Fred Zinnemann’s last film. He made it when he was 75 years old as a homage to Erich von Stroheim. Interesting enough, the climbing scenes were shot part in the Engadine -on the North face of the Piz Palii and on the face between the North ridge of the Piz Badile and the Punta Sertori— and part on the mountains that divide the Val Masino (Italy) and the Val Bondasca (Switzerland). 38 This type of attraction appears also in mountain films such as Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), Edward Dmytryk’s The Mountain (1957), Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction (1975), and Martin Campbell’s Vertical Limit (2000). As an expression of the essential human drive to defeat time, and thus death, images of dead bodies preserved from aging appear in folkloric tales, such as E.T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Mines of Falun.” At the end of this tale, the dead body of a miner is found fifty years after his death, petrified in sulfuric acid and thus without a trace of decomposition, at the bottom of a bore. I thank Karen Pinkus for mentioning to me the similarity between mummification and petrification in the tale by Hoffmann. 39 The period of great excavations in ancient Egypt were drawing to a close when cinema was beginning to emerge. The final discovery of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb in 1922 marked the hundredth anniversary of Champollion’s first discovery. 40 Stephen Bottomore, “Shots in the Dark: The Real Origins of Film Editing,” Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema 105. 41 Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive Cinema’: A Frame-Up? Or the Trick’s on Us,” Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema 101. 42 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions 122. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 170 43 For a history and theory of the cinematic gaze in Western scientific culture, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. 44 “Es war nur eine schmale Spalte im Gletscher des Palii — aber sie ging hinunter ins Dunkle.” 45 “Da drang flehend ein Hilferuf aus der eisigen Tiefe — Maria lebte noch!” 46 The same kind of shots used for the climbers on the rock face, with clouds floating in the backdrop, were to be used later for shots of Hitler in Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. This is certainly one of the reasons why Kracauer saw a proto fascist aesthetics in the Bergfilme of the Weimar period. 47 Another major element of visual suspense which, like the “mummy,” is present in Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palii. and will be present in all later mountain films, is the “hanging figure.” In future revisions of my dissertation I intend to include a discussion of hanging figures in mountain films and how the expression “cliffhanger” defines both suspended figures in mountain films and rhetorical elements that create narrative suspense. 48 in Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion. 1880- 1960, John MacKenzie explores “popular imperialism” (2). With this expression he defines the effects of the British Empire on its domestic scene rather than the radiation of influences from Britain into its wider hinterland and the worldview these effects created for the British. 49 For a history of panoramas and an analysis of the panorama as antecedent to cinema, see Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama, and Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. 50 a game very similar to the popular children game known as “Snakes and Ladders.” Reproductions of the board game, the souvenir fan can be viewed in “Monte Bianco: leggenda e realta,” II Monte Bianco nelle immagini e nelle relazioni deH’800. 51 The 1914 expedition was Shackleton’s third expedition to the Antarctic and the most ambitious of all Antarctic expeditions. Shackleton first went to the Antarctic in 1901 as a member of the National Antarctic Expedition led by Robert F. Scott, the famous British explorer. They drove 745 miles from the South Pole, the deepest penetration of the continent at that time. Then, in 1907, Shackleton led the first expedition actually to declare the South Pole as its goal. With three companions, he struggled to within 97 miles of their destination and then had to turn back because of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 171 a shortage of food. The return journey, was a desperate race with death but the party finally made it and Shackleton became a hero of the British Empire (Lansing 8). Evidence of the dimension and scope of his third expedition, the one I am concerned with, is the fact that after Shackleton’s failure, the crossing of Antarctica remained untried for forty-three years, until 1957-8. Then, as an independent enterprise conducted during the International Geographical Year, Doctor Vivian E. Fuchs led the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition on the trek. And even Fuchs, though his party was equipped with heated, tracked vehicles and powerful radios, and guided by reconnaissance planes and dog teams, was strongly urged to give up. It was only after a tortuous journey lasting nearly four months that Fuchs did in fact achieve what Shackleton set out to do in 1915. 52 An American expedition under Robert E. Peary had reached the North Pole in 1909. On his second expedition in late 1911 and early 1912, Robert F. Scott was raced to the South Pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Amundsen beat Scott by a little more than a month. Moreover, Scott and his three companions died as they struggled, weak with scurvy, to return to their base (Lansing 8-9). 53 Marc Theodore Bourrit, Description des cols ou passages des Aloes. Vol. I, 43. The English translation of the quotations from this text are by Fergus Fleming. The Swiss explorer of the Alps Bourrit attempted twice, between 1784 and 1788, to reach the summit of the Mont Blanc but he never succeeded. Mont Blanc was conquered on August 3,1787 by the another Swiss explorer, Horace Benedict de Saussure. 54 Vittorio Sella (Biella, 1859-1943) is the photographer who accompanied the Italian explorer Luigi Amedeo, the duke of Abruzzi, on many mountain expeditions early in the twentieth century. Weighted with heavy, nineteenth-century camera equipment, he climbed many Alpine peaks and also some of the world's greatest and most perilous peaks (such as the Russian Caucasus, the Saint Elias Range in Alaska, Mount Ruwenzori in Africa, the Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas) and photographed them, many for the first time. His beautiful photographs offer groundbreaking scientific and documentary information as well to the extent that climbers today still use Sella's pictures to map out routes and to better comprehend their challenges. Indeed, his photographic documentation of these peaks had no precedents and has few, if any, equals. See Summit: Vittorio Sella - Mountaineer and Photographer, the Years 1879-1909. 55 It can certainly be argued that Antarctica was the first continent to be discovered by the camera. Beginning with Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition in 1902, photography had captured that white, inviolate vastness. Photographic records proved to be not only of historic and geographic interest, but also highly popular. The footage of Scott’s expedition and his tragic death near the South Pole was first Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 172 released in 1913 as The Undying Story of Captain Scott, and it had an enormous success not only in Britain but also in the rest of Europe. Shackleton was well aware of this success and thus formed the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Film Syndicate specifically to exploit all film rights to the expedition, exclusive story rights having already been sold to the Daily Chronicle (Alexander 10). 56 Frank Hurley was hired as the official photographer of Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition. He was in charge of making a complete (still and cinematic) photographic record of the expedition. Hurley had already been the official photographer of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition Expedition to the South Pole led by Sir Douglas Mawson in 1911. 57 Quoted in Lansing, 9. 58 The Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated on June 28,1914 and exactly a month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Soon afterward, Germany declared war on France. 59 The “golden age of mountaineering” in the Alps witnessed a proliferation of first- person narratives modelled on exploration narratives. As this vertical exploration gained a firm place alongside traditional forms of horizontal exploration, a body of narratives began to grow that portrayed mountain space in conspicuously concrete terms. Soon the new mountaineers felt the need of a forum in which they could discuss their ideas and experiences. Mountaineering narratives came to occupy a more prominent place in the journals, magazines, and publishing houses that issued traditional nineteenth-century exploration literature from the time that the British Alpine Club began to publish its prestigious organ, the Alpine Journal in 1863. Moreover, in 1860 John Ball published the anthology Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, a collection of narratives by early Alpine Club members. 60 “Die Wand ist halt das letzte gorsse Problem hier am Palii.” 61 British mountaineers almost never climbed “without a guide.” Mountaineering without a guide was developed at the turn of the twentieth century by Austrian and German mountain climbers. This is why it is commonly defined as fiihrerlos. This phenomenon led to the practice of mountaineering all year round as opposed to the seasonality typical of the traditional mountaineers with guides (Michel Mestre, “Alpinismo svizzero e modello britannico: conformita e specificita.” L’invenzione di un cosmo borghese 91-104). This phenomenon is also one of the reasons for the development of winter mountaineering (i.e. climbing with skis where the snow is fresh and soft, and then with crampons and ice axes when the ice walls start) which Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 173 reached climax in 1910. For a discussion of the development of winter mountaineering in the Alps, see Ercole Martina, L’alninismo invemale 43-56. 62 “I’ mein, der Fohn kommt herunter, da wird’s Eis wieder poltem am Palii. Aber den Ehrgeiz sollst endlich raustassen aus den Bergen - Flannes.” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 174 CHAPTER III: THE METROPOLIS 1. Introduction: An Epic New City? Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down? . . . We want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists! So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! . . . Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! [...] Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly! The Futurists scorned the “museum city” of the nineteenth century. They lacked respect for the past and were determined to make a break with tradition and historical continuity. For these reasons, to associate Antonio Sant’Elia, the alleged author of the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” and his Citta Nuova with the word “epic,” which, among other things, is a synonym for “antiquity,” might sound like sheer nonsense. Within intellectual debates, the Futurist avant-garde is usually seen as an artistic movement of radical iconoclasts. Particularly in relation to attempts at “revitalizing” and “reinvigorating” the moribund Western tradition and culture within Anglo-European modernism, the Futurists’ behavior toward tradition 2 has been perceived as too pessimistic for they exclusively saw its negative aspects. Yet, inasmuch as Sant’Elia is a unique figure within Futurism and only partially assimilable to Marinettian poetics, his metropolis of the future can be associated with the word “epic” in at least two different ways: the Citta Nuova can either be Italy’s New Urbs Roma or a New City whose space has an inherent epic dimension. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 175 When the drawings of the Citta Nuova were first shown at the First Exhibition of the artistic group “Nuove Tendenze” in the summer of 1914 in Milan, the young Italian nation needed to strengthen its own boundaries while expanding its sphere of influence in Africa, where other European nations had already built colonial empires. More important, Italy needed to “colonize” its own soil, the rural and severely under-developed areas that, with the exception of a few industrial cities in the north, constituted the great majority of the country. From this perspective, Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova can either be seen as an attempt to propose a model for the young nation’s urban development or as an attempt to envision a New City which would become a new Urbs Roma, the original and “epic” nucleus of the Roman Empire, the prophetic image of the future city that would stand as the core of the 3 (Mediterranean) world. This view of the Citta Nuova is motivated by the fact that Sant’Elia came from an artistic and culturally moderate background, and was influenced by Futurism’s more revolutionary ideas only at a later stage of his 4 artistic/architectural production. Sant’Elia studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan where most of the leading architects of that time were teaching. When he entered the school in 1909 the Italian nation was less than fifty years old and the search for a cultural identity (now that it had a political identity) was still active. Italian architects were immersed with the atmosphere of nationalism, and they aspired to do for Italian architecture what Alessandro Manzoni had done for the Italian language: to create the architectural idiom of a unified Italy, that is, a national style. Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova was certainly influenced by the fact that, in early Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 176 twentieth-century Italy, arts, and architecture in particular, were pressed into service to advance the ex post facto creation of a national character (da Costa Meyer 4). Besides viewing the Citta Nuova either as a model for the young nation’s urban development or as Italy’s new Urbs Roma, there is a more intriguing way of associating Sant’Elia’s metropolis of the future with the word “epic.” Henri Lefebvre’s suggests that occupied space, the space of society, gives expression to the relationships upon which social organization is founded: “In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. The preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space. Thus primary nature may persist, albeit in a completely acquired and false way, within ‘second nature’— witness urban reality” (229). If this is so, it can be argued that the Citta Nuova underpins certain ancient modes of relation between man and space that can be traced back to the epic/mythic origins of the space of the Mediterranean as the center of the inhabited earth. It is not only Lefebvre who supports this idea. It also finds support in Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of The Odyssey and in Adorno’s discussion of different forms of human locomotion in the aphorism “More haste, less speed” in Minima Moralia. By focusing on a contradiction or difference between the text of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture and the drawings of the Citta Nuova. I will examine how metropolitan traffic in the futurist-ic city points back to a mythic or epic form of human locomotion. At the turn of the twentieth century, technology, particularly as applied to means of transportation, had made daily life more fragmented and faster-moving Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 177 (Kern 118). As early as 1909, Marinetti bombastically proclaimed the emergence of a “new aesthetic of speed”: We [Futurists] say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. . . . We cooperate with mechanics in destroying the old poetry of distance and wild solitudes, the exquisite nostalgia of parting, for which we substitute the tragic lyricism of ubiquity and omnipresent speed. Marinetti’s principles of speed and technology inspired Futurist artists who sought dynamic ways to depict the impact of technology on human experience and represent the new aesthetic sensibility in the arts. This emphasis on movement and speed may well be a manifestation of the technological anxiety widespread at the turn of the twentieth century. Fear of and fascination with technology played a crucial role in transforming everyday life and in integrating technology and the technological imagination in the production of art in the period of time that I define as the age of the emergence of cinema. As Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, it was precisely a new experience of technology that sparked the early twentieth-century avant-garde’s attempt “to overcome the art/life dichotomy and make art productive in the transformation of everyday life.. . . No other single factor has influenced the emergence of the new avant-garde art as much as technology, which not only fueled 6 the artists’ imagination but penetrated to the core of the work itself’ (9). I contend that technological anxiety leads to the “mythologization of technology” and thus, inevitably, of progress. As a consequence, circulation as physical remythologization of human locomotion is only one of the ways in which Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 178 the mythologization of technology manifests itself both in the vision of the Futurist metropolis and in the vision of the modem and futuristic metropolis. My reading of Fritz Lang’s city in Metropolis will highlight, more generally, how the mythologization of technology manifests itself in the vision of the modem and futurist/ic metropolis as machine-city, a gigantic mechanism in constant motion. 2. Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova and Circulation 2.1. The Images versus the Text(s) Like the other Futurists, at least in the first, most utopian and experimental 7 phase of the movement, Sant’Elia was interested in technology, dynamism, speed, and urbanity: We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the house must be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must scale the lengths of the facades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculptures, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily “ugly” in its mechanical simplicity. . . must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many storeys down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving 8 pavements. Because Sant’Elia was the author of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, his drawings of the Citta Nuova were appropriated by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder and spiritual leader of the Futurist movement, to be used as a re-statement, in visual terms, of the most important tenets of Futurism. However, there is one Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 179 interesting exception and it is precisely this exception that I intend to explore. Differently from what he affirms in the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, the beautiful drawings of the Citta Nuova show that Sant’Elia’s interest in dynamism and movement was idiosyncratic. The drawings highlight an obsession with circulation not expressed in other Futurist work or even in the words of the Manifesto. Sant’Elia’s obsession with circulation, expressed in purely visual terms is, indeed, the most remarkable and distinctive feature of the Citta Nuova. What is the source of the contradiction or difference between the images of 9 the Citta Nuova and the texts of the Futurist writings about architecture? Sant’Elia’s drawings of the Citta Nuova were shown at the “First Art Exhibition of the Group ‘Nuove Tendenze’” held in the showrooms of the association “Famiglia Artistica” in via Agnello 8, in Milan. “Nuove Tendenze” was a group of the Milanese avant-garde that included among its members many young artists impatient with the establishment and dissatisfied with “the lachrymose Verismo” and “the gloomy mysticism of the symbolists” then in vogue (da Costa Meyer 94). As the artworks displayed at the exhibition showed, the group clearly accepted Futurist artistic theories but they refrained from the label “Futurism” because they disagreed with the Futurists’ most intransigent positions in the fields of both art and politics.*0 The noun “Tendenze” suggests the artistic group’s belief in a more moderate approach to the renewal of aesthetic sensibility than the radical Futurist approach. The First Exhibition of “Nuove Tendenze” opened on May 20, 1914, and was accompanied by a catalogue to which Sant’Elia contributed an untitled essay. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 180 Moreover, sixteen of the sixty projects displayed were his. The exhibition closed on June 10, 1914 and, only a month later, on July 11, 1914, the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, signed by Sant’Elia, was distributed to the members of the movement accompanied by six drawings of the Citta Nuova. On August 1, 1914 it was published in the Futurist journal Lacerba. By signing the Manifesto Sant’Elia made public an official adherence to the Futurist movement. His Citta Nuova became La 12 Citta futunsta. In a typical propagandistic fashion, most of the copies of the essay that Sant’Elia wrote for the exhibition catalogue, now commonly known as the Messaggio, disappeared soon after the exhibition closed, replaced by the Manifesto, which resembles but is not identical to the Messaggio. It may well be that Marinetti found in both the Messaggio and his author the right ideas and the right representative for an art form, architecture, which still lacked an official Futurist 1 3 manifesto and a representative Futurist artist within the Movement. The differences between the Messaggio and the Manifesto have led critics and art historians to 14 conclude that Sant’Elia is not the author of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. The Messaggio is then considered the only genuine theoretical document about architecture that Sant’Elia ever wrote or, at least, the only one that survived him. However, the differences are at most stylistic both at the level o f the language and at the level of the format. The changes clearly demonstrate that what the Manifesto had to convey was not simply a careful and expert analysis of the architectural field in the early twentieth century. Rather, it had to be a call to arms against the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 181 architectural past in its totality. In other words, the changes and additions made to the Messaggio in order to turn it into a virulent manifesto bear the characteristics of Marinettian bombast. Many of the sentences in the Messaggio. in which the words “Futurism” or “Futurist” never appear, read like observations, though certainly persuasive and resolute, of an expert on the status of architecture at the time and on the absolute need to renew it. Moreover, it is clear to the reader that the Messaggio. as illustrated in this representative passage, was meant to accompany the drawings that Sant’Elia displayed at the “Nuove Tendenze” exhibition. The problem of modem architecture is not a problem of rearranging lines.. . . [It is a question] of creating the newly built house from a sound plan with all the resources of science and technology, richly fulfilling every demand of our habits and our spirit, treading asunder all that is grotesque, heavy, and antithetical to us (tradition, style, aesthetics, proportions), determining new forms, new lines, a new harmony of profiles and volumes, an architecture that finds its raison d’etre exclusively in the special conditions of modem life, and its relation as an aesthetic value in our sensibility.. . . We feel we are no longer the men of cathedrals and meeting halls but of grand hotels, railway stations, vast highways, colossal harbors, covered markets, 1 5 luminous arcades, straight lines, and salutary demolitions. By contrast, the Manifesto, in which the words “Futurism” or “Futurist” appear nine times in fewer than three pages, is a constellation of explosive formulae such as “the supreme imbecility of modem architecture” (“la suprema imbecillita dell’architettura modema”), “architectonic prostitutions” (“ruffianerie architettoniche”), “a moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements” (“un balordo miscuglio dei piu vari elementi di stile”) and “the onanistic recopying of classical models” (“onanistica ricopiatura di modelli classici”), and sensational statements such as: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 182 No architecture has existed since 1700. As if we who are accumulators and generators of movement, with all our added mechanical limbs, with all the noise and speed of our life, could live in streets built for the needs of men four, five or six centuries ago. THINGS WILL ENDURE LESS THAN US. EVERY GENERATION MUST BUILD ITS OWN CITY. The changes introduced in the conclusion of the Manifesto are also telling, as they turn Sant’Elia’s words into a startling proclamation: And I oppose fashionable architecture of every country and of every kind.. . . Just as the ancients took their artistic inspiration from the elements of nature, so too must we — [who are] materially and spiritually artificial- find our inspiration in the elements of the new mechanical world that we have created, of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most effective artistic integration. (Messaggio) I COMBAT AND DESPISE: All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American;. . . This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism . . . for which 16 we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice. (Manifesto) The changes introduced are perfectly understandable if one keeps in mind the ideological position of a Manifesto within Futurism in particular but also within political and artistic movements in general. A Manifesto is a form of communication that relies on immediacy and publicly declares or proclaims someone’s intentions, motives, or views mainly by surprising its readers’ rhetorical expectations. Ultimately, the purpose of a Manifesto is to persuade as many people as possible to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 183 act but, unlike other means of persuasion, it does so through a linguistic electroshock effect. Whereas a comparison between the two texts, the Messaggio and the Manifesto, is highly revealing of the Futurist ideology and its propagandistic methods and aims, it does not say much about Sant’Elia’s drawings of the Citta Nuova. At most, the comparison reveals Sant’Elia’s ideas about the renewal of architecture in the modem technological world. For the purposes of my discussion, what is most compelling is the contradiction or difference between the text(s) and the images. In the drawings, the Futurist praise of dynamism and movement takes a most interesting and unexpected turn. The two written texts differ from the drawings in that they fail to acknowledge an obsession with dynamism and movement in the form of circulation that emerges precisely from the lacunae between text(s) and images. 2.2. A Panorama of the Citta Nuova If one imagines advancing through an exhibition space to follow the drawings of the Citta Nuova and look at them sequentially or, better, if one imagines flying over the Citta Nuova. one would observe a compact urban structure where traffic arteries and architecture are perfectly integrated. To borrow a concept that was coined in the 1960s, the Citta Nuova looks like a “megastructure” ante-litteram or, as 17 Enrico Crispoldi has suggested, a premonition of the megastructure (6). In 1914, the project of the Citta Nuova presented a utopian (in the double meaning of “non place” and “happy place”) urban reality dominated by speed and technology. Simply Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 184 put, a megastructure is technically a large “ffame-structure” in which all the “functions” of a city, or part of a city, are housed (Banham 217). Particularly important in the megastructure is the articulation of all different functions. For an urban space to be considered a megastructure it has to radically employ the new technological resources at hand, respond to a mass condition, strictly integrate architecture and urban planning, and, finally, be designed according to a rigorous . . 18 structural principle that organizes the multiplicity of its functions. The Citta Nuova meets these fundamental requirements. Sant’Elia’s metropolis was inspired by the tum-of-the-century technological developments and innovations in transportation (automobiles, trains, tramways, and planes), in architecture as practiced by engineers, and in the science of building (the use of iron 19 and reinforced-concrete, like Eiffel and Hennebique had done, for instance). It was also inspired by ideas about the nature of architectural intervention in urban space (especially espoused by Otto Wagner and the Wagnerschule), and by the vertical thrust given to the North American cities of New York and Chicago by the construction of skyscrapers. Secondly, Sant’Elia’s metropolis was inspired by the European avant-garde’s urban ideology, a fundamental component of the Futurist Weltanschauung, which saw the crowded industrial city as lively, full of energy, and whose nervous and mechanical vibrations were a source of artistic inspiration. In Sant’Elia’s metropolis buildings and infrastructures, particularly transportation infrastructures, are deeply interrelated. Although, as I will later argue, traffic channels are much more developed than residential or office buildings, the two are Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 185 clearly and profoundly interconnected. Moreover, all traffic functions, both internal and external (pedestrian galleries and walkways, elevators, automobiles, trains, trams, airplanes) are equally developed and integrated. Sant’Elia’s metropolis also has a ffame-structure that organizes the urban space with all its structural and polyfunctional interconnections: it is a machine. All the individual structural units and functions that form the Citta Nuova seem to be kept together by a larger machine-structure, as if they were gears of a machine. The most famous drawing of the Citta Nuova shows an aggregation of stepped-back high-rise buildings, with terraces that recede from a large base to a 20 smaller rooftop, and towering over a deep urban canyon. The high-rise building, single or combined back-to-back or side-to-side with another, constitutes the basic unit of the Citta Nuova. In all its variations the “Casa a gradinata” (or “Casa Nuova,” as it was originally called in the “Nuove Tendenze” catalogue) includes an external 21 tower that houses the elevator. This tower is usually connected to the main part of the building on each floor by means of bridges that increase in span from the ground upward. As Esther da Costa Meyer has rightly pointed out, Sant’Elia treated the elevators as “autonomous channels of vertical traffic” by housing them in separate structures or outside the buildings, and thus exposing them in a way one could see only in warehouses and factories at the time (114). Another distinctive characteristic of Sant’Elia’s stepped-back high-rise buildings are the flat roofs. Although these roofs are relatively small as the buildings usually taper toward the top, they are used as terraces for various purposes: lighthouses, radio-transmitting equipment or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 186 illuminated advertisements. As for the elevators, these elements become, for the first time in Italian architecture, an essential part of the design of the building. The drawing titled “La citta futurista” allows one to see Sant’Elia’s metropolis as a megastructure. This drawing makes clear how the stepped-back high- rise buildings characterizing the Citta Nuova are not only combined among themselves but are also combined into a complex structure of traffic arteries that spreads out its tentacles to encompass the multi-layered urban tissue: streets for pedestrians, high- and low-speed traffic lanes, overpasses, bridges, train and tramway tracks, and even air-runways. Moreover, iron catwalks, overpasses, and viaducts intersect the buildings. There is absolutely no separation between city and infrastructure: habitation and circulation are perfectly integrated. In his attempt to accommodate within his New City all the possible means of transportation, Sant’Elia consigned traffic to three superimposed layers, typologically differentiated, according to vehicle and speed: overpasses for pedestrians, roads for cars, and tracks for tramways. For the Citta Nuova Sant’Elia also envisioned a giant station for trains and airplanes. In the traditional modem city of the late nineteenth century, “traffic buildings” (Schivelbusch 172), such as the railroad station, were always outside the 22 traditional city limit and thus never completely integrated into urban life. On the contrary, in Sant’Elia’s metropolis not only the train station but also the airport is an integral part of the city. His “Station for railroad trains and airplanes” includes funiculars and elevators linking the three different street levels. The main building of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 187 the station has a sloping facade and two-pronged towers on both its sides, and there is a broad, transversal tunnel that runs lengthwise under the main part of the 23 building. Even though the main building of the station appears quite defined, once again the greatest emphasis is given to the traffic channels. The building overlooks a series of interlocking highways and railway tracks. Elevators and funiculars connect the various levels and carry passengers from the lower to the upper decks. Behind the building, but possibly also on its roof in-between the two towers, an airstrip stretches out and airplanes appear in three different drawings of the station. In Sant’Elia’s metropolis, traffic channels are the only structures that have been carefully, even obsessively, determined. All the rest — residential spaces, the function and division of the buildings and their interiors- remains totally undefined. The contrast between the hypertrophy of transportation facilities and the very low demographic density implied by the stepped-back high-rise buildings is indisputable. These buildings, though imposing, have no formal autonomy. They can only be considered in conjunction with the many different traffic arteries from which they are inseparable. Moreover, pedestrian traffic is kept to carefully circumscribed areas; there is none of the intermingling of individual and machine that actually occurred and still occurs in most contemporary cities. I would go even a step further and state that Sant’Elia seems almost to completely efface pedestrian traffic from his drawings of the metropolis. Thus, scale and modem transportation contribute not only to an over-determination of the traffic arteries with respect to all the other structures and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 188 functions of the city, but also to the confinement of pedestrian traffic into very circumscribed and limited areas of the urban “reality.” One of the drawings of the Citta Nuova, which was published in the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, explicitly highlights this second characteristic of the Citta Nuova. This drawing depicts stepped-back high-rise buildings overlooking 24 a broad urban valley made up of four superimposed road levels. Although pedestrians are able to reach the lower levels reserved for vehicles by means of elevators, they are mostly consigned to the upper levels where interior streets seem to be laid out for their use. But what use? These upper-level interior streets, though probably reminiscent of the interior streets of the nineteenth-century modem capitals, do not seem to play the same role as the famous arcades that Walter Benjamin perceived as the allegorical emblem of modernity. Although not an Italian invention, gallerie were built in Italy almost at the same time the first Paris passages were built. It is hard to believe that Sant’Elia did not have in mind the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, the city where he 25 studied and worked, when designing the interior streets of the Citta Nuova. Benjamin described the Parisian arcades as having transitory purposes as centers of both trade in luxury goods and flanerie. According to Benjamin, the arcades, business and shopping areas, welcomed Baudelaire’s flaneur, the quintessential pedestrian, who walks in the city as if the streets were his dwelling place and whose goal is nothing else but strolling: The flaneur goes botanizing on the asphalt. B u t. . . [scrolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades. The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 189 arcades, a rather recent invention of industrial luxury,. . . are glass- covered, marble-panelled passageways through entire complexes of houses whose proprietors have combined for such speculations. Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature. It is in this world that the flaneur is at home; he provides “the favorite sojourn of the strollers and the smokers, the stamping ground of all sorts of little metiers,” with its chronicler and its philosopher. [The arcades] turn a boulevard into an interieur. . . . The street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur: he is as much at home among the fagades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. (“The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 37-8) Particularly in Italy, the galleria merely extended the typical and traditional functions of streets and squares (piazze), the urban sites of meeting and promenade (passeggiata), social events, and transitory activities. In Italy, more than in any other European nation, the galleria represented the coalescence and transformation of public life into modem terms (Bruno 43). Because, as a ferrovitreous structure, it is an interior “light-space” (Schivelbusch 46), the galleria, even more than streets and piazze before it, exploded the division between interior and exterior. If the interior streets of the Citta Nuova are not equivalent to the arcades of the modem capital of the nineteenth century, likewise, in the Citta Nuova there is nothing equivalent to the traditional streets and piazze of the typical Italian city. City streets and piazze. while they had always been meant to manage traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, have also served another, even more important, function. They formed social spaces where people congregated, strolled, or simply looked around. Especially in Italy, city squares were in fact salotti pubblici (“public livingrooms”), for all intents and purposes closed spaces for neighborhood life and, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 190 thus, microscopic versions of the city. Both streets and piazze were, in other words, extended dwelling places where, as Benjamin observed in Naples, “each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life” so that “the living room 26 reappears on the street.” In the Citta Nuova there are no urban containers such as streets, piazze. or gallerie for pedestrians. The traditional pedestrian spaces of the modem capital of the nineteenth century do not exist in Sant’Elia’s metropolis. Apart from some indoor or open air corridors within the buildings, the Futurist metropolis does not seem to have any space for Baudelaire’s flaneur. Moreover, if one can hardly conceive of taking a walk, stopping somewhere to rest is totally unimaginable. This is certainly not a city for pedestrians, or for crowds. In a sort of Haussmannian way, in Sant’Elia’s New City the streets become thoroughfares and nothing else; they are completely given over to vehicular traffic, even though, 27 ironically, vehicles themselves are seldom actually drawn in the Citta Nuova. In fact, with the exception of some airplanes, Sant’Elia left the traffic arteries of his New City empty. As I have demonstrated, the over-determination of traffic channels and the effacement of pedestrian traffic in the Citta Nuova constitute the lacunae between text(s) and images, that is, between Sant’Elia’s written architecture and his architettura disegnata. Sant’Elia clearly departs from both Ms Manifesto of Futurist Architecture and, more generally, Futurist ideology that celebrate the modem city in its totality: the street, its main inhabitant (the crowd), and its vehicles (automobiles and trains, the quintessential symbols of the transformation of urbanity by Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 191 technology) with their creative potentials and boundless energy. Thus, if, as the architectural historian Carlo Ragghianti argues, the Citta Nuova does not do anything else but circulate, and if, as I argue, circulation is no longer — or not yet— equivalent to metropolitan traffic, the question that comes to mind is: how is one to understand 28 circulation in the Citta Nuova? 3. A Theory of Circulation. 3.1. Between Myth and Enlightenment: Epic and the Birth of the Bourgeois Subject In “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno divide the history of civilization into three different modes of behavior that correspond to the three successive stages of the anthropological progress of mankind: the mimetic mode, the mythic mode, and the metaphysical mode (31). The era of myth is characterized by the end of mankind’s nomadic existence and by symbolic representation. At the same time as mankind settles and grounds itself, the expressions of human fear of material and natural elements are no longer directly identical with the feared elements, as in the mimetic mode of behavior, which is dominated by magic. In magic, as Adorno and Horkheimer have pointed out, there is specific representation since “what happens to the enemy’s spear, hair or name, also happens to the individual” (10). In other words, the signifier is of the same order as the signified. In the era of myth, the things feared are explained by being named. Their names symbolize their quintessence; spirits and deities, that is mythic figures, are no longer identical with the feared elements but they signify them. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 192 Within the mythic mode of behavior, classical Mediterranean epic constitutes a further step in the process of the rationalization of nature in the history of 29 mankind. This is so for three main reasons. First of all, epic organizes diffuse variants of myths into a narrative unit (43). These chosen variants will come to gain prestige over the variants and fragments of antiquity, even if they are not necessarily originary. Epic unifies many different myths that belonged to oral popular traditions and were not necessarily connected with one another. Secondly, epic — a later stage in the development of mankind within the mythic mode of behavior- illustrates the withdrawal of the self from the mythic powers that still govern the self s fate unconditionally, notwithstanding the fact that at this stage these powers already bear names and are consequently recognizable. Finally, epic describes the beginning of the process of transformation of language from pictorial, where concept and thing are one, to a system of signs, where concept and thing are separated. In so doing, epic shows the origin of the process by which the word becomes, in Saussure’s terms, a “linguistic sign” in which the signifier, the visual or acoustic image, is detached from the signified, the concept. These three characteristics of classical Mediterranean epic correspond to the three distinctive aspects that constitute the foundations of the bourgeois subject. As a consequence, one can state that classical epic witnesses the birth of the bourgeois subject as an individual who is at the same time homo oeconomicus (he who appropriates nature), autos (he who has an autonomous inner life), and logos (he who speaks the language of reason). Epic, as Horkheimer and Adorno present it in their Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 193 discussion of The Odyssey, constitutes a transitional but meaningful moment in the progress of mankind because it is the locus of the confrontation between myth and Enlightenment. In other words, epic, as the stage of both physical and conceptual demythologization, is no longer mythology but, at the same time, it is not yet Enlightenment. The reading of The Odyssey proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno suggests that Odysseus is the representative of the more modem self that strives to withdraw from the archaic and fearful powers that compel him to rootless wandering. Although in the era of myth the self abandons nomadism and begins to ground itself, the epic hero Odysseus does more. Odysseus’s wanderings around the Mediterranean Sea in the attempt to reach Ithaca, his homeland, result in the physical appropriation of the territory in which he wanders. To the extent that, according to Enlightenment logic, the self acquires its identity by the process of appropriation of nature (Robinsonade), the stage of the physical appropriation of the earth witnesses the birth of the bourgeois self or subject as homo oeconomicus. Hence, one can say that the process of appropriation of nature begins precisely with the appropriation of terrestrial space. Upon closer analysis, however, it is precisely the terrestrial space that Odysseus appropriates through his wanderings that hinders the birth of the bourgeois subject as autos, that is, a “self’ that is not merely a body but the autonomous internal life that constitutes one’s subjectivity or personality. Showing their debt to Georg Lukacs’s analysis of the historical-philosophical differences between the epic and the novel in The Theory of the Novel. Horkheimer and Adomo demonstrate how Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 194 Odysseus is at the origin of the bourgeois novelistic hero -th e exemplary autos- but he is not the bourgeois hero. As I have previously mentioned, epic organizes the various different myths into a narrative unit through the wanderings of the hero. Thus, the epic hero Odysseus serves to unite the adventures that, one after the other, occur in the places sacred to the local deities where he happens to land or find himself. From this perspective, the narrative account of Odysseus’s life is nothing more than a sequence of adventures. According to Lukacs, “the autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only... when interiority and adventure are forever divorced from one another” (66). The substantiality of the subject Odysseus that results from the coordination of the adventures is, in fact, only a “thing-self ’ (Horkheimer and Adomo 48), that is, a body as mere exteriority. It is not a self as autos, as interiority, because the epic hero Odysseus does not perceive the difference between his internal space, his interiority, and the external space, the world. He does not perceive the difference, as Lukacs maintains, between “the incongruence of soul and deed” (29). In moving from one adventure to the other, the epic hero’s identity derives from the unidentical, unconnected, unarticulated myths that he, through his wanderings, turns into an external spatial unity. As Horkheimer and Adomo put it, “the self does not constitute the fixed antithesis to adventure, but in its rigidity molds itself only by way of that antithesis: being an entity only in the diversity of that which denies all unity” (47). The conclusion that one necessarily has to draw is that Odysseus as subject is merely a formal device, a subject solution to the stmctural problem of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 195 having to organize many different myths in the form of adventures. Furthermore, the external space of the adventures, the spatial change of scenery, stands in place of the internal space of the hero, and his individuality. To further emphasize this, one might say that in epic there is movement through space precisely because there is no space of the subject. Horkheimer and Adomo state that “in the image of voyaging, historical time is detached from space, the irrevocable pattern of all mythic time” (48). This means that it is precisely the picaresque solution of wandering that confines the epic hero to mythic time. According to Lukacs, mythic time is a time in which the world is internally homogeneous. The mythic world is an organic whole, a totality in which men do not differ qualitatively from one another; there is not yet the belief that each soul is autonomous and incomparable. As a consequence, the epic hero, as bearer of his destiny, is not lonely, for this destiny connects him by indissoluble bonds to the community whose fate is crystallized in his own. Moreover, in this type of world, an event — always expressed in a series of adventures— has a quantitative, rather than qualitative, significance. This means that the event must be significant to “a great organic life complex,” a community, namely a nation or a family (Lukacs 67). For these reasons, none of the parts of the mythic world can become so enclosed within itself, so dependent upon itself, as to become autonomous, to find itself as an interiority. For Lukacs, the epic cosmos still partakes of the condition proper to the mythic world. As a consequence, in this context, to speak of an “epic individual,” in the sense of subject, is an oxymoron. The epic hero cannot be an individual, an Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 196 autos; he cannot be or become a personality. He does not live in the historical time that would allow an inner organization of individuality in the form of time. 3.2. “More haste, less speed” This discussion of the subject has great relevance for the theory of circulation on which I will elaborate. In the aphorism “More haste, less speed” of Minima Moralia, Adomo defines as “physical demythologization” the moment in which mankind gives up running for walking. According to Adomo, running is a rhythm “extorted from the body by command or terror” (162). In the era of myth, running was mankind’s form of locomotion either because people had to escape “the unleashed powers of life,” or because they were “under the spell of hieratic pacing” and consequently compelled to ran. In Western bourgeois civilization, the form of locomotion is walking so that a person who, for any reason, runs, hints at the return to the mythic mode of behavior. Running becomes what estranges one from bourgeois walking and makes one aware of the presence of the “archaic power” in everyday life. By reversing Adorno’s approach to running, one can state that the shift from running to walking occurs when and because space becomes meaningful, when and because the self starts to appropriate nature in the form of space and does not leave any part of it to the unknown. Hence, the self becomes homo oeconomicus. Physical demythologization is the moment in which the self stops running and frees itself from fear by withdrawing from the mythic powers that guide its fate and starts to give meaning to the space of its compelled wanderings. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 197 Horkheimer and Adomo, however, suggest that walking has had more than one meaning in the history of mankind. The civilization that emerges from “the program of the Enlightenment” is a result of the disenchantment of the world obtained through the “the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (3). In particular, Horkheimer and Adomo seem to make a distinction between the activity of walking in the liberal era, that is, the bourgeois era, the era of capitalism tout court, and the activity of walking in the era of advanced capitalism, that is, the era of culture industry. They see already in the liberal era a reversion to the mythical mode of behavior in the dying out of bourgeois walking. This regression happens not because human beings start running again but, rather, because nobody walks for leisure any longer. In other words, walking as conscious and intentional activity — bourgeois walking— is already disappearing in the liberal era. As Adomo points out in the aphorism “More haste less speed,” to take a walk or to stroll were “private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century” (162). Insofar as walking is considered a legacy of feudal society, than in the liberal era walking is already an anachronism, something that belongs to the past, and that one experiences only partially or indirectly. Indeed, Adomo seems to suggest that bourgeois walking comes to a definitive end with the disappearance of the nineteenth-century flaneur who walks about everywhere in the city as if the streets were his dwelling place and his goal was nothing else but strolling. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 198 In the era of advanced capitalism, nobody walks anymore, but not strictly for reasons related to mass ownership of automobiles. On the contrary, walking is no longer an activity according to the original meaning of this word. “Activity” comes from the Latin actus, the past participle of the verb agere, which means “to do,” and individual who performs an activity is an agente ‘agent,’ someone who acts. In the era of advanced capitalism, walking again becomes a sort of compulsion, which implies that an individual does not act but, rather, is acted upon. It is the exact opposite of an activity. To put it another way, in the era of advanced capitalism, walking reverts to being a mythical form of locomotion; it is, in a way, re mythologized. The archaic power “inaudibly guides our every step” once again and it “makes itself heard” (162) particularly, I would add, every time one sees someone running for whatever reason. It does not matter if it is a person running in the street to catch a bus, or a child who is commanded to run and fetch the purse that his mother forgot. Running is feared as a reversion of the bourgeois subject to the mythic mode of behavior from which he had detached himself with a great effort. As far as running is concerned, the difference between the mythic era and the democratic era is that whereas in the former terror is the cause of running, in the latter running, as Adomo points out in the opening line of the aphorism, “conveys an impression of terror,” which is to say that terror is no longer the cause but rather the effect of running. In Adorno’s words, a person who is running “unwittingly bears witness to past terror” and consequently reminds one of the fearful mythic power that once compelled mankind to run. This is so because “the victim’s fall is already Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 199 mimed in his attempt to escape it” (162). This statement by Adomo raises the question of what locomotion in the metaphysical mode of behavior — the third stage in the anthropological progress of mankind— would be. A careful analysis of the sentence “the victim’s fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it” from a Freudian perspective brings to the fore the state of mankind within the metaphysical mode of behavior. This state appears to be a desire to be at rest that, nonetheless, can never be achieved. I will attempt to explain Adorno’s sentence in the form of an equation. The sentence implies that what is really feared is the fall into mythology, that is, the reversion into a superseded stage of the anthropological progress of mankind where the “archaic power” governed the individual unconditionally. The condition of being “under the spell” of the archaic power that extorts the rhythm of walking from human beings is, in psychoanalytic terms, the repressed, the forgotten experience which, however, still exists in the unconscious. As a consequence, to escape the fall means to mn away from the repressed. Nevertheless, if one attempts to escape the repressed, the repressed itself becomes the motive behind one’s action or, better, movement. Thus, the attempt to escape the repressed is self-defeating because one inevitably limits one’s own freedom of action or movement. In other words, in the attempt to escape the archaic power one ends up being controlled by it, which is the equivalent of saying that in the attempt to run away from the fall one runs toward it. The inevitable conclusion is that if it is true that one never falls back into myth, it is also true that one has to keep running away from falling into myth. From Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 200 this point of view, what Adomo describes in the abovementioned sentence is not dissimilar from what Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) defines as “parapraxis” (295). According to Freud, parapraxes are everyday mental phenomena in the form of faulty acts (such as the forgetting of things, mistakes in speaking, the automatic execution of purposive acts in wrong situations, the loss or breaking of objects) which are expressions, in the form of “surrogate-creations” of experiences or desires which are repressed, hidden from the consciousness. Hence, they are symptoms of the repressed. One can certainly argue that running toward the fall is a symptom of the repressed fear of regressing into a previous mode of behavior and being compelled to run again. As a result, the form of locomotion within the metaphysical mode of behavior is characterized by continuous fast repetitive movements, a ceaseless stumbling along. In the same way as the fall into myth never happens, the desire to be at rest is never fulfilled or attained. 3.3. Circulation in the Citta Nuova To address the question I have posed above, namely, “How is one to understand circulation in the Citta Nuova?” I want to return to Lefebvre’s suggestion that second nature, the space occupied by society, does not replace primary nature, the space of the relationships upon which social organization is founded. We should recall the critic’s words: “In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. The preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space. Thus primary nature may persist, albeit in a completely acquired and false way, within ‘second nature’— witness urban reality” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 201 (229). One can then argue that the urban space of the Citta Nuova is “second nature,” a produced space, which, however, has retained certain natural traits, that is, traits distinctive of primary nature. Both in the aphorism “More haste, less speed” and in his discussion of The Odyssey, Adomo seems to suggest that a fundamental moment, within primary nature, in the relation between man and space is what he defines as “physical demythologization” (162). This is the moment in which mankind gives up running - a rhythm “extorted from the body by command or terror”— for walking. The era of myth for Adomo and Horkheimer is one of the stages of the anthropological progress of mankind to which classical Mediterranean epic belongs. In this era, running was mankind’s form of locomotion either because people had to escape “the unleashed powers of life,” or because they were “under the spell of hieratic pacing” and consequently compelled to run. In the stage of physical demythologization, the self (embodied by Odysseus) stops running and frees itself from fear by withdrawing from the mythic powers that guide its fate. Thus, the self starts to give meaning to the space of its compelled wanderings. This happens because each of Odysseus’s adventures during the journey from Troy to Ithaca gives each locus in which the adventure takes place “a proper name and permit[s] space to be surveyed in a rational manner” (Horkheimer and Adomo 46). To put it another way, the space of the Mediterranean Sea is physically demythologized by Odysseus, who measures and appropriates it by refusing the dangerous temptations that each place offers. Each place takes the name of the demon that Odysseus has forced back into the form of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 202 rock and cavern. The “unknown” ceases to be an unfathomable menace because it is located by being named and thereby controlled. Henceforth, Odysseus, or more generally mankind, is no longer compelled to run. A person who runs for any reason makes others aware of the presence of the archaic power in everyday life from which mankind has become estranged with great effort. The human form of locomotion becomes walking. It is outside the scope of this discussion to further explain Adorno’s compelling analysis of the different meanings of walking in the history of mankind. From my perspective it is important that walking is a mode of relation between man and space which, generally speaking, can be described as the conscious and intentional form of human locomotion. This is opposed to running, which, on the contrary, is a rhythm “extorted from the body by command or terror.” What I want to propose is an understanding of circulation in Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova that can be inferred by the following relation: circulation stands to secondary nature as running stands to primary nature. In Lefebvre’s terms, circulation in the urban space of the Citta Nuova is an instance of primary nature — a natural mode of relation between man and space— within second nature, that is, the space of society. In Adorno’s terms, circulation in the urban space of the Citta Nuova is a return to a mythic/epic mode of relation between man and space. From both these perspectives, however, the analogic relation that I propose results in an understanding of circulation in the Citta Nuova as no longer — or not yet- an activity, according to the original meaning of the word. In Sant’Elia’s metropolis, circulation reverts to a compulsion that implies Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 203 that an individual does not act but, rather, is acted upon. In other words, circulation reverts to an ancient/epic form of human locomotion: running. As Adomo would put it, human locomotion is “physically re-mythologized.” 4. The Mythologization of Technology: The Cinematic Metropolis as Mechanism 4.1. The Citta Nuova as First Step Toward a Cinematic Metropolis In perfect alignment with the Futurist ideology, which relentlessly promoted the cult of the new, the machine, speed, and urbanity, Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova is a (utopian) technological city of speed and movement. It is offers a dynamic representation of the metropolis of the future. Sant’Elia’s attempt to reproduce urban dynamism was influenced by the Futurist kinetic paintings and sculptures which intended to capture the laws of movement and vital energy. To capture the impact of technology on human experience, Futurist artists intentionally ignored the figure and began to paint or sculpt action and the optical effect of movement. In 1912, Giacomo Balia began to break down motion in successive stages. He painted the trotting of a dachshund in Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio. Le mani del violinista. which portrays different movements simultaneously: vibrating strings, a gliding bow, a left hand grasping the neck of the instrument, and sound vibrations pulsating through air, and Bambina che corre sul balcone. which portrays the girl’s swirling skirt and running feet. In 1913, Umberto Boccioni sought to create continuous movement and the dynamic sensation of movement itself in the bronze sculpture Forme uniche della • • , „ • 3 0 contmuita nello spazio. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 204 Despite his interest in dynamism and movement, Boccioni, the Futurist artists’ group leader and theorist, had a particularly conflicted relationship with cinema (and photography). His reticence toward cinema as a medium for art, at least in the first phase of Futurism, influenced significantly Marinetti. Boccioni derived and elaborated his paradoxical position toward cinema from Bergson’s philosophy. From his perspective, the mechanical eye of the camera, while it prodigiously scrutinizes the fleetingness and invisibility of the interaction between matter and energy, produces only dead images, images that are extraneous to art as Boccioni intended it. For him, art was an immediate reflection of the vital sensation and a lyrical transfiguration of the dynamism inherent in the perpetual becoming. The artist was the only legitimate mediator between the aesthetic experience and the sensible world. For Boccioni, the artist’s intuition is the source of knowledge and the artist’s ability to discern duration as experience of the latent and the unforeseeable is the artist’s subjective contribution to the creative act. This contribution is, however, irreconcilable with the mechanical determinism of the camera eye. Rather than a dynamic perception, the camera eye records a passive perception of reality as absolute becoming. For this reason, Boccioni, though strongly influenced by the images produced by the camera eye as a model for exploring reality (he was inspired, for instance, by the chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey and by the bodies’ transparency allowed by Rontgen’s x-rays), he rejected it as an aesthetic medium. Boccioni’s love/hate relationship with cinema was not uncommon among avant-garde artists at the time. Anthony Vidler maintains that “film had been the site Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 205 of envy and even imitation for those more static arts concerned to produce effects or techniques of movement and the collapse of time in space” (100). Although this is true for all figurative or spatial arts, it is even truer for architecture. From the outset, the prominent and indisputable role of architecture and architects in the construction of film sets, and the equally prominent and indisputable ability of film to “construct” (Vidler 101) its own architecture in light and shade, scale and movement, allowed for a reciprocity between these two art forms. Interestingly enough, some of the most prominent early filmmakers, like Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang, had originally been trained as architects. For them in particular, filmic art was a site of spatial experimentation as it offered the potential to develop a new architecture of time and space that was not hampered by the material constraints that the practice of traditional architecture has to constantly and inevitably confront, such as gravity and daily life.3 1 Cinema contributed both to the introduction of effects of movement in architecture and architectural drawings and to the association of technology with movement. It did both things in two different ways. First, cinema is the technological art form par excellence, since film can not only be materially reproduced and endlessly multiplied, but is in fact designed for mechanical reproducibility. Cinema is a technique of reproduction through a mechanical apparatus (the camera or “kinetograph,” as the first motion-picture camera invented by the Edison Labs was called) that produces “moving pictures,” that is, images in movement or the movement of images. Thus, cinema also represents movement. Moreover, one of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 206 primary aims of early cinema was to explore and represent technology, movement and, last but not least, the modem city. As Tom Gunning has noted, from the moment of its birth, cinema re-presented city crowds, street attractions, and urban 32 traffic. Although the fascination for the dynamism and vitality of the urban environment stirred the imagination of both avant-garde and commercial cinema, it is the former that particularly celebrated technology, dynamism, and urban life and that led to interesting cinematic experiments. Within the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth-century, Futurist cinema played a too often unacknowledged but not irrelevant role. Thus, a parallel between Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, one of the most representative early avant-garde films envisioning a metropolis of the future and a technological urban space, is more than plausible. Besides being commonly recognized as an icon of expressionist utopias and a masterpiece of set design, Metropolis (1926) is also one of the best examples of the early cinematic genre of the “city-film,” that is, (re)presentations of the metropolis in 33 the early history of cinematography. Both Sant’Elia and Lang attempted to build the futurist-ic metropolis in the present and both searched for ways to represent urban movement. Sant’Elia and Lang were both architects sui generis who worked within two different cultural and artistic environments (the Italian avant-garde movement and Weimar culture) and times (the Citta Nuova was produced before World War I and Metropolis after World War I). Nevertheless, they appear to have shared a similar attitude toward urbanity and technology. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 207 4.2. The Cinematic Metropolis The turn of the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented urban population growth, industrialization, and consequently crowding and filth. Architects and urban planners searched for new concepts of the city. They offered different visions of the future city’s urban development. Both in Europe and in the United States, two major but very divergent visions and reinterpretations emerged. On the one hand, there was a revulsion for the old, industrial — and thus compact, dirty, and crowded— city reinforced by the ancient dislike of urban centers as dens of vice and corruption. This widespread image of the wicked city led to visions of centrifugal urban spaces (Dimendberg 93) forever cleansed of slums, congestion, traffic, and disorder. This vision inspired, among others, Ebenezer Howard to design his Garden Cities as early as 1898 in England, and Frank Lloyd Wright to design Broadacre City 34 in the early 1930s in the United States. On the other hand, the density of the tum- of-the-century industrial city inspired visions of a future metropolis in which technological advances could provide a more efficient and orderly life. Thus, some architects and urban planners explored ways to adapt the existing intense, interactive, and dense city to the greater speed and heights allowed by the modem technological era (Safdie 16). They saw the advent of the new means of transportation, such as the automobile, the train, and the airplane, and high-rise constructions as a way of escaping from the limitations and the oppressions of the old compact horizontal city. Among these visionaries one can certainly count Antonio Sant’Elia who, in Italy before World War I, offered his view of a new technological city. Analogously, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 208 Hugh Ferriss and Harvey Wiley Corbett in the 1920s in New York, to give only two examples, offered their visions of a city of streamlined blocks with tapering skyscrapers and complex, carefully devised transportation systems (Ghirardo 3). I consider Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as part of the second reinterpretation of urban space in the early twentieth century. However, because it was a product of Weimar culture, the city of Metropolis is also informed by yet two more opposing views of urban space as transformed by modem technology: the Expressionist (dystopian) view and the Neue Sachlichkeit’s utopianism. Expressionism’s attitude toward technological urban space emphasizes technology’s oppressive and destructive potential and is clearly rooted in the experiences and memories of the mechanized battlefields of the Great War (Huyssen 67). In the film, the industrial explosion that suddenly occurs in the machine room of the city clearly shows the potential danger of technology. Conversely, the city of the film, with its canyon-like walls rising far above street level and with its bridges and elevated roads thrown between towering factories and office buildings, is reminiscent of the technology cult of the Neue Sachlichkeit and its unrestrained confidence in technical progress, social 35 engineering, and the machine’s rational order. Metropolis has been the subject of numerous interpretations. One of the many possible interpretations of this film is through an analysis of the cultural environment in which the film was conceived and produced. Film critics and scholars have also widely discussed the many issues that the film raises, which span from social and ideological contents to urban and psychoanalytical approaches. Thus, Metropolis has Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 209 been read by critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner in the past, and Roger Dadoun, R.L. Rutsky, Patricia Mellenkamp, Andreas Huyssen, Thomas Elsaesser, Peter Fisher, Dietrich Neumann, and Tom Gunning in recent years, as a combination of comments on (1) the class/power or capital/labor relation in a modem technological city, (2) a working-through of World War I trauma, (3) the affirmation of a tyrannical, patriarchal technological order foreshadowing the rise to power of National Socialism in Germany. The interpretations do not end here. Further critical readings of Metropolis have focused on the Christian religious symbolism, the Oedipal triangle that dominates both the characters’ relations and the plot, the future as triumph of the machine in the style of science-fiction films, and the theme of gendered technology centered on the female-robot or machine-woman. All these elements of the film, which have been analyzed at length and, some might argue, ad nauseam, by the abovementioned critics, are undoubtedly crucial within the film narrative and strongly sustained by the stunning visual imagery of technology, especially considering that the film was made in 1926. I want to move the constructed location of the film from the background, for which the set is usually created, to the foreground. Like Lang, as Neumann has suggested, I am most interested in the vision of urban space portrayed in the film, and in Metropolis this vision, as I will demonstrate, is far from being merely a background.3 6 My analysis of Metropolis is based upon the architecture of Lang’s city of the future, a dynamic, futuristic construction following the era’s most progressive trends in architecture and design. Proceeding from the assumption that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Metropolis is an architect’s film, my reading of the film will particularly emphasize the urban planning and organization of the city, and the characters’ movements within its space(s). In turn, my description of Lang’s metropolis will expand and further illuminate my definition of mythologization of technology as it originated from my discussion of Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova. Although my perspective on the city of Metropolis is more attuned to Tom Gunning’s interpretation of technology in Metropolis as modem magic than with any other major recent analyses of the film, I will formulate my own analysis of the film based on two pivotal themes: the machine-city and the technological urban space as bearer of an epic dimension. 4.3. Metropolis: the Machine-City [Berlin is] a wonderful modem engine-room, a giant electrical motor, which executes with incredible precision, speed and energy a plethora 37 of complicated mechanical tasks. (Egon Fnedell, 1912) [T]he wonderfully light, spirited tempo of Metropolis’s visionary mise-en-scene, the airplanes smoothly swimming across the skies, the automobiles that practically hover in the air as they glide across Hugh steel girders . . . [Metropolis is] a hyper-American, utopian, urban mechanism from, let’s say, A.D. 3000. (Willy Haas, 1927)3 8 Metropolis is not so much a film about machines as it is itself a machine, made up of parts fitted together, whose intricate clockwork elements are as much the human passions, anxieties and aggression as 39 they are the pistons, flywheels and dials. (Thomas Elsaesser, 2000) The quotations above suggest that at the beginning of the twentieth century a vision of the modem technological city as a machine-city was already in the mind of many. These quotations also demonstrate that the city portrayed in Metropolis has Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 211 always been perceived, from the time of its release, as a machine-city. The creators of Lang’s city devised a variety of meaningful urban spaces that are all part of a complex three-dimensional “megastructure.” There are several levels, both above ground, in the Upper City, and underground, in the Lower City. The emphasis is placed on the vertical connections between these different parts. Staircases, steeply inclined tunnels, and especially elevators play a central role in the film (Neumann 34). The urban space of the Metropolis is organized into a Dantesque-like structure. Moving from top to bottom, the distribution of the levels is as follows: the pleasure garden, the Upper City, the machine rooms, the workers’ dwellings, and the ancient catacombs. “High above,” the intertitles tell us, there is a “pleasure garden.” Access to this sort of Eden, hidden behind an imposing gate, is limited to the ieunesse doree. that is, the sons of the wealthy and powerful people of the city of Metropolis. This artificial paradise is filled with exotic vegetation, fountains, strutting peacocks, and big white birds. Then, there is the real Upper City with enormous towering buildings and many layers of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The Upper City features at its center the New Tower of Babel, the headquarters of the industrialist Joh Fredersen, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the Metropolis. Joh Fredersen’s spacious and rationalist office looks like a control room with a window spanning one entire wall. This window faces the heart of the Upper City with its jungle of skyscrapers and traffic arteries and also overlooks the entire Metropolis’s skyline. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 212 Below the street level of the Upper City begins the Lower City. Here, in the underground, there are three different levels. The first level is that of the halls of the Great Machines the so-called engines of the machine-city. In the machine rooms, workers on a ten-hour shift manipulate levers and turn dials and man control panels. Beneath the machine rooms lies the workers’ city. It consists of gigantic caves with quarters for the workers densely packed around a central empty square in which a big gong is mounted on a pedestal. Despite the fact that in the intertitles it is defined as a city, there is no sun or fresh air at all. The machine rooms are connected to the workers’ city by means of a steel see-through freight elevator that slowly moves up and down. Finally, far below the lowest levels of the workers’ city, are the ancient burial sites, the catacombs. They are dark bowel-like passageways opening up at the bottom into a cave where an altar covered with tall crosses and candles is placed in the center. There, in the lowest and almost forgotten part of the Metropolis, illegal activities take place. Two sequences of the film show that the workers need maps of the catacombs and directions as how to reach them from the upper levels. Somewhere in the Upper City are also a gothic cathedral, a sport stadium, a nightclub, and the house of Rotwang, the inventor, but their location is not specified by the film’s diegesis. As I have already pointed out, all the different levels of the Metropolis are interconnected so that it is possible to move vertically among them. However, as I will later illustrate, the main character of the film, Freder Fredersen, Joh Fredersen’s son, is the only character who actually circulates through all the different levels. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 213 The similarity between the Upper City of Lang’s metropolis and Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova is indeed striking. They both appear as “centripetal spaces” (Dimendberg 93), characterized by density, agglomeration, vertical thrust, and complex, carefully devised transportation systems. It is likely, in fact, that Lang was familiar with the urban visions of contemporary architects, such as Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova. Indeed, the similarities are not limited to the Upper City. As concerns their overall urban organization, the two futurist-ic metropoles can, despite their differences, be characterized as machines in constant operation where the emphasis is on working, the mechanics, and not on what the machine produces. That the city of Metropolis is a vast mechanism moving in a constant and inexorable rhythm is demonstrated in the film in a number of scenes. The title of the film appears on the screen during frames of static shots of the cityscape of the Metropolis, where moving shafts of light pointing upward play across the skyscrapers’ massive contours. Immediately after the title dissolves, the film’s opening shots are dynamic and animated. With impressive close-ups, they show parts of machines that throb, chum, or rotate. There are pistons moving up and down, giving way to crankshafts and cogwheels while connecting rods pushed by giant flywheels let machine parts rotate in steady rhythm. These shots alternate with shots of a ten-hour wall clock with a fast moving hour hand. Since there is nothing in these frames but pieces of machines working without either raw materials or finished products, these frames emphasize the working of the machine-city. The second scene of the film introduces one of its leitmotifs, the organ-sized steam whistle. Located Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 214 somewhere in the Upper City, its sound can be heard in each of the spatial levels of the metropolis. The whistle blows the signal that another shift is about to come to an end in all four directions against the sky. The steam whistle, then, also marks the passing of time, the mechanical progression of the city-machine. Later on in the film, we are introduced to the underground halls of the great machines attended by mechanical workers. Suddenly, there is a close-up shot of a thermometer. The thermometer registers that a machine is overheating. The excessive heat eventually causes an explosion that jams the entire system of the machine rooms. The explosion, another leitmotif of the film, reveals that when the repetitive and orderly motion of the mechanism is interrupted by an accident, the whole city-machine might be affected. As a consequence, the machines must be kept under control and in perfect functioning condition at all times. Yet another scene set in the machine rooms begins with a tracking shot that takes the viewer gradually closer to a giant control dial. The camera keeps moving forward until it stops at a close-up shot of the dial with a worker attending to it. His job consists of matching the two heavy pointers of the dial with the flashing lights around its circumference. The exhausted worker can no longer keep up with his job. While he is collapsing in the arms of Freder Fredersen, he desperately shouts: “The machine! Someone must stay with the machine!” At this point there is another shot of a thermometer again registering (because the control dial is not working properly) that the machine is overheating and, thus, running the risk of exploding. This time, however, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 215 explosion does not occur for Freder Fredersen promptly replaces the exhausted worker and himself starts a ten-hour shift. These two accidents only hint at the possibility that the entire machine-city could be affected by an explosion occurring in one of the levels of the Metropolis. The first explosion is confined to the machine rooms. The second explosion is barely averted. There is a third and final explosion, at the end of the film, which has disastrous consequences for the whole machine-city. The scene begins with the robot Maria inciting the workers to smash the machines: “Let the machines stop! Destroy the machines!” The workers, eager to follow her orders to rebel, rush to the machine rooms and start storming them. What they do not realize is that to destroy the machines means to destroy the central powerhouse of the Metropolis. If the powerhouse stops working, the workers’ city will be flooded and the Upper City will no longer have power to function. The whole machine-city will soon be a broken mechanism. Regardless of the enormous danger, the workers violently stop the machines from working. There is, inevitably, yet another explosion in the machine rooms and the water turbines stop. As a consequence, the water reservoirs of the Metropolis, which apparently are below the workers’ city, burst and the water starts forcing its way into the workers’ city. While the workers’ city is flooding, the camera moves to the Upper City and reveals it in all its night splendor. The night in the Upper City of the Metropolis is filled with shining neon lights. Joh Fredersen is watching the beautiful night view of the Metropolis from his office, which overlooks the Upper City. He is sitting in his Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 216 office with no lights on. He does not need to turn the light on for the city lights, coming through the giant window (which looks like a screen) light up the entire room. Joh Fredersen is looking at the city (and controlling it) from a distance above. However, he is, at the same time, well within the city, as its lights coming through the window not only light the office up but also seem to embrace him. All at once, he realizes that something is wrong. Sudden flashes, almost like lightning, occur all over the Upper City. They are not caused, as one might at first believe, by a natural phenomenon. They are caused by electric short-circuits. Then, the city lights start flickering and after a moment they all go off. The Upper City is completely in the dark and so is Joh Fredersen in his office. He has to use a flashlight to be able to see the person who is entering the room to warn him about what is happening. This time, what has been foreshadowed earlier in the film, actually occurs: the entire machine- city has come to a halt. Because the city of Metropolis is organized as a mechanism, the urban environment that it represents is totally artificial. It is not a given but rather a built environment, completely detached from the organic habitat. If one looks overhead, not only from the lower levels of the Metropolis but also from the street level of the Upper City, one does not see nature as there are no clouds, nor sun nor moon. One 40 never sees the sky. Nature is alluded to only twice in the film. The first of these sequences depicts the Pleasure Garden, treated in a painterly fashion, like an obiet d’art. an artificial production. The second sequence further reinforces this interpretation of nature: Freder Fredersen’s sumptuous room has walls covered with Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 217 stylized plant motifs. Nature is reduced to a decorative sign, crushed and flattened against the surface of the wall (Dadoun 141). Nature, then, is totally absent from the Metropolis, which is an all-enveloping technological structure, a megastructure, designed for automatic and mechanical operation. Where does the machine-city of Metropolis as an image of a sheer artificial environment come from? The city of Metropolis as machine-city has two artificial spatial models: the underground world and the assembly line. Images of subterranean surroundings, whether real or imaginary, have provided prophetic views into the environmental future. They have furnished models of artificial environments that helped shape responses, either actual or visionary, to 41 technology and the technological future. Particularly in the early twentieth century, a standard image of artificial environment was the technological metropolis. The imagery of technological hyperurbanity, as presented in Lang’s Metropolis, resembles the imagery of the underground as actually experienced or only imagined in earlier centuries. The mine has become the iconic working environment of the First Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. But mining had set the pattern for capitalist exploitation as early as the sixteenth century. Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) stresses the importance of 42 mining in promoting “paleotechnic industry.” Why? What is a mine? From the point of view of my discussion, it is, first and foremost, an artificial environment from which nature has been effectively banned. Miners must use mechanical devices Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 218 to provide the necessities of life: food, light and air. Inside the mine, nature provides only space. Thus, the mine as underground world takes to an extreme the displacement of the natural environment by a technological one and, moreover, it hypothesizes human life in a “manufactured” world. The mine, to begin with, is the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived in by man . . . The mine is the environment alone of ores, minerals, metals.. . . Except for the crystalline formations, the face of the mine is shapeless: no friendly trees and beasts and clouds greet the eye.... Day has been abolished and the rhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night production first came into existence here. The miner must work by artificial light even though the sun be shining outside; still further down in the seams, he must work by artificial ventilation, too: a triumph of the “manufactured environment.” (Mumford, 69-70) Mumford defines mining as a metaphor for modem technology because the mining environment is a space where the organic is displaced by the inorganic and “artificial means” dominate the environment. In other words, it is a space where the environment is deliberately manufactured by human beings rather than spontaneously created by natural, nonhuman processes. The attempt to build an interior space of great dimensions completely separated from the exterior and thus from nature, long preceded the nineteenth century “inhuman” experience of the mine. As Rosalind Williams has suggested, this ideal seems to have shaped Western architecture beginning with the construction of the dome o f the Pantheon during the Roman Empire, begun in C.E. 118-119 and still the largest stmcture on earth vaulted in simple masonry. However, in architecture, the ideal of a vast, enclosed, yet luminous interior space was a natural impossibility. Nature could not be completely banished from monumental interiors. The Pantheon Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 219 in Rome, for instance, is not a completely enclosed space. It has an open hole at the very top of the dome that admits a beam of light inside the dome. Although this small hole is the only link between the interior and the exterior, between the internal (artificial) space of the dome and the external natural environment, it could not be avoided because it was necessary to have some light inside the dome. It is precisely the combination of a vast internal space and the feeble light coming through the hole at the top of the dome that creates the awe-inspiring sense of enclosure that one experiences inside the Pantheon. In the days before artificial illumination, the interior space that was completely sealed off would also be completely dark (Williams 91). Thus, a totally sealed off space could be realized only through the power of imagination or through the power of technology. However, the aesthetic possibilities of artificial light — light so extensive and brilliant that it could illuminate a large underground space— were explored in imagination long before the electrical technologies enabled them to be realized in fact. One of the most influential of these aesthetic explorers was the architect and 43 engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). In his etchings of the Imaginary Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione). first published around 1750, he drew, from multiple 44 viewpoints, a large enclosed space at once sealed off and illuminated. It is an immensely suggestive, vast, cavernous, and multi-chambered space. Although not literally underground, the space of the Imaginary Prisons conveys an overwhelming sense of enclosure. Piranesi was greatly inspired by the underground “worlds” he saw in Rome. Piranesi was not only an architect and an engraver, he was also an Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 220 enthusiastic antiquarian and archeologist. He seems to have explored every subterranean remnant of ancient Roman monuments known in his day, such as amphitheatres, cisterns, and cellars with their many levels of underground corridors that often sink to surprising depth (MacDonald 12). The etchings of the Imaginary Prisons are, thus, architectural approximations of a subterranean environment, inspired by the ancient Roman substructures. Nature has been completely banished from this subterranean environment. There are no animals and plants, earth appears nowhere, as it is covered over by tiles or pavings, and not even air seems to circulate. At a closer look, one can notice that in the comers of almost all the etchings lie various tools and machines: trestles, jacks, scaffolds, rings, chains, ropes, pulleys, ladders, and wheels. In the context of a prison, they suggest, of course, torture and execution. However, in a different context, they could be everyday items, and, most interesting, they could be ordinary construction devices. But Piranesi’s “underground” world is not only a fantasy of an illuminated enclosed and compact space. It is also a complex stmcture that contains some of the most important functions of an urban space. Piranesi did not need to go underground to find architectural sources of inspiration for his Imaginary Prisons. The Rome in which he lived, like his not so imaginary “Prisons,” was full of defensive towers and turrets, large barred windows, bollards (solid, massive cylindrical stones with hemispherical tops, used to protect public monuments), bridges, gangways, piers, large stairs, spiral staircases, arches, arcaded vaults, monumental doorways, piazze of different shapes and dimensions with wells in the middle, and steep, partially Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 221 covered streets. Moreover, one of the major ancient urban structures in Rome, still existing, was that of the Markets of Trajan (Mercati di Traiano). The certerpiece of the Markets is a covered shopping street flanked by tiers of galleries and flights of bridges. In Piranesi’s day the Markets (nowadays in the open) were partly embedded in other, later structures, and the main vault of the shopping street having been covered during the Middle Ages, pierced with large holes for light (MacDonald 20). The artificial environment of the Imaginary Prisons, with its great heights and its suggestion of limitless although divided space, mainly due to the Piranesi’s use of 45 a low viewpoint, is populated. There are people wandering around at each level so that it gives the impression of a sort of subterranean city. Not only does “imaginary” seems somehow inappropriate, but also “prison,” at least in relation to its most common referent. Indeed, the word “prisons” of the title seem to refer more to enclosed spaces than to spaces of incarceration, punishment, and torture. The Latin root of the word carcere (“prison” in Italian) is carceres which means enclosures, such as, the gate-stalls in which chariots were enclosed for the start of the races in Roman circuses (MacDonald 23). The Carceri d’invenzione are, then, imaginative enclosures that, in fact, only vaguely invoke actual contemporary prison-like 46 spaces. Either real (as in the case of the mine) or imaginary (as in the case of Piranesi’s Prisons'), the combination of three main characteristics -enclosure, verticality, and artificiality— gives the image of the underground world its unique power as a model of an artificial and, consequently, technological environment. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 222 Although my aim is to consider the Metropolis in its overall organization as machine-city, one has to admit that, at a visual level, Lang’s Upper City reflects images of the underground world much more than the Lower City, the actual underworld of the Metropolis. The space of the city in Metropolis appears as a huge factory building where the rationality of production dominates. In the machine-city by Lang (and Sant’Elia) every urban function and building refers to the megastructure to which it belongs. All buildings, urban elements, and functions lack formal and structural autonomy so that they appear truncated, unfinished, and useless if they are not considered within the context of the megastructure. As an architect, Lang was certainly aware of the latest developments in building design and changes in industrial architecture brought about by the new technologies of the early twentieth century. Indeed, the dominant characteristic of his machine-city is the integration of all its functions on a large scale. This characteristic also dominates one of the crucial industrial techniques of the time: the assembly line, the chain arrangements of departments and machines, and the emblem of the Taylorist organization of work. The production technique of the assembly line was created by Frederick Taylor and first developed by the American entrepreneur Henry Ford in 1909. It is a fundamental element of the Second Industrial Revolution (the period of “neotechnic industry,” according to Mumford) as it allowed mass production which, in turn, made many products (e.g. cars) cheap enough for ordinary people. In order to accommodate big and articulated machine systems that allow an uninterrupted Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 223 productive cycle, the factory building had to be planned according to a new spatiality. Design was dictated by the organization of the production cycles and resulted in a space as container of productive activities. According to the fundamental principles of Taylorism, the assembly line required a physical space that would allow for the entire working cycle of production, a space where it was possible to concentrate and maximize the functionality of the entire productive cycle. This space is usually a multifloor factory building (such as the Old Shop at Highland Park in Detroit or the Fiat Lingotto in Torino) as the assembly line production usually is vertically organized and proceeds from top to bottom. The two main characteristics of the assembly line production are the continuous flow and unrestrainable dynamism. The first results from the rational methods of the productive process (the conveyer belt or chain that allows for the breaking down of production into its working phases) and the uninterrupted production cycle (the production never stops so that the factory is always running, always in action). The latter, the unrestrainable dynamism, is a direct result of the constant and coordinated flow of production. It gives one the impression that everything and everyone inside the factory building is following the convulsive and inexorable rhythm of the machines. Indeed, the image that best expresses this industrial reality of the early twentieth century is that of a mechanism in constant movement, complex in its articulation and rational in its organization. The vastness and complexity of its structure resembles the enclosed and compact technological metropolis as it is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 224 envisioned by Lang and Sant’Elia. It resembles a gigantic mechanism whose tempo is beaten by the mechanical movement of the machines. Like the machine-city that I am describing, the typical assembly line factory is based on muovere rather than fare. 4.4. The Epic Dimension of Space in Metropolis The mythologization of technology manifests itself in the vision of the city in Metropolis as a vast mechanism in constant motion that progresses at an inexorable rhythm. Within this machine-city, circulation as I defined it, that is, as expression of a mythic or epic mode of human locomotion, is key to analyze the movements of the main human character of the film. Without any doubt, Freder Fredersen is the most mobile character in the film. Indeed, he is the only character that traverses all the levels of the Metropolis and stops, even though not for long, at each of them. From a traditional standpoint, it is undeniable that Freder Fredersen is both narratively and visually the hero of the film. In another context, Lang’s most obvious epic hero is clearly Siegfried, who slays the fire-breathing dragon and has a vulnerable spot that 47 recalls Achilles’ heel in Greek mythology. Like Siegfried in the first Gesang of Lang’s film Die Nibelungen (1924), Freder performs archetypal heroic functions within the narrative structure of the film: the journey into the underworld, the quest for the pure maid, the encounter and the confrontation with the monster, a symbolic death followed by triumph and resurrection (Gunning 64; Dadoun 155). Likewise, Freder is visually the hero of the film. He is tall, young, good looking and, with his white clothing and radiant appearance, stands out from the other characters. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 225 Neither his narrative role nor his powerful appeal, however, translates into the power to influence other characters’ behaviors or determination to act. Thus, as a hero, as Gunning has suggested, Freder is totally ineffective for he does not propel the narrative in any way: [Freder’s] voyage to the underworld yields revelations, but his return to the surface is beset by missed appointments, temporary imprisonment, fainting fits and sickbed feverdreams. His role as saviour becomes shunted aside as the film’s demonic energy kicks into high gear.... No-one, other than the demons, wants to take action in this film . . . (67) Freder is not an agent as he never really takes action. Rather, he circulates within the space of the Metropolis according to forces beyond his control. In truth, this can be said to a certain extent of all the characters of the film. However, with Freder it is all the more evident that he, as the most prominent human character in the film, is part of the machine-city like the Machinenmenschen who mechanically move around in the lower levels of the Metropolis, their entire persons geared to the rhythm of the machines (Eisner 226). Interestingly enough, despite his “passivity,” Freder is not, unlike Siegfried, betrayed and defeated at the end. On the contrary, he ends up triumphant as he assumes the role of the mediator who reconciles the workers (labor) and the entrepreneur (capital). As the super-legible and very theatrical morality displayed at the end of the film illustrates: “There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.” The final scene of the film reveals that Freder is the anointed one, the one whose fate was to become the heart that brings the hands and the brain to a mutual understanding. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 226 One first meets Freder Fredersen in the pleasure garden where he is playfully chasing a young woman back and forth around a fountain splashing water at her. From the outset, one notices that he is not really in control of his actions. The young woman is inviting Freder to chase her but every time Freder gets close to her she runs away so that he has to keep chasing her. Finally they collide in front of the fountain only because she has decided that she wants Freder to catch her. The choreography of Freder’s body movements in the pleasure garden scene emphasizes geometry, symmetry, and, control. Thus, his movements are not so different from the mechanical marching of the workers shaped in rectangular or rhomboidal divisions. As Thomas Elsaesser has suggested, Freder is the upper-class equivalent of the workers’ geometrical and mechanical moving columns (Metropolis 70). In other words, this first scene sets the standard for Freder’s mechanical, compulsive, and predetermined movements, or “voyages,” throughout the film. The pretty young woman finally falls in Freder’s arms and they are about to kiss when suddenly the imposing gateway at the far end of the garden opens. Another, though very different, young woman emerges. She is dressed in an austere fashion and surrounded by a cluster of children wearing ragged clothing. She is Maria, the daughter of one of the workers of the Metropolis. Freder suddenly releases the lightly-clad young woman in his arms and stares mesmerized at Maria. We see here for the first time Freder’s typical spell-bound look. Although his mesmerized expression and highly emotional reaction to the appearance of Maria have usually been interpreted (and, indeed, confirmed by the narrative plot) as love at first sight, the truth is that he will have Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 227 this transfixed look throughout the film at every encounter with a demonic deity. Thus, his hypnotic stare, the several hallucinations and fainting-fits he experiences are signs of not being in control of his actions and ultimately his fate. Maria is immediately escorted out of the Pleasure Garden and Freder, as if hypnotized or sleepwalking, runs after her. He descends underground and ends up in the halls of the great machines, a level of the Metropolis of which he was unaware. When a human operator fails to watch over his machine, the temperature rises relentlessly above the danger point so that there are several explosions that throw workers off the scaffolding and into the void. Steam whirls and bodies fly through the air. The rooms are filled with smoke. In a total state of shock Freder shouts: “Moloch!” At his cry, the smoke suddenly fades away and the aperture high up in the belly of the central dynamo room (the heart machine), in which we can see revolving cranks, changes into a grotesque mask-like face with a gaping mouth framed by huge teeth. The central dynamo room turns into a demonic machine god, a man-eating Moloch who requires human sacrifices. Two priests standing on either side of the fiery and blinding abyss supervise several muscular slaves who toss human beings one after another against the gleaming cranks which keep rising and falling amid clouds of smoke and steam (Huyssen 79). Horrified, Freder rushes out of the machine rooms. He reaches the street level of the Upper City, boards a cab that is to take him to his father’s office on top of the highest skyscraper of the Metropolis. His father’s highly technological office is, indeed, another machine-room. It features a panoptical system of control, security, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 228 and surveillance over both the Upper City (through the window) and the Lower City (through screens that report what the hidden cameras in the machine rooms record). Moreover, the office is full of technological devices such as screens, telephones, televisual intercoms, buttons, levers and lights. Freder wants to tell his father what he has experienced in the machine-rooms and denounce the workers’ awful working conditions. However, he is immediately rebuffed like an unwelcome intruder by his father who first makes him wait while he dictates business data to some employees and then tells him that accidents like the one he just saw in the machine-rooms are unavoidable and he should not worry and keep his proper place. Freder is in a state of great agitation and wants to understand what is going on in the Lower City but his father does not answer any of his questions, nor does he try to calm him down. Like an Olympian god, Joh Fredersen not only remains unperturbed by the accidents and misfortunes of his “subjects” but to a certain extent he, as the “master” of the Metropolis, also causes them. Likewise, he is unperturbed by his son’s plea to help the workers, and is even annoyed by the unexpected commotion raised by his son’s visit. Freder is a passive spectator to what is happening in his father’s office. Under Freder’s very eyes his father fires one of his most trustworthy employees, Joseph, for not preventing his son from reaching the machine-rooms and for not bringing him the mysterious maps that some workers accidentally dropped on the floor of the machine-rooms. Desperate, and (apparently) determined to help the workers, he then returns to the Lower City. As soon as he opens one of the access doors to the machine- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 229 rooms, he is overwhelmed by the smoke. When the smoke dissolves another technological demon comes to sight: the giant dial wheel. As if he had to confront a monster, Freder takes on the identity of the exhausted worker assigned to the giant wheel for that shift and he begins labouring on the machine. He is barely able to keep up with the flashing lights and heavy pointers so that he seems to engage with the machine, as Sigfried engages with the dragon. At the height of the struggle, a sequence that critics have usually perceived as recalling the Christian symbolism of the crucifixion, he cries out for his father: “Father, father — I did not know that ten hours can be torture!” He is saved by the whistle signaling that the ten-hour shift is over. Thus, as if to reinforce his passivity, he does not emerge as the winner of the fight. Suddenly he finds a mysterious map on the floor with directions to reach yet a lower level that leads him to his next adventure. He follows other workers to their clandestine assembly-point, the catacombs, where, as a fellow-worker tells him, “She has called another meeting” (emphasis added). Once in the catacombs, he discovers that the girl he had seen in the garden is none other than Maria, the workers’ prophetess. He hears Maria narrate the parable of the Tower of Babel. The story sounds like a prophesy because it explicates the structure of the Metropolis and narrates its (near) destruction: the tower was built by slaves but also destroyed by them because no common language existed between the rulers and the ruled. Freder listens to Maria’s sermon once again in a state of rapture and kneels when Maria promises the advent of a savior: “mediator between brain and hands has to be the heart.” The viewer infers from the close-up shot of Freder that he Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 230 is the announced savior. His role as savior is restated when, after the meeting is over, Freder stays behind to talk to Maria. She gives him a chaste kiss as if to confirm once again that he is the chosen, the longed-for mediator. They arrange to meet in the cathedral the next day. This sets the stage for Freder’s next adventure. Maria does not show up at the appointment; she has been kidnapped by Rotwang the inventor who, in agreement with Joh Fredersen, dragged her into his laboratory with the purpose of creating her double: the false Maria, a robot to be disguised beneath Maria’s skin and sharing her appearance. While Freder is wandering around the cathedral searching for Maria, he is suddenly attracted to some of the statues that adorn it. The camera follows him as he walks closer to the statues, which represent the Seven Deadly Sins flanking a scythe-bearing skeleton, the Grim Reaper, a symbol of Death. The entranced and confused Freder kneels to pray. This sequence serves the purpose of preparing the viewer for Freder’s later confrontation with Death. Freder leaves the cathedral and wanders the streets in the middle of the city walking with bowed head and moving like an automaton. He passes an old house and thinks he can hear cries for help from a female voice. He forces his way into Rotwang’s house but, once again, he is clearly not in control of the events happening to him as the internal doors of the house open and close automatically so that he is led to his own entrapment. Although he does not know what is happening in Rotwang’s laboratory, he cannot prevent the creation of Maria’s mechanical double. He is allowed into Rotwang’s secret quarters only after the creation of the monster Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 231 Maria has been accomplished. Freder challenges Rotwang who tells him that Maria has gone to his father’s office. Freder rushes once again up to the Upper City to his father’s office where Joh Fredersen is instructing the false Maria to go down to the workers and undo Maria’s teachings and stir them up to criminal acts. A careful parallel editing shows images of Freder heading to his father office intercut with images of his father closely inspecting the robot Rotwang has just created, a perfect copy of Maria. When the two series of images merge Freder’s point of view prevails: not knowing that he is looking at the robot with Maria’s traits, he thinks he sees Maria in his father’s arms. Devastated by this vision he starts feeling dizzy and has fever-brained nightmares. He is taken home and one next sees him sick in bed traumatized by what he has seen. He suffers from fever-induced hallucinations where he fantasizes first a lascivious Maria wearing a see-through costume and dancing provocatively before devouring male eyes and then, as his illness worsens, in his delirium he sees the statues of the Seven Sins adorning the cathedral coming to life and led by the Grim Reaper threateningly marching toward him. But Freder the hero is not overcome by Death and one next sees him nursed back to health. He is visited by Joseph, his father’s former employee, who tells him that Maria is inciting the workers to revolt and is telling them to destroy everything. Freder, who is wearing again his white clothes and has reacquired his radiant mien, returns to the catacombs where Joseph’s words are confirmed. The false Maria is instigating the workers to wait no more for their mediator and smash the machines. From this point on the editing accelerates so do Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 232 Freder’s movements. As soon as he sees the false Maria in the catacombs Freder shouts out loud: “You are not Maria! Maria pleads for peace, not for violence. This is not Maria!”. By so doing he attracts the attention of the workers who recognize him as Joh Fredersen’s son and they want to lynch him. He is once again ineffective when he tries to convince them that they are making a mistake in listening to that woman, the false Maria. But the exhortations of the false Maria have by now made a great impression on the workers who are determined to storm the machines. Freder runs away from the threatening workers. In the meanwhile, the real Maria has at last managed to escape from Rotwang’s house. Once back in her city, she realizes that things are not well when she sees water slowly forcing its way through the concrete floor of the workers’ city. She rushes to the central square and tries to activate the giant gong in order to summon help. Joseph and Freder respond and come to her aid. Freder immediately recognizes the real Maria and the two reunite. But there is no time to waste. The workers’ city is flooding and they have to help the workers’ children get out. Maria takes the children away while Freder searches frantically for the children’s parents, the workers, in order to stop them from destroying the whole city. He ends up in the Upper City where the angry workers, believing that their children are all drowned because of the witch, have prepared a pile in front of the cathedral to bum Maria at the stake. Freder has lost sight of Maria in a scuffle with the workers. He has, once again, a blurred vision, and as he reaches the cathedral square, he thinks they are burning the real Maria. He wants to stop them, but watches in horror as Maria is tied Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 233 to the stake. As the flames consume the stake, the writhing figure turns into the steel robot and Freder suddenly catches sight of Rotwang chasing the real Maria up the bell tower onto the roof. Rotwang wants to kill Maria thinking she is the robot he had created for fear that the workers will realize he had tricked them. Freder rushes after Maria and confronts Rotwang. Everybody, including Joh Fredersen, sees them fighting high up on the roof of the cathedral. At first Freder is knocked down by Rotwang; when he recovers and stands up again he sees Rotwang carrying the limp and faint Maria on his back along the parapet of the cathedral. Launched on a heroic rescue of Maria, he scales the walls of the cathedral. Rotwang slips on the pitched roof and dies. Freder pulls Maria to safety ready for the grand finale on the steps in front of the main gate of the cathedral where Freder is crowned as the hero-mediator. Freder’s movements within the space of the Metropolis are those of an epic hero. His voyages recall circulation as I have interpreted it in the Citta Nuova. He appears “under the spell of hieratic pacing” and thus compelled to “circulate,” or “run,” a rhythm, as Adomo has pointed out, “extorted from the body by command or terror” (Adomo 162). The space of the city of Metropolis displays an epic dimension. In the city of Metropolis, as in Sant’Elia’s Futurist city, human locomotion is physically remythologized. From this perspective, Freder encounters a variety of demonic deities, most of them technological, which may well function as the archaic and fearful mythic powers that compel Freder to “rootless wandering” within the space of the Metropolis. Thus, his “voyages” can be seen as nothing less than a sequence of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 234 predetermined adventures. This is why Freder the hero, though portrayed as rather passive, survives every adversity. His fate is predetermined and his adventures have the function of spatial digressions, of prolonging his journey, in the same way as it takes Odysseus a long time to return home and it takes Aeneas a long time to find the site where he founds the city that will become the nucleus of the Roman Empire. The course of events is predestined, and so are Freder’s movements through space. In other words, he is powerless to interfere in the workings of fate/technology, so that nothing truly new can happen. If his role is that of the mediator between the brain and the hands, as the most literal reading of the film narrative suggests, I suggest that he is neither aware of his role, nor can he escape it. This is further confirmed by the fact that Freder’s vision(s) often prevent him from properly seeing what is happening. Nonetheless, whereas a blurred sight, or lack of visual acumen, will usually misdirect one and lead one to commit mistakes that would change the course of events and he/she would fail to attain his/her goals (Lang’s hero Siegfried stands as an example of this), Freder is able to charge blindly from place to place, from adventure to adventure, and is victorious in the end. It appears that he is all impulse, that he wants to do heroic things and, particularly after he recovers from his traumatized-induced illness, he appears heroic but the truth is that he never really makes decisions or acts. His movements are controlled and compulsive and he is led from one place to another of the Metropolis by the inexorable mechanical and demonic rhythm of the machine-city. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 235 Referring to Lang’s cinematic exploration of the systematic nature of the modem world, Gunning sees as one of the basic elements of the Langian Weltanschauung what he defines as the “Destiny-machine” (35). Individual destiny is the product of the all-encompassing system of interlocking elements with fatal consequences which determines the closed and inescapably framed environment in which Lang’s characters struggle (10). Gunning raises the question of whether it is anachronistic to speak of a “Destiny-machine” in a film like Die Nibelungen — Lang’s national film epic— which portrays a mythological primordial past and thus a pre-mechanical era. The city of Metropolis as machine-city and the theory of circulation that first stemmed from my analysis of Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova, offer a possible response to Gunning’s question. The “Destiny-machine” is precisely the structure of the mythic/epic world, “a dark realm of chthonic forces and determinism” (35), to which the modem mechanical (i.e. technological) world points back. Paradoxically, from my perspective, Lang’s closer filmic encounter with the world of mythology and epic is not Die Nibelungen but, rather, Metropolis. As Gunning has suggested, in Die Nibelungen allegory interprets and explains the elements of mythology in terms of other, and later, belief systems: “Allegory represents a stage in the disenchantment and melancholy of the world as opposed to the coherent belief structures of mythology” (39). Thus, while in this “epic” film allegory works in a “de-mythologizing mode” (39) and consequently points to a later stage in the progress of mankind, in Metropolis one witnesses a mythologization of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 236 technology and a reversion to an earlier stage of the progress of mankind. Therefore, the metropolis, the technological city, can be envisioned as a modem epic world. Notes: 1 “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” R.W. Flint, ed., Marinetti: Selected Writings 43. 2 Despite this common belief, the Futurists were extremely concerned with the issue of tradition. Perhaps it can be argued that they were not interested in tradition as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for instance, envisioned it: a moribund culture to reinvigorate and revitalize. However, they were interested in tradition according to the original meaning of the term, which has its root in the Latin verb tradere. According to the original meaning of the term, “tradition” is the action of someone handing over something to someone else, such as a man to another man or a father to his son. As Marinetti’s novel Mafarka the Futurist (1909) demonstrates, tradition as the handing over from fathers (biological fathers, creators, or predecessors) to sons is a theme that the Futurists held dear. In the novel, Mafarka hands his life over to his son Gazouramah so that he is at once destroyed by his son and reborn in him. At a symbolic level, Mafarka’s death and rebirth can be read as the destruction of an old tradition by the Futurist utopia and the beginning of a new one. Like Gazouramah, Futurism leaps into the future only after having, first, looked at the past and, then, violently responded to its threat. On the question of tradition and the myth of rebirth in Mafarka see Cinzia Blum, The Other Modernism and Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality. 3 The Urbs Roma constituted the legendary (i.e. epic) nucleus of the ancient city of Rome. As Jerome Carcopino maintains “. . . in its origins the city [of Rome] represented something greater and different from a more or less closely packed aggregate of dwelling houses: it was a templum. . . . the home of the gods and their sanctuaries, and of the king.. . . its precincts strictly defined by the furrow which the Latin founder, dutifully obeying the prescriptions of Etrurian ritual, had carved round it with a plough drawn by a bull and cow of dazzling white.. . . The sacred urban boundary thus described in anticipation of the fortifications and walls to come, formed the abbreviated ground plan, the prophetic image of the future city, and hence known as the pomerium (post murumj. From the pomerium the Urbs derived its name, its original definition, and its supernatural protection” (Daily Life in Ancient Rome 11-2). 4 Sant’Elia had a Beaux-arts training and was not technically an architect. He studied at the Accademia di Brera and got a degree in disegno architettonico (“architectural Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 237 draftmanship”), which did not legally entitle him to practice the architectural profession. The students graduating from the Accademia di Brera were considered artists because they lacked any technical and scientific know-how inherent in the architectural profession. In other words, architecture, as taught at the Accademia di Brera, was viewed as a strictly humanistic discipline. Sant’Elia worked in engineering firms and architectural offices always as a draftsman, which means that his job was to devise suitable facades to the “real” architects’ (his collegues who studied at the Politecnico) specification. For further information about Sant’Elia’s life, see Chapter I, endnote 2. 5 “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” R.W. Flint, ed., Marinetti: Selected Writings 41. 6 For a fully elaborated theory of the avant-garde, see also Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-garde, in particular chapters 3 and 4. 7 Scholars have tended to simplify matters by drawing a boundary between a utopian, experimental first phase (the so-called first or heroic futurism) and a more pragmatic, less innovative second phase (the so-called second futurism). Some writers locate the turning point in 1915-16, with the outbreak of the Great War and the deaths of Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia (Blum 126). 8 Antonio Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” Apollonio Umbro, ed., Futurist Manifestoes 170. 9 Although outside the scope of my discussion, I believe it necessary to mention that the image/text relationship has been the subject of extensive debates in both the arts and the humanities. W.J.T. Mitchell well summarizes this problematic, yet fruitful, relationship when he states that it has always been seen as either “a war of opposite signs” or, conversely, the foundation of the ut pictura poesis and “sister arts” tradition in aesthetic theory: “The belief that words and images are inevitably implicated in a ‘war of signs’ claims that each type of sign or medium lays claim to certain things that it is best equipped to mediate, and each grounds its claim in a certain characterization of its ‘self,’ its own proper essence. Thus, each type of sign characterizes itself in opposition to its ‘significant other.’ On the other hand, the aesthetic theory based on the ut pictura poesis tradition claims as its main project a unitary theory of signs (and consequently of arts) that identifies points of transference and resemblance between texts and images” (Iconology 47-8). 10 The artists/exhibitors were the architects Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone, the painters Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Leonardo Dudreville, Carlo Erba, Achille Funi, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 238 Marcello Nizzoli, the sculptor Giovanni Possamai, and Alma Fidora, who contributed embroidery. 11 The catalogue lists sixteen drawings by Sant’Elia, divided under the following headings: La citta nuova (stazione aeroplani e treni) [one drawing]; La citta nuova (particolari) [six drawings]; La casa nuova [one drawing]; La centrale elettrica [three drawings]; Schizzi d’architettura [five drawings]. It is of little importance here, but there is still a debate about whether the Manifesto was actually written by Sant’Elia or, rather, by Marinetti. It is, however, worth mentioning this scholarly quarrel to better understand the text/image relationship. 13 Sant’Elia’s was not the first manifesto of Futurist architecture to be written. In January 1914 Enrico Prampolini had published “Anche l’architettura futurista ... E che e?” (“Futurist Architecture Too ... and What Is It?”) in II Piccolo Giomale d’Italia, and Umberto Boccioni before the opening of the exhibition of “Nuove Tenderize” had written a “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture.” However, neither of them were officially authorized by Marinetti. For further details about these two essays and their failure to become official Futurist writings, see Enrico Crispolti, Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo. 14 To get a sense of the querrelle about the authorship of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, see “Un Messaggio contraddice il Manifesto” and “Futurista, sarebbe un pagliaccio,” Bruno Zevi, Cronache di Architettura. Vol. 3, and Esther da Costa Meyer, “The Authorship of the Manifesto,” The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia. “U problema dell’architettura modema non e un problema di rimaneggiamento lineare.. . . [si tratta] di creare di sana pianta la casa nuova costruita, tesoreggiando ogni risorsa della scienza e della tecnica, appagando signorilmente ogni esigenza del nostro costume e del nostro spirito, calpestando quanto e grottesco, pesante e antitetico con noi (tradizione, stile, estetica, proporzione) determinando nuove forme, nuove linee, una nuova armonia di profili e di volumi, un’architettura che abbia la sua ragione d’essere solo nelle condizioni speciali della vita modema, e la sua rispondenza come valore estetico nella nostra sensibilita.. . . Sentiamo di non essere piu gli uomini delle cattedrali e degli arengarii; ma dei grandi alberghi, delle stazioni ferroviarie, delle strade immense, dei porti colossali, dei mercati coperti, delle gallerie luminose, dei rettifili, degli sventramenti salutari.” (From the catalogue of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 239 the “Prima Esposizione d’arte del grnppo ‘Nuove Tendenze”’ 13-15. English translation by Esther da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia 211). 16 Antonio Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture,” Apollonio Umbro, ed., Futurist Manifestoes 160-172. “Dopo il 700 non e piu esistita nessuna architettura.” (Manifesto) “Le case dureranno meno di noi. Ogni generazione dovra fabbricarsi la sua citta.” (Manifesto) “Come se noi, accumulatori e generatori di movimento, coi nostri prolungamenti meccanici, col rumore e colla velocita della nostra vita, potessimo vivere nelle stesse case, nelle stesse strade costruite pei loro bisogni dagli uomini di quattro, cinque, sei, secoli fa.” (Manifesto) “E concludo in sfavore dell’architettura di moda di ogni paese e di ogni genere.. . . cosi come gli antichi trassero l’ispirazione dell’arte dagli elementi della natura, noi - materialmente e spiritualmente artificiali - dobbiamo trovare quell’ispirazione negli elementi del nuovo mondo meccanico che abbiamo creato, di cui 1 ’architettura deve essere la piu bella espressione, la sintesi piu completa, l’integrazione artistica piu efficace.” (Messaggio) “Io combatto e disprezzo tutta la pseudo-architettura d’avanguardia, austriaca, ungherese, tedesca e americana.. . . Questo costante rinnovamento dell’ambiente architettonico contribuira alia vittoria del Futurismo . . . pel quale lottiamo senza tregua contro la vigliaccheria passatista.” (Manifesto) 17 The definition “megastructure” in architecture was first elaborated by Fumihiko Maki in 1964 and then further articulated by Ralph Wilcoxon in 1968. The major contribution to the concept of “megastructure,” however, comes from Reyner Banham in Megastructure (1976). The concept of “megastructure,” anachronistic with respect to Sant’Elia’s project, can be applied to the Futurist metropolis because it is no longer a strictly historicist concept, that is, strictly related to the specific theory and practice of the late 1960s and early 1970 avant-garde in architecture. As apparent in the 1978 Venice Biennale Exhibition “Utopia e crisi dell’antinatura: Momenti delle intenzioni architettoniche in Italia,” the concept of “megastructure” has also become a sort of umbrella concept that refers to urban realities designed in different places and times that share, however, the same substantial features (Crispolti, Immaginazione megastrutturale 5). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 240 18 Many contemporary megalopoles (such as Los Angeles and Houston) are precisely the opposite of a “megastructure.” See Lerup, After the City, and Dimendberg’s description of the centrifugal city in the essay “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways and Modernity.” 19 The use of new building materials, such as iron and reinforced concrete, played, of course, a great role in Sant’Elia’s vision of his metropolis of the future. However, since my emphasis on the Citta Nuova is not directly related to the use of the building materials, I will not go into details as far as they are concerned. 20 This drawing can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/naghirar@,tin.it/cecilia.html> The original title of the drawing is “La Citta Nuova: casamento con ascensori estemi, galleria, passaggio coperto, su tre piani stradali (linea tramviaria, strada per automobili, passerella metallica), fari e telegrafia senza fili.” It appears in both the catalogue of the exhibition of “Nuove Tendenze” and the “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture.” Hoever, in the latter it bears with the title “La citta futurista.” 21 Drawings of three different variations of the “Casa a gradinata” can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> Two drawings bear the title “Casa a gradinata con ascensori estemi” whereas another drawing is titled “La citta nuova: case a gradinata su piu piani stradali.” 22 For a compelling discussion of the development of railroad stations within cities, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey 171-197. 23 Drawings of the station can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> Some drawings bear the title “Stazione per treni e aerei” whereas another drawing is titled “Stazione d’aeroplani e treni ferroviari, con funicolari e ascensori su tre piani stradali.” 24 This drawing, which bears the title “La citta nuova: la casa a gradinata con ascensori dai quattro piani stradali,” can be viewed at <http://space.virgilio.it/paghirar@tin.it/cecilia.html> 25 For a history of gallerie and their role within city centers in post-unification Italy, see “L’interesse per il ‘centro’ della citta,” Federico Zeri, ed., Storia dell’arte italiana. Vol. 2, 765-775. In Milan, the Futurist artists very often met and held discussions at the Caffe Campari in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 241 26 Walter Benjamin, “Naples,” Reflections 171. 27 For a discussion of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, see Schivelbusch, Railway Journey 181-190. 28 Carlo Ragghianti, “Sant’Elia: II Bibiena del duemila” 17. 29 Classical Mediterranean epic is the epic that narrates the wanderings of the hero around the Mediterranean sea, particularly the coasts of Greece, Southern Italy and North Africa, which form the Ionian sea. Homer’s The Odyssey is the most representative and the most ancient epic narrative within the Mediterranean or Graeco-Roman model of epic. It is necessary to clarify this because the European epic tradition includes other epic models (such as the North European model and the Serbian epics of Kosovo), which, however, do not appear in Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the The Odvssev in Dialectic of Enlightment. Moreover, they refer to the Homeric epic as “Ionian epic,” which, as I have mentioned above, defines an even more circumscribed space. 30 On dynamism and movement in Futurism, see Stephen Kern, “Speed,” The Culture of Time and Snace 109-130, and Giovanni Lista’s discussion of Futurist photodynamism in Cinema e fotografia futurista 148-172. 31 For a discussion of the relation between cinema and architecture, see Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” Warped Snace 99-110. 32 Tom Gunning, “Images of the City in Early Cinema,” paper presented at the Getty Center “Cine-City” Conference. Santa Monica, California. Mar. 28, 1994. 33 For a survey of early “city-films” a useful essay is Helmut Weihsmann, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City-Film’ 1900-1930,” Cinema & Architecture: Melies, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia 8-27. Weihsmann’s discussion, however, does not distinguish between avant-garde and commercial cinema. 34 For a discussion of Garden Cities in the early twentieth century, see Moshe Safdie, “The Evolving City,” The City after the Automobile, and Diane Ghirardo’s parallel analysis of Fascist New Towns in Italy and New Towns in New Deal America in Building New Communities. 35 For a comprehensive account of technology and culture in interwar Germany, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism, and Peter Fisher, Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 242 36 Dietrich Neumann, “Before and after Metropolis: Film and Architecture in Search of the Modem City,” From Metropolis to Blade Runner 33-8. Cinematic visions of highly technological urban space do not end with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Most recently, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) has provided an excellent example of a futurist-ic city in the tradition of Lang’s Metropolis. 37 Quoted in Elsaesser, Metropolis 64. 38 Willy Haas, “Metropolis,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook 623-25 (First published in Film-Kurier, n. 9, January 11,1927). 39 Elsaesser, Metropolis 64. 40 This is tme for all the different versions of the film. On the many versions of Metropolis, see Thomas Elsaesser, “A Ruin-in-Progress: Release Versions and Restorations,” Metropolis 30-41. 41 My point of departure for the discussion of the image of the underground world as a model for Lang’s Metropolis is partially borrowed from Rosalind Williams’s Notes on the Underground. Her thesis, however, focuses exclusively on nineteenth- century narratives. According to Williams, particularly Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’s narratives about underworlds provided the model for most twentieth-century science- fiction. Thus, the primary documents she analyses are nineteenth century narratives that imagine human life in subterranean spaces. Differently from Williams, I do not discuss science-fiction narratives or intend to read Metropolis as a science-fiction film. Moreover, I am strongly convinced that there are visual images that might have served as spatial models for the technological hyperurbanity represented in Lang’s Metropolis. Williams mentions Metropolis only once in the book (176) to report that when H.G. Wells saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, he pointed out how closely the look and the plot of the film resembled those of one of his tales, namely, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). 42 For a history of mining, see Lewis Mumford, “Agents of Mechanization,” Technics and Civilization 60-106. Moreover, for an insight into the “fundamental industrial revolution,” see chapter 4, entitled “The Paleotechnic Phase,” of the same book (151-211). 43 Bom in Venice, he received there his early training as an architect from his maternal uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, and Giovanni Scalfurotto, both leading designers and engineers of the Venician "Magistrato delle acque." He, later, moved to Rome as a draftman in the entourage of Marco Foscarini, ambassador to Pope Benedict Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 243 XIV. He started learning the rudiments of etching, a form of engraving, and began to produce etched views of the Eternal City, which were becoming increasingly popular in the age of the fashionable Grand Tour. With a choice that may remind one of Antonio Sant’Elia, his career shifted from “built architecture” (a profession in which he did not encounter much luck, neither in Venice nor in Rome) to architettura disegnata. For more details on Piranesi’s life and work, see John Wilton-Ely. Piranesi 1-11. 44 The Carceri d’invenzione were first published as a collection of fourteen prints about 1744. Originally, Piranesi withheld his own name in favor of that of his publisher Bouchard, a Frenchman who had settled in Rome, but he soon changed his mind. This early version did not sell at all well. In the early 1760s, however, he reissued the series with alterations and with two new scenes, making a total of sixteen prints in this second state. The revisions consisted of darkening most areas and adding more architectural elements and ladders, as well as some references to Latin texts and an inscription alluding to “impiety and the black arts.” The printing history of the Carceri is very complicated. Piranesi returned to the plates again and again, making alterations and experimenting with effects and techniques, and their exact chronology is still being unravelled. Thus, the concept of two states, of about 1744 and about 1761 is correct provided one realizes that Piranesi re-worked details whenever he felt like it, up to about 1775, and would print the plates accordingly (MacDonald 13). 45 Used to evoke a sense of depth and vastness the low viewpoint, or scena per angplo, reminds one, once again, of Sant’Elia’s use of the worm eye’s view in his drawing of the Citta Nuova to suggest great heights and cyclopean structures. In the scena per angolo the Renaissance principle of a single, centered perspective frame is abandoned in favor of a system of diagonals receding, like tightly stretched tent ropes, right and left in overlapping sequences. Interestingly enough, this is a method of perspective construction expounded in detail by Ferdinando Bibiena’s architectural treatise Architettura Civile (1711). 46 It seems that in the first series of the Carceri d’invenzione. of about 1744, the almost complete lack of prison paraphernalia confirms this vague reference to prison-like spaces.The near failure of that series, and the addition of some vivid prison imagery in the second series published about seventeen years later, suggest that perhaps Piranesi thought the prints would sell better if he added images that lived up to the literal meaning of his title. 47 For a discussion of Lang’s Die Nibelungen. see Tom Gunning, “The Decay of Myth: Siegfried’s Death, Kriemhild’s Revenge,” The Films of Fritz Lang 34-51, and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 244 David J. Levin, Richard Wagner. Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal. 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Creator Boggio, Cecilia (author)

Core Title Projections of epic: Spatial transformations and narrative revisions in Italian and European modernism

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art History,Cinema,comparative literature,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-634812

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Identifier 3116669.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-634812 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3116669.pdf

Dmrecord 634812

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Boggio, Cecilia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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