Re-viewing Fascism by Jacqueline Reich

Re-viewing Fascism by Jacqueline Reich

Author:Jacqueline Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253109149
Publisher: Indiana University Press


Working within Hollywood’s male-biased heterocentrist conventions, Garnett demurs from showing Garfield’s body, fully dressing Frank in shirt and jacket for most of the film. In the beach scenes, his camera retreats to modest long shots, avoiding any homoeroticization. In stark contrast, Visconti costumes Gino in a sleeveless undershirt during the first part of his film to accommodate his fetishization of Girotti’s “equine” shoulders. Visconti also lowers the diegetically functional over-the-shoulder shot to include Girotti’s shoulders as an element of the composition in their own right. Visconti opens the first bedroom scene with a close-up shot of a shirtless Gino and a fully dressed Giovanna distanced in a mirror shot. Throughout the scene, Visconti foregrounds Girotti’s chest and shoulders, even when Giovanna undresses down to her slip. Visconti keeps the potentially provocative imagery of female sexuality in the background in a manner that contrasts with Garnett’s male heterosexual direction. Later, when Giovanna wipes the sweat off Bragana’s naked torso, Visconti juxtaposes the invasive proximity of Bragana’s bloated obesity with Gino’s tempting but inaccessible lean body in the background, the camera empathetically approximating Giovanna’s point of view as subject. In Ancona, when the Spagnolo lights the match in his room with Gino, he holds it over Gino’s back, extending the shoulder fetish beyond Giovanna’s subjectivity to the film as a whole and positing it within a homosexual narrative context. Visconti prefers Girotti’s left shoulder in particular as fetish object, so that the injury to this arm from Bragana’s murder constitutes, from a purely visual perspective, a sort of symbolic castration. When a shirtless Gino confronts Giovanna in a bedroom scene after the murder, he throws her onto the bed and himself on top of her, untying his bandaged arm in symbolic refusal of such castration. The visual presentation of this heterosexual aggression again homoerotically privileges Gino’s back and shoulders, which are stretched out over and covering Giovanna’s body. At the end of the film, Visconti concludes this shoulder motif on a nurturing rather than aggressive note, when Gino tells Giovanna to rest her head on his shoulders as they drive away from the trattoria.

Lino Miccichè has painstakingly recounted how, contrary to popular belief, Visconti’s film does not merely use Cain’s novel as a point of departure but rather constitutes a genuine adaptation, as the film appropriates not only its plot but at times also its actual dialogue from the book. Insofar as Visconti’s invention of the character of the Spagnolo deviates from Cain’s original text, this breach of fidelity stands out as a sore auteurist thumbprint, prompting much critical speculation. Fernaldo Di Giammatteo sees him as “Gino’s alter ego.” Schifano dubs him “the ironic and disenchanted conscience of the film.” Screenwriter Mario Alicata laments that “he was supposed to be the positive character in the film,” but that he ended up “a highly equivocal figure.” Giulio Cesare Castello calls him “a nebulous symbol of a particular sexual rapport.” Miccichè reports that “the adjective most often used by Italian critics to describe the Spagnolo is ‘ambiguous.



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