Millicent Marcus,
Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-8020-9189-5
US$29.95 (pb with dvd)
224pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press)

Millicent Marcus has taught Italian film and literature, and co-taught courses on Holocaust literature and film, at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, and is currently a Professor in the Italian department at Yale. She is the author of Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz is the result of her teaching, research and conference papers on the subject of Italian Holocaust literature and film, and some parts of the book are revised versions of articles which have previously been published in Italian or American anthologies.

The author surveys the period from 1945 to 2004 and discusses (sometimes briefly and sketchily, at other times more extensively) every Italian film and TV mini-series that has directly or indirectly addressed the subject of the Holocaust. But she first provides some history and an argument. In a terse introduction, crammed with dates, facts and figures, she describes the experience of Italian Jews under Fascism and Nazism; then she goes on to argue that the Italian postwar cinema paid little, and only sporadic, attention to the presence and experience of Italian Jews until the 1990s, when a veritable spate of films and miniseries devoted to the Holocaust were produced. She offers several reasons for this late about-turn, for this national indulgence in mourning after such a long period of repression. She suggests changes in the Italian political and social context were important factors: the collapse of communism, the rise of right-wing extremism and concomitant rehabilitation of Fascism, the influx of Third World immigrants (with an attendant re-emergence of racism) and the Polish Pope’s public pronouncements and actions expressing remorse for Christian anti-Semitism.

The rest of the book is devoted to the films. A couple of these (Visconti’s Sandra [France/Italy 1965] and de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi Contini [Italy/West Germany 1970]) are familiar to many of us because of the fame of their directors – therefore figuring in auteur-based retrospectives and criticism; a few (Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties [Italy 1975], Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter [Italy 1974], and Benigni’s Life is Beautiful [Italy 1997]) achieved international notoriety, their reception having been marked by widespread controversy. But many have not had international exposure and were unknown to me. So this book is a valuable source of information, alerting us to the gaps in the coverage of Italian film history, due to the limited distribution of Italian films abroad and the auteurist bias of the literature on Italian cinema in English.

The first section on the films, grouped under the heading ‘A Diaphanous Body of Films’, offers brief discussions (no more than a few pages, sometimes less) of each film, referring the reader to more extended analyses (in Italian and English, by herself and by Italian film critics) in other publications. The second section is devoted to recent productions, those made since 2000, which she examines at greater length. The heading of this section is ‘Recovered Memory: Contemporary Italian Holocaust Films in Depth’. She demonstrates the emergence of a major new development, a shift in the representation of Italian Fascists, who are now shown to be kind towards, even heroic saviours of, Jews destined for extermination. Marcus attributes this development to the influence of Spielberg’s Schindler and to the recent exposure of such Italian ‘heroes’ in the Italian media (TV interviews, journalism and biographies), but plays down the debt to revisionist history, and the rehabilitation of Fascism in the era of Berlusconi. Mainly, however, she stresses the continuities with the past. In her discussions of contemporary Italian films, she demonstrates the persistence of certain tendencies and tropes evident in earlier postwar Italian cinema – caricaturing Nazis; favoring the innocent child’s point of view; stressing the innate decency and big hearts of the Italian people; stereotyping Jews as cultured connoisseurs of high art (music, art, and literature); using non-Italian settings as sites of Jewish victimization and thus locating evil elsewhere in Europe.

A special bonus for buyers of this book is the inclusion of a DVD of a 10-minute short film by Ettore Scola called ’43-’97, which Marcus discusses in her epilogue. Scola opens his film with a solemn B&W re-enactment of the Nazi round-up of the Jews of Rome, on October 16th 1943, and their herding into trucks for deportation to Auschwitz. Amongst the adult and elderly victims a young boy has a poignant presence, but the camera soon discovers another young boy who has hidden from view, to escape capture, is then chased through the streets and eventually eludes his pursuers by finding refuge in a cinema. On the cinema screen we are shown a Nazi newsreel, followed by Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler impersonation in The Great Dictator (USA 1940) and then, in quick progression, a montage of dramatic excerpts from postwar Italian movies, opening with the disturbing ending of Rossellini’s Open City [Italy 1945] (Anna Magnani’s death at the hands of the Nazis) and concluding with the opening of Rosi’s The Truce [Italy/France/Germany/Switzerland 1997] (the scene of the liberation of Auschwitz). Scola then switches to the present and to colour. We see the young boy as an old man in the same seat in the cinema, and hear sounds of someone running into the cinema and panting, behind him. The old boy turns around to smile collusively at a young African who has taken refuge from his pursuers in the same cinema. Succinctly and evocatively, in this short film, Scola mourns the Italian victims of the Holocaust and tells his fellow Italians why they must not repress this from their historical memory, for it remains unfortunately relevant to the situation in Italy today, where national indifference to, and collusion with, racism and oppression in their midst survive.

Freda Freiberg,
Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 4 September 2008