After watching Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Michael’s brilliant choice for the Family Pictures Podcast) it was my turn to come back with a follow-up.* While watching the classroom scene at the start of The 400 Blows, Antonella suggested Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) might be a nice complement for all sorts of reasons, and as usual she was right. The formative role of school in many of the family films we’ve watched thus far deserves its own post, but more broadly the sharp realism of The 400 Blows plays nicely off the nostalgic remembrances of Fellini’s childhood Rimini. They’re two radically different frames for a coming of age story: one focused on an existential isolation of a post-war child in Paris, while the other chronicles a small coastal city in Italy enmeshed within the fascist norms of “Dio, patria and famiglia” (God, homeland, family) in 1937.
Still from the making of Amarcord during the fascist parade. Foto Credit: Davide Minghini, Biblioteca Gambalunga Rimini
As I mention in the podcast, the year 1937 is significant because it marks a kind of national point of no return for Itlay leading up to World War II. It’s the year just before a series of Racial Laws were put into place that aligned Italian fascism more closely with that of the Nazis. What’s more, “Dio, patria, and famiglia” is not just a slogan we see on a banner during the Fascist parade during the film, but a 19th century nation-building manifesto taken up by the fascists to tie Italian national identity to a strict Roman Catholic vision of family values.
In fact, this watching of Amarcord was even more resonant given the rise of extreme right-wing governments in both Europe and the US. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni has recently defended the use of “Dio, patria, famiglia” as part of her party’s discourse (Fratelli di Italia is a post-war political party considered the successor to Mussolini’s). The slogan encapsulates the conservative vision of the national character of not only Italy, but much of the Western world. It’s this holy trinity of a Christian identity that’s ostensibly everywhere under attack. You can easily substitute “illegal” (often Muslim) immigrants from North Africa with European Jews of the 30s to capture much of the current rhetorical context—very often still rooted in religious differences.
Fellini’s seemingly benign dreamlike fantasy of a quaint Italian city on the Adriatic (not far from Mussolini’s birthplace) sustains a razor sharp attack on a culture that’s sleepwalking towards a militant radicalization of this identity. In Amacord that ire initially manifests against the anarchists and communists, but just beyond the scope of this moment it would transform into a targeted racial attack against the Jews. As it happens, I was reading about this very moment in another masterpiece of Italian art, namely Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-rimmed Spectacles (Gli occhiali d’oro). In this novel a Jewish university student narrates the quickly developing impact of the Racial Laws on the Ferrara† community in which he lives. It’s a beautifully lyrical, yet haunting, novel that highlights how corrosive the everydayness of fascism becomes for the fabric of the Jewish community in Ferrara, many of whom were fascist up and until the Racial Laws were passed.
What my father had so long feared had, unfortunately, proved exactly true. No more than a week after Fadigati’s departure, in all the Italian newspapers, including the local Corriere Padano, the crude campaign of vilification, which within the space of a year would bring in its wake the announcement of the Racial Laws, had suddenly begun in earnest.
What you start to realize from Bassani’s novel is that the orchestrated vilification of the Jews in Italy was relatively abrupt, and within a year’s time Italian citizens were being stripped of their rights and some even deported to concentration camps outside the country. An excellent example of Faulkner’s words of wisdom:
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Unlike Bassani, Fellini’s film doesn’t fully explore the impact of fascism on the Jewish communities in Italy. Possibly because the racial laws were not yet in effect so the fiction of a more “gentle” Italian fascism could still be floated? Not sure, but this idea of the Italian character as incapable of the same kind of fascism as Germany is something Bassani underscores when one of the narrator’s “goyim” friends holds onto a milder Italian fascism in late 1938 despite the increasingly hostile climate:
‘Oh, we Italians are too buffoonish for that,’ he replied … “We may imitate the Germans in some things, even the goose-step, but not the tragic sense they have of life. We’re too old, too sceptical and worn out.’
Maybe the absence of the darker side of the Racial Laws in Amarcord can be read as a self-aware, embedded critique of the limits of his own nostalgia for the Rimini of his youth? I have to believe Fellini was well-aware of Bassani’s novels given another Italian film auteur, Vittorio De Sica, had just adapted another novel from Bassani’s Ferrara Trilogy: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. This novel, as well as Behind the Door, are set against the backdrop of fascism in Italy during the 1930s.
I guess the resurgence of “Dio, Patria, Famiglia” here in Italy struck me so hard while watching this film because what seemed like a relic from the past was a current event. What’s more, my ex-patria’s “America First” is an analogous white-nationalist slogan engineered by the rich, wicked, and powerful to create internal divisions that may very well tear us asunder
These are all the things I wanted to mention in this podcast, but sometimes a blog post can be just as good.
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*In many ways our film choice for each episode has developed into its own kind of playful dialogue, choosing each week’s film is a large part of the joy.
†Ferrara is in Emilio Romagna, the same region as Rimini, which has a significant Jewish population that took the brunt of 1938 Racial Laws.
