The Unmaking of Fascist AestheticsIn works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, and political others. This book exposes the "madness" inherent in such a course, which attests to the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical constructions from political, ideological, and moral codes. Kriss Ravetto argues that contemporary discourses using such devices actually continue unacknowledged rhetorical, moral, and visual analogies of the past. Against postwar fictional and historical accounts of World War II in which generic images of evil characterize the nazi and the fascist, Ravetto sets the more complex approach of such filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and Lina Wertmuller. Her book asks us to think deeply about what it means to say that we have conquered fascism, when the aesthetics of fascism still describe and determine how we look at political figures and global events. Book jacket. |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 Between Remembering and Surviving | 21 |
2 Feminizing Fascism | 53 |
A Fatal Strategy | 97 |
4 Mixing Memory with Desire | 149 |
Survival without Omertà | 187 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic ambiguous antifascist argues Barthes becomes Bettelheim body bourgeois cabaret Cavani cinema concentration camp critical critique cultural death decadence Deleuze depiction desire Dietrich discourse economy evil fascism and nazism feminine sexuality feminized femme fatale film Final Solution former nazis gender German historical Hitler Holocaust homosexual human icon ideals identification identity ideological impure Italian libertines logic Lola Lyotard male masculine masochistic Max and Lucia Max's memory Minnesota Press modern moral Mussolini narrative nazi nazism nazism and fascism neocapitalism neodecadent neofascism neorealism neorealist Night Porter object Otto Weininger Pasolini Pasqualino past Pier Paolo Pasolini pleasure postwar present Primo Levi psychoanalysis pure purity question racial radical relationship represent representations of fascism role Sade Sadean sadistic Salò Saul Friedländer seduction Seven Beauties sexual politics Slavoj Žižek social spectacle survival symbolic tion Trans transgression University Press victims violence visual Wertmüller woman women York Žižek