Many filmmakers show undue religion successful their quality to picture ways of beingness acold extracurricular their ain experience. This blithe self-confidence is peculiarly egregious successful depictions of distant history, wherever imaginativeness inevitably courts fabrication. The Croatian manager Igor Bezinović confronts this occupation boldly and brilliantly successful “Fiume o Morte!” (“Fiume oregon Death!”) by showing his process. He combines nonfiction elements with fictionalizations of humanities events—and reveals the behind-the-scenes instauration of these reënactments, turning the enactment into a documentary astir its ain making. The film, which volition surface connected April 4th and 5th successful the “New Directors/New Films” bid astatine some MOMA and Film astatine Lincoln Center, is centered connected an astounding existent communicative that took spot successful Bezinović’s location municipality of Rijeka, and his telling emphasizes some his idiosyncratic transportation to the saga and the strangeness of dramatizing it.
The movie focusses connected a tumultuous play betwixt 1919 and 1921, erstwhile the Italian-nationalist writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, successful defiance of his ain government, led a convoy of rebel soldiers into Rijeka—a town, connected the Adriatic Coast, which had a ample Italian number and was past wide known by its Italian name, Fiume. Quickly consolidating power, D’Annunzio ruled Fiume arsenic a dictator. The results were oppressive for the metropolis and—because D’Annunzio’s exploits won the admiration of the younger, adjacent much ambitious Italian nationalist Benito Mussolini—catastrophic for the world. Bezinović presents the communicative of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and autumn successful a mode that’s arsenic antithetic arsenic it is revelatory. He gathers a teeming array of archival worldly and a teeming formed of actors—mostly nonprofessionals, galore recruited via person-in-the-street interviews—to re-create the archival depictions of the occupation.
Bezinović, acold from shrugging disconnected the peculiarity of the procedure, calls attraction to it, with humorous barbs aimed successful aggregate directions—including astatine himself. The casting interviews commencement retired arsenic informational ones, arsenic helium stops passersby to inquire whether they cognize of D’Annunzio. Many, particularly younger ones, don’t. Those who do—mainly elders—have small bully to accidental of him; 1 calls him “a horrible fascist” and adds, “They’re inactive astir today.” Amid these spontaneous discussions of the erstwhile dictator, Bezinović asks middle-aged men who hap to beryllium bald, similar D’Annunzio, whether they’d beryllium consenting to represent him. Bezinović besides pays peculiar attraction to those who talk Fiuman, the town’s past prevalent, present uncommon Venetian dialect—not slightest due to the fact that helium integrates the connection into the soundtrack, sharing the duties of voice-over narration with the participants whom helium films.
Throughout, Bezinović enlists different amateurs successful smaller roles. Young men are invited to play soldiers; upon locating the edifice (now a backstage dwelling) wherever D’Annunzio spent a nighttime en way to the takeover, Bezinović recruits the pistillate of the location to play the chambermaid ministering to the traveller. Some of these scenes necessitate drastic transformations: the storefront that housed D’Annunzio’s favourite tavern, reputedly the tract of his and his cronies’ licentious revels, is present a nail salon, which, with the consent of its owner, the formed and unit crook into a set-like reproduction of the long-ago haunt. But astatine different times there’s a seemingly deliberate dissonance, arsenic erstwhile the would-be dictator drives into municipality astatine the instrumentality of a snazzily modern reddish convertible sports car. In 1 memorable sequence, D’Annunzio is played by a nonrecreational guitarist who, aft acting retired a important showdown with an Italian general, provides his ain raucous philharmonic accompaniment to the aftermath.
One important facet to Bezinović’s antic yet earnest restagings is that they bash much than simply correspond the events seen successful archival ocular sources. He besides replicates the compositions, the framings, of the originals, engaging successful his ain signifier of directorial reënactment. It’s a fraught gesture, due to the fact that immoderate of the sources that helium mimics are themselves implicated successful the movie’s grim history. Many of the archival images are the enactment of D’Annunzio’s ain alleged Photography Section, which, arsenic Bezinović relates, took 10 1000 pictures; the manager wryly comments, “It was important to him that the concern beryllium remembered, arsenic it is to america who are making this film.” Bezinović thereby shares successful the governmental risks of the project, putting himself into the aforesaid ethical position, down the camera, arsenic the actors impersonating D’Annunzio successful beforehand of it.
The question of representation goes some ways—not lone does “Fiume o Morte!” conjure the past, it pulls the events of the past into the contiguous tense, conveying an eerie feeling of witnessing them occurring successful existent time. Bezinović’s consciousness of the city’s past involves a native’s intimacy with its locations, its monuments, its traditions. The manager visits sites that figured prominently successful D’Annunzio’s reign, specified arsenic a present-day flat gathering that was past a prison, and reveals surviving traces and artifacts of the regime. He counts disconnected the years, from the precocious nineteenth period done the First World War, by filming the floors of buildings successful which the twelvemonth of operation is acceptable successful mosaics. By means of a elemental and ingenious twist of editing, Bezinović makes his reënactments constituent some ways, too: helium often puts his ain restagings up of the sources he’s copying, arsenic if visually proclaiming his astonishment that the seeming absurdities helium himself puts onscreen are the undeniable realities of D’Annunzio’s time.
Bezinović brings to the fore the radical hatred connected which D’Annunzio’s iron-fisted, thin-skinned regularisation was based, and the taste cleansing that it involved. The movie cites his archetypal sojourn to Fiume, successful 1907, erstwhile helium attended a play successful which, the voice-over says, “Slavs are referred to arsenic ‘thieves’ and Croatians arsenic ‘wolves.’ ” The strutting demagogue, who declared “whoever is not with america is against us,” meted retired unit connected nationalistic pretexts: erstwhile Italians were killed successful the adjacent metropolis of Split during clashes betwixt supporters of D’Annunzio and the section population, helium ordered the carnal demolition of non-Italian businesses and institutions passim Fiume. (The attacks, too, are reënacted, to jolting effect, astatine their existent sites.) When Italy sought a referendum successful Fiume connected D’Annunzio’s government, helium archetypal agreed but, realizing that it was coming retired against him, sent troops to disrupt the vote, which was past ignored. Bezinović notes that the different thoroughly documented authorities someway failed to photograph these doings—then dramatizes them nonetheless.
Bezinović besides visually apostrophizes D’Annunzio’s fanatical nationalism with footage of a current-day rally, with chants and fireworks, sparked by the rivalry betwixt Rijeka and Split’s shot teams: an mundane look of the identitarian pridefulness truthful easy weaponized by opportunists. Sports played a relation successful the authoritarian ethos imposed by D’Annunzio, and truthful did culture—he created a codification of behaviour that required his troops to excel successful a wide scope of diversion skills, singing and dancing, and the unusual signifier of imitating quality and carnal voices. The aesthetic regimen for assemblage and caput was matched by a tune that dominates the soundtrack of “Fiume o Morte!”—a marchlike opus called “Giovinezza” (“Youth”), which, nether Mussolini, became the authoritative Italian Fascist anthem.
The endgame of fanatical younker is cruel. The city’s residents bushed of D’Annunzio’s reckless rule, and his bellicose posturing and expansionist maneuvers discomfited the Italian monarchy. The dénouement came connected Christmas Eve, successful 1920, erstwhile the progressively isolated D’Annunzio declared warfare connected his autochthonal Italy. The playful enthusiasm that his soldiers had hitherto displayed successful martial grooming and sporty festivities, and the esprit de corps forged successful their communal cause, gave mode to their bloodied corpses; the film’s depictions of their gory stillness, successful afloat color, travel arsenic a shock.
D’Annunzio slunk backmost to Italy the pursuing period with a bombastic aerial of satisfaction, of a ngo accomplished, and lived successful palatial isolation. (Mussolini supposedly likened D’Annunzio to a atrocious tooth: “You either propulsion it retired oregon screen it successful gold.”) The palace, Bezinović notes, is present a tourer attraction. What “Fiume o Morte!” makes plain is the easiness with which a motivated demagogue and a coterie of followers, taking vantage of a divided citizenry, tin thrust waves of complicity and complacency to implicit power. As 1 actor, preparing to impersonate the dictator, tells Bezinović, “I deliberation it’s a beauteous crippled that has to beryllium approached with a large seriousness.” The movie’s humanities re-creations, nevertheless derisive, are chilling. The story’s immediacy is intensified not lone by clever dramatics but by its echoes of existent events, for which D’Annunzio provides—depending connected one’s views—a cautionary communicative oregon a cookbook. ♦
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