The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics

Dave Monroe davidmmonroe at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 27 02:47:44 CDT 2002


Ravetto, Kriss.  The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.

A startling revision of the aesthetics in the wake of
the Holocaust.

Amid the charged debate over whether-and how-the
Holocaust can be represented, films about fascism,
nazis, and the Final Solution keep coming. And in
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. In a brilliant analysis with ramifications far
beyond the realm of film, 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 different, more complex approach of such
filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and
Lina Wertmüller. Rather than reassuring viewers of the
triumph of the forces of Good over the forces of Evil
and the reinstitution of ethical values, these
filmmakers confound the binary oppositions that
produce clear and identifiable heroes and villains.
Here we see how their work-complicating conventions of
gender identity, class identifications, and the
economy of victim and victimizer-disturbs rather than
reassures the audience seeking relief from a sense of
"bad history."

Drawing on history, philosophy, critical theory, film,
literature, and art, Ravetto demonstrates the complex
relationship of thinking about fascism with moral
discourse, sexual politics, and economic practices.
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.

Kriss Ravetto teaches film history, criticism,
philosophy, media, and gender studies in the
Department of Critical Studies at California Institute
of the Arts [= CIA (!!)]. 

$19.95 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3743-1 
$54.95 Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3742-3

296 Pages 32 halftones 7 x 10 (2001)

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/R/%20ravetto_unmaking.html

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