Lena Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani: Knee-jerk Anger and Slow Understanding for The Black Sheep of Italian Feminist Film. (Italian contemporary women film-makers 1973-1976).

 

 

Io Sono Mia (I Belong To Me), Sofia Scandura’s[1] one and only picture, was produced in 1978 as result of the rise of second-wave feminism. It is a good reference point for this essay, because it marks the first time women’s movement  directly addressed the mass market in Italy in a non-documentary feature-length production[2]. Scandura presented her audience with a established storyline; a woman is dissatisfied with her uncaring husband, makes friends with a group of feminists, and thereby gains the courage to leave him. Its narrative is simplistic and trite and follows an easily recognisable ideological formula which is unfulfilling.

 

This essay deals with the years before such an openly feminist film like Io Sono Mia  could be made.  Specifically it deals with two women film directors, Lena Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani. Their names are often mentioned in the same breath because they were far and away the most prominent women film-makers in Italy before 1978[3]. Their styles are not dissimilar, and their rejection of a straight-forward feminist ideology like Scandura’s has provoked comment, apologies, and anger from some feminists (These specific criticisms will be dealt with later on). The films that stand out (and that are most commonly available) from this mid-seventies period are Wertmuller’s Love & Anarchy (1973)[4], Swept Away (1975)[5], Seven Beauties (1976) [6], and Cavani’s Night Porter (1974)[7].

 

These four films must been seen in the context of  the growing social movements in Italy. The popular resurgence of left-wing movements in 1968 kept up its momentum through the seventies[8]. This provoked a re-analysis of the 1941-45 war and whether fascism, as an ideology, had really been purged from the psyche of Italy’s ruling classes. Italy had not suffered the same post-war humiliation that German had, and as such Italian film-makers could touch of the subject of fascism with relative freedom.

 

This re-analysis of fascism is reflected in the male directed landmark films of the era, mainly Visconti’s The Damned (1971, he died in 1976), Pasolini’s Salo (1975, murdered by a mob a month later), Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976). These directors were were committed social reform, and both Bertolucci and Pasolini were prominent homosexuals who had a good grasp of sexual politics.

 

The Italian film making scene was based in Rome, and there was a good interaction of ideas between the film community because of its relatively small size[9]. There was also no big ‘film’ industry as such apart from television, and people like Wertmuller continued to direct theatre well after she started collaborating on films with Fellini[10]. Cavani started making films for TV to do with Mussolini, Hitler, and one about women fighters who had been part of the partisan resistance. She was specifically interested in the nature of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and how these old moral binaries operated during times of war[11]. It was her investigative journalism into the personal experiences of victims after the war that inspired her to make The Night Porter. [12]

 

Acker, who attacked Wertmuller, emphasised the fact that she was ‘allowed’[13] to make cinema by the patriarchy. She levels this lance at Cavani too. It is indisputable that during the 60s both these women directors were at the mercy of an exclusively male-dominated industry. Cavani’s living income came from her TV documentaries, and Wertmuller used Fellini’s money until she had established a sufficient reputation to be able to gain funding on her own. By the time they directed the films that are discussed below, they had full directorial control, and were free to produce the stories they wished. Annabella Misculgio says the feminist movement took “blind objection” to Wertmuller in the 70s, (Such a reaction is wholly understandable after Swept Away came out in 1976).  However she goes on to warn critics against “the dangers of self-segregation”[14]. Cavani and Wertmuller could have become mouthpieces for the women’s movement, but they chose to follow their own paths, and sometimes deliberately provoked the feminist press.

 

It is best to start with Cavani, and her only movie which is freely available nowadays, the notorious Night Porter. It was met with the following criticism,

 

“[there is an implication that] those imprisoned by the Nazis share in their jailor’s depravity… the victims, The Night Porter would have us believe are just as guilty as their torturers.”[15]

 

And…

“Possibly, though I doubt it, Miss Cavani is less interested in the banality of evil or its psychology than in what she tries to picture as the eroticism of it.”[16]

 

In response to this analysis Teresa De Lauretis took it upon herself, in the face of a huge amount of adverse opinion, to explain the why The Night Porter is a woman’s film[17]. She drew inspiration for her stance from a positive review by Molly Haskell[18] in the alternative press, published four months after the initial reviews surfaced in the mainstream papers. In her article she points out that the experience of Lucia (the woman victim) was a real one, with reference to Cavani’s interviews with former concentration camp interns. De Lauretis explains that

 

“The Night Porter  is more profoundly a woman’s film than Cries and Whispers, A Woman Under the Influence, Love and Anarchy, and many other recent films by and about women ….[38] truly and profoundly dialectic, the point of consciousness, the core of perception, the sensor nerve is Lucia’s.” [19]

 

She concludes by saying “consciousness and a new self-image for women cannot be achieved by repression, exorcism or ignorance of history past and present”[20].

 

Ally Acker, in 1991, dismissed this point of view.

 

“With the Night Porter (1974), Cavani drew wide attention in America. In this sadomasochistic look at a love affair between a woman and her Nazi tormentor fifteen years after the war, the use of kinky fascist imagery was more difficult to bear than anything Wertmuller attempted in Seven Beauties.”[21]

 

Acker’s criticism of Lucia and Max’s relationship are based upon the fact that the images are ‘kinky’. Kinky connotes more than perversion, it is usually used in a derisive and patronising way. She uses the word in her paragraph on Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties too. Acker marginalises women involved in S/M, by using linking S/M and ‘kinky’ in a negative way, as somehow unnatural, and un-feminist. Carol Queen says,

 

“Feminism has made the mistake of overestimating its area of expertise…. Some women are deeply damaged by this absence of support. .. … most of us do not eroticise spanking and other pervy joys out of a lack of self-worth” [22]

 

With the exception of Love and Anarchy, the other three films have big S/M scenes. In The Night Porter Lucia/Max the sadomasochistic relationship takes up most of the film. In Seven Beauties Pasqaulino seduces the camp commandant, and in Swept Away Gennario beats Raffaela into sexual submission. The inclusion of S&M theory into  feminism may not yeild a positive response to Swept Away, but it transforms The Night Porter. Ally Acker seems to have taken the view that the image of a woman whose pleasure is derived from violence not speak to female viewers. This viewpoint is rather contentious. Linda Williams outlines the other side of the debate[23]  which  argues for the existence of bona fide female identification and pleasure with S/M films.

 

Swept Away is a extreme example which illustrates that although there maybe female indentification in some S/M texts, there are some which are rightly condemned by anyone who is interested in women’s liberation. In movie-guides Swept Away’s basic plot summary reads like The Night Porter’s, only this time set on a desert island. This is a purely superficial similarity as the interaction between the characters is entirely different. Wertmuller produced it after seeing The Night Porter and it seems she is deliberately trying to provoke controversy. Wertmuller was conversant with feminist film theory, and also with the negative reviews of The Night Porter, yet she went ahead and made an even more outrageous film. In her interview with Gideon Bachmann she said,

 

“Man, humiliated by work, returns and creates his private slave in the home. Stronger, he can take it all out on her. Man has his own private Third World. This is how he became a king, by having a slave. And we try to take away that last security valve! Imagine what’s happening to his frustrations  and aggressions now! What will remain of man? This is a problem which is at least as grave as that of the enslavement of women.”[24]

 

This makes sense of why Swept Away is a Marxist class analysis. Wertmuller refuses to see feminism as being helpful unless it is accompanied by a revolutionary change in society’s structure. She deliberately made Raffaela into something that feminists would despise. She purposely made the most “patriarchal-applauded”[25] cinema she could. The climax of this is when Raffaela, days after being raped, urges her ‘master’ to sodomise her. Scene like that are an open invitation for feminists to walk out of the theatre. Wertmuller must have been aware of what would follow. Ally Acker issued a scathing response,

 

“Swept Away (1975) displays the most conscious mass ridicule of the female, which we learn that all that any woman needs to straighten her out is a good fuck”[26].

 

Margaret Pomerantz put the best spin on it she could, “Swept Away… gets away with a lot because it is so obviously a satire”[27]. Pomerantz hoped Wertmuller was satirising, because the alternative is quite unthinkable. It is highly probable that Wertmuller made Swept Away simply to upset the feminist lobby, who was looking to her to voice their opinions, and thus maintain her “independence”.

 

From her interview with Bachman it is clear that Wertmuller is contemptous of any feminist activity that does not work in a political context. Love and Anarchy is a productive and non-satirical view of a community of prostitutes under fascist rule. Wertmuller sees communes of prostitutes as a positive society on the fringes of a strict hegemonic fascist state. It is only prostitutes who can refuse the nuclear family (one of her pet hates), and subvert  fascism’s obsession with genital pleasure[28]. Prostitutes  deal in penises and vaginas, but because it is their work, they rise above it. This is contrasted with the black-shirt commandant is obsessed with his penis and his whores. Together the prostitutes form a community which fosters revolution, and provides Tunin the anarchist with a home. He falls in love with a prostitute, Tripolina, who reciprocates and gives up her work for a few days before he decides to commit the assassination (which is tantamount to suicide). It is never suggested that this is a ‘marriage’ and a return to patriarchal norms. Peter Biskind is dead wrong when he writes,

 

“The brothel mirrors the regimentation of the fascist state. Female sexuality has been assimilated to thr system of capitalist commodity exchange. For these women family and private life have ceased to exist, thereby rendering their longing for love and personal satisfaction more pathetic and desperate.”

 

On the contrary, the group of prostitutes are free to do what they like. They work during the day in plush apartments, and at night Wertmuller focuses on their communal meal, which ends with a beautiful song played on guitar. They are all dressed in carnivalesque clothing, and they all tease each other, but not in a harmful way. (“mutual recrimination and bickering which reflects their competitive position” is Baskind’s interpretation of the ‘hysterical’ female). The banquets, overdone make-up, costume, laughter and satire all fit nicely into Bakhtin’s coinage of the ‘grotesque’[29], a concept which highlights male fears of woman when she ceases to be the ‘Other’[30]. 

 

The brothel is run by a strict but reasonable mistress who takes care of the women. Although they are under the thumb of the patriarchy all the prostitutes are happier than most people under the fascist state. Their refusal of a separation public and private spheres is liberating, but again, Biskind sees this as incarcerating.

 

In Seven Beauties, Wertmuller uses the community of prostitutes as a way of remaining ‘pure’ ideologically, by living on the margins of the main system. Thus Pasquolino’s post-war wife is a prostitute – and nothing critical is said, in fact the opposite is suggested; it is as if she has saved herself. To Wertmuller, true corruption would come from assimilating into the fascist state.

 

The films of Cavani and Wertmuller describe their feelings towards a society which sought to transform them into a vehicle for the organised women’s movement. Wertmuller rejected this stance by putting her own class-based analysis and gender theories above those of established feminist writers. Cavani, also, went with an individual’s portrait of the world, as is evinced in her interview with the survivors of Auschwitz and Dachau. They made sure by not avoiding controversy, and sometimes inviting it, that their films are considered their own, and were not dismissed like Io Sono Mia has been. They are two artists who have a “great creativity… rich ambiguity”[31]. They will not only be remember by the effect of their films, but in the huge amounts of women film-makers who picked up a camera to clarify the ambiguities they opened up.