By Acquarello
AFI FEST Daily News

Whether motivated by idealized nostalgia or an attempt to divine the past in order to navigate an uncertain future, an indirect consequence of the global recession has been the recurring use of refigured prewar history in contemporary cinema. Interweaving truth and fiction, reenactment and dramatization, films such as Sabu’s KANIKOSEN, Michael Haneke’s THE WHITE RIBBON, and Marco Bellocchio’s VINCERE eschew the romanticization of conventional period pieces and instead, re-evaluate the essence of a national identity as revealed in the recesses of a people’s collective consciousness, dissociated from the facile interpretation of a mediated, official history and reframed within the context of an organic, ingrained social culture.

With its woefully dated polemic on worker solidarity against the evils of capitalism, the resurgence of dissident author Takiji Kobayashi’s 1929 Marxist novel in 21st century Japan seems, on the surface, like an aberration. Overtly constructed, exaggerated to the point of caricature, and unabashedly partisan in its depiction of exploited young workers aboard a dystopian, corporate-owned, Imperial Navy-escorted crab canning ship operating between the territorial waters of Japan and Russia, KANIKOSEN nevertheless resonates with modern audiences in its audacious depiction of the dysfunctional alliance between economy and geopolitics.

Revisiting the country’s immediate prewar history that was marked by increasing militarism, expansion, and rapid modernization, KANIKOSEN demythologizes the notion of a golden age at the height of the Japanese Empire that is often associated with ushering an era of social and economic progress. Moreover, by evoking Japan’s imperialist culture in its quest for global domination, KANIKOSEN is also a pointed allegory for the challenges facing contemporary Japanese society, where the unrealistic paradigm of sustained economic growth confronts the reality of a shrinking and increasingly aging population.

While KANIKOSEN retains the anarchic irreverence of consciously artificial staging, the narrator (and village schoolteacher [Christian Friedel]) of THE WHITE RIBBON acknowledges the ambiguous nature of truth and fiction in his imperfect recollection of seemingly related unsolved mysteries in his adopted village that had since been forgotten in the sweep of turbulent history.

Set in the preceding years before the Great War, THE WHITE RIBBON is both a reconstruction of history in its richly textured portrait of early 20th century provincial life at a remote farming community in deeply Protestant northern Germany, and a cultural deconstruction of entrenched class division, isolation, and moral rigidity that engendered the spread of Fascism. Juxtaposed against the schoolteacher’s ominous tale of the proverbial hand of God exacting punishment through omniscient, unseen agents, the film’s meticulous social observation is also a potent and relevant analysis of the interrelated dynamics of repression, surveillance, secrecy, and sense of righteousness intrinsic in shaping the ideology of modern day extremism.

In contrast to the idea of fictional past as prologue, VINCERE proposes an incisive corollary in its deconstruction of official history as (literally) institutionalized fiction. Based on the tragic fate of Benito Mussolini’s (Filippo Timi) secret first wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) who was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for refusing to renounce her marriage despite pressure from the state even in the face of her husband’s abandonment and subsequent marriage to his longtime mistress, Rachele Guidi, VINCERE reframes national history through the perspective of cursory anecdotes left in its wake.

Using archival footage and newspaper headlines as temporal ellipses that play out against Dalser’s decades-long fruitless quest for recognition and legitimacy at the hands of powerful, collusive institutions, Bellocchio reflects on the media’s complicit role in perpetuating her systematic persecution, helping to cultivate Mussolini’s cult of personality by promoting his sanitized public image as traditional family man, devout Catholic, and charismatic statesman even as it collectively suppressed common knowledge over his bigamy and silencing of political opposition. Similarly, by illustrating the formative role of Il Popolo d’Italia–the conservative newspaper founded by Mussolini to rival the Socialist Party publication, Avanti! that would subsequently be used to provide a wide-scale platform for the Fascist movement–in further propelling his political ambition, VINCERE also exposes the perils of creating an incestuous relationship between media and politics. Framed within the modern day context of media mogul turned right-wing politician, Silvio Berlusconi, VINCERE serves as a trenchant cautionary tale on historical whitewashing and the price–and implication–of a compromised, state-controlled media.

Acquarello is the author of Strictly Film School.