Film Essay -- Love and Anarcy, a film directed by Lina Wertmueller

　

　


Long names

Lina Wertmueller’s films have long names. Invariably, these names were shortened when the pictures were premiered in the United States. A perceptive critic might observe that Wertmueller’s Leftist cinema is influenced heavily by the theater of Bertolt Brecht and the German playwright also favored lengthy titles with a didactic inflection. The actual title of the film released in the United States as Love and Anarchy is A Film about Love and Anarchy: this morning at 10 am on the Via de Fiori (Flower Street), in a noted brothel...

Identifying the Brechtian influence on Wertmueller’s films is an interesting exercise. But it is probably wrong with respect to the long names by which this director christens her films. My suggestion is that the long and unwieldy names are a trademark referring to Wertmueller’s own grandiose name: she was born Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmueller von Elgg Spanoel Braueich. Of course, this is not entirely an Italian name. Wertmueller was born in Rome in 1928 to Swiss nobility. However, she is, perhaps, the most fundamentally "Italian" of all directors from that country – the most passionate, vehement, and wildly expressive of all the Italians making films in the sixties and seventies. Indeed, she was so flamboyant in her personae, and her films were so uniquely and vibrantly personal to her, that she was caricatured no less than twice on Saturday Night Live in the mid-seventies. (Larraine Newman did the impersonation.)

Heavily influenced by Fellini both personally and professionally, Wertmueller affected big round glasses. She wore tight slacks and blouses. Her Wikipedia page show her sprawled across a kind of chaise lounge with a large statue of a sphinx adorning the windowsill of the room where she is photographed – her huge white glasses and extravagant posture make her look like a depraved Southern California real estate agent.

　



A Puzzle

Wertmueller made some of the most well-known and famous pictures released in the seventies. At one time, she was the star of the International Art Film circuit. Some of her films were enormous box-office hits both in Europe and North America – indeed, one of her pictures, Swept Away, was so influential and controversial that it was remade as a vehicle for Madonna. But after the decade of the seventies, Lina Wertmueller’s star seems to have gone into eclipse. She continued to make movies and, indeed, has been prolific but none of her films directed after the late seventies have been commercially released in this country. The first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for directing was, by and large, forgotten in the United States. People are always surprised when they learn that Wertmueller is still alive.

Wertmueller was a rebellious girl and, repeatedly, expelled from private schools where her wealthy family enrolled her. She was supposed to attend the university to become a lawyer, but, instead, spent her time in theater. She wrote plays and toured Europe with a Communist puppet theater. In the early sixties, she finagled her way into Cinecitta Studios where she worked as an assistant director on Felllini’s 8 ½. Her proficiency in that work led to a number of solo directing assignments. Her first film, The Lizards, was the type of movie obligatory to young Italian directors – a neo-realist study of crime and poverty in the South. Thereafter, she made pictures in a variety of genres, directing a comedy, two musicarello comedies (these were like beach party of Gidget movies), and, even, a spaghetti western, The Belle Star Story.

Her breakthrough film was The Seduction of Mimi (1972), the first of her pictures starring Giancarlo Giannini. This film featured Wertmueller’s trademark mixture of lurid and explicit sex, operatic emotion, and Communist politics. A major hit, The Seduction of Mimi (1973) was followed by Love and Anarchy, also a vehicle for Giannini. These two films established Giannini as matinee idol of international proportions. Wertmueller’s next film, All Screwed Up, did not star Giannini and was, therefore, less successful commercially. Wertmueller returned to her collaboration with Giannini with the film Swept Away (1976), probably the most financially successful of all of her pictures. (Swept Away played for extended runs in all major American cities – it was so scandalous that everyone had to see it; the film was highly fashionable and regarded as a picture as important as Last Tango in Paris.) Wertmueller’s most ambitious film is The Seven Beauties, a concentration camp epic also starring Giancarlo Giannini. Although some influential critics (notably Pauline Kael) derided The Seven Beauties, many writers acclaimed the picture as a masterpiece and it was nominated for an Academy Award – Giannini won just about every acting award available for his performance as the picaresque hero, a man who uses his sexual allure to escape death in a concentration camp.

Invited to Hollywood, Wertmueller made her first picture in English, also starring Giannini and the starlet du jour, Candice Bergen, The End of the World in our Usual Bed in a Night full of Rain (1978). The movie flopped and, indeed, it was the kind of catastrophic flop that caused many critics to feel that Wertmueller’s fame was a kind of fraud, the sort of failure that casts a long and harsh light on the film maker’s earlier pictures. She returned to Italy, directed a crime thriller that was modestly successful in Europe but without the scandalous provocation that had characterized her earlier films. Since that time, she has made an additional 12 films, many of them apparently mafia dramas, some musicals, and romantic comedies. Her last picture, Too Much Romance – it’s time for Stuffed Peppers was released in 2004. Although none of these pictures were commercially shown in the United States, and, indeed, I don’t think any reached the "art-house" or international film screens (consisting of two or three theaters per major city) these movies were all well-funded, major productions starring important Italian actors like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastrioanni. For some reason, however, exhibitors regarded these films as uninteresting to American audiences and so they have not been shown in this country.

What happened? I have two hypotheses. First, Wertmueller films in movies in huge close-ups – she is addicted to placing her camera about eight inches from the faces of her performers. The stars of Wertmueller’s films in the seventies, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangelo Melato, have incredibly expressive and memorable faces. Simply put, Wertmueller’s success in the mid-seventies is largely related to Giannini’s wet and enormously melancholy eyes and Melato’s equally expressive, if strangely hooded, and protuberant eyes. Even critics who were disdainful of Wertmueller’s aggressive vulgarity, her pretentious, over-the-top melodrama, commented on the astounding beauty of her actors – the whores in Love and Anarchy have the pale, ethereal faces of silent movie stars. In the scenes in which they are together, Giancarlo Giannini and Marieangelo Melato have an indefinable chemistry, an erotic charge that is palpable to the viewer. (This is also true of Lina Polito, one of the most beautiful actresses who ever lived; she plays the whore Tripolina who falls in love with Giannini’s miserable and trapped would-be assassin.) Wertmueller’s films from the seventies presented an extraordinary visual spectacle and, of course, the most enduring appeal of film has always been its erotic aspects – bluntly stated, Wertmueller’s movies made in the seventies were highly charged with sex appeal and female audiences swooned over Giancarlo Giannini.

Second, Wertmueller’s films are overlong and, sometimes, poorly scripted – people speak in political slogans or melodramatic hyperbole. Some films are better with subtitles. The subtitle keeps the audience from otherwise laughing at dialogue that would seem pretentious or vapid or both if spoken in the native language of the viewers. It’s no accident that Wertmueller’s first film in English bombed.

There is a third factor: audiences are more willing to accept a radical and disquieting political message if that message is delivered in a foreign language and from an exotic milieu. Wertmueller’s two greatest hits, Swept Away and Seven Beauties, are politically disorienting and weirdly misogynistic – indeed, it has been asserted that Swept Away is one of the most politically incorrect films about male-female relationships ever made and many critics, although acclaiming the movies’ erotic appeal, were deeply uncomfortable about its plot. (The film concerns a privileged and wealthy trophy wife of a capitalist who is swept away in a storm to a remote desert isle; the only other survivor of the shipwreck is a Communist sailor. The sailor proceeds to beat the woman into submission, raping her repeatedly, abuse that she extravagantly enjoys since she is suffering at the hands of Giancarlo Giannini – the sado-masochism in this film is so overwhelming that it appealed to Madonna; she remade the film under the direction of her then-husband Guy Ritchie in 2002. The picture featured Adriana Giannini, the son of the star of the 1976 film – predictable, the film was an embarrassing failure.) As far as I can determine, Wertmueller’s later films are far less scandalous and, thematically, more audience-friendly – and, therefore, less interesting to international audiences.

　



Giancarlo Giannini

Male beauty morphs with age into handsome dignity – at least, this is how aging men are regarded in the male-dominated cinema. Giannini continues to be active in films. He has played a debonair assassin in several recent James Bond films, including Quantum of Solace.

Marieangelo Melato also made a number of films, although only in Italy – she died of pancreatic cancer when she was 71.

The transcendentally beautiful, Lina Polito, never achieved much fame. By 1976, she was appearing in soft-core pornography, films like The Deported Women of Special SS Brigade. She has appeared sporadically in made-for-TV movies, lent her voice for Italian cartoons, and had continuing roles in television series.

　



Errico Malatesta
Love and Anarchy concludes with long quote from Errico Malatesta. Malatesta was born in Italy in 1853 and died in Rome in 1932. He was a life-long anarchist and international nomad, often arrested and jailed, sometimes deported. He worked editing anarchist publications in Italy, London, South America, Egypt, and the United States. During his life, he spent about ten years in prison.

Malatesta believed in violent revolution. He was friends with Bakhtin and may have been involved in the conspiracy resulting in the assassination of the Italian King, Umberto I. The King was killed by an expatriate Italian anarchist from Paterson, New Jersey who had ties to Malatesta. 　

Heavily bearded, scruffy, and with Byronic cast to his features, Malatesta is the stereotypical bomb-throwing anarchist.


　


Style

Wertmueller’s major films are shot in a raucous, over-emphatic commedia dell’arte style. Her direction punctuates points with big close-ups. Long shots emphasize picturesque locations and scenery. Her film’s are edited for clarity of narrative. She sometimes uses silent film techniques – for instance, early in Love and Anarchy, Wertmueller cuts to the old man killed by the Fascists to show what Tunin is thinking. Wertmueller’s film draws contrasts that are schematic if broadly effective – the place most conceptually remote from a Fascist rally is a brothel: accordingly, the film’s action plays out in the brothel establishing a space where desire and pleasure are more important than duty and self-sacrifice. Wertmueller begins the film with a pan across a landscape flooded with water – small ribbon-like islands exist here and there in this watery panorama. We see someone running along one of the ribbons of islet – the person running is trapped: the slender sliver of island comes to end in the water and there is no egress. From this broad landscape, Wertmueller tightens the focus and reduces the space in which her characters can act – the film immediately encloses its characters in the labyrinthine world of the brothel, a maze devoted to pleasure. In the end of the film, Tunin is shown half-dead in a stone cell that comes to sharp point at its corner – Tunin is shoved into that corner, filmed from overhead, as the thugs beat hilm to death. Like the running man in the opening scene, he has been literally "cornered." The broad landscape of the film’s opening scenes has been narrowed to the vertex between two impermeable, hard, and blood-stained walls. (Curiously, after the credits, Wertmueller shows another shot of the landscape that opens the scene: the meaning of the landscape has been altered by Tunin’s horrific death and now bears an elegiac aspect – even at the outset of the film, however, the range of motion available to the film’s characters is significantly limited by the water isolating the land into fragments, that is, islands.)


　

　


Lina Wertmueller is just one of the boys

Love and Anarchy was intensely criticized by the Marxist press in Italy as being "apolitical" – presumably, the Marxist critics hoped to see Tunin shoot Mussolini. Some writers thought that film’s contrast between the private and public realms was "cartoonish" and primitive, thereby, vitiating the movie’s political effectiveness. Love and Anarchy are literal combatants when Tripolina and Salome fight over whether to wake the sleeping Tunin to his destiny as an assassin. Since it is broadly apparent that Wertmueller’s objectives are not political these criticisms seem beside the point. Wertmueller is not Brecht and does not intend to move her audience to action. In fact, Love and Anarchy is defeatist and suggests that political action, particularly against a well-funded and strong opponent, can never be effective.

The more interesting charge leveled against Love and Anarchy and, indeed, all of Wertmueller’s films is that she is a sexual reactionary and not a true feminist. (This argument becomes overheated to the point of hysteria in essays relating to Seven Beauties and Swept Away – but the same points can be made about Love and Anarchy.)

Feminist critical response to Wertmueller’s films tends to be laden with rebarbative jargon. Here are some of the words that I gleaned from a recent feminist essay about Wertmueller’s movies: her pictures are said to have as their subject "the specularization" of the female – this means that her films deliver the spectacle of nude or semi-clothed women for our delectation: the movies are about looking at how women appear. Debate rages as to whether Wertmueller’s mise-en-scene is

"androcentric" or not – that is, focused mostly on men to the exclusion of women. Films that delight us with images of naked women induce "scopophiliac" reactions – "Scopophilia" is a sexual pleasure derived from looking. One text uses the word "somaphany" – a term that is not defined in English, but which would seem to mean something like the revelation ("phany") of "soma," an intoxicating liquor derived from a mysterious plant that confers immortality, at least according to Sanskrit scriptures. "Somatic" also means "bodily" but with the exception of the "germ cells" – that is, reproductive cells. (What this possibly means with respect to Love and Anarchy remains mysterious to me.)

Wertmueller is sometimes derided for not being sufficiently "feminist". Her films are not adequately attuned to the realities of the female experience. She is a woman who makes movies like a man. Certainly, Wertmueller’s own statements have contributed to this perception. In one famous interview, Wertmueller said:


For laughter is the Vaseline that makes the ideas penetrate better. Not in the ass, but in the brain. In the heart.
The notion of ideas being introjected into the audience’s brain via some kind of lubricated phallus is not exactly feminist friendly. After this essay, a feminist critic noted that "after all, Lina Wertmueller is just one of the boys."

In HBO’s excellent new series, The Night of, a young man who has been thrown into jail on Rikers Island in New York is counseled by an older, more experienced, inmate: "You have to look people in the eye but without looking them in the eye." The older man, then, proceeds to give an exhibition of what he means – looking intently at the younger inmate, but at an askew angle out of the corner of his eye. This dialogue exemplifies the power of the "gaze" – and embodies the question of who has the right to gaze at whom. To gaze is to look "steadily, intently with fixed attention." According to the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the gaze privileges the person who exercises it – looking is inevitably hierarchical: some people have the right to look at others but not vice-versa. The guards in a prison have the right to subject the inmates to close scrutiny, but are likely to react violently if an inmate gazes at them. Military discipline authorizes the commanding officer to closely scrutinize his or her soldiers; the soldiers, however, understand that it would be a breach of military etiquette and, potentially, disrespectful for the recruit to "eyeball" his/her superior officers.

Transposing this analysis to the realm of gender, we might argue that men who have paid to observe a striptease "control the gaze" in that environment – the man has paid for the privilege of scrutinizing every aspect of the woman. He may react adversely, perhaps, even violently if a woman turns her gaze on him – he is supposed to looking intently at her, not vice-versa. In 1972, the British Marxist, John Berger, presented a series of TV programs for the BBC, simultaneously the subject of a book, Ways of Seeing. Berger argued that in renaissance art, "men look – women watch themselves being seen". In most cases in Western art, the woman is the subject of the man’s gaze and, therefore, objectified as subordinate to him.

Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" (published in 1973 in the London Marxist journal Screen) is a pioneering application of these ideas to Hollywood films. Mulvey says that classical Hollywood cinema, the product of a capitalist market economy controlled by men, "is constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer." The male spectator is "privileged to possess the objects of his gaze, typically women." Film, therefore, is a spectacle in which men look at women; to the extent that the woman is allowed to see, she gazes at herself, or other women, through a male perspective. Since, women are the objects of sight and not, themselves, seeing actors "the female actor is never meant to represent a character that is directly responsible for action or her own fate" – instead, she is "acted upon." Cinema is a mechanism for inducing scopophiliac pleasure in the men watching the movie – all narrative Hollywood film is akin to pornography, a system of gazes that reduces women to gazed-upon sex objects. Film encodes three gazes – the gaze of the cameraman (who is usually male) filming a man gazing or beholding a woman; the image of the man looking at the woman is, then, gazed upon by an audience of both men and women, however, from the perspective of the man. (Mulvey much later admitted that her widely influential 1973 article was intended to be "polemical" and that much of what she argued was over-simplified for that purpose – her more recent work, particularly that after 2011, acknowledges the possibility of the female gaze as well in pop culture cinema.)



Feminist analysis of Love and Anarchy show that the film is constructed in "androcentric terms" – the system of shots is encoded around Tunin’s gaze. We first see the brothel through Tunin’s eyes – thus, the male gaze remains central to the film. Generally, Tunin is shown to be looking at women – they don’t always return his gaze. (In this context, it should be said that other critics turn this equation on its head: I have earlier commented on both Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangelo Melato’s large, protruberant eyes. Tunin looks on her but she looks back and I’m not convinced that Giannini’s gaze is necessarily dominant in the film: rather, I think the whores may "look" Giannini to death, he is gazed into "castration" and can not act because he has taken refuge in a brothel and the women in that place, I think, are empowered to return the looks that he bestows upon them.)


　


A Fantasy

In late October 2016, Jethro, a Mormon from Boise, Idaho, concluded that the safety of this Republic required that he assassinate Donald Trump. Jethro knew that Trump was going to barnstorm in Elko, Nevada and so he went to that place. A snowstorm delayed Trump’s arrival in the little town and, so, the young man sought refuge in one of the licensed brothels that small community. Expecting to die in the morning, the young assassin spent the night in amorous pleasure.

When Trump’s motorcade stopped at the High School on College Street (the home of the Warriors), Jethro shoved through the crowd and fired four shots from his revolver into Trump’s head and neck. The Secret Service returned fire and riddled Jethro with bullets.

Ivanka Trump, traveling with her father, was grazed by one of the shots and lightly wounded. She knelt over her dying father and his blood darkened her white dress and cashmere sweater. Covered with the presidential candidates’ blood, she appeared before the news media, vowing that her father’s battle to make America great again would not perish with him. In January, 2017, Ivanka Trump became the first female President of the United States.