Kriss Ravetto - The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics - University of Minneapolis Press, Usa, 2001

In this challenging and fascinating work, Kriss Ravetto examines how fascism, nazis, and the Final Solution are represented in films throughout the various stages of reconstruction and critique that fascist aesthetic discourse has passed through since the war. A sophisticated and important contribution. Andrew Hewitt, UCLA

A startling revision of 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, KrissRavetto 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.

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KRISS RAVETTO-BIAGIOLI, Associate Professor of Technocultural Studies is film and media scholar whose work focuses on the problem of representing and theorizing the violence produced by nation building, ethnocentrism, and sexism in a manner that does not play into a vicious cycle where moralism, media images, and language produce their own forms of violence. This research has resulted in The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001), ISBN: 13: 978-0-8166-3743-0, and her current book project, „Mythopoetic Cinema on the Margins of Europe. She has published articles on film, performance, installation art, and new media in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Third Text, PAJ, Representations, Screen, Third Text and numerous collected volumes. Her interest in the "digital uncanny" and the culture of surveillance has inspired "Recoded" - the large international conference on the politics and landscapes of new media (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/modernthought/recoded/ and "Figures of the Visceral"(http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts/news-and-events/the-visceral/figures-of-the-visceral).