Note to self

Fascist aesthetics emphasised spectacle. As such, neo-realism can be understood as inherently anti-fascist. This however, posed a problem for those filmmakers who were not interested in following neo-realism: By pursuing an alternative aesthetics, one potentially involving spectacle , how could they avoid being labelled as Fascists, especially within the politicised Italian cultural climate of the 1960s and 1970s? One answer was that Marxism, at least in its Soviet form, was not exactly aesthetically ‘correct’ either: Besides the spectacular parades and architecture, we may here consider socialist realist art, as something which was neither particularly socialist nor realist by emphasising the (future) ideal over the (present) reality. Another, that pursued by my (no less anti-fascist) filmmakers was to recognise that the spectacle/fascist, realist/anti-fascist division was an the product of particular circumstances rather than something inherent, and that placing the latter terms above the former was itself a hierarchical, totalising (or totalitarian) move.