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“The Cause of Fascism was the Capitalists”: Igor Bezinović on Fiume o morte!
Fiume o Morte! In 1919, poet, playwright, aristocrat and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio led an expedition of disgruntled legionnaires from the Italian army to occupy the city of Fiume, now a part of Rijeka in modern-day Croatia. D’Annunzio’s irredentist conquest initially sought to reclaim the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. D’Annunzio treated his occupation of Fiume with the same romanticism as his writing, even going so far as to obsessively have him and his men filmed and photographed to project a propagandistic ideal. These images, along with D’Annunzio’s continued popularity in Italy, have muddled history, with the event often being remembered as either a strange incident from an eccentric poet or a momentary artist’s paradise instead of the subjugation of a city—not to mention once which served as a prelude to fascist Italy and model for Mussolini.
Igor Bezinović unearths the forgotten history of his hometown in his hybrid documentary Fiume o morte!, which won the Tiger Award at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. Bezinović starts the film by asking locals if they know of D’Annunzio and the occupation or not, and if they would like to embark on a film with him to retell that story. Many young men are cast as soldiers, playfully recreating the innumerable archival images that the legionnaires took of themselves (as if they had few goals in mind for Fiume beyond photo-ops); for D’Annunzio, Bezinović recruits as many bald men as he can to play the slippery and many-faced myth of a man, from retired carabinieri to local musicians. In doing so, Bezinović strips romantic aesthetics from the occupation, showing both how ridiculous the whole thing looks when the camera is pulled back and how seriously dire a situation it can create.
Following the film’s premiere at Rotterdam, where it won the Tiger, I sat down with Bezinović over Zoom to talk about Fiume o morte! and D’Annunzio’s legacy ahead of the film’s run at New Directors/New Films.
Filmmaker: You first learned about the occupation through the book Temporary Autonomous Zone, but was that when you first heard about D’Annunzio as well?
Bezinović: It was certainly one of the first memories that I have putting D’Annunzio on my map. I remember some people mentioning him as a relevant person for Rijeka’s history, but I didn’t learn about him in elementary nor high school. I contacted some people from my high school that I hadn’t heard from in a long, long time, just to check if they remember if anybody mentioned D’Annunzio in our school. No one did. I first learned about him through [Temporary Autonomous Zone] by Hakim Bey, and partly through a book called Alla festa della rivoluzione [At the Party of the Revolution] by Claudia Salaris. She’s an art historian, and the book is from the early 2000s. Back then I was at some sort of Erasmus—like a student visit—for a semester in Padua, Italy. I was in this bookstore and saw this book that takes place in Fiume, which is today Rijeka, and it was so strange for me to see that this occupation had happened that I had to double-check that it actually was my hometown that Hakim Bey was talking about. So, I decided that I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the citizens today, not of D’Annunzio, because this story was retold so many times. I don’t know if you read Italian; they publish tons of books on D’Annunzio every year, most from the D’Annunzian perspective, and very few critical ones.
Filmmaker: When you’re doing your word-on-the-street interviews at the start of the film, most of the Croats don’t seem aware of him, and the couple that do are like, “Oh, he was a fascist. He was an occupier.” But then all the Italians emphasize, “He was a great poet first.”
Bezinović: That is the case in Italy today. When I have Q&As after the screenings in Italy, we always have somebody who has to mention he was a great poet. For me, this poetry of his is not the most important thing, although I think that to understand this whole occupation, [it is important to remember that] D’Annunzio was an artist, so he needed to make drama out of this occupation. He needed to end it in a poetic and dramatic way. You can’t end this occupation with a truce or sign an agreement or anything. You have to end it with bloodshed, because that’s how drama ends. It’s either a love story or a tragedy. In this case, he had to end it like a tragedy. That’s why it ended with bloodshed, not because it was necessary.
Filmmaker: It seems like everything they were trying to do with the occupation was purely aesthetic rather than relating to governance in any way. I think about how much footage there is of them just filming themselves doing athletic feats.
Bezinović: That’s basically it. They cared more about how it’s represented than how effective it was. They were always taking pictures of themselves. In the Vittoriale Archive, which is [D’Annunzio’s] foundation, you see literally thousands of photos of happy soldiers. You don’t have an impression that it was a military occupation, because you mostly see them without guns. They’re always in uniforms. Only on the beach are they not wearing uniforms. He had this propaganda that they came there in peace, as if it was Woodstock and not a military occupation. Which, of course, from the perspective of the citizens—both Croatian and Italian—was not true.
D’Annunzio invited his own photographers. There were also photographers from Fiume that he hired, but, for example, D’Annunzio had a pretty famous [Italian] cinematographer from that era, Luca Comerio, [who] was hired by an industrialist from Milan called Senatore Borletti to come and shoot a documentary about D’Annunzio in Fiume, called Il paradiso all’ombra delle spade, which means “the paradise in the shadows of swords.” Fragments of the documentary are still available; we used some of them in the film, but the whole documentary doesn’t exist anymore. The credits in between the shots were written by D’Annunzio with his own handwriting.
Filmmaker: D’Annunzio also did the intertitles for Cabiria [1914 silent epic directed by Giovanni Pastrone, set during the Second Punic War]. You emphasize in the film D’Annunzio’s influence in popularizing the “Roman salute,” which is also a thing that is not exactly historical. It’s a trope from neoclassical painting, then in Cabiria they bring it out, then D’Annunzio is doing it. All of a sudden, it becomes a modern image of Roman romanticism.
Bezinović: Romanticism, exactly. They say that the first filmic representation of the Roman salute is in Cabiria, a fiction film. In documentary, it’s this shot that we have in our film: the 20th of September, 1919, when D’Annunzio salutes with the Roman salute.
Filmmaker: To me, when people talk about the ideological soup that becomes Italian fascism, people often emphasize Marinetti’s Futurist impulses, but it seems to me Fiume is the main aesthetic driver for what Mussolini does in Italy.
Bezinović: I think it’s both. Alceste De Ambris, the guy who co-wrote the constitution of Fiume with D’Annunzio, also co-wrote the “Manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento” [Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat] with Marinetti. So, it was just a bunch of guys who knew each other from before. It’s really superficial in a way to say that Marinetti was the cause of fascism, or that D’Annunzio was the cause of fascism, or even that Mussolini was the cause of fascism. I think the important thing that we have to learn from history in the 21st century is that the cause of fascism was the capitalists who were investing money in these people, and the army who was supporting them and giving them power. You can’t imagine some artist just proclaiming their ideas if it wasn’t a triangle. There’s Mussolini, a journalist; D’Annunzio, a poet; Marinetti, a poet. Then you have capitalists investing loads of money because they have obvious financial interests in Fiume: oil refinery, harbor, shipyard, all there and waiting to be used by some investors, like today. And the third part is the army, which obviously has interests of their own. The thing that isn’t really mentioned in Italian historiography, and I think we should, is that many of D’Annunzio’s soldiers were receiving a salary from the Italian army. They were supposedly fighting and leading a revolution against them, but at the same time they received a salary because they were ex-soldiers. So it’s propaganda, this whole story.
Filmmaker: In pulling that apart, you analyze the many faces of D’Annunzio through having many D’Annunzios of your own in the film. Were you always planning on having many locals as D’Annunzio, or did you ever want to have just one?
Bezinović: It was a long development process. I finally decided that I’ll have loads of D’Annunzios after a very specific test we did at a workshop in 2019 called Ekran+ in Warsaw, at the Wajda School. In this program, they enable you to shoot two short films, or short scenes, in which you try different stylistic aspects of your film. So, with some Polish extras, I tried to reconstruct D’Annunzio’s first speech from the balcony of the governor’s palace, and it worked. And it was a lot of fun to shoot it with many people, so I said “Okay, this will surely work in Rijeka as well.” Until I tried it, I wasn’t sure it was going to work. Then I realized: to have many D’Annunzios and many narrators adds to this collective filmmaking aspect. That is, I think, the reason why people like this film, at least in Rijeka—the idea behind the film is that you have a collective telling a story about an individual. To have a collective, it helps to have more actors for one character, more narrators, a bunch of extras—to work with a community, basically.
Filmmaker: It’s the inverse of what the occupation was. The locals come together to tell the story of the person that invaded.
Bezinović: The idea is to let the locals tell the story now, although they didn’t know it. They gave me huge trust, because I was the one who spent years reading the archives. They basically said, “Okay, you’re our co-citizen and we trust you that you’re gonna tell this story in a way that suits us as well.” I was really terrified before the film went out, because I didn’t know if all the participants were going to say that they’re cool with the film. But they really understood it, so they accepted it. It was the biggest reward I could get for the film, the recognition of the citizens themselves.
Filmmaker: The way you do the anachronistic recreations, where everyone is in period costumes in the modern city, highlights just how ridiculous the occupation seemed. That scene you mentioned at the governor’s palace, where the camera pulls out and they’re speaking in front of an empty road with cars driving by, is so funny.
Bezinović: We shouldn’t underestimate the fact that D’Annunzio was a celebrity. This little marginal town isn’t famous in any kind of art, it’s just a merchant township, a shipyard and a port with a lot of nationalities. Then, all of sudden, this famous guy comes. It’s like an event in the city, and everybody comes to see him: “Oh, D’Annunzio came!” Everybody is curious what will happen next, like today, when people see a celebrity in the street, they’re interested: “Oh, I saw Brad Pitt today!” Then you post him on social media—you got a lousy photo, but you have proof that you saw Brad Pitt in the street. I think it was the same with D’Annunzio at the time. I read a bunch of testimonies of his legionnaires, and there was a very funny testimony of a kid—I think he was younger than 20—and he’s writing in his diary when he first sees D’Annunzio like, “Ooh! I just saw D’Annunzio!” Then two months later he mentions, “Okay, I see D’Annunzio everyday in the street.” He stops being a celebrity for him. That demystification of persons is what happens when you know their story. Even for the D’Annunzian people in Italy, hopefully when they see this film they start questioning their ideas about him—or they [will] think this film is a lie or Slavic propaganda and that it’s not true and misleading. But it’s hard to stay neutral after seeing it, at least I hope.
Filmmaker: To go back to the start of the film, where you’re holding the pictures of destroyed bridges over the current locations—did that make the occupation feel real to you, or did it make it feel stranger?
Bezinović: For me, it made it more real. With this first scene, you basically reveal the concept of the film. You explain to the viewer in the first two or three minutes, “Okay, this is what the film is going to be about.” It’s going to be you thinking about the parallels between the present and the past. At the same time it’s a storytelling and stylistic method in which you put the audience in a specific kind of perspective in which you should continue watching the film. For me, it makes history more close.
Filmmaker: You mention in the film that Marinetti went to Fiume for two weeks and left. What did he make of the occupation?
Bezinović: When people talk about the occupation, there is this discourse that I find plain wrong. They say it was like an artist’s community, a lot of artists came: Marinetti, [Arturo] Toscanini, the scientist [Guglielmo] Marconi. But they rarely mention that almost none of them stayed for a very long time. Marconi and Toscanini stayed for two days, Marinetti for two weeks. They were just coming and going and couldn’t really handle D’Annunzio’s ego.
D’Annunzio and Marinetti didn’t like each other from before, and both wanted to be “The Poet,” but D’Annunzio was there first. They had different politics: They were both nationalists and militarists, but D’Annunzio was writing dramas for a general audience, very passionate love stories. Marinetti, on the other hand, was an avant-gardist. During his performances and plays, people would boo him or exit the theater. There is an anecdote that Marinetti was walking backwards on the Rijeka Corso for a performance, although I didn’t find any historical source. There are no photos, for sure. He was staying in the Hotel Lloyd, which is in the city center, where he had a group of Futurists hanging out with him. But after two weeks he realized in the city there can be only one poet and he had nothing to do there, so he left for Italy.
Filmmaker: With them both being nationalists underpinning their ideologies, it’s interesting, using Fiume as an example—it shows the impossibility of that idea. It has to be based on something that’s not true with how multicultural the city was. It can’t just be part of “Italy,” it doesn’t make sense that way. You mention in the film that so many different countries in the last 100 years have been in control of it. At the end of the day it’s the same people living there.
Bezinović: Not really. After the Second World War there was a huge exodus of Italians, which I mentioned at the end of the film. Soon after D’Annunzio the city was under fascism for 20 years, and the city was de-Slavicized. Slavic names [of streets and buildings] were prohibited, Slavic schools as well. So, after the Second World War, when the Yugoslavs came, Croatian was imposed as the main language, and Italians didn’t feel at home because many Slavs that came considered “Italian” to be an equivalent of “fascist.” With a strong heritage of fascism, you had a lot of unacceptance and intolerance. So, not the same people. Some Italians stayed, and these are the ones who are the narrators of the film. It was extremely important to have the narration in the old Fiumano dialect, which is still spoken. Also to say that the Italians are still here, they didn’t all leave, and I think their cultural presence in the city is still very important.
It’s all related. D’Annunzio was the one to start talking about the eastern Adriatic coast and Fiume as being Italian. Along most of the coast Croatian was then the dominant language, and in Fiume the majority of Italians lived in the centre of the city, but in all surrounding territories Croatian was the most common language. The idea of D’Annunzio, Marinetti and Mussolini was that the eastern Adriatic coast should be Italian because it was under the Roman Empire and the Venetians, and you have this architecture which is Venetian. So they said, “This is our territory.” It basically came true in the Second World War for three years. Don’t forget that Italy also had colonies in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya. Some of the Greek islands were Italian. They were also a colonizing country like France, England, Portugal and Spain, although they weren’t so successful as colonizers.
Filmmaker: That growth of Italy into being expansionist, too, is an extension of the Risorgimento and the country unifying itself. It’s often thought of as, one day in the 1870s all of a sudden Garibaldi had brought all of Italy today. But that process was ongoing, and that 19th century nationalist instinct eventually turned into 20th century fascism.
Bezinović: Absolutely, and it was already bloody in the 19th century. It wasn’t so easy to unify Italy, to create Italy. So, it’s a bit naive when you think how the automonists in Rijeka thought that Italy would let them be this little autonomous state, as if they were San Marino [independent microstate surrounded by the province of Emilia Romagna in Northern Italy]—which, of course, was not in the Italian minds, that they would permit such an idea. So, the autonomous Free State of Fiume survived only for a few months in 1921 and 1922, before the fascists made the military coup and chased the autonomists out of the town. Maybe it’s good to remind people about the early combinations of propaganda, militarism, and capitalism—which is happening now in the States.
Filmmaker: You mentioned in another interview the parallels to when Elon Musk used the Roman salute.
Bezinović: That was just scary. That was 10 days before our premiere in Rotterdam, and you see him use the Roman salute. And then people defending him—that it wasn’t really a Roman salute, that he was just saying “Hi” to the audience. That’s just very, very improbable.
Filmmaker: It makes me think of Musk and his ilk’s unreal sense of history and how back then you had D’Annunzio writing romantic stories, or the Germans had Wagner and all this—now we have A.I. that makes warped ideas of the past.
Bezinović: You have something there: A.I. could become the new D’Annunzio for the 21st century. It’s really plausible. You don’t need a big poet now who will tell the narrative. The computer can create a propagandist text in a second, which is scary as shit.
