Lauren Elizabeth Drozd
(KCL) -
2024-25 Students
lauren.drozd@kcl.ac.uk
Afterlives and Antagonisms: The Fascist Trace in European Postfascist Cinema
My research will represent the first systematic survey of postfascism in European art cinemas, synthesising the concerns of scholars of memory and fascism, queer theorists of temporality, and scholarship on film performance. I define postfascist cinema as the postwar cinema that wrestles with or is coloured by the fascist past, especially in the sense of this past remaining engrained in and contouring the present, undermining the aspirations of postwar democratic states to overcome fascism. Postfascist cinema challenges official histories of fascism and problematises narratives of its having been overcome by tracing or evoking its postwar continuities, creating a counter historiography. My research aims specifically to investigate the ambivalences that attend postfascist cinema, the simultaneity of reproducing and undoing fascist logics and aesthetics, as signalled in my framing around the “afterlives” of and “antagonisms” to fascism, positing that this often-irreconcilable simultaneity poses a radical and timely intervention into our temporalisation and historicization of fascism. Using temporality and the body to anchor my analysis, I ask: how is fascism (and, conversely, antifascism) corporealised and performed? How does the cinematic body, and its corporealization of postfascist temporalities, mediate the institutional and interpersonal traces of fascism? I argue that it is the body that makes the spectral presence of fascism in modernity legible: whether that is in the order of its disciplined movements and the organisation of its repressed or exploitative sexuality; in its unruliness and disruptiveness; or its bearing of memory and trauma that belies postfascist state discourses on overcoming fascism. I contend that the unification of corporeal unruliness with temporality, borne in the kinds of temporal cuts and bodily pauses that recur across postfascist cinema – emblematised in the pause of the strike, the withdrawal of labour – constitute glimpses of the undoing of the naturalised postfascist continuities across such spheres as labour relations, incarceration, the family, policing and legal frameworks, and, thus, represent disruptions to the post-1945 fascism that these films depict as imbricated with these spheres. I thus delineate how the cinematic body’s articulations of performance, labour, and pleasure reveal both scripts for postwar memory and the postfascist amnesia that interpellates them, as well as the instincts and desires that defy and unravel them. I take how postfascist films arrest and manipulate time, duration, and temporality as a key strategy. My corpus moves between films of the 1970s and contemporary film, as this comparison illuminates my argument that these two time periods are essential for us to understand the material and ideological legacies of fascism in the postfascist world. I attend to the current fascist retrenchment, the concurrence of climate, labour, and refugee crises; war; social alienation, and the proliferation of screen media and digitalities, as reactivating and reconstituting the nature of the fascist trace, in relation to and networked with both historical fascism and 1970s postfascist cinemas. I look at how bodies are temporalized in a variety of spatial contexts. My readings thus concentrate on how bodies perform and express sexuality, repression, and labour according to certain rhythms in specific spaces; how the space affects the rhythm; how the temporality constructs the space; how both fashion bodies, and how all work in concert to subjectivise the fascist trace. With the reoccurrence of organised fascist politics, both in Europe and across the globe, there has been a renewed sense of urgency across disciplines to make sense of historical fascism, against the amnesiac memory culture instituted for the stability of the postwar consensus among European capitalist democracies. This research will perform some of this work, within the field of film studies. Primary Supervisor: Dr Elena Gorfinkel Secondary Supervisor: Professor Rosalind Galt |