Machiavelli and Marxism

IN A WEEK of wanton destruction in Cambodia, of the wilful murder of four students in Illinois, of the dive of Wall Street, of the dictatorial assumption of power by Nixon supported by the most rabid and lunatic assembly of generals, of the crisis of American imperialism reaching its sharpest and most barbaric expression, it seemed apt to see a film which dealt with the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis and Marxism Tuesday, May in Germany.

Insights into this period are valuable.

Yet on almost every level Visconti's "The Damned', currently showing at the Odeon, Kensington High Street, is unsatisfactory.

The situation he focuses on is promising enough. He selects a rich aristocratic German family, owners of a vast steel mill, adapting themselves to fascism.

The film opens with the birthday of the old baron. It is a gathering of the family. The home is magnificent, rich tapestries, furnishings, paint'Oh fie garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely!

Kings, the finest of bourgeois art and refinement; the servants respectfully and dutifully prepare the dinner, the silver, the cut glass.

First there will be a family entertainment, which the children will give, a recitation, then a cello solo ...

Assembled are the sons, relatives, daughters; the only non-family visitor is the manager of the steel works, a middle-class technocrat who wishes to marry one of the daughters.

But divisions are apparent in the family. One member is in Hitler's army, another in the SA (Brownshirts').

Yet the authority of the baron maintains a unity, for he is the unquestioned head of the family, of the steel works.

The one early jarring note is the grandson's party piece— a cabaret song dressed as a woman, much to the disgust of the grandfather.

But the apparent harmony is disrupted by the news that the Reichstag has been set on fire and that a Dutch communist has been arrested.

It announces a new period for Germany, the smashing of communism and the building of the new order.

The baron has hitherto preserved an aristocratic contempt for the upstart Hitler, but he knows that his primary duty is to preserve his property, and regretfully he asks his son to resign from his post as managing director of the works to make way for someone who is more amenable to the Nazi regime.

The son, a classic liberal, denounces Hitler and a row breaks out.

Flees

That night the Gestapo arrive to arrest the son, who is persuaded to flee by the technocrat manager, who insists that he leaves his revolver behind. Later the baron is found shot in his bed by his son's gun.

The rest of the film concerns itself with the machinations in the family to seize control of the works.

The workings of the plot and the changing family situations immediately remind one of an Elizabethen world. "The Damned' is, in fact, Shakespeare written as melodrama yet without Shakespeare.

It's like an amalgam of Hamlet and Macbeth, yet a Hamlet without the Prince, merely a sensualist substitute in the form of the grandson, who seduces small girls and finally rapes his mother.

And his mother is a cross between Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, urging on her technocrat lover to murder and take the crown of the steel works.

The technocrat is the ambitious Macbeth— the instrument through which the Gestapo work to wipe out the survivors of the family-who finally is usurped by the grandson, who forces poison on him and his new wife, to emerge as a fully fledged Nazi, the owner of the steel works and the second most powerful man in Germany.

Visconti, the Italian, seems unable to break from a Machiavellian view of history. It is this that predominates his thinking and fits comfortably with his melodramatic instincts.

The latter gives his work a statuesque, extremely formal quality which I find personally TV lumbering, obvious and formalistic. He processes gracefully from one archetype to another.

It gives his work a predictable quality with few surprises or flashes of ingenuity.

The former means he is incapable of grasping the full political significance of fascism.

He can only see the steelworks as a symbol of power or, at the end of the film, the flames that announce the hell of damnation and national socialism, not as the machinery of class conflict and the extraction of surplus value.

His characters adapt to fascism, not primarily to save their tottering enterprises to allow Hitler to do their dirty work in defeating the working class, but to retain their power by humbling themselves to this unwanted intruder.

It is again the Machiavellian principle of power.

The so called Marxist Visconti is really nothing more than a moralist.

Again we go back to Hamlet, for his vision is oi 'something rotten in the state of Denmark'.

The German state is corrupt, the natural order breaks down, patricide, matricide, incest, perversion.

Indeed all of these are expressions of a wider crisis. Trotsky himself pointed out that the psychology of the Gestapo was that of pederasty.

One of the best sequences in the film is the SA, the 'Brownshirt' street thugs who killed and hounded communists and social democrats alike, carousing near Munich, drunk, some in women's clothes, the sentimentality of their singing, the ubermensch physique.

But in this film Visconti's understanding seldom transcends a moral outrage and the result is really an ambiguity towards the aristocracy.

For if the moral degeneration of the state signifies a breakdown in the natural order, what then is the natural In this sense 'The Damned' is a lament for the passing of the old aristocratic values. Vola PAGE THREE

If we contrast the refined formality, the order, the sense of family, place and position of the opening sequence with the closing moments of the film, where the same house is strident with jazz music, drink, girls in a state of half dress being kissed and fondled, the furniture scattered, two poisoned bodies in one room, and the new head of the works in jackboots and Nazi uniform, it is hard to avoid this conclusion.

'The Damned' is obviously an intensely felt film. Visconti has said that it was made in hate, that it was made as a warning and reminder to the young.

But at a period when fascism becomes a real threat once again, youth need clear political understanding to defeat it once and for all, by defeating the system that breeds it, capitalism.

I'm afraid they won't find it in "The Damned'.