In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in. We’re here at 7 pm on Sunday nights.
One of our commenters suggested we do a Medium Cool on the rise of Fascism as portrayed in art. So, this being a full-service section of the blog, let’s do that.
What films, or books, or music, comic books, or anything in the art world has done good work in representing the rise of Fascism?
And perhaps you could give us an idea how such a work accomplishes such an important task.
HumboldtBlue
I maintain that Ferris Bueller was a staunch opponent of the Nazis, and that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is indeed an anti-authoritarian and anti-Nazi movie.
Only so I may insert this little fact: Ferris Bueller went to Wrigley Field on his Day Off, June 5, 1985.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Haven’t seen it in years, but I recall Bob Roberts being kinda scary in a fascist-getting-elected sort of way…
JPL
Death of Democracy is an important read only to show how quickly democracies can fail. Hitler was able to tear up the constitution within six months. People wanted to restore pride and peace. They knew that Hitler used a strong arm, but that was only to stop the immigrants. If that was to stop the dirty Jews from Poland, that was okay, because it would not affect citizens of Germany.
Remind you of anyone? Republicans have been able to increase Latinos supporters by using the same bullshit.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Pink Floyd’s The Wall, in an oblique way (emphasized more in the movie, maybe?). Some frightening fascist-rising music on Disc 2…
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Star Wars
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
V for Vendetta (2005)
Triumph of the Will (1935)
Cabaret (1972)
Battle of Algiers (1966)
Nixon (1995)
Magnum Force (1973)
Rollerball (1975)
Blues Brothers (1980)
Chetan Murthy
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Ohhhh yeah. I still remember the final scene in the wheelchair.
JPL
Several years ago, friends visited for a few days, and I suggested that we watch Cabaret. We are all in our seventies and one was raised Jewish. When she saw it the first time, she missed all the signs and was surprised it was such a powerful movie.
Scout211
Erik Larsen’s In the Garden of the Beasts was a chilling book about the rise of Nazism through the experiences of a US Ambassador and his family in Berlin.
In the Garden of the Beasts
tommyspoon
The novel, “Jennifer Government”, is a great look at a corporate-driven fascist world.
andy
You might want to check out Punishment Park. A lot of Contrapoint’s older stuff examines the rise of the right, and some of the pathologies associated with it like incels or the works of Jordan Peterson.
Antonius
The Lord of the Rings
NutmegAgain
Babylon Berlin is staring us right in the face. It works on a number of levels: as a detective series; as a fabulous costume series; as a good German language tune up–although there is a lot of Berliner slang. But mainly, it’s illustrative of how and who and what factors (well, some of them) were in action in the late 1920s in urban Germany. The poverty, and income inequality, the fights–literal street fights between the Communists and the far right wing, corruption in the police, militarization in the police, . Wait, this is sounding familiar.
PS. See also Cabaret, of course.
[Personally it very resonant for me since my mother spent a lot of time in Germany as a young person prior to the rise of Fascism. Her parents (one German, one American) had emigrated to the US in 1910, and were very progressive left in today’s terms. So the Fascists and the Hitlerites and the Nazis, well lets just say they never went back after 1930.]
JPL
@Scout211: That book just captured me, and then it ended. I actually wanted more.
MagdaInBlack
@Scout211: That was a tough read, because we have the curse of knowing what was coming.
WaterGirl
Hey everybody, BG had an unexpected out of town visitor this evening, so he won’t be able to participate as he usually does. I’m sure he misses us, though, it’s been a month. Next week!
SamIAm
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
YES! This was a prescient movie.
PIGL
“Brasil”
Baud
@WaterGirl:
That sounds like the beginning of a thriller.
Tom Levenson
Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown is amazing n this theme.
hadestown.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=15712438725&utm_keyword=…
Pappy G
Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which transplants the Third Reich to Chicago and portrays Nazi’s as gangsters attempting to take over the cauliflower trade. Direct analogues of characters and events abound.
geg6
Has to be Cabaret. Love that movie. Sally Bowles is a fascinating character.
SamIAm
I also agree with Cabaret and Roller Ball.
debbie
@Scout211:
Seconded. We knew what was coming, but witnessing the characters’ dawning awareness, I thought, was chilling.
Geoduck
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. The villain of the piece, Buzz Windrip, was probably inspired by Huey Long, but he bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain shiatgibbon. He’s ruthless, but ultimately dumb, and ends up getting exiled to France as the country spirals into anarchy and civil war.
geg6
@Scout211:
Excellent book, as all of his seem to be.
Brachiator
The 1969 film Z.
Along with Battle of Algiers, this film makes you feel society crumbling around you.
The Agronomist
The Year of Living Dangerously, All The President’s Men, The Post
Although the press is depicted as heroes in two of these films, if you look more deeply, you see how lazy, cynical, privileged reporting props us fascist regimes. In The Post, you learn that Katherine Graham and Robert McNamara are buddies, and pal around in the same DC social circles. And so there is a hint that the Beltway crowd are not disgusted because McNamara deceived the American people. The elites are upset because McNamara dared lie to them.
JPL
@Geoduck: It almost did
The Lincoln Project on Twitter: “What it was like to be @MarkMeadows on January 6th… t.co/6uFhZ7edJo” / Twitter
Fleeting Expletive
Brad Dorif, in an old black and white movie, an itinerant hustler who learns to manipulate crowds? I can’t remember the name of it, and that amazing actor has done so many movies there’s not enough time to search.
MisterDancer
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch: The Blues Brothers is screamingly under-rated as a work about Facism. It’s pretty explicitly anti-Law Enforcement, and screamingly anti-Nazi. And although it doesn’t exactly center the Black voices it features, it makes clear that the protagonists are on their side, and respect and partake of African-American culture and art in a thoughtful manner. Moreover: they stand by Catholicism for how one institution in that space protects and supports kids like they were– even as it is the Black guy who actually, in that Catholic institution, does the Emotional Labor in trying to raise them.
It’s a movie that’s been on my mind for a bit; here’s one video essay on it — a flawed analysis, as the creator’s comment’s acknowledge, but there’s a lot to mine and I suspect damn litter scholarship on Blues Bothers: youtube.com/watch?v=FhBBJCvJXPE
dexwood
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch:
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch:
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch:
Good list. I hate Illinois Nazis.
Ksmiami
Guernica
martha
All the Frequent Troubles of our Days by Rebecca Donner. It’s about the author’s great aunt, Mildred Harnack, from Milwaukee, who was beheaded by Hitler in 1943 for espionage. Mildred moved to Germany in the early ‘30s for graduate school and became part of the German resistance in the rise of fascism. The author is a novelist, so this biography is beautifully written and doesn’t feel like non fiction. But it’s bleak.
MisterDancer
Although it’s not the “rise” exactly, I think Casablanca is a critical work around how people can fool themselves into passivity in the face of incipient (backstory) and present Facism.
And, perhaps far more crucially, how those same people can be brought back to a higher calling.
prostratedragon
@Fleeting Expletive: Wise Blood. Very interesting movie. Keep meaning to read some Flannery O’Connor because of it.
ETA: Perhaps you remember it as b&w because of a rather spare and high-contrast design, but actually it was in color.
Craig
@Fleeting Expletive: Wise Blood?
dexwood
@dexwood: no idea why the multiple reply links appeared. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully to reply to comments in previous threads.
mrmoshpotato
@dexwood: A list so nice, you addressed David thrice.
Mike in NC
The graphic novel The Watchmen depicted a fascist dystopian USA where Nixon was able to cling to power for many years. The real Nixon would have loved to be dictator, but that whole Watergate thing got in the way.
I sensed in the mid 1980s that the Republican Party was trending towards fascism (Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, etc.) and it got there with Trump and the many radicalized GQP members of Congress. Another coup attempt is very real; Trump is worshipped by his demented cult followers. We can only hope the January 6 Committee soon puts the nail in his political coffin.
PJ
A Face in the Crowd with Andy Griffith. How a sweet talking huckster abetted by the media can manipulate the masses.
yellowdog
Mephisto. A German film about an actor and his career as a darling of the Nazis.
zhena gogolia
@Craig: Looks like it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Blood_(film)
zhena gogolia
@MisterDancer: Good choice. It’s also very inspirational about fighting back, which I always appreciate.
prostratedragon
In an odd way, Metropolis. I doubt that Lang saw it that way, but consider that only about 5 years after its release, he was a refugee from the Nazis and his collaborator and former wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the script, was a Nazi Party member. I’ve wondered whether Lang might not have looked back on the work and those two facts with horror.
(The story advances a bit beyond that early period with Brazil.)
Citizen_X
Babylon 5
A Face In the Crowd
mrmoshpotato
@Mike in NC:
And then a stake through his non-existent heart, and nails in his actual coffin.
Splitting Image
Catch-22, obviously, but I’d also suggest Heller’s follow-up, Something Happened, is about one man’s descent into a fascist mindset. The constant refrain in the book is that something happened to the narrator’s marriage, something happened to his working life, something happened to his kids, etc., etc. By the end he is willing to do just about anything to feel on top again. Pretty harrowing read.
Craig
@MisterDancer: agreed. The standoff with Victor Lazlo leading The Marseilles and then Rick’s growing appreciation for Lazlo as an opponent of facism is a great part of that film
Bex
@martha: I also recommend this book. Mildred Fish-Harnack’s husband was related to the German theologian Adolf von Harnack, in case there are any theology nerds on this thread.
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon: Interesting take. So glad they found a complete copy in Argentina back in ’08.
JPL
@martha: I was half way through the book and after the Uvalde shooting, I put it down. I’ll finish it, but just not now.
Wyatt Salamanca
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Conformist.
While not directly about fascism, A Face in the Crowd does a great job depicting the rise of a demagogue through his skillful manipulation of mass media.
JPL
Race, the Jesse Owens Story was an important piece of history during that time.
oatler
“MIchaelmas” by Algis Budrys, one of several Budrys works I can’t believe wasn’t optioned for film.
Another Scott
Timely topic it seems.
An entertaining ad, but one that probably makes me less likely to sign up. (I’ve been holding off and will continue to do so.)
Cheers,
Scott.
James E Powell
@Fleeting Expletive:
He’s got 177 actor credits on IMDb & quite a few memorable performances. From Billy Bibbit to Doc Cochran.
Are you thinking of Wise Blood? He’s a preacher, but it’s not in black & white.
WaterGirl
@dexwood: If you hit reply, it should add the @nym of the person you want to reply to. If you use the x (in the upper right hand corner of the reply box) to close the window without hitting Post Comment, then that @nym will stay in there.
If you hit reply again later, to the same person or a different person, you will have two @nyms in the reply box.
Let’s say you want to reply to Baud and Omnes about something. You hit reply on Baud, click the X to close the reply box, go to the Omnes comment, hit reply on that. Now you have a reply box with @Baud and @Omnes. If you want to say one thing to Baud and another to Omnes, you can put your Baud reply underneath @Baud and then put your reply to Omnes under @Omnes.
If you want to say the same thing to both of them, then delete the blank lines between @Baud and @Omnes.
Don’t forget to click Post Comment when you’re ready.
prostratedragon
@Wyatt Salamanca: The Conformist was somehow slipping my mind, strange since it’s one I watch at least annually. Marcello Clerici: his interior monologue has an unreliable narrator.
Dan B
@JPL: That Lincoln Project piece is a visceral experience. I’ve wondered for many months why some police officers committed suicide. This is a disturbing look at how a violent authoritarian takeover of the US would feel. It’s the sounds of chaos and malevolence that would shake someone whose life was devoted to keeping the peace would feel.
piratedan
since someone already went with All The President’s Men, I’ll pivot to Redford’s other political intrigue move of the 70’s Three Days of the Condor. Good call out on Z and when pop culture hated Nazi’s, the first three Indiana Jones films and how art and culture and education are at risk of being co-opted.
although its hard to find anyone better than the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
JPL
There was a book that I read a while ago, that I wished would be made into a film. Not because of the writing, but the story. It was supposedly a historical fiction, but more romance than history, and it followed a few families through Mussolini’s reign.
The book was Eternal by Lisa Sotomayor. On Goodreads, one of the comments had to do with how it had to be fiction, because the Catholic Church protected everyone.
We need to educate the populace, before it’s too late.
Delk
(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang
dm
Does Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, count? Its sequel, The Parable of the Talents, written in 1998, even had the fascist motto, “Make America Great Again”.
Citizen_X
Be Prepared from The Lion King.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=zPUe7O3ODHQ
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
I didn’t want to include “Network” (1976), but as I think about it, two mammoth monologues by Paddy Chayefsky do forecast the rise of fascism in America.
JPL
@Dan B: Yup. I don’t know how the story ends, and it scares me.
Omnes Omnibus
Soldier of Orange.
VOR
@NutmegAgain: I second Babylon Berlin. It’s set during the Weimar Republic around 1930.
prostratedragon
American-style
UncleEbeneezer
Handmaid’s Tale (tv series). There are a couple before-Gilead episodes that are really tough to watch because they are so similar to real life, right now.
rm
The graphic novel Berlin by Jason Lutes.
Fleeting Expletive
Thank you all. Appreciate it.
rm
Moderated, so I might end up commenting twice. The graphic novel Berlin by Jason Lutes.
Haydnseek
Jojo Rabbit.
Brachiator
The follow-ups to Star Wars romanticize and infantilize resistance to fascism. I watched all the recent episodes of the new Obi-Wan Kenobi series and decided that there is no reason for this misadventure ever to have been made. For the most part, people try to escape the Empire. This just recapitulates what we saw in the main trilogy. Nothing new is added.
Also, a noisy group of supposed fans are unhappy that Kenobi is not a one-dimensional bad ass who can defeat the Empire with a simple flash of his light sabre. Worse, there is a small, noxious but vociferous offshoot of Fandom that is extremely upset that Disney is including black actors and other actors of color in the Star Wars universe.
Bad Fan expectation represents a putrid imitation of American exceptionalism in which the right white people never lose and are solely responsible for policing the world.
SiubhanDuinne
As always, I’m here to look for Dorothy L. Sayers’ take — this time on Naziism/fascism.
She doesn’t say much, directly, in the novels, but there are a few pointers, especially in Gaudy Night, set at an Oxford college in 1935. Except in a few flashbacks, Lord Peter doesn’t even show up until the second half of the book.
But one of the Shrewsbury College dons (lecturers), Miss Barton, has written a book highly critical of Hitler’s Kinder, Küche, Kirche philosophy. And there is a scene in which the college porter, Padgett, has this brief exchange with a workman:
There is nothing ominous about this. Padgett is a good guy. I take this dialogue to suggest that, in the mid-1930s, Hitlerism was widely accepted in Britain, not as the cruel policy it became but as a social/political guide for returning to a “golden past,” much as some Trumpites in 2015 viewed “mak[ing] America great again.”
When Lord Peter finally enters the narrative, it turns out he has been working abroad on behalf of the Foreign Office. He is weary, and apprehensive:
By the time World War II came to Britain, DLS had mostly abandoned Lord Peter for Dante and Christ, although she did write a series of pieces for The Spectator (“The Wimsey Papers”), purporting to be correspondence, diary entries, and so on among various members of the fictional noble family detailing their experiences and thoughts on the war. But these were less about Hitlerism/fascism, and more about how the upper classes coped with blackouts, rationing, and the Blitz.
UncleEbeneezer
Not Fascism per se, but the comedy series Minx on HBOMax, featured a really great episode that involved the violent protest of men who are outraged about the existence of a magazine geared towards women. Considering how much shit like Gamergate, anti-Hillary sentiment, Johnny Depp troll armies etc., are currently playing in our own potential descent into Fascism, it seems worth mentioning.
Also a surprisingly good, hilarious and feminist show…with lots of dicks (for anyone who’s into that). Like LOTS of them!!!
kindness
Orwell’s Animal Farm still works.
O. Felix Culpa
@Bex: [raises hand]
Tarragon
Oh man I haven’t thought about that one for a long for time. I used to love it.
Thinking back on it now I i don’t think I’d enjoy it right now.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
Network (1976)
— Ned Beatty explains the rise of corporate fascism (link)
— Peter Finch explains the death of democracy (link)
Shooter (2007)
— Ned Beatty gloriously exposes American fascism (link) [NSFW]
Spies Like Us (1985)
UncleEbeneezer
@JPL: I know people love to shit on the Lincoln Project because they are still Republicans at the end of the day, helped create this mess etc. I totally get it. But DAMN they are good at this shit, and I am here for it!
schrodingers_cat
How does one define fascism? Do repeated genocides by starvation of millions all over the world count? Or do only atrocities against European people count?
zzyzx
@Geoduck:
The best (in terms of being relatable) part of It Can’t Happen Here is that even in the wake of fascism, the left is still too busy in fighting to do anything.
AWOL
I don’t have the Criterion Channel, but if they still exist, they should be there. All films seen in NYC art houses in the 1970s, many upon original release.
“The Conformist”—novel by Moravia, film by Bertolucci. Moravia actually fled the fascists. He understood the sexual-insecurity psychosis that fuels the profiles of most fascists. I re-read it about four years ago, and it held up. The film I have not seen in about three decades. It was well received, and I admired it. Not sure how it would hold up in 2022.
Of course, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (De Sica) was a major Italian release back then, and it may hold up. Never read the autobiographical Italian novel.
“Seven Beauties” (Wertmuller) is essential. No one cares anymore. See it, if you can find it. She was the first commercial female director of my lifetime (Lupino was probably retired when I was born).
“Lacombe Lucien” is essential, and I think, now utterly obscure. (Malle)
Amarcord (Fellini). Essential—a look at Fellini’s hypersexual adolescence as a nonfascist in fascist Italy. Maybe it’s whitewashing—I had no idea until recently Fellini hung with Mussolini’s son in the 1930s—his son loved film and, like Hitler et al, knew the political power of cinema.
I’m sure I forgot about a dozen or so decent efforts done in Europa . . .
kalakal
H G Wells The Shape of Things to Come
Thomas Mann Mario and the Magician
Jack London The Iron Heel
West of the Rockies
Soooo much doom-saying here yesterday. The Jan. 6th hearings begin soon. I have hope they might be a true game-changer.
Casablanca was a fabulous anti-Fascist film!
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I wouldn’t describe fascism as synonymous with imperialism. Both are awful in their own right but not the same thing. Most significantly, a fascist government is fascist with respect to its own people. An imperialist government treats other peoples badly.
Baud
@West of the Rockies:
I’m not a big believer in game changers, but you never know.
I agree that we often don’t help ourselves in the fight against fascism when it comes to what we want to talk about.
mrmoshpotato
@schrodingers_cat: Care to share your thoughts? Serious question, even though it can sound snarky when written.
schrodingers_cat
Agreed that’s an important distinction.
@mrmoshpotato: The Queen’s platinum jubilee is being celebrated without any accounting of the misery perpetrated in the name of the crown. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that comment
Almost everything the Nazis did to their victims, was tried out by those who acted in the name of Lizzie’s ancestors.
CapnMubbers
Not facism in art, but the actual thing
William Shirer’s books.
Berlin Diary
End of a Berlin Diary
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940
Volume two of his autobiography: The Nightmare Years
James E Powell
@schrodingers_cat:
I start right here. Direttamente dalla bocca del cavallo.
Then, I’d go there. Same country, but this guy’s against it.
James E Powell
Although it concerns a socialist regime, I’d put Milan Kundera’s The Joke on the list.
kalakal
Terry Pratchett did a nice job skewering fascists in The Fifth Elephant
prostratedragon
@kalakal: The Wells was adapted as the movie Things to Come, complete with a “hero” named Cabal, representing an entity called Wings Over the World.
The Conformist ends with this song, which in the video is accompanied by fascist-era sculptures, including a bust of Italo Balbo:
Sandia Blanca
The Sound of Music
WaterGirl
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch: That went into spam, likely because it was super long.
I freed this one and deleted the second one.
Wyatt Salamanca
@AWOL:
Within the past few years, I’ve seen The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The Conformist, Amarcord, The Battle of Algiers, Z, A Face in the Crowd, Network, and All the President’s Men and they’ve all held up remarkably well. They weren’t the least bit dated.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat:
Or as Hannah Arendt put it, “Fascism is the methods and toolsof imperialism, but applied to the metropole.” So yeah, imperialism is just as awful.
Miki
@Brachiator:
Z was immensely moving in the 70s – and terrifying and not less so today. Fascism exposed with no excuse or romanticism. Painful. Wrenching.
Calouste
@piratedan:
The earlier comment about the Blues Brothers also made me think about how the police in quite a bit of pop culture in the 70s is portrayed as incompetent, corrupt, and brutal. And then I’m thinking about mainstream “guys stuff” like Convoy, Cannonball Run, heck even the Dukes of Hazzard.
WeimarGerman
@dm: I can’t believe I hadn’t read Bulter’s Parable series until this past year. I also thought it is very apropos this thread.
As I finished it, I really wanted to read more about the larger societal changes that Butler thought would lead to that dystopia. Then I realized that was likely more my own privilege and inability to read the current situation well enough. We could be well along that path already.
NotMax
Attempting not to repeat any listed above, would add
Elmer Gantry
Lord of the Flies
The Castle
The Mortal Storm
Europa, Europa
.
Wakeshift
Not intending to derail the topic, but extend it – I am trying to crystallize a half-formed thought about a society’s emotional processing *after* fascism in art/literature/cinema.
Spent some time with postwar German works, and i’m wondering what lessons there are for us now.
I ask because it seems in our immediate moment, we must simultaneously work to prevent AND resist AND *deprogram* fascism in our society. It’s not orderly and linear, it’s muddled and blended as some elements are trending towards it, some have embraced and wield openly. But who can be saved? Or at least dragged back from the abyss?
ETA – meant to mark agreement with all titles listed so far, and to add one more recent but rather obscure:
The Last Castle, Redford and Gandolfini
Blues Brothers is best answer though
FluxAmbassador
On the comic book front I’ll recommend Maus and though it’s not about fascism per se, James Tynion IV’s current ongoing Department of Truth is about how a belief that is shared by enough people can become physical reality, which has some things to say about the present moment.
Pretty much anything by Mark Millar, mostly by accident though because he’s a tool.
NotMax
‘@FluxAmbassador
For comics, would mention both Judge Dredd and Marshal Law as being at least Fascism-adjacent.
dexwood
@WaterGirl: Thanks. I know all of that. The problem only started today with my phone. Hit reply, comment window appears, but no reply to nym. Then there was the weird triple nym showing up just once. I have no problem here using my desktop or tablet.
ETA: when the comment window has appeared it lacks a cursor preventing me from typing anything.. Old Samsung phone I’ve been meaning to replace.
mrmoshpotato
@schrodingers_cat:
Got it.
ian
The original x-men comics, also a lot of the themes of the Bryan Singer’s X2, were about a government and society determined to rid itself of a minority group it viewed as troublesome and that extremes they were willing to go to in order to achieve that.
J R in WV
My paternal grandfather was Switzerdeutch, and spoke that Germanic language first, even tho he was born in NE Ohio dairy country, where his parents settled after arriving in the US from Switzerland. In the county orphanage he was taught to be a typesetter, back before Linotype machines were invented, and eventually became a small town newspaper publisher.
In 1938 he took his family, my uncles and father to Europe to visit his Swiss cousins and tour the old country; they took their big grey Oldsmobile touring car. They sailed across on a German liner and landed in Bremenhaven (if I have that old port name correct) and so their car had German plates on it.
They were in Vienna just days before Mr Hitler made his triumphant entry to that newly German city, and the whole city was draped with scarlet banners with the traditional black Nazi swastikas on them. I learned about this when helping a cousin going through my Uncle’s papers in his basement, when she pulled from a file cabinet filled mostly with theatrical play bills a scarlet German flag circa 1938, with the black swastika in the center. We were shocked, I still am.
My father told us of being in England on the way home, waiting for a ship — England no longer allowed German ships to make port, so they were having trouble getting out of Europe. The family was in a movie theater one afternoon in the British port city when the film was stopped, and a speech by the Prime Minister on BBC was put on the sound system. It was when he announced “Peace in Our Time” by giving Hitler Czechoslovakia — at the time an industrial powerhouse that provided Hitler with his armored corps after being taken over by the Nazis. We know how that worked out!
A little family history. Granddad only had a left leg, so was in the passenger seat for the European travel.
VFX Lurker
Bitch Planet (comic) — non-compliant women get shipped off to a prison planet. Fascists overthrew the previous democratic government when it elected a woman as President. The fascists targeted marginalized groups (ex: trans women) first, then they imprisoned non-compliant cis women next.
Pan’s Labyrinth (film) — a young girl escapes fascism through fantasy.
susanna
The movie, Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964 by Luis Brunel. Well done, at times confusing, and unclear of purpose and direction. A brutal realization with the final shot of this movie.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
@Calouste: that also includes Smokey and the Bandit and The Longest Yard
AWOL
@Wyatt Salamanca: Good to hear. I forgot “The Last Metro” (Trauffaut). I wish TCM, HBO, and SHO would get the rights to these films now and then.
I saw “Salo” (Pasolini) upon release. It remains infamous, I imagine.
All the films I’ve mentioned are from nations that were fascist or were occupied by fascists, which contained people who resisted or collaborated or didn’t care. I found this period of European cinema to be memorable and not manipulative.
schrodingers_cat
Has anyone mentioned Downfall?
Because that’s what happens to fascists in the end.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Many of the works noted here specifically involve non European people.
I had to go out, so I kept my list short. I would have added Sandakan Number 8, directed by Kei Kumai, which deals with fascist Japan through the eyes of a poor Japanese woman who was forced to become a comfort woman.
I omitted films about the Raj or the British in Africa because most of these films have a kind of blindness, a nostalgic filter which does not see the atrocities clearly.
I would love to know about English language or subtitled films by Indian, Pakastani and other directors that might illuminate the topic.
Ivan X
@tommyspoon: Loved that book, as well as several others of Max Barry’s.
SamIAm
@Fleeting Expletive:
Are you sure you’re not thinking of “A Face in the Crowd” with Andy Griffith playing the part of the con man turned demagogue?
prostratedragon
In Lust, Caution the young characters whose lives have been disrupted by the invasion of the fascistic Japanese government penetrate the bubble in which the grifter class of the collaborators lives.
Ivan X
The medium is archaic, even at the time of its release, but the 1985 text adventure game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, was written in reaction to Reagan’s election, and its vision of a future America that descends into fascism over a 50 year period following the election of a charismatic conservative demagogue who enacts a “Plan For Renewed National Purpose” was extraordinary ambitious, disturbing, and prescient. It might not have been the best game, as games go — there’s not much to do but walk around and observe — but it is great art. A recent write-up on it is here: if50.substack.com/p/1985-a-mind-forever-voyaging?s=r
billcinsd
I’ll add a couple of songs
New Dark Age by Adrian Borland and The Sound
youtube.com/watch?v=CWoNSADanoA
Christian Militia by New Model Army
youtube.com/watch?v=TA30j2DKbVs
Feathers
One of the problems with seeing the Star Wars films as anti-fascist is that they set up the dualism of the light and dark side of the force competing against each other in the first film. The true problem of fascism is that it sets itself up as the “light side”
So rise of fascism films may give hope to the anti-fascist cause, but not really help, because the fascists will invariably see themselves as the good guys.
Mathguy
@Citizen_X:
The entire subplot of Clark and the Psycorps in Babylon 5 is a scary parallel to modern times.
WeimarGerman
@J R in WV: Nice story. Not sure if you miss-typed, but the port is Bremerhaven (the port of Bremen) just west of Hamburg.
NutmegAgain
@Brachiator: Yep! Year of Living Dangerously, and Z are two favorites and all time classics. Does it make a difference if you know people whose lives were directly affected by the events? (E.g., the dictatorship in Greece, ad the attempted overthrow of the gov in Indonesia–speaking of Russia, ahem. Well USSR.)
Betsy
@Feathers:
Oh, that reminds me! I finally thought of one: O Brother Where Art Thou
scribbler
A Special Day. Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastrroianni. Brutal but very affecting movie about the effects of growing fascism in Italy before WWII.
Steeplejack
@James E Powell:
Links don’t work. Fixed:
The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini. PDF file.
“Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco. PDF file.
Always a good idea to warn about links to PDF files, because some phones and tablets download them without warning.
Steeplejack
@dexwood:
No cursor and/or no “reply to” nym in the comment box is a long-standing bug in the “Visual” mode. Click the “Text” tab and they should appear.
SFBayAreaGal
The movie Missing with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek
jefft452
It Cant Happen Here
A Face in the Crowd
This Land Is Mine
joel hanes
Late to this (I’m travelling, can’t read BJ while driving)
Jo Walton’s “Small Change” series ( Farthing, Ha’ Penny, Half A Crown ) depict an alternative timeline in which Hitler/Nazis persist in Europe, and Great Britain’s privileged set and government slowly accede to Fascism in the UK
Recommended.
DonkeyKong
A film that came out in 2012 called Compliance that dramatizes a real life hoax. A caller posing as a cop calls into a fast food restaurant and demands the manager strip search employees accused of theft. Imagine a John Hughes movie directed by Roman Polanski.
prostratedragon
@SFBayAreaGal: Yep. Costa-Gavras was explicitly trying to waken the U.S. audience with that one.
A documentary on the onset of the Condor period in South America is The Battle of Chile. In three full-length parts, with the first two concerned with the onset of the Sept. 11 1973 coup against Allende. The third describes attempts to formulate a resistance to the fascists. Link to imdb description of Part I
Some theatrical films that deal with life under fascism in South America are Frantic (my view), Apartment Zero, The Official Story, The Plague (1992), State of Siege, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, and Chronical of an Escape.
Xenos
@Chetan Murthy:
Thank you for the Arendt quote. I have long argued that fascism is just colonialism imposed on white people, but of course she says it more clearly.
rm
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day and the movie adaptation.
His next most famous novel, Never Let Me Go, subtly implies that it takes place in an alternate history where fascists won. <spoiler>Human cloning seems to have been developed in the 1950s and clones are treated as non-human objects.</spoiler>
James E Powell
@Steeplejack:
Thank you. I did not know that about pdfs.
J R in WV
@WeimarGerman:
Yes, multiple typos hard to see when writing about European names! Thanks. Little kids threw small stones at their big car at rural border crossings, thinking Granddad was a high-ranking German [aka Nazi — tho granddad was a FDR Democrat all his life] official in that big grey car with a driver.
Granddad and his 3 sons all wore suits and ties most days. Touring Europe by car in ’38 was mostly a rural experience, there were no thruways yet.
ETA: The whole story is far too long for a B-J comment!
way2blue
With respect to the rise of Fascism as it pertains to WWII—the novel, Stones from the River, (by Ursula Hegi, 1994). The first book I read that described life of ordinary German people as their world flipped to Nazi control. Going from the villagers making fun of the boys in their silly brown uniforms singing patriotic songs to neighbors beaten for speaking out…
The Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr. View of Germany from before WWII through the war and afterwards. The first three are known as the Berlin Noir trilogy, but the series continues for another 10 books as Gunther moves to Argentina, Cuba after the war… Masterful historical detail as to the forces pushing and resisting Facsim…
Tehanu
@AWOL:
It’s my favorite movie and I think it holds up damn well… alas.
TBone
Because I’m not a regular, I’m using reply: Harold and Maude.
TBone
Also, Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning…before she lost her mind!