Venue: Royal Holloway, room IN243

Speaker: Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Title: ‘Traumatic Hermeneutics, Jean Renoir, and the Memory of War’

Trauma poses one of the problems of interpretation in a particularly potent form: how can we tell that what we insist on finding is actually present in the interpreted work? As Thomas Elsaesser has put it, ‘If trauma is experienced through its forgetting, its repeated forgetting, then, paradoxically, one of the signs of the presence of trauma is the absence of all signs of it’. Trauma may be most devastatingly present when it is most vehemently denied. This paper sketches some of the methodological problems involved in interpreting trauma, and then looks more closely at some of the later films of the great French director Jean Renoir. After the critical and commercial failure of his masterpiece La Règle du jeu in 1939 and the invasion of France by Germany in 1940, Renoir moved to the US, where he lived for the rest of his life. The 13 films he made after 1940 have never been largely neglected in comparison with his work of the 1930s. Some critics depict Renoir as having abandoned his earlier political interests, now preferring colourful, superficial spectacle to social commentary. The paper suggests that this is a misreading, and that the bright surfaces of Renoir’s later films screen – in the double sense of ‘mask’ and ‘put on display’ – traumatic experiences. Trauma inhabits these films even if it only indirectly disturbs their apparent cheerfulness.

Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room GSB2

Dr Ruth Glynn, Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Bristol

‘Trauma and the Leaden Years’

The legacy of Italy’s widespread and prolonged experience of political violence in the period known as the ‘anni di piombo’ (years of lead, c. 1969-83) has begun to be interrogated through the prism of trauma theory. This paper sets out the case for pursuing such a reading of the anni di piombo as cultural and collective trauma paying close attention to issues of repression and hypervigilance in Italian cultural and legal responses to those years. It then turns to address, more specifically, the traumatic import of women’s participation in the political violence of the anni di piombo, with reference to critical perspectives on the roles traditionally assigned women in discourses relating to culture and nation.

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Dr Giuliana Pieri, Senior Lecturer in Italian, RHUL

‘Trauma and Memory after Fascism: Italian Art and Fascist Violence’

This paper will focus on Italian art in the period 1938-46 ca. As Italian Fascism entered its final phase, Italian artists began to show a  new violent imagery in their works. This paper will focus on war art and its contemporary and postwar reception as a means to interrogate the difficult and still debated legacy of Italian Fascism in Italy. I began to reflect upon the possible links between trauma theory and the reception of Fascism in postwar Italian culture when I curated the exhibition Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator (London: Estorick, 2010). Some of the images which will be the focus of my talk can be found in the exhibition website: http://mussolinicult.com

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questions:

Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room GSB2

Speaker: Dr Dora Osborne, University of Nottingham

Title: ‘What Remains: Trauma and the Archive in Contemporary German Memory Culture’

The archive stands in complex relation to history and fiction, perhaps no more so than when it carries the traces of traumatic impact. The notions of Trauma, Fiction, History, brought together in this research group, are of critical concern to post-1945 German Studies. In their configuration they ask questions of memory and witness, but also, increasingly and urgently, of the archive. What kind of archive material remains ‘after Auschwitz’? And how is this used by artists and authors in the attempted representation of Germany’s traumatic past? Drawing on examples from recent German-language literature (Durs Grünbein) and visual art (Anselm Kiefer), this paper will consider the relation of archive to Trauma, Fiction, History.

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Introduction by Colin Davis .

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talk:

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questions:

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Les Remords d’Oreste (1862), by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

Date: Friday 13 May 2pm

Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room F1

Speakers:

Dr Katherine Ibbett, UCL, ‘Perp talk: Trauma and the triumph of Louis XIV’

Dr Joseph Harris, Royal Holloway, University of London, ‘Tragic trauma? Remorse, repetition and the Orestes myth’

On the face of things, there seems something ineradicably modern about trauma as a concept. Born, as ‘traumatic neurosis’, alongside modern psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century, and revitalised within deconstruction at the close of the twentieth, trauma theory has also been shaped by a series of – it is sometimes supposed – uniquely modern catastrophes: World War I, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam. So what if anything can trauma theory reveal of other historical periods? Is to speak of trauma in the early modern period, for example, merely to indulge in futile anachronism? Or can trauma theory still teach us something about early modern violence and the mental scars it left behind? More provocatively, perhaps, can early modern texts tell us anything of trauma theory itself: its assumptions, its blind spots, its own unspoken past? In the second of a two-part mini-series on ‘Trauma and the Early Modern’, Katherine Ibbett and Joseph Harris interrogate modern and early-modern discourses on trauma and the tragic.

THREE DOCUMENTARIES ON MUSSOLINI

 As part of an AHRC project on the Cult of Mussolini run by Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri, three documentary films have been made for educational purposes (all directed by Vanessa Roghi). These films, each lasting approx 43 mins, will be launched publicly to academic and educational colleagues at UCL in London on Friday 11 February. The films include newsreel footage, home movies, location material and interviews and are of broadcast quality.

They will be available as DVDs and we hope they will be widely used in teaching.

The programme of the day is listed below. Please note that the location is not the main UCL building.

 There is no charge for this event but for catering purposes it would be appreciated if those planning to attend could say so to Stephen Gundle (s.gundle@warwick.ac.uk) by Monday 7 February.

THREE DOCUMENTARIES ON MUSSOLINI: PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION

 UCL: Friday 11 February

Edward Lewis Lecture Theatre, Windeyer Building, 46 Cleveland Street (3 mins from Goodge Street tube)

 10.30 coffee

 11.00 intro and film 1 (’Fascism and the Cult of the Duce’) followed by panel with Christopher Duggan, Philip Morgan and Vanessa Roghi.

 12.45 – 1.45 lunch

 1.45 - 3.15  film 2 (’Predappio: Past and Present in Mussolini’s Birthplace’) followed by panel with David Forgacs, John Foot, and Sofia Serenelli

 3.15-3.45  tea

 3.45 - 5.15 film 3 (’Mussolini after Mussolini’)  followed by panel with Robert Lumley, Giuliana Pieri, and Stephen Gundle

 5.30. drinks reception

Date: Wednesday 24 November, 5.00 pm
Venue: Royal Holloway, IN032

Speakers:

Professor John O’Brien, RHUL, ‘Beginnings and Trauma’

Dr Timothy Chesters, RHUL, ‘Divine Trauma’

On the face of things, there seems something ineradicably modern about trauma as a concept. Born, as ‘traumatic neurosis’, alongside modern psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century, and revitalised within deconstruction at the close of the twentieth, trauma theory has also been shaped by a series of – it is sometimes supposed – uniquely modern catastrophes: World War I, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam. So what if anything can trauma theory reveal of other historical periods? Is to speak of trauma in the early modern period, for example, merely to indulge in futile anachronism? Or can trauma theory still teach us something about early modern violence and the mental scars it left behind? More provocatively, perhaps, can early modern texts tell us anything of trauma theory itself: its assumptions, its blind spots, its own unspoken past? In the first of a two-part mini-series on ‘Trauma and the Early Modern’, Timothy Chesters and John O’Brien test the applicability of trauma theory in a number of texts arising out of the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598).

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Introduction by Colin Davis

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John O’Brien – Beginnings and Trauma

handout: Beginnings and Trauma (download)

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Timothy Chesters – Divine Trauma

handout: Divine Trauma (download)

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questions:

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Speakers: Professor Robert Eaglestone and Professor Dan Stone

Title: Trauma and History: Approaches to the Holocaust

Abstract:
How should we write and talk about the Holocaust? Do the facts speak for themselves, or do they defy speech altogether? Does trauma provide a lens which can help us understand the Holocaust or does it confuse an already bewilderingly complex issue? Aiming to go beyond polemical simplifications, two leading scholars from different disciplinary fields will discuss whether it is necessary, possible or even desirable to give clear cut answers to questions such as these.

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Introduction by Colin Davis:

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Professor Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

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Professor Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

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questions:

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The exhibition constitutes a central element of a wider research project entitled The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, 1918-2005, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Prof. Stephen Gundle (Warwick University), working in collaboration with Prof. Christopher Duggan (Reading University) and Dr Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway, University of London).  The aim of the project has been to investigate the nature, purposes, functioning and impact of the personality cult of Mussolini in the period from 1918 until 1945.  The after-effects of the cult in popular memory have also been studied.

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) began his political career as an ardent Socialist, promoting the overthrow of the Liberal state through an aggressive journalistic style that led him to be appointed editor of the party’s newspaper Avanti!. However, the outbreak of the First World War represented a turning point in his evolving political consciousness, causing him to reject his party’s official line of neutrality in favour of the interventionist cause, seeing in war a chance to shake bourgeois society to its foundations and precipitate revolution.  He established his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which functioned as the mouthpiece of his particular brand of Socialism – and of the nascent Fascist movement.

Officially founded in March 1919, Fascism’s programme initially attracted few supporters with its bewildering blend of right-wing nationalism and leftist social reforms.  Dismal election results that year encouraged yet another ideological reappraisal on the part of Mussolini, who undertook a further – and irrevocable – move to the Right, abandoning the movement’s earlier republicanism and anticlericalism, and shedding the last vestiges of Socialist ideology in an opportunistic pursuit of power.  In response to the industrial unrest precipitated by the economic problems of the post-war era, Mussolini played on fears of an imminent Bolshevik revolution of the kind he had once encouraged, presenting Fascism as the sole defender of law and order.  With support for the movement increasing, the Liberal Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti invited Mussolini to form an anti-Socialist alliance in 1921 which led to the election of thirty-five Fascist Deputies.  However, Mussolini was not satisfied to play a supporting role.  The failure to suppress the Fascist ‘March on Rome’ of 28 October 1922 revealed a fatal lack of political will to resist the rise of Mussolini’s movement, culminating in his appointment as Prime Minister at the end of the month.

Having swiftly discarded the democratic framework of Liberal Italy, Mussolini had established his dictatorship by 1925.  He then directed his attention to the outside world, determined to make Italy a great colonial power.  Ethiopia was invaded in 1935 and increasing admiration of Hitler’s Nazi regime led to the signing of the 1939 Pact of Steel, which bound both countries to support one another in the event of war – even if one party had unilaterally precipitated the conflict.  Italy declared war on the Allied powers in June 1940 but her military weaknesses soon became apparent and a series of defeats in North and East Africa and the Balkans ensued.

Following the landing of Allied troops in Sicily in July 1943 and heavy bombardments of Rome, Mussolini was overthrown at a meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism and imprisoned on the orders of his former colleagues, who signed an armistice on 8 September.  However, having been rescued by German commandos, Mussolini was installed as the puppet leader of a new Fascist regime in the north of the country, now occupied by Nazi forces – known as ‘The Republic of Salò’ after the town on the shores of Lake Garda that served as its administrative centre.  As the Allies advanced north through an Italy divided in two by a bitter civil war, Mussolini attempted to escape to Switzerland but was captured by partisans and executed on 28 April 1945.

Mussolini was the first political leader to harness the techniques of theatre, the visual arts and the mass media to a personalised system of rule.  One of the key features of the Fascist regime was an orchestrated personality cult involving systematic adulation of the leader.  Mussolini was hailed by admirers as a genius, the saviour of the nation, the founder of the empire, a superman and a demi-god.  The cult was vital to the way the regime functioned, integrating the population into a system of consensus that appeared solid until it was undermined by the setbacks of World War Two.  Busts and portraits of the Duce were situated in public buildings and private homes, while a number of larger monuments depicted him on horseback or helmeted in warrior mode.  The cult was a product of the Duce’s megalomania but it was also a peculiarly modern phenomenon.  It was the result of a complex synergy of Italian nationalism, mass politics, visual culture, popular religion, celebrity and consumerism.  Far from being a purely political phenomenon, it was multi-faceted and driven by factors that went beyond the regime itself.

The exhibition Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator relates to the part of the project concerned with the decline of the cult.  It brings together some of the diverse paintings and drawings produced in Italy and abroad throughout the Fascist era, but focuses particularly on the years immediately following Mussolini’s initial fall from power in 1943 and the period of civil war and resistance.  This period witnessed the destruction of many Fascist symbols and images of Mussolini.  Portraits in homes and local Fascist organisations were thrown out while larger works were attacked and defaced.   Popular anger reflected the detachment from the cult that the hardships and setbacks of the war brought.  Artists shared these feelings and in several cases anticipated them.  Many of the works in the exhibition are characterised by a demonisation and a desecration of the man who had once been hailed as a demi-god, depicting a grotesque figure of tragic or comic proportions.  The virile Duce is turned into an obese, mis-shapen man in works that have an air of blasphemy.  Others represent meditations on the tragedy of the Nazi occupation and civil war.  Together they offer a unique insight into the way the visual arts responded to a period of transition that still remains controversial today.   

The exhibition will feature a large selection of satirical drawings by the Paduan artist Tono Zancanaro (1906-1985) depicting the grotesque figure of ‘Gibbo’ and his entourage – a thinly veiled caricature of Mussolini and the grandees of the Fascist regime.  Zancanaro began the series of drawings in 1937, the works being fed by a series of diverse influences and inspirations.  The name ‘Gibbo’ was taken partly from the character of Gibbon in John Ford’s film The Informer and partly from the animal, while Gibbo’s monstrous, bloated form was inspired by patches of damp on the walls of the hospital where the artist was confined during the late 1930s after being mistakenly informed that he was terminally ill.  Described by one critic as ‘half-man, incomplete, shapeless, deformed, immature and abortive’, Gibbo embodies the inflated pomposity and obscene squalor of the Fascist regime.  Similar in tone is the work of Mino Maccari, who is represented by images from his Dux series, which presents the dictator as a lascivious buffoon.  The small scale of Maccari’s works was in deliberate contrast to the monumental dimensions of the cult statues and paintings.

There will also be a number of drawings made by partisans during the final months of the war, documenting the capturing of German soldiers, battles in the mountains and fellow partisans at rest in their makeshift barracks.  In their directness and simplicity these drawings reflect the revival of realism in Italian art that was to become the dominant aesthetic tendency of the post-war years.  Exhibited in the spring of 1945, these works were created by the artists Nicola Neonato (1912-2006), Vittorio Magnani (1912-1994) and Renato Cenni (1906-1977) – under the pseudonyms Pollaiolo, Marcello and Neri – who worked for the newspaper Il Partigiano (The Partisan).  Neonato went on to fresco the memorial chapel at Dachau.  As they were described by the newspaper, ‘these drawings, born between one battle and another, between the joy of victory and the sorrow for one’s fallen companions, in leaking, drafty barracks full of smoke […] will remain among the most important documents of the events through which an oppressed people is fighting for its freedom’. 

One of the most renowned exponents of post-war realist aesthetics was Renato Guttuso (1912-1987), who had also fought in the Resistance during 1944.  Key works on view include the Picasso-inspired Massacre (1943) and a study for his famous work Flight from Etna (1940).  Considered by the artist to be his first politically-charged image in its symbolic depiction of peasants fleeing in terror from an encroaching wave of lava, the finished work was, ironically, the star of the state-sponsored Bergamo Prize of that year.

A section of photographs is dedicated to the equestrian statue of Mussolini that was inaugurated in the Littoriale stadium in Bologna in 1929.  A large-scale work by Giuseppe Graziosi (1879-1942) fused from Austrian cannons captured during the First World War, it remained mounted on a pedestal until the human figure was pulled down by an angry crowd in July 1943.  The head was seized by loyal Fascists who conserve it to this day.  The remainder of the statue was taken down after the war and was turned into two figures of a male and a female partisan which now stand at one of the city’s gates.  

Foreign perspectives will also be considered through satirical drawings published in magazines such as Punch as well as the work of eye witnesses to the dramatic events surrounding the fall of Mussolini. The British painter Merlyn Evans (1910-1973) was serving in Italy in April 1945 and had witnessed the public exhibition of the corpses of Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci and other members of the Fascist hierarchy in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.  His painting The Execution was made from his memory of this macabre spectacle, the jostling, jagged, abstract forms intending to represent the rage of the surging mob.

Works from two painting cycles by Mario Mafai (1902-1965) entitled Demolitions and Fantasia will also be shown.  The first chronicles Mussolini’s destruction of large areas of ancient Rome to make way for Fascism’s public works programmes and new districts such as the zona augustea.  Although not explicitly political, these works have been seen in retrospect as covert denunciations of Mussolini’s megalomania.  The Fantasia cycle is, by contrast, openly condemnatory of the violence and savage brutality of Fascism and strongly recalls Goya’s Disasters of War.

The cult of Mussolini cast a shadow in post-war Italy and nostalgic Fascists continued to cultivate their admiration in private.  But, for the majority of Italians, the failings of the dictatorship and the horrors of war were sufficient to end any attachment to Fascism’s dreams of building a mighty nation.  Artists played a vital part in portraying these horrors and in visualising the disenchantment with the man who led the country for more than twenty years. Their works stand as testimony to that particular, tragic phase in Italian history that preceded the rebirth of democracy.  They also offer something more: a stark condemnation of the vanities of dictatorship and of the violence that is an intrinsic part of Fascism.  To this extent they offer a universal message of humanity and peace that is no less urgent in our troubled times than it was in the middle of the twentieth century. 

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Location:                Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art     www.estorickcollection.com

                               39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN,    Tel. +44 (0)20 7704 9522

Opening hours:      Wednesday to Saturday 11.00 to 18.00 hours.  Sunday 12.00 to 17.00 hours

                               Late night opening Thursdays until 20.00 hours.  Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.  Shop: open gallery hours.  Library: by appointment only

Admission:             £5.00, concessions £3.50, includes permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.  Free to under-16s and students on production of a valid NUS card.  Library, by appointment only, £2.50 per visit.

Catalogue:             

Groups:                  Groups of 10 or more may book gallery talks (approx. 50 minutes) by curatorial staff on the current exhibition and the permanent collection.  £3.50 per head. 

Events:                   Gallery Talks: Informal talks on aspects of the exhibition last approximately 40 minutes and are free with admission ticket.   Saturday afternoons at 15.00 hours.

Café:                       The licensed Italian caffè, with outdoor seating in the landscaped garden, offers delicious fresh Italian food as well as snacks and hot and cold drinks.

How to get there:  Victoria Line, Overground and First Capital Connect to Highbury & Islington; First Capital Connect to Essex Road; buses: 271 to door; 4, 19, 30, and 43 to Upper Street/Canonbury Lane; 38, 56, 73 and 341 to Essex Rd/Canonbury Road.

Access:                  Main entrance in Canonbury Road.  Wheelchair access to galleries 1 to 4, café, shop and toilets. Limited car parking for blue badge holders (please telephone in advance).  Induction loop in gallery 2.

For further information, text in Italian, and images, please contact:

Sue Bond Public Relations

Tel. +44 (0)1359 271085, Fax. +44 (0)1359 271934

E-mail. info@suebond.co.uk, www.suebond.co.uk                                                              8/6/2010

Venue: Royal Holloway, room MX001

Speakers: Professor Robert Eaglestone and Professor Dan Stone

Title: ‘Trauma and History: Approaches to the Holocaust’

Abstract: How should we write and talk about the Holocaust? Do the facts speak for themselves, or do they defy speech altogether? Does trauma provide a lens which can help us understand the Holocaust or does it confuse an already bewilderingly complex issue? Aiming to go beyond polemical simplifications, two leading scholars from different disciplinary fields will discuss whether it is necessary, possible or even desirable to give clear cut answers to questions such as these.

About the speakers:

Professor Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

Professor Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.