"Fiume O Morte " Brilliantly Dramatizes the Rise of a Demagogue

Summary

Many filmmakers display undue faith in their ability to depict ways of life far outside their own experience. This blithe self-confidence is particularly egregious in depictions of distant history, where imagination inevitably courts fabrication. The Croatian director Igor Bezinović confronts this problem boldly and brilliantly in “Fiume o Morte!” (“Fiume or Death!”) by showing his process. He combines nonfiction elements with fictionalizations of historical events—and reveals the behind-the-scenes creation of these reënactments, turning the work into a documentary about its own making. The film, which will screen on April 4th and 5th in the “New Directors/New Films” series at both MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, is centered on an astounding true story that took place in Bezinović’s home town of Rijeka, and his telling emphasizes both his personal connection to the saga and the strangeness of dramatizing it.The film focusses on a tumultuous period between 1919 and 1921, when the Italian-nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, in defiance of his own government, led a convoy of rebel soldiers into Rijeka—a town, on the Adriatic Coast, which had a large Italian minority and was then widely known by its Italian name, Fiume. Quickly consolidating power, D’Annunzio ruled Fiume as a dictator. The results were oppressive for the city and—because D’Annunzio’s exploits won the admiration of the younger, even more ambitious Italian nationalist Benito Mussolini—catastrophic for the world. Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory. He gathers a teeming array of archival material and a teeming cast of actors—mostly nonprofessionals, many recruited via person-in-the-street interviews—to re-create the archival depictions of the occupation.Bezinović, far from shrugging off the peculiarity of the procedure, calls attention to it, with humorous barbs aimed in multiple directions—including at himself. The...