To his admirers, Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) was a poet and a patriot – both an important literary figure and a true war hero. To his detractors, though, the flamboyant Italian was a dangerous and even preposterous figure – a narcissist with extreme fascist leanings.
In his new feature documentary Fiume o morte!, which he has worked on for a decade, and has spent two years editing, Croatian director Igor Bezinović tells the story of how, in 1919, D’Annunzio staged his own private coup in the Adriatic port town of Rijeka (which is called Fiume in Italian) and which he insisted should be part of Italy. For 16 months, he and his troop of Italian irregular soldiers ruled over the city.
The period was exhaustively documented. A reported 10,000 photographs were taken of D’Annunzio and his followers. These images form the backbone of Bezinović film, which won a Tiger at the International Film Festival Rotterdam at the start of the year and is now vying for both international and documentary Oscars. It has also been shortlisted for a European Film Award nomination. Sales of the film are handled by Lightdox. Icarus is handling the US release of the film, while the ICA is aboard for the UK.
Some of the pictures seen in the film were taken by local photographers. However, the footage of D’Annunzio giving the Roman salute was filmed by British Pathé, and D’Annunzio had many other important international press representatives following him.
Bezinović uses the pictures as the starting point for his vivid and often very funny recreations of the Italian maverick’s eccentric invasion. “They were, without a doubt, one of the biggest motivations why I did the film this way. I decided to base everything on the images.”
The director, who was himself born in Rijeka, has been poring over these images for years and has built up a strong emotional connection to them. He received the first script development money for his film back in 2015. In 2019, he visited the Vittoriale museum which houses many of D’Annunzio’s possessions.
“When I started looking through [the images], it was one of the most exciting days in my life,” he enthuses about the hoard he uncovered. He consulted historians to discover more about the pictures that most fascinated him. As we see in the documentary, he then worked out exactly where the pictures had been taken, and shot his own images in exactly those places.
The recreations are staged with local people and with a variety of amateur actors playing D’Annunzio.
“I wanted to share responsibility. I didn’t want to give the role of D’Annunzio to only one person. Since the whole film is a collective effort, we have seven narrators and me as an eighth narrator; we have a huge number of people who applied to be in the film; we were also doing the street casting you see in the film.”
Bezinović adapted the script to the needs of the actors he chose. They may be amateurs but they all rise very gamely to the challenge – and they’re all equally convincing as D’Annunzio.
At times, the film takes on a surreal hue. For example, one key location is a nail salon which, 100 years ago, was famous as the Platypus Taverna, one of the leader’s favoured watering holes. To the surprise and delight of the locals, he recreates the old restaurant.
The film has a deceptive tone. Bezinović is telling a complex and dark story that ultimately involved bloodshed, and yet the storytelling remains playful throughout.
“I think it’s my sensibility and also D’Annunzio’s sensibility that are combined. I am a very different person from D’Annunzio. I really believe in democracy and he believed in aristocracy. I believe in the idea of the collective and he believed in the individual. But what I think I have in common with D’Annunzio is this humour.”
D’Annunzio treated his seizure of Fiume/Rijeka as an awfully big adventure – and that’s how Bezinović approached his film too. “To tackle D’Annunzio’s madness, you have to be as passionate about it as him,” the director suggests. “It [the film] includes humour; it includes irony and some sort of provocation. The idea of this film was to use his methods, his materials, his photos, and his actions – but to put it in a different context.”
A large part of the budget went into the costume design. Casting director Sara Jakupec and costume designers Tajči Čekada and Manuela Paladin Šabanović found actors prepared to go to exhaustive lengths to make sure they looked exactly like the characters depicted in those very evocative photographs from more than a century ago.
It helped the mood on set that the filmmaker encouraged his collaborators to enjoy themselves. “I think they had loads of fun. Since we are a carnival city, people are used to dressing up…this type of entertainment isn’t something new to the city.”
Since the Rotterdam premiere at the start of the year, Bezinović has toured all over the world with the film, generally receiving the same rapturous response where he goes.
“I was so worried when I was working on it that it would be a local story, but it turned out to be very universal in the sense that each country that has an authoritarian leader can relate to the story…and if you can’t relate to politics, then you as an audience can relate to the fact that your streets have some history.”
In Rijeka itself, the film has become a huge cult hit. Spectators have gone back to see it again and again, regarding it with strong local pride.
Fiume o morte! is a hybrid project but the director says he is more trying “to extend the boundaries of documentary film,” than to trespass into the world of fiction. He cites filmmakers like the late Peter Watkins (“certainly a person who used communities to tell his stories”) and Italian mischief maker, Nanni Moretti, as among his main influences. It’s a source of particular pleasure to him that Moretti has championed Fiume o morte!, presenting it at his cinema in Rome.
And, yes, Bezinović believes you can draw a direct line from D’Annunzio to all those equally conceited and self-obsessed politicians we see strutting in the west today. “I would say that D’Annunzio was a crucial figure for the creation of the Italian right. He was a huge influence on Mussolini and, in a way, to Berlusconi, although I am not sure Berlusconi was so aware of his work. It’s the spirit of the politics combined with this narcissistic joyfulness…Donald Trump has a very similar approach to politics where you have him as a self-professed leader/clown.”
How does the director feel about D’Annunzio now, having spent all those hundreds of hours researching and thinking about him?
“I think he’s an egomaniac! These types of personalities should be taken as dangerous in our societies. This type of orientation of the whole world around yourself, I think it’s something that should be criticised…I would say that he’s a dangerous guy, and his ability to seduce people is something quite worrying.”
The director adds that he still finds D’Annunzio a fascinating film character – “but in the same way the Joker from Batman is a fascinating film character…. he has a lot of wit and charm and he’s extremely intelligent, but you know you can’t trust him.”
