Synopsis
On 12 September 1919, a troop of some three hundred soldiers under the leadership of the flamboyant war loving Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio swooped into the Northern-Adriatic port town of Fiume, now Rijeka, wanting to annex the city to Italy. Over the course of the next 16 months, during what is regarded as one of the most bizarre militant sieges of all time his official photography team captured over 10,000 images.
A century later, Rijeka-born filmmaker Igor Bezinović, along with some three hundred citizens, orchestrates a direct-action history lesson focused on the siege and its modern-day implications. The communal undertaking in historical empowerment not only revisits both facts and legends but also puts forward a social counterweight to D’Annunzio’s occupational agenda.
The result is a brutally factual yet defiantly punk cinematic journey, deadly serious yet hilariously surreal. It critically examines the tactics of performance, manipulation and propaganda employed during the siege and transgresses them to create a wild ride directly into the heart of chaos. An invitation to dare create new viewpoints, narratives, and experiences, it uncovers nationalist historiographies as effective and obstinate ideological instruments, no matter how absurd or ridiculous.
FIUME O MORTE! is a film on poetry, dynamite, cocaine, machine guns, football, airplanes, furniture flying out of windows, concerts, prisons, sunbathing, thousands of soldiers, millions of bullets, endless speeches, a platypus and on the power of political performativity. D’Annunzio might as well be considered its trailblazer heralding some of the biggest masters of ghastly political showmanship of our age.
Statement of the director
By making this film I wanted to get to know the past of my hometown Rijeka/Fiume, but also to get to understand it’s present state from a new perspective. During this process I’ve met hundreds of my fellow citizens who wanted to work on the film in front of the camera or behind it. I’ve met drivers, politicians, dustbin collectors, archivists, doormen, cooks, musicians, professors, translators and waiters who all had ideas about what this film should be like. I’ve also met historians of all kinds, from those who saw D’Annunzio as the crazier version of Mussolini to the ones who saw him as the Italian Che Guevara.
Besides meeting new people I’ve also read thousands and thousands of pages on D’Annunzio in Fiume, and while doing it I was not only gathering facts but was also shaping my own political ideas.
One idea, however, stayed clear to me all the way. That idea is formulated in a political pamphlet published in Fiume in 1922, soon after D’Annunzio’s departure: “Long live Fiume, free and independent from any kind of rescuers, liberators and protectors!”.
I made a film with my fellow citizens and for my fellow citizens, building a chronological story that we’ll be able, I hope, to retell to new generations. I also hope that our film will help the audiences outside of Rijeka think about how much they know about the histories of their own hometowns and about how these histories got remembered and retold.
In his lesser-known essay from 1960, Pier Paolo Pasolini calls D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume a “pagliacciata narcisistica”, “a narcissistic escapade”: D’Annunzio saw Fiume as a personal playground, as a place where he could experiment and practice everything that came to his mind.
By making this film I wanted to keep D’Annunzio’s idea of Rijeka/Fiume as a playground, but this time the citizens of Rijeka are the ones who are playing.
Review
Screen International Review
