Son of Cain. Visconti, Ossessione and the censors 70 years later

Luchino Visconti’s debut flm Ossessione, based on James Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), came out in 1943 when Italy was still strongly under the Fascist yoke. Visconti’s socialist attitude, as well as his dislike for Mussolini, was difcult to reconcile with his budding cinematic activity. On the one hand, Visconti could take advantage from Fascist isolation and autarchy, which enabled him to adapt Cain’s text bypassing the international laws on copyright; on the other, his unsparing vision of Italy’s bleak underside, as well as the adulterous triangle at the center of Ossessione were irreconcilable with the prevailing moral tenets. His strategy, one that could save him from the grip of censorship and at the same time enable him to convey his disgust for the world around him, was to ignore the sinister Fascist scenario and to remove all the ensigns and symbols of the Fascist sway from the scene. Not a single black shirt appears in his flm, and references to the political situation become vague, indirect and oblique. An important point to make is to evaluate the extent to which this strategy boomerangs against its deviser. Is Visconti’s blank, anodyne portrait of the Italian ventennio still readable in oppositional terms?