From which book is the dialogue at the beginning of "Dillinger Is Dead" taken?

From which book is the dialogue at the beginning of "Dillinger Is Dead" taken? - Top view of opened novel book with pencil and romantic postcard placed on white marble surface

The beginning of Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger Is Dead (1969) features dialogue that seems to be from some book:

“One’s needs for physical survival are met by industrial production, which, in addition, sets forth as equally necessary the need to relax, to enjoy oneself… to behave and consume according to advertising models that render in explicit detail desires anyone may experience. Film, radio, television, the press, advertising, and all other facets of industrial production are no longer directed at different goals.”

From which book is this dialogue taken?



Best Answer

While the question was initially vague, based on the dialogue provided (after confirmation from the original poster) a Google search for a chunk of that dialogue brings me to this citation/footnote in Fabrizio Cilento’s book “An Investigative Cinema: Politics and Modernization in Italian, French, and American Film” 2018; page 66 item number 32:

Screenshot of the citation in the above mentioned book.

The mention of “Marcuse” in that piece led me to this 2010 L.A. Times piece by Dennis Lim titled “'Dillinger Is Dead' makes a political statement”:

At his workplace, Glauco listens to a colleague reciting from an essay that compares the isolation gas chamber to "the condition in which modern man lives" before going on to introduce the concept of "one-dimensional man," popularized by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse a few years before the film was made.

Which then brings me to Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book One-Dimensional Man which Wikipedia describes as:

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the author offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Communist society of the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies, as well as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West. He argues that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought.

If that book isn’t the source off that dialogue, I would be quite shocked.




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