The Form of Ferrari

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Wheel spokes turn, first on the left of the screen, then the right. Swinging, scratchy music guides the scene as we watch the cars roll off the starting line. The first three shots of Ferrari, Michael Mann’s long-awaited portrait of the eponymous motorsport magnate, can’t take up much more than a second and a half. The grainy archival images of the Golden Era of Grand Prix racing, blended with a digital Adam Driver as a young Enzo Ferrari, flow in that “rhythmic montage” that one of Mann’s cinematic heroes, Sergei Eisenstein, so scientifically described almost 100 ago as film form was just getting its footing. One could chalk the style up as a brief homage, or take it seriously as a statement of political intent.

Mann’s narratives are sometimes reduced to being melodramatic tales of cops and robbers, or critiqued for his apparent obsession with highly professional, passionate and aloof men. But at the foundation of these stories—whether they are about a freelance gem thief, tobacco industry whistleblower or all-time-great boxer—is a systemic analysis: Mann is interested in the way things work. It is also the element that is most easily missed in his narratives. While the Soviet pioneer Dziga Vertov would pull the camera back, revealing the machinery of the modern world by making humans small and looking at patterns rather than specificity, Mann’s camera is always tight, intimate, in close-up.

From the beginning, Mann has always put the human first to reveal the institutional failings. We are kept in the prisoners’ perspective in The Jericho Mile (1979). In Thief (1981), we see the failure of American justice not through its broad implications but in a personal experience of bureaucracies official and unofficial. We don’t see the stirring masses like in Eisenstein’s Strike! (1925) or October (1928), but we are shown the juxtapositions, the contrasts—that unifying movement of editing that strings images beyond their individual implications and into new, symphonic meaning.

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Take, for example, how Ferrari opens after the black-and-white prelude: Scenes of a cool morning bathed in that yellow Emilian sun, cutting through the light haze and tall trees of the Po Valley. The lowlands fade to hills, the hills fade to bodies in a bed, the awakening Enzo poetically arising from the earth. He tries to make his exit secret, gently pulling the sheet over his still-sleeping son before pushing his humble hatchback down the driveway. Then the engine fires, and the rest of the world wakes up too—Ferrari’s mechanical modernity punctures the quiet of the natural world.

The camera stops its smooth pans, taking on the vibrations of powering pistons; the tonality of the editing shifts from gliding to stark. Every action is emphasized: Cut-to clutch in, brake, cut-to gear shift, cut-to gas in, clutch out, road ahead. Mann’s tight montage is as clicky as a gated gear shifter, conveying through image and sound not just the experience of driving, but how it works. This pedagogical approach drives Ferrari’s early scenes, with each fleeting instance of automobile piloting building up our understanding of their functions and limits as the film races towards the infamous Mille Miglia of 1957.

The plot of Ferrari, like so many Mann movies, is deceptively simple: “Win on Sunday, sell cars on Monday.” But if it wasn’t ripped from history, recounted by American motor journalist Brock Yates in his biography on Enzo, and adapted by Troy Kennedy Martin for the screen, the whole thing would be too dramatic to be true. Not only is Ferrari going broke, his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) is on the cusp of finding out about his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), and their illegitimate son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), all around the one-year anniversary of the death of Dino, Enzo and Laura’s own son.

If one had time to stop and think, they might even derisively call Ferrari melodramatic, but also like so many of Mann’s films—and like the experience of driving at speed with a corner racing at you—there isn’t time to think, just act, react. It’s the tense heart of Mann’s narratives, logic and passion coming up against survival instinct. It’s Neil McCauley hesitating to abandon the woman he loves when knows he’s almost caught. It’s Hawkeye taking one last look at Cora before he runs. Mann’s men are often out of time, but can’t help but wait one more second; in Ferrari, there isn’t even the possibility: If a character has run out of time, they are already dead.

I noted in my review that Ferrari is a distillation, and part of what makes it a perfect Mannian subject is the film’s two irreconcilably distinct elements: Men and machines. There is a beautiful allure to the illusion of harmony between the two. In an interview with Motor Sport, Mann quotes Jean Behra’s notion of perfect “ecstasy” when pilot and car mold into one machine. That is a temporary state, of course, and the separation of these two bodies can be deadly for both. In the already infamous scene depicting a crash so violent that it ended the Mille Miglia as it used to be run for good, the driver’s body lays strewn amongst the mangled civilians, both his human and machine body severed. Ferrari romantically calls racing “our deadly passion; our terrible joy,” but you could just as quickly call it a death drive. And lurking behind the veneer of that post-war European reconstruction are the ghosts left behind from yesterday’s death drive, fascism.

The Futurists saw the new possibilities of speed brought on by the automobile as a modern divinity; meanwhile, the Vatican thought that the “Temple of Speed,” mainland Europe’s first-ever purpose-built autodrome in Monza, was a “pagan amphitheater,” and the Fascists saw “race car driver as the New Man,” according to Paul Baxa. In his seminal study Motorsport and Fascism, Baxa, a historian of both topics, describes motorsport as the “fascist sport par excellence” because of its reconciliation between those concerned with the future and those concerned with a mythic past against the bourgeois present. Baxa argues that motor racing provided a bridge, weaving two strands together into the DNA of Italian Fascism, where a death cult for “progress” and a death cult for “mythic values of the Fatherland” could meet on track. This, too, is the DNA of Ferrari.

Like an autocrat of a small nation, Ferrari the man is Ferrari the company, and Ferrari the company is the cult of Ferrari the man. Enzo is il commendatore, as his underlings and advisors call him. Yet fascism, motorsport’s great taboo, is never mentioned by name. One might argue that Mann, a historically adept filmmaker hostile to unjust power, is avoiding the topic of Ferrari’s fascist roots for two reasons: The company’s fearsome brand control and Mann’s personal, trusted relationship with one of the films principal players, Piero Ferrari (née Lardi).

This would be disingenuous criticism, however. As discussed previously, Mann’s films perform their critiques through analyses of personal actions in relation to systems. Mann doesn’t need to be explicit. Mann once remarked that “overt politics interest me less than the states of mind: The specific kinds of aberration that explain why a lower middle-class bourgeois in Munich would be attracted to the Waffen SS in 1933.” In the case of Enzo’s political position, Yates argues in his biography that, “While Enzo Ferrari never revealed any strong political orientation, he was a pragmatist of the first order…If Fascism was in fashion and it meant extra racing successes for the Scuderia, so be it; Enzo Ferrari would be a good Fascist.” Baxa rebuts this sort of analysis as taking “Ferrari’s own claims that he was apolitical…at face value.” To Baxa, it is apparent that, “Up until [Ferrari’s] death, the Scuderia Ferrari maintained a Fascist DNA in how it was run and how it presented itself to the public.” Mann’s film finds truth in the simple pragmatism that Yates notes—constantly negotiating to keep driving the Prancing Horse forward—yet Ferrari also makes clear Baxa’s point: Ferrari, and how he ran the company, is demonstrably fascist. Mann doesn’t write his thesis on paper, but in images.

While owing a great debt to Eisenstein, it would be wrong to call Mann a strictly dialectical filmmaker in the way many often think of Eisenstein. Mann is not doing some simple A+B=C shots, as Eisenstein’s theory of “intellectual montage” is so often reduced to. Instead, he is constantly building an increasingly complex machine, harnessing all the dimensions of light, camera, mise-en-scene and sound into a symphony of movement where, by some magic trick, the internal becomes external. Perhaps it is part of why Mann is so interested in men of action (and it is almost invariably men—although there is something to be said about Ferrari as a standout amongst motorsport movies for actually giving life and agency to the female characters in a genre that usually relegates them to the sidelines): Their stories are so natural to his style.

Ferrari also stands in interesting contrast to Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s historic epic that grossed nearly a billion dollars at the box office. Oppenheimer is a film almost wholly consumed by the guilt of a man who can’t reconcile his actions with his stated beliefs, and by the end, Oppenheimer’s decisions leave us wondering if he has any convictions at all. Ferrari is the inverse: Enzo’s bravado is a mask, part of the wall he’s built to distance himself from the extreme emotion of the world he’s tried to conquer. Enzo’s convictions are always clear: Control, race, win. And it doesn’t seem to bring him much happiness, either—not in the way bonding with his son Piero does (even if it’s bonding over the design of intake manifolds). Yet, Ferrari doesn’t seem to know another way to live. He’s an old world man, an atavistic vestige of Italy’s fascist years, left toiling away performing violent, fascinating, terrifying, inhumanly beautiful nationalist conflicts on rural roadsides.

Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.