Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 * Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema

Abstract

Fascism poses problems for historians of Italian cinema. While the work produced during that period is no longer entirely disavowed or discredited, it nevertheless provides an uncomfortable antecedent to the heroic moment of postwar neorealism and cinema's much-vaunted role in national reconstruction. Part of the problem is that fascism, like the advocates of neorealism, believed in the potential of the medium to create a common culture in its audiences. Debates around the political and aesthetic particularities of neorealist cinema uneasily negotiate any residual attachments to fascism, most evident in continuities of personnel in the industry. While it is now clear that feature films made with the support of the fascist regime were not overtly propagandistic in content, and were more thematically varied and technically accomplished than once had been allowed, they offer an unwanted inheritance to a body of work that sought to break from Italy's immediate past. Steven Ricci's Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 and Noa Steimatsky's Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema ostensibly sit on either side of the divide created by the fall of Mussolini and the new republic. Ricci's attempt at clear periodization, however, contrasts with Steimatsky's reluctance to section off the past from the present. The contrasting sense of temporality is indicative of other differences between the two books. While in a broad sense both are part of recent attempts to reinterpret the cultural history of Italy during and after fascism, their methodological approaches are distinct. While Ricci is much more concerned with cinema's relationship with the state, and with its audiences, Steimatsky interrogates film as an element of a broad cultural field, drawing on an expertise in early painting, photography and architecture in order to offer a rich contexualization and detailed textual analysis of the works she studies.