Forgotten Images and the Geopolitics of Memory: The Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6)

Abstract

The Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–6) had a profoundly destabilising effect internationally and can be regarded as one of the events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Benito Mussolini's occupation of the country (then known as Abyssinia) was facilitated by the massive use of air power and chemical weapons – in ways that at the time were still unprecedented. Mussolini's chemical war, occurring in a country at the periphery of geopolitical spheres of interest, has remained marginal to established historical narratives, rendering it anachronistically topical to today's politics of memory. By examining two films based on archival film footage, respectively Lutz Becker's documentary The Lion of Judah, War in Ethiopia 1935–1936 (1975) and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's video work Barbaric Land ( Paese barbaro, 2013), this article considers the significance of the moving image as a trace of events that have mostly remained visually undocumented and questions its relevance vis à vis today's mediated warfare and the ethics of images.