Sounding Fascism in Cinema

Abstract

Technological innovations bring change and unpredictability, redefine sensory perception, motor ability, and cultural horizons, modes and ways of acting and interacting, they require the development of new knowledge and skills which are implemented in turn in the socio historical context of their advent and progress: technologies are absorbed into and modify human social systems, becoming part of the environment which forms our thought, actions and creativity. Cultural and technological reciprocity is a fundamental issue in the history of modernity. A significant cultural historical coincidence in modern Italian society is that the much-anticipated sound revolution came to cinema when cinema came to the careful attention of the fascist Regime in charge of the life of the nation. Situating the advent of sound cinema in its given social and political moment allows us to consider the developing modalities and specificities of the new cinematic apparatus, now made of images and sounds. There is something like a universalized history of the emergence of sound cinema, which I will consider from a national perspective, and there are a few general studies concerning film censorship during Fascism, which I will explore in relation to sound cinema. My main interest is to focus attention on the interrelation and significance of the coming of cinematic sound technology in the national case of fascist Italy, and how it has played out politically and aesthetically during Fascism and in the post-fascist neo-realist cinema and beyond.KeywordsForeign LanguageNational LanguageItalian LanguageFilmic RepresentationForeign WordThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.