Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses Claudia Lazzaro Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses. Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 234. Cloth, $49.50; paper, $16.95. Jeffrey Schnapp’s Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses is itself a work of spectacle, both analyzing and dramatizing its subject of Fascist mass theater. At its core is a detailed analysis of the experimental theatrical production, 18 BL, named after the first truck mass-produced by Fiat, which was the drama’s principal protagonist. The event and surrounding issues are reconstructed from journal and newspaper accounts as well as an extended interview with the sole survivor among its creators, Corrado Sofia, recorded in one of the book’s several appendices. But Staging Fascism is much more than an account of 18 BL, which leads the author on to an “inquiry into the place of media, technology, and machinery in the fascist imagination, particularly n its links to fascist models of narrative, historiography, spectacle and subjectivity” (9). Only recently have explorations of the complex relationship between fascism and modernist culture begun, and Schnapp rightly calls for more sustained engagements with fascist aesthetic artifacts” (11). His own provocative engagement employs strategies analogous to those of fascist modernism: juxtaposition, montage, correspondences, associations, and constructed histories. The title of the book derives from Mussolini’s call, in April 1933, for a fascist theater of the masses, for an audience of 20,000, to which 18 BL was a response, a theatrical performance not only performed for such a large audience, but also of the masses, a cast of thousands. Theater has been a favored art of revolutions, and the relationship with other contemporary theaters, particularly in Soviet Russia and Germany, is one of the leitmotifs of the book (whose opening line is “Moscow or Rome?”). Influences and parallels punctuate the narrative, culminating in the Volta Congress of October 1934 devoted to dramatic theater, where the international participants included Walter Gropius presenting his Total Theater (unbeknownst to the Italians, on his flight from Nazi Germany). Schnapp admits the permeability of the boundaries between “‘fascist,’ ‘socialist,’ and even sometimes ‘liberal’ modes of envisaging a theatrical revolution” (120), providing some striking comparisons, but raising questions about how to differentiate common responses to the crowds and technology of the modern world from ideologically driven innovations. In fascist Italy theater was a highly effective means of nationalizing the masses through a common culture and language, mediated by new construction materials and technologies. Traveling thespian cars brought Goldoni to the provinces; and performances of Verdi and Euripides in ancient theaters and temples in Verona, Paestum, and Siracusa, brought the masses to the classics. But a truly revolutionary theater, not just traditional theater for a wider audience, demanded also a different kind of interaction between performance and audience, and new theater structures to facilitate it and accommodate a much larger number of spectators. Schnapp demonstrates, in his text, the relationships between socialist and fascist revolutions, modernity and tradition, technology and ideology, human and mechanical bodies, through the artful selection and juxtaposition of contemporary photographs: a Bolshevik crowd, Italian soldiers in formation, and a photomontage of heads of Mussolini; the steel armature of a thespian car under construction and the columns of the ancient temple of Paestum; the Italian engineer Gaetano Ciocca’s model of his Soviet-inspired massive theater and the design of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret for a vast auditorium; a truck entering the first page of text and military wagons veering off the page at the end of the book. The illustrations [End Page 171] are not referred to or analyzed in the text; they parallel, complement, and rival the text, even literally underlying it, where text is printed over pale images. For example, in the discussion of the aesthetic of discipline in the new mass society and its theatrical representation, the contemporary text praising the beauty of the “collective gymnastic exercise” is literally mapped onto a photograph of a line-up of girl athletes (35), reversed and cropped from its later appearance (62). Schnapp exploits such juxtapositions of words...