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 Andrea Prosperetti (bio) Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. xviii + 234 pp. ISBN 0-8047-2607-8 (clothbound), 0-8047-2608-6 (paper bound). “It was the biggest fiasco in the history of international theater.” With these words the director of BL 18, the mammoth mass theater production that is the subject of this book, qualified the bitter outcome of his efforts. The man was Alessandro Blasetti, the year 1934, and the place Florence. These three elements immediately place the events at the center of a crucial juncture in the political, economic, and cultural history of fascist Italy and make this book fascinating reading for anyone interested in the time and an eye-opener for anyone—like the present writer—who has always looked on that part of his heritage with embarrassment and pain. The story begins with a speech given by Mussolini in April 1933 during the 50th anniversary congress of the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE), in which he called for an effort “to prepare a theater of masses, a theater able to accommodate 15,000 to 20,000 persons. . . . Theaters . . . must stir up the great collective passions, be inspired by a sense of intense and deep humanity, and bring to the stage that which truly counts in the life of the spirit and in human affairs. Enough with the notorious romantic ‘triangle’ that has so obsessed us to this day! The full range of triangular configurations is by now long exhausted. Find a dramatic expression for the collective’s passions and you will see the theaters packed.” As Schnapp—who is Professor of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University—aptly points out, these were not particularly original concepts. A crisis of the traditional theater had long been widely recognized throughout Europe and the first chapter of the book deals concisely with the cultural ferments prompted by this perception. Because of these circumstances, Mussolini’s speech fell on fertile terrain and was immediately followed by a flurry of debates, projects, and ideas of which 18 BL was the most accomplished example. The first impulse was due to Alessandro Pavolini, the young, flashy, and cultured federal secretary of the Florentine fascio. The future Minister of Popular Culture had been entrusted with the organization of the first Lictorial Games of Culture and Art to take place in Florence in April 1934 and he saw this display of “free, solar gymnastics of the brain” as the ideal context in which to premiere the mass theater advocated by Il Duce. In December 1933 he convened a group of eight fascist critics, playwrights, and directors at the Florence Casa del Fascio. This collective of authors was joined in late January 1934 by the movie director Blasetti—who had just completed 1860, one of the masterpieces of the time—and gave life to 18 BL. Needless to say, the spectacle was conceived as an exaltation of fascism. Its structure may have owed something to a celebratory film, Camicia Nera (Black Shirt), directed by Giovacchino Forzano and just released the previous March, that had encountered a broad success at home and abroad (where [End Page 706] over 150 copies were sold), in spite of technical deficiencies sometimes bordering on the ludicrous. The three acts of 18 BL delineated fascism’s roots in World War I, its emergence in the early post-war years, and its latest achievements in the reclamation of marshlands. Tying together these disparate events was a truck—the Fiat 18 BL model, “camion della guerra, della rivoluzione e della ricostruzione” (truck of the war, the revolution, and the reconstruction). Schnapp gives a convincing explanation of how Pavolini may have conceived the idea of a truck as protagonist: trucks as “symbols of the ‘off-road’ world of the outlaw proletariat,” as “the fascist everyman and everywoman, humble and heroic soldier carrier,” the “carroccio [the cart bearing the standard of Italian free cities in the Middle Ages] of avenging raids, troop carrier within which [fascist] songs were born.” To this one may of course...