Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema

Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema

Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0253015669

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini’s government that took as their subjects or settings Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship.


Cinema and Fascism

Cinema and Fascism

Author: Steven Ricci

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-02

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0520253566

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"This study considers Italian filmmaking during the Fascist era and offers an original and revealing approach to the interwar years. Steven Ricci directly confronts a long-standing dilemma faced by cultural historians: while made during a period of totalitarian government, these films are neither propagandistic nor openly "Fascist." Instead, the Italian Fascist regime attempted to build ideological consensus by erasing markers of class and regional difference and by circulating terms for an imaginary national identity. Cinema and Fascism investigates the complex relationship between the totalitarian regime and Italian cinema. It looks at the films themselves, the industry, and the role of cinema in daily life, and offers new insights into this important but neglected period in cinema history." -- Book cover.


Fascism in Film

Fascism in Film

Author: Marcia Landy

Publisher:

Published: 2014-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780691610900

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Through her study of the narrative themes and strategies of Italian commercial sound films of the fascist era, Marcia Landy shows that cultural life under fascism was not monopolized by official propaganda. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Mussolini's Dream Factory

Mussolini's Dream Factory

Author: Stephen Gundle

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-12-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1782382453

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The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference. Focused on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945, this book examines the development of an Italian star system and evaluates its place in film production and distribution. The performances and careers of several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari, and Alida Valli, are closely analyzed in terms of their relationships to the political sphere and broader commercial culture, with consideration of their fates in the aftermath of Fascism. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema.


Screen Nazis

Screen Nazis

Author: Sabine Hake

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-08-31

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0299287130

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From the late 1930s to the early twenty-first century, European and American filmmakers have displayed an enduring fascination with Nazi leaders, rituals, and symbols, making scores of films from Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Watch on the Rhine (1943) through Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1955) and Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), up to Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and beyond. Probing the emotional sources and effects of this fascination, Sabine Hake looks at the historical relationship between film and fascism and its far-reaching implications for mass culture, media society, and political life. In confronting the specter and spectacle of fascist power, these films not only depict historical figures and events but also demand emotional responses from their audiences, infusing the abstract ideals of democracy, liberalism, and pluralism with new meaning and relevance. Hake underscores her argument with a comprehensive discussion of films, including perspectives on production history, film authorship, reception history, and questions of performance, spectatorship, and intertextuality. Chapters focus on the Hollywood anti-Nazi films of the 1940s, the West German anti-Nazi films of the 1950s, the East German anti-fascist films of the 1960s, the Italian “Naziploitation” films of the 1970s, and issues related to fascist aesthetics, the ethics of resistance, and questions of historicization in films of the 1980s–2000s from the United States and numerous European countries.


Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Author: Giuliana Minghelli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1135104816

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This study argues that neorealism’s visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism’s complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema and memory. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943) Paisà (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).


Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945

Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945

Author: G. Lichtner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-05-29

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1137316624

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From neorealism's resolve to Berlusconian revisionist melodramas, this book examines cinema's role in constructing memories of Fascist Italy. Italian cinema has both reflected and shaped popular perceptions of Fascism, reinforcing or challenging stereotypes, remembering selectively and silently forgetting the most shameful pages of Italy's history.


How to Stop Fascism

How to Stop Fascism

Author: Paul Mason

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0141996412

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'For its historical depth, analytical vigour and mobilizational potential, this book is unparalleled ... every page is an urgent invitation to resist' David Lammy MP The bestselling author of PostCapitalism offers a guide to resisting the far right The far right is on the rise across the world. From Modi's India to Bolsonaro's Brazil and Erdogan's Turkey, fascism is not a horror that we have left in the past; it is a recurring nightmare that is happening again - and we need to find a better way to fight it. In How to Stop Fascism, Paul Mason offers a radical, hopeful blueprint for resisting and defeating the new far right. The book is both a chilling portrait of contemporary fascism, and a compelling history of the fascist phenomenon: its psychological roots, political theories and genocidal logic. Fascism, Mason powerfully argues, is a symptom of capitalist failure, and it has haunted us throughout the twentieth century. History shows us the conditions that breed fascism, and how it can be successfully overcome. But it is up to us in the present to challenge it, and time is running out. From the ashes of COVID-19, we have an opportunity to create a fairer, more equal society. To do so, we must ask ourselves: what kind of world do we want to live in? And what are we going to do about it?


Feminism, Film, Fascism

Feminism, Film, Fascism

Author: Susan E. Linville

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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German society's inability and/or refusal to come to terms with its Nazi past has been analyzed in many cultural works, including the well-known books Society without the Father and The Inability to Mourn. In this pathfinding study, Susan Linville challenges the accepted wisdom of these books by focusing on a cultural realm in which mourning for the Nazi past and opposing the patriarchal and authoritarian nature of postwar German culture are central concerns—namely, women's feminist auto/biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s. After a broad survey of feminist theory, Linville analyzes five important films that reflect back on the Third Reich through the experiences of women of different ages—Marianne Rosenbaum's Peppermint Peace, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother, Jutta Brückner's Hunger Years, Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane, and Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou. By juxtaposing these films with the accepted theories on German culture, Linville offers a fresh appraisal not only of the films' importance but especially of their challenge to misogynist interpretations of the German failure to grieve for the horrors of its Nazi past.


The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics

The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics

Author: Kriss Ravetto

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780816637430

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In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, and political others. This book exposes the "madness" inherent in such a course, which attests to the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical constructions from political, ideological, and moral codes. Kriss Ravetto argues that contemporary discourses using such devices actually continue unacknowledged rhetorical, moral, and visual analogies of the past. Against postwar fictional and historical accounts of World War II in which generic images of evil characterize the nazi and the fascist, Ravetto sets the more complex approach of such filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and Lina Wertmuller. Her book asks us to think deeply about what it means to say that we have conquered fascism, when the aesthetics of fascism still describe and determine how we look at political figures and global events. Book jacket.