Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945

Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945 PDF

Author: G. Lichtner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-05-29

Total Pages: 262

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.

Re-viewing Fascism

Re-viewing Fascism PDF

Author: Jacqueline Reich

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2002-05-07

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780253109149

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When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.

Cinema and Fascism

Cinema and Fascism PDF

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.

Mussolini's Dream Factory

Mussolini's Dream Factory PDF

Author: Stephen Gundle

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-12-30

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.

Fascist Modernities

Fascist Modernities PDF

Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-03

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0520242165

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This cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship discusses the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. The work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past.

Fascism and Resistance in Italian Cinema

Fascism and Resistance in Italian Cinema PDF

Author: DOMINIC. GAVIN

Publisher:

Published: 2019-08-28

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9781789015744

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Italian cinema is one of this country's postwar success stories; the memory of Fascism one of its ongoing challenges. This book proposes to read these two stories together, looking at the treatment of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship in a series of works by Italian filmmakers. The work of Italian directors has much to tell us about the ways in which the memory of the Italian dictatorship was processed by postwar society. The focus on the 1970s, when a climate of political instability made fascism a theme charged with contemporary relevance for postwar society. Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernado Bertolucci were among the directors whose films participated in the re-evaliation of the years of dictatorship in the wake of the late 1960s. These films returned to a historical period which had been elided from collective memory, at a time when fascism and antifascism were also key terms in the political debate. The work of these filmmakers is revealing not only for what it tells us about postwar perceptions of Fascism, but the ways in which democratic society and its values were defined in opposition to the memory of Mussolini's rule.

Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City

Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City PDF

Author: Sidney Gottlieb

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-06-14

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780521545198

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Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City instantly, markedly, and permanently changed the landscape of film history. Made at the end of World War II, it has been credited with initiating a revolution in and reinvention of modern cinema, bold claims that are substantiated when its impact on how films are conceptualized, made, structured, theorized, circulated, and viewed is examined. This volume offers a fresh look at the production history of Rome Open City; some of its key images, and particularly its representation of the city and various types of women; its cinematic influences and affinities; the complexity of its political dimensions, including the film's vision of political struggle and the political uses to which the film was put; and the legacy of the film in public consciousness. It serves as a well illustrated, up to date, and accessible introduction to one of the major achievements of filmmaking.

Italian Fascism

Italian Fascism PDF

Author: R.J.B. Bosworth

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1349272450

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Bringing together scholars from the Italian and English-speaking worlds, Bosworth and Dogliani's edited book reviews the history of the memory and representation of Fascism after 1945. Ranging in their study from patriotic monuments to sado-masochistic films, the essays here collected ask how and why and when Mussolini's dictatorship mattered after the event, and so provide a fascinating study of the relationship between a traumatic past and the changing present and future.

Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz

Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz PDF

Author: Millicent Joy Marcus

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 080209189X

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Throughout the book, Marcus brings a variety of perspectives to bear on the question of how Italian filmmakers are confronting the Holocaust, and why now given the sparse output of Holocaust films produced in Italy from 1945 to the early 1990s.

Global Neorealism

Global Neorealism PDF

Author: Saverio Giovacchini

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2011-10-11

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1628468882

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Contributions by Nathaniel Brennan, Luca Caminati, Silvia Carlorosi, Caroline Eades, Saverio Giovacchini, Paula Halperin, Neepa Majumdar, Mariano Mestman, Hamid Naficy, Sada Niang, Masha Salazkina, Sarah Sarzynski, Robert Sklar, and Vito Zagarrio Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period and aimed at recovering the reality of Italy after the sugarcoated moving images of fascism. Lasting from 1945 to the early 1950s, neorealism produced world-renowned masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1947). These films won some of the most prestigious film awards of the immediate postwar period and influenced world cinema. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism. The traditional story notwithstanding, the meaning and the origins of the term are problematic. What does neorealism really mean, and how Italian is it? Italian filmmakers were wary of using the term and Rossellini preferred "realism." Many filmmakers confessed to having greatly borrowed from other cinemas, including French, Soviet, and American. Divided into three sections, Global Neorealism examines the history of this film style from the 1930s to the 1970s using a global and international perspective. The first section examines the origins of neorealism in the international debate about realist esthetics in the 1930s. The second section discusses how this debate about realism was “Italianized” and coalesced into Italian “neorealism” and explores how critics and film distributors participated in coining the term. Finally, the third section looks at neorealism’s success outside of Italy and examines how film cultures in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States adjusted the style to their national and regional situations.