Barely Alive

The importance of the seas for European totalitarianisms usually goes unacknowledged, possibly because the recognition of water as the fundamental element for Nazi Fascism would also require recognizing colonialism as a driving force of modern history. As philosopher Carl Schmitt explains in his 1942 Land and Sea—a world history in the form of a tale written for his eleven-year-old daughter—World War II can be interpreted in many regards as the culmination of the conflicts over colonial territories and resources that had started with the European settling of the Americas five hundred years earlier.11 Dominating the world’s waters meant not only controlling global trade but also regulating access to the colonies with their raw materials and expendable labor power: this is why Hitler and Mussolini were invested in the seas and shared the aspiration of turning their countries into naval superpowers. As far as Italian totalitarianism was concerned, the regime’s project was to challenge the British hegemony over the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, taking over Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, and the Bab al-Mandab Strait in East Africa to control the routes connecting Europe to the Pacific Ocean and the Americas as well as to the Indian Ocean and Asia. Significantly, these plans for marine dominance were severed from the long tradition of European extractive and settler colonialism to which they belonged and were instead sensationalized as a matter of life and death.

Foucault famously commented that under biopolitics, wars are waged “on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life.”12 Fascism’s wars are no exception. Italy’s anticommunist repression, the coup, the invasion of Ethiopia, and then the entrance into the war were mediated not as acts of violence but rather as struggles for survival—as the efforts of real Italian people to secure for themselves and for other threatened races the resources they needed to live on. The fight against improper national bodies who spoiled Italy’s spiritual and physical welfare with their foreign dispositions was already underway; now was the time to wage war against the United Kingdom, the great sea monster that could easily starve the nation’s biological body by means of maritime blockades and economic chokeholds. As David Rodogno argues, the expansionistic impetus of 1930s Fascism was a direct emanation of the regime’s original political biology.13 The regime’s melodramatic imperialism and its racial health concerns were structurally and chiasmatically intertangled—one had to dominate the world to allow the Italian race to be great again, and one had to make the Italian race great again so to allow it to dominate the world. This entanglement of victimhood and imperialism is the centerpiece of the speech that Mussolini gave to the Grand Council of Fascism in 1939.14

In this highly affected intervention, Mussolini emphasized that only countries that could sail unbothered around the world were truly free. Italy was thus imprisoned, not only because it lacked access to the oceans but also because the fascist nation was surrounded by virtual enemies such as Malta, Cyprus, and Greece, which were ready to form a “chain” with England and suffocate Italy. Given the imminent calamity emerging from the Mediterranean Sea, the nation had no alternative but to strike back and reclaim what ancient Romans had dubbed Mare Nostrum: a march toward the oceans was the natural extension of the fight in defense of Italian life that Fascism had launched with the March on Rome. Yet Mussolini was aware that the nation was very skeptical about the viability of a war. Thus in his speech to the Grand Council, he also reassured the hierarchs that he had already directed the propaganda machine to emphasize how vital a conflict against Great Britain was for Italy’s very survival. And Italian cinema did indeed stir the waters, supporting the projection that it was the British presence in the waters that surrounded the Blackshirt ethno-nation—not Fascism—that was endangering Italians.

Luigi Pensuti’s Dr. ChurKill (1941), a six-minute animated newsreel inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is possibly the most obvious and ugly manifestation of the self-exonerating rhetoric that Fascism relied on to emotionally manipulate Italians into war making. In 1941, Süss the Jew was released in Italy, and Dr. ChurKill relies on similar antisemitic tropes to portray England as the puppet master of a global conspiracy against humanity. In Pensuti’s cartoon, whose title strikingly resonates with the infamous “Killary” Clinton moniker of yesterday’s United States, the Bank of England is depicted as a great spider with gigantic tentacles that extend to faraway seas, and Winston Churchill is represented as a monstrous shape-shifting creature with thick dark skin, a sinister grin, clawed hands, and an avarice for gold. This monster conceals its true colors by transforming itself into a white progressive democrat and pretending to help people in need. The modern-day golem travels from place to place—from factories to the Suez Canal to oil fields—scavenging for profit and exploiting “other races’ hard work,” to use the voice-over’s own terms. But its time has come: Blackshirt squads have exposed the creature and are hunting it down. Dr. ChurKill ends with bombs over London, a triumph of doves taking over the frame, and English flags disappearing from the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East, and Africa. As the voice-over concludes, twinning biology and politics, only when the heinous emblem of exploitation is eradicated will life on earth bloom again.

Dr. ChurKill was produced by the Industria Cortometraggi Milano (INCOM, Industry for Short Films Milan)—an entity created in 1938 with the function of exploring new ways of engaging with the public since the LUCE newsreel model was getting worn out. While Pensuti’s cartoon blended political satire with national-racial exaggeration to make an impact on the spectators, a more subtle take on aquatic domination characterizes another INCOM production: Rossellini’s directorial debut Fantasia sottomarina (Underwater Fantasy, 1940). In this short film, Rossellini mixes sequences from Roberto Omegna’s naturalist documentary Uno sguardo al fondo marino (Gaze on the Seafloor, 1936) with original footage shot in his home aquarium to tell a story akin to Finding Nemo. A young porgy ventures away from his den to meet up with his love interest, but he is attacked by an octopus. Two morays come to the assistance of this small fish in the big ocean, yet they cannot do much against the long, strong arms of the predator. The porgy mobilizes an army of allies in the fight against the predator, and this multispecies water community, united, is able to defeat the common enemy.

The camera, from behind the aquarium glass, mimics the flow of life at sea, which can go from tranquil to hectic in a matter of seconds. The score punctuates the action, and montage is used both to anthropomorphize the animals and to heighten the affective import of the film. Fantasia sottomarina also has an important haptic and immersive quality: when the octopus attacks his prey, he pins it to the aquarium’s walls—pushing it toward the camera’s lens and taking over the frame with his tentacles. Moving toward the camera, the octopus is also moving in the direction of the spectator, who is made to occupy the position of the prey. As we see the octopus coming at us through water that the fight has made murky and viscous, we can almost feel its tentacles extending from the screen to the skin, smothering us (Figure 20).

To film this short, Rossellini filled dead fish with lead and manipulated them with strings, like puppets. For the battle scenes, he threw live octopuses, morays, lobsters, and fish in the small tank—turning their struggle for their lives into a macabre spectacle for the human public. Approached through the lens of ecocriticism and posthumanism, Fantasia sottomarina is in all regards a snuff film. More than a love for the ocean and for nature, more than an appreciation for the precarity of life or an interest in alterity, what moves Rossellini in his debut is the will to experiment: experiment with what he can make a body do for the camera but also—as Giuliana Minghelli argues—to experiment with how film forms can be used to move spectators’ bodies.15 Whereas directors such as Omegna and Jean Painlevé were committed to the cinematographic apparatus as a means of exploring the mesmerizing beauty of underwater life, Rossellini—closer to Walt Disney, as Luca Caminati aptly concludes—was more interested in exploiting nature and film techniques to construct captivating moral parables.16 In the final instance, then, what is the moral of the story being told by Fantasia sottomarina?

It is the story of the ominous creatures in our waters and of the violence they are capable of; it is the story of a peaceful and diverse community that is victimized by a terrible monster but that comes together to defeat it. One must agree with Enrique Seknadje-Askénazi that this story, although not manifestly political, does not exist in an ideological vacuum. As Jameson reminds us, we must always historicize. Thus Rossellini’s short cannot and should not be abstracted from the larger historical context of war, empire building, and anti-British fearmongering in which it is couched.17 The very fact that Rossellini’s debut short was produced by the same entity that delivered Dr. ChurKill suggests that Fantasia sottomarina also constituted an effort to find new ways to mobilize the people—to eschew LUCE’s explicit geopolitical lessons and move the population by triggering inarticulate bad feelings in regard to the sea, feelings that stuck with the viewers much like the suckers of an octopus’s tentacles.

A similar attempt to incorporate anxiety in the Mediterranean seascape and use embodied sensations to stir up the people to war also characterizes Navy captain Francesco De Robertis’s first feature film, Uomini sul fondo, for the newly established Centro Cinematografico del Ministero della Marina (Navy Ministry Film Center). This film not only manifests a decisive shift in the aesthetic and affective registers deployed by Italian feature film in support of Fascism but also showcases most clearly cinema’s power to contribute to political history and governmental processes through seemingly apolitical chronicles of human lives in distress. Realism has been praised in film theory (I am thinking especially of Bazin and Roland Barthes) for its capacity to punctuate our consciousness, to make us feel for the fragile bodies and lives that the camera exposes to our gaze. Uomini sul fondo is an important cautionary tale of how feelings like love and empathy, once they are enmeshed with existential fear, can turn ugly and be easily weaponized for the worst.

In an article from 1948, renowned film journalist Guido Aristarco criticized De Robertis’s war cinema for its incapacity to bring into focus the enemy against which Italy was fighting. De Robertis responded that that the enemy was the sea itself. This response should not be dismissed, as it bears witness to the director’s project to depoliticize and naturalize the war, to turn Fascism’s belligerency into something that has to do with the elements, the environment, and bare life rather than with geopolitics and the appropriation of resources.18 Leaving global history and politics off-frame, Uomini sul fondo scales back the field of vision and zooms in on fragile Italian bodies, so as to convey the atmosphere for a body politic on the brink without having to also explicitly embrace a political project or ideology. The film’s visual and narrative focus on Italian soldiers running out of air effectively harnesses what Peter Sloterdijk dubs “atmo-terror”: the sensation that our very environment—the air, water, and soil, the very conditions necessary for the bare survival of organic life—is under attack.19 One of the first times atmo-terrorism manifested itself in human history was in 1935, when Italian planes launched gas attacks against Ethiopian soldiers and civilians (including women and children) to annihilate the country’s obstinate resistance to the fascist invasion. With this in mind, it is especially exploitative that Uomini sul fondo—which De Robertis consciously planned as a film d’atmosfera, an “atmospheric film”—appropriates the experience of airlessness to mediate bodily excesses that obfuscate the truths of fascist history and start giving Italians and the regime a new body, a new identity.20

Uomini sul fondo features the A103, an Italian submarine involved in a prewar exercise. Submarines were already used as prime offensive and defensive weapons in World War I, and their strategic importance in the new conflict increased radically, given their increased autonomy and their ability to trespass into territorial waters undetected. The drill depicted in the film requires spending as much time as possible submerged, to put the structural solidity of the boats to the test but also to allow the sailors—and the public with them—to develop resilience to the pressures that are coming. The A103 is pushing things to the limit.

The camera moves through the restricted environment, and a long lateral pan reviews the crew. We notice class differences between soldiers of different ranks but also the differences in their accents, facial features, skin tones, and body types. Yet, bringing together these different Italians through editing and camera movements, Uomini sul fondo connects all the people on board and conveys the feeling of a diverse but compact racial totality. De Robertis’s uomini (men) are not mascalzoni (scoundrels); they are not excessive beings, they are not to be formed or re-formed. The way that they are framed conveys the sense of bodies that fit in perfectly. And it is particularly important in this regard that these bodies are not even “fictional”: the cast is composed exclusively of real Navy operatives playing themselves. What we see projected on the big screen are thus the disciplined lives that fascist totalitarianism has supposedly made: suffering in silence but proud of their social roles and subject positions. De Robertis showcases the perfect synchronism between flesh and technology, organic matter and steel, focusing especially on the militarized bodies’ capacity to interact and communicate with the submarine’s apparatuses.21 But these bodies are also fragile and exposed to the elements, notwithstanding the iron cocoon enframing them and the technologies augmenting their abilities. Close-ups and medium shots convey the stress that these men are experiencing: the fatigue and the hunger are obvious in their dull eyes and furrowed brow; the absolute silence on board—broken only by the crew’s sighs and moans, the shrill metallic noise of the submarine’s fuselage under pressure, and white noise coming from the radio—is haunting.

All the submarines have returned to the base; only the A103 is still out there. After sixty hours, the captain finally gives the order to surface. The men are starved and air is so scarce that the sailors are experiencing early signs of paralysis and blindness: a POV shot makes the public experience the sailors’ loss of vision through their eyes. As it is preparing to surface, the A103 is hit by a steamer and sinks to the seabed, turning its operatives into the titular “uomini sul fondo” (men on the bottom). Water, food, and air are already scarce—and the impact has damaged some internal circuits, such that fluoride gas is pouring into the submarine’s compartments, transforming the machine from a protective shell into a gas chamber and death casket. The heat is unbearable. The sailors take off their uniforms to get some relief (Figure 21). By stripping these bodies down and staging them as bare lives, De Robertis turns fascist soldiers into mere human beings. But these lives in danger, these men on the bottom we are made to care for and identify with, are not simply men. As Alexander Weheliye reminds in his scathing critique of Agamben’s work as color-blind and hence implicitly discriminatory, bare lives do not exist under racial capitalism; there are only and always specific forms of living that are gendered and raced according to the urgencies of the capitalist-colonial order.22 Thus the naked bodies from De Robertis’s film ought to be recognized as the bearers of a violent history and an imperial enterprise that Uomini sul fondo, through its surplus of pathos and embodied sensations, works hard to exorcise and keep off scene—implicitly recognizing them as obscene.

The Italian Navy promptly comes to the rescue of the submarine and of the brave Italian seamen who now, pinned on the sea floor, cannot breathe. All the rescue efforts are futile. The lever that is stuck can only be released from inside a chamber totally saturated with toxic gasses. The courageous stoker Leandri—who had almost lost the use of his hand during the drill due to carbon monoxide poisoning—sacrifices his life for the greater good. After having secured the survival of his crewmates and of the precious war machine, he collapses.

A POV shot lets the viewers experience Leandri’s last moments. Before drawing his last breath, he catches a glimpse of a sign attached to the submarine’s wall that reads, “I am proud of you.” Leandri finds consolation in this message of approval, whose “I” is implicitly but obviously Mussolini, and can die content in knowing that he is making the Dux but also his people proud by sacrificing his life. After living through the breathless and exhilarating experience of being on the bottom, the public, too, can enjoy a much-awaited climactic rise. The rhythmic alternation between Leandri dying and the submarine being ejected to the surface, emerging into the open through a cloud of white foam, welcomed by the jubilation of the men and boats involved in the rescue operation, allows the spectatorial body to partake in the dual pleasures of being a national hero and of being saved.

The viewers travel from the water to the land, from the submarine to the base, from the maritime abyss to the surface, and then to the humble dinner tables where families are holding their breath for the sailors and the churches where prayers are said for them. By means of montage, De Robertis not only indissolubly links the sea to the nation’s soil, staging the Mediterranean as an integral part of Italy. In assembling civilian and military spaces so tightly together, he also erases the boundaries between war and peace. The opening intertitle of Uomini sul fondo announces that the privilege experienced by “gli uomini dei sottomarini” (literally, the submarines’ men) consists in the fact that U-boat crews cannot distinguish between “life in peace” and “life at war.” But in putting us in their position, by making us feel what it is like to be in a sunken submarine—running out of air, dying from the heat, at the mercy of an unforgiving environment, unwavering, ready to do whatever it takes to protect one’s country and one’s people—the film grants the public the same privilege. It is Italy as a whole, as one nation and one body politic, as one united race, that is pinned on the bottom and gasping for air. De Robertis’s cinema works metonymically. The suffocating bodies that Uomini sul fondo features are not metaphors for a country strangled by economic tariffs. They belong to the same organic totality as the viewers, to an organism that is lacking the breathing space it needs to survive. Their vulnerability is thus our vulnerability, because the sea that is causing their death is also causing our death—given the enemies circling the peninsula and infesting our waters. Instead of showing war, De Robertis evokes for the viewers what is like to be in it. Because the actors are actual Navy operatives, viewers at the time of the film’s release knew that these bodies pretending to suffer and to die were bodies now at war to ensure everyone’s safety; they were bodies that might have experienced in reality what they were pretending to experience in the film. Some of them might never come back home, might be forever stuck at the bottom of the sea it was so vital to police, patrol, and control to guarantee a bright future for the fascist ethno-nation. As the song chanted by the sailors in distress makes explicit: on the bottom of the sea one dreams, but one can also die.

Uomini sul fondo features extensive use of Guglielmo Marconi’s radio towers and Antonio Meucci’s telephone buoys, and in one scene an Italian mother is able to use a radio-telephone bridge to talk with her son, who is stranded in the submarine. In featuring the role that these new Italian technologies have in connecting lives, connecting localities, De Robertis positions his own cinema in the same genealogy of technologized nation building. Through editing, Uomini sul fondo builds a shared national experience characterized by the fear of subalternity and death—thus it shapes a victimized “us.” It also maps the spaces that need to fall under Italian rule in order for us to stop being at the bottom and without resources to live on. In the film’s final sequence, the A103 submarine finally cruises away, with an Italian flag raised at half-mast on its fin, accompanied by an army of battleships paying tribute to it. Once its silhouette has exited the frame, exposing the calm, open sea to our gaze, a message appears from the luminous horizon: “To the memory of the men who never resurfaced from the depths of the SEA in order for it to be OURS.” As all the other words fade, we are left to read “MARE NOSTRO,” our sea, superimposed over the Italian flag.

It is Gabriele D’Annunzio who popularized the expression used by the ancient Romans to name the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into a watchword for Italy’s colonial ambitions. The infamous motto is featured in the “proemio” of his La nave (The Ship, 1908), a tragic play set in 552 CE that celebrates Venice’s rise as a united imperial power.23 The beginning of La nave is actually a flash-forward. From the ship where a common homeland for all Venetians is established, an order is given: “Arm the prow and set sail toward the world.” A prayer is then raised: May God bless the sailors who drowned and protect those crossing the seas; may the Lord “turn all the Oceans into the Mare Nostro.” Uomini sul fondo appropriates the prayer but represses the connection between the urgency to appropriate the globe’s seas and Italy’s project of world domination. In this way, in sync with Fascism’s melodramatic imperialism, De Robertis can redeploy the reclamation of the Mediterranean as a matter of self-preservation. Let us not forget that Uomini sul fondo went into production a few months after Mussolini’s address to the Grand Council of Fascism, where the Duce emphasized the need to persuade the nation of the vital necessity of turning the Mediterranean into an Italian sea, to make it belong to us again.

But “us” who? Who is the “us” of which Mussolini speaks? Who are these Italians to whom the Mediterranean would belong?

Seascapes of Racial Exceptionalism

At first sight and against phenotypical evidence, the “Manifesto della razza” of 1938 unequivocally affirmed that Italians were Aryan, that is, white.24 In reality, this intervention, which was authored by Italian scientists and paved the way for the promulgation of the Racial Laws, is fraught with all sorts of tensions in regard to Italy’s relation to whiteness. At play in the “Manifesto” is a sort of racial exceptionalism that simultaneously grafts fascist Italy onto white Europe and severs the two. The distinction between “big races and small races”—more general (“maggiori,” major) and more specific (“minori,” minor) ways of taxonomizing human masses—in fact allows the document to posit that although Italians are indeed Aryans in a generic sense, it would be more precise to identify them as Mediterraneans. As Claudio Fogu argues, through the authorizing category of “Aryanism,” the “Manifesto” biologically elevated Italians to the rank of white people, drawing Italy closer to Germany and establishing uncrossable race lines separating them from both Jewish Italians and Black colonial subjects.25 But through the reference to the Mediterranean, the document distinguished Italian whiteness from majoritarian European whiteness and reconnected Italians with the history of minoritized peoples from the Global South—a history that was first one of civilization and culture and then became a history of subalternity, exploitation, suffering, and subjection. Notwithstanding the regime’s embrace of Aryanism in the aftermath of the alliance with Hitler, Giuseppe Sergi’s thesis on Mediterranean supremacy in world history remained the racial horizon proper to fascist Italy. In the regime’s imaginary, the Roman Mediterranean was the cradle of Western civilization, and the crises that the West was experiencing were the result of the very race that had birthed Europe being put down and held back. Superior insofar as biologically Aryan but historically minoritized as nonwhite races were, Italy could pose as the liberator of all oppressed peoples and claim a hegemonic position in the Mediterranean region and beyond—to once again show humanity the way forward.

The corpo-realism in Uomini sul fondo was praised in postwar criticism for its apolitical, objective, uncompromising, immediate representation of the human element of war—a notable anticipation of neorealist aesthetics and ethics. Scholars as distant as Bazin and Brunetta, among others, not only overlook the film’s heavy formalism and overblown pathos.26 They also miss how its melodramatic focus on bodies in danger, on bodies to be saved, overwhelms geopolitical history and gives substance to the fantasy of Italy’s racial exceptionalism. Whereas the Italian technology and ingenuity showcased in the film attest to the nation’s intellectual primacy—its “white” mind—the character displayed by its people bears witness to Italy’s big, warm, pacific, southern heart. Mussolini’s large chest and imperial jawline are perspicuously absent from Uomini sul fondo, which is instead populated by the caring gazes and reassuring features of an ordinary Italy concerned with the destiny of its sons, of real officers contemplating the destiny of their men, and of real sailors reflecting on the destiny of the puppy they have on board. In humanizing Italy and Fascism’s war machine, De Robertis ultimately reracializes the fascist nation into a good people who are not gearing up to take over the world but are just trying to survive.

La nave bianca, De Robertis and Rossellini’s 1941 film for the Navy Ministry Film Center, expands on this operation and deploys color to further embody the presumed difference between a predatory, parasitic, violent whiteness (the major whiteness of the North and of the world’s colonial superpowers) and Italy’s whiteness (the minor Mediterranean whiteness that was the exclusive prerogative of Italians). De Robertis’s solo feature had stripped its soldiers down to hide the continuity between the regime’s ambition to appropriate the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and Europe’s colonial history, on the other. La nave bianca instead dresses the fascist war machine in a blinding white, and through its army of white-clothed doctors, nurses, and injured soldiers, it identifies Italian whiteness as the whiteness of victims and caregivers. With this film, Italian masculinity especially changes its skin.

Italian men are no longer the master race that, in splendid desert whites, proves its superiority by killing Black lives, as in Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco (The White Squadron, 1936) or Goffredo Alessandrini’s Luciano Serra, pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938, with Rossellini as assistant director). Italians are now a victim race that might soon see its coastline violated. Samuel Agbamu rightly points out that the status of the Mediterranean shifts in the fascist imaginary as Italy’s involvement in the war develops.27 The Mediterranean ceases to be a space to be traversed to reach the much-coveted colonial realm, as it was, for instance, in Blasetti’s Alderbaran from 1935. It instead becomes an unsecured boundary through which Italy’s mortal enemies are creeping into the ethno-nation. La nave bianca feeds into Fascism’s victim mentality and supports its melodramatic imperialism by featuring a crossed Mediterranean instead of Mediterranean crossings.

As with Uomini sul fondo, La nave bianca opens with an intertitle assuring viewers that all the characters in the film are real people playing themselves and captured in the reality of their daily occupations, emotions, and humanity. Here, however, the people featured are both men and women. As Maria Antonietta Macciocchi suggests in her groundbreaking 1970s research on women under Blackshirt rule, the film’s commitment to a more diverse representation of Italians doing their jobs is not informed by a desire for realism or inclusivity.28 In order to reproduce itself, Fascism relied on toxic forms of masculinity and femininity. Thus, by prominently featuring women, La nave bianca specifies the work that the two genders had to take up within the new context of war and naturalizes caregiving as women’s destiny. In this regard, the romantic subplot in the film might be read in connection with its effort to engage with women, as a more diverse range of emotions and sensations is deployed here to appeal to a diverse audience. Among the different body genres discussed by Williams, the sentimental drama—“the weepie”—is as a matter of fact the guilty pleasure traditionally associated with women’s cinematic consumption.

We are at war, but the sailors aboard the Italian Navy’s majestic battleship can enjoy some well-deserved time off. They write to their madrine di guerra, young women serving the country as soldiers’ pen pals, to keep their spirits high. Some letters, the sailors hint, border on erotica. The stoker Augusto Basso’s letters to Elena Fondi, an elementary school teacher, are different. They are in love and will meet soon in Taranto, where Basso’s ship is deployed. Elena will recognize her marinaretto (little sailor) thanks to the white carnation—a symbol of pure love—he will be wearing. Just as Basso is about to disembark, duty calls. Renzo Rossellini’s score changes from romantic to bellicose. Enemy ships have been spotted in Italian waters, terribly close to the Adriatic coastline, and need to be pushed back. Elena is at the port when Basso’s ships sails off to combat. She sobs and she salutes. She understands that the homeland is at risk and that Italian men’s job is to keep national soil free from foreign bodies.

During the clashes—reproduced by mixing original reenactments, newsreel footage, and sequences from the Navy training film I gas di guerra sul mare (War Gases on the Sea, 1934)—many sailors are maimed. Bloody gashes, broken arms, bandages, burn marks: La nave bianca morbidly emphasizes the effects of war on the flesh of our boys, who at the beginning of the film were introduced as so lovable and affable. Basso is in especially bad shape. He has been blinded by a gush of toxic gasses and needs to undergo emergency surgery. By cross-cutting between combat scenes and the medical intervention on Basso, La nave bianca conjures a synergy between war and medicine, warriors and doctors: in both cases, it is a matter of curing a vulnus—of healing an open wound. Through binoculars, we see looming on the horizon the British ships infesting our sea, paralyzing our traffic, compromising our ability to move, and preventing us access to what we need to assure our bare survival. They are the geopolitical vulnus that is causing so much pain, and in the same ways that our soldiers’ injuries need to be sutured, the Mediterranean ought to be sealed, because it is only when this vulnerable body of water is secured that Italian bodies and the Italian body politic will stop hurting. The mighty weaponry of the Italian Navy does its job: the enemies withdraw behind smoke screens. The doctors’ hard work pays off as well: the intervention on Basso is successful. He is safe but still in bad shape: his innocent body wrapped in white shroud, Basso is evacuated to a hospital vessel—the eponymous white ship—to fully recover (Figure 22).

On the Arno, he finds his injured crewmates but also some Nazi soldiers, who are jolly good fellows as well. In a choral scene that speaks to the film’s connection with the racial laws’ efforts to bring Nazism and Fascism closer together, we see Italian and German war operatives on the ship’s deck, singing the same tune, each in their native tongue, and recovering together under the warm Mediterranean sun. Taking care of them is an army of volunteer nurses from the Red Cross—among whom is Elena, who has taken a leave of absence from her job as a teacher to serve Italy and its sons in a manner befitting the country’s national emergency. The woman recognizes Basso by the medal he is still wearing but decides not to reveal her identity. Elena did not play favorites with her pupils; now that she is a crocerossina (Red Cross nurse), she cannot afford to love any man in a special way. It is notable that in a film that works so hard to suppress the aspirations informing the fascist investment in the Mediterranean, characters hide their identities and desires as well—as if to emphasize the necessity of repression for the greater good. After recovering his sight, Basso recognizes Elena as well but accepts that this is not the time for romance. While sentimental dramas are characterized by the temporality of the “too late,” this racial melodrama mobilizes the time of the “not now, not yet.” National security comes first, and romantic love needs to be deferred to an unspecified time to come. The patriotic love to which romance must be subordinated, however, comes with its own form of enjoyment.

At the end of La nave bianca, Basso’s warship returns to port from the combat zone after successfully warding off the enemies. Basso rises from his sickbed and is joined by Elena, who supports and embraces him. Together, they passionately gaze at the battleship’s homecoming. In a medium shot, the camera frames their ecstatic faces, literally illuminated by the appearance in the sickbay’s porthole of the majestic Italian battleship and its phallic arsenal (Figure 23). Sexual enjoyment gives way to the ecstasy of patriotism, as tears of fascist jouissance mark Basso’s and Elena’s patriotic eyes.

The camera then moves forward, into a close-up on the red cross on Elena’s white uniform, voiding the screen, as Ben-Ghiat notes, “of all reference to surrounding reality.”29 A cross-fade leads to the film’s final dedication: “To the stoic sufferings and to the resolute faith of the wounded of all armed forces. To the silent abnegation of those who soften their suffering and nurture their faith.” Not only does this homage confirm the essential woundedness of the Italian body politic and the gendered division of labor that La nave bianca so prominently features; it has an additional performative value. The film reminds the public of their options ahead: either assume the position of men and fight; or adopt women’s quiet support for the armed forces’ efforts, taking care of the fragile, precious bodies of those who risk their lives for the survival of the Italian race.

After Mussolini’s downfall, Rossellini downplayed his involvement in La nave bianca by pointing out that he did not figure in the credits of the film. Neither does De Robertis: both Uomini sul fondo and La nave bianca are presented as developed and directed by the Navy Ministry Film Center. On other occasions, he would blame the regime for having altered and softened his brutal gaze on war by introducing the romantic subplot between Basso and Elena.30 Against the grain of such self-excusing forgetfulness, it is now well documented that Rossellini was well aware of the romantic subplot of La nave bianca, since it was an integral part of De Robertis’s original treatment. Moreover, it is precisely in the second half of the film—in the “romantic” segment—that Rossellini’s touch becomes evident. Ben-Ghiat argues: “Elena, a carrier of rectitude and charity as well as a love interest, is a prototype for characters in later Rossellini films.”31 And in many regards, La nave bianca truly constitutes a prototypical film for Rossellini: this work is rife with themes and stylistic choices Rossellini returned to throughout his career. The presence of pain in the world, the importance of care, the tension between private love and public urgencies—these motives are all constant in Rossellini’s oeuvre. Additionally, the graphic representation of suffering bodies and the admiration for the people attending to them are common features in Rossellini: the stylistic and ideological distance between La nave bianca and Rossellini’s “democratic” films might then be shorter than is usually acknowledged. In Rossellini, it is always the presence of evil in the world that makes painful deaths unavoidable facts of life. The specificity of La nave bianca lies in its representation of evil as a transgression of a nation’s natural borders and the borders themselves as extending, nearly infinitely, past the horizon of the mare nostrum. It is important in this regard that the film’s British ships withdraw from sight but are not gone. They are there, behind smoke screens, threatening with their invasive presence the very existence of Italy and of Italians. Thus, with fright being turned into an integral element of the national environment, the racial geopolitical anxiety harnessed by the film asks, “How far is far enough?”: how far will the British ships have to be pushed back, but also how far will the fascist war machine have to go—literally and metaphorically—for the Italian race to be really safe? It is this experience of the Italian sea and of what lurks on the horizon for the country that allows La nave bianca to spin Italian expansionism as a righteous act of self-defense, to stop the hurting. Ben-Ghiat reads the film’s general iconography as a manifestation of that Christian humanism, that empathy for human suffering, which will also be the mark of Rossellini’s celebrated postwar works. Yet humanism is precisely the alibi that makes the film’s affective justification of fascist war-waging so effective.

The problem with Rossellini’s humanism here and elsewhere, a problem that the field of film studies has been unwilling to acknowledge, is that the director’s emphatic appreciation of the vulnerability and sanctity of life is not as innocent as it presents itself to be. Since it is only specific lives, bodies, and identities that are actually depicted as being in danger and thus in need of protection and care, Rossellini’s humanistic stance makes matter only certain lives, which are staged as tokens of human life in itself: the enemies of a particular historical form of life are in this way mediated as threats to human life itself. But this is a more general problem with how Western humanism works: on the one hand, it purports to care for the interests of humanity as a whole; on the other, it cannot but establish that some are more human and humane than others, and thus that one needs to do whatever it takes to protect this exemplary humanity from what Naoki Sakai has dubbed “the Rest.”32 In the case of La nave bianca, the ideal humanity mediated as being under attack and in need of protection is fascist humanity, and this leads De Robertis and Rossellini to implicitly demonize fascist Italy’s enemies as enemies of humanity and to explicitly romanticize the regime as the life force whose exclusive preoccupation is humanity’s well-being. How can humanity live on if the most human of the human races, the race that birthed civility and Western humanity, dies out? In consideration of the discriminatory thrust of white humanism, Aimé Césaire famously concluded that the “West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.”33 The humanism in La nave bianca does not live up to the world either.

The entanglement between humanism, racism, and imperialism in La nave bianca, and its effort to humanize the fascist state and its war machine, is especially evident in an earlier scene from the film that deploys a camera movement very similar to that which, later on, elevates Elena into an emblem of Christian charity. The leadership of the Arno is holding a meeting to plan the next rescue mission. Gathered around the table are the military commanding officers but also the head physician and the head nurse. In the background, we see pictures of Mussolini and of Italy’s king, Victor Emanuel III (Figure 24). The captain explains that the injured soldiers picked up in the colonies will disembark, so as to make room for the many Italians maimed during the recent battles in defense of territorial waters. As he reassures the others that he has readied the surgery rooms and facilities necessary to take care of an army of injured soldiers, the camera moves in on him—relegating both the king and the Duce out of the frame. This empathetic, caring, and authoritative captain, in his immaculate white Navy uniform, surrounded by the medical personnel donning their white uniforms, is now made to serve as the voice and face of the fascist ethno-nation fighting to survive.

Renzo Rossellini’s score kicks in and the elegiac music is used as a sound bridge as the film jumps from the meeting to a surgery room where a team of physicians, in their white coats, has successfully saved a maimed soldier. Colonialism is mentioned, yet the focus on Italian pain immediately forecloses the possibility of feeling the pain of others—Black pain, the suffering that Italians have caused. In this way, notwithstanding the crimes against humanity the good people had perpetrated in Ethiopia a few short years earlier, notwithstanding the rising discrimination against Jewish Italians, the film can project Italians as the only truly suffering race: the race at risk and in need of saving is us, not the peoples the West had brutalized for so long. Rather than pervaded by a consolatory ideology, La nave bianca appears driven by the urgency to excuse, trigger, and mobilize.

The manifest goal of De Robertis and Rossellini’s textual machine is in fact to whiten: whiten Fascism, whiten Italian colonialism, whiten the bodies performing totalitarianism, whiten the regime’s claims over the world’s seas, and whiten the Blackshirt history in which the film is trying to involve the public. But in this apparent operation of whitewashing, the Mediterranean also changes color. The Arno sails on to save more lives, and the dark sea—replete with threats, replete with death—that the nave bianca is traversing is made white by the wake of the Italian hospital boat. Thanks to Fascism, the Mediterranean is not a bleak border zone anymore. It has finally reverted to a white Italian space.

In presenting the sea as a reclaimed mare nostrum, what La nave bianca conceals is the Mediterranean’s Blackness. The expression “Black Mediterranean” has been mobilized by authors working at the intersection of Italian studies and critical race theory, such as Alessandra Di Maio, SA Smythe, Angelica Pesarini, and Camilla Hawthorne, among many others, to flag the Middle Sea’s pluri-centennial history as a site of violence and terror, slavery, and the exploitation of Black lives. In a book from 2022, the Black Mediterranean Collective explains: “scholars of the Black Mediterranean challenge the romanticization of the Mediterranean as a space of convivial exchange and unfettered hybridity, pointing to oft-overlooked histories of racial violence and their contemporary reverberations.”34 In making invisible through its orgy of self-pity the true color of the mare nostrum, La nave bianca—which was funded by two brothers who had made a fortune by building roads in the fascist empire—amplifies a way of feeling about Italians and the Italian milieu that has deep reverberations in past and present national history. It is only insofar as we recognize how the Mediterranean has been racialized as a white Italian space and Italians as a victimized good race that we can come to terms with the power of current proto-fascist securitarian discourses regarding an African invasion of Italian soil.35 But, as I show in the next section, by keeping close to Rossellini’s fascist corpus, this racial melodrama whitening the regime and the Mediterranean also served as a powerful foundation upon which to build in order to defend Italy’s deployment well beyond its sea.

Humane Warriors, Humanitarian Wars

After La nave bianca, De Robertis and Rossellini parted ways. De Robertis kept working for the Navy Ministry Film Center, insisting with Alpha Tau! (1942) on the need to take over the Mediterranean in order to keep Italy free and Italians alive. By featuring five Navy operatives visiting their respective hometowns on a two-day leave, Alpha Tau! stages an Italy maimed by bombs—dropped by planes stationed on the aircraft carriers bearing down on the Italian coastline. De Robertis then followed Mussolini to Salò and, in 1945, directed for the puppet state the unconvincing La vita semplice (The Simple Life), a eulogy of unpretentious living that, with its critique of financial speculators, borders on antisemitism. In the postwar period, De Robertis gained attention especially for his anti-Black Il mulatto (Angelo, 1950), possibly the earliest cinematic rejection of jus soli (birthright citizenship) in national cultural history. Using as its backdrop the charming sights and sounds of the Mediterranean Sea, this film amplifies the message that mixed-raced children, even those born in Italy, belong elsewhere.36

Rossellini’s postfascist cinema is of course incredibly well known, while his films from the Blackshirt Ventennio have long remained unaccounted for. This is somewhat expected, given the traditional lack of engagement with realist cinema under the regime. But this specific suppressed memory has a particular weight to it. By avoiding Rossellini’s work for Fascism, scholars have failed to reconsider the mythic status of the director and, with it, of neorealism itself. La nave bianca is in fact part of a trilogy in which Rossellini anticipates audiovisual strategies that have defined the neorealist supposed ethico-aesthetical revolution—the use of nonprofessional actors, long takes, outdoor shooting, elliptical narration, voyage form, and consciousness of clichés, just to name a few—to cast a positive light on the various arms of the Italian war apparatus as the fascist ethno-nation marched east. After featuring the Navy and the Mediterranean in the film codirected with De Robertis, Rossellini moved on to the Air Force and the invasion of Greece in Un pilota ritorna and the Army and the Russian campaign in L’uomo dalla croce. The category of “male melodrama,” as elaborated by Catherine O’Rawe and Dana Renga on the heels of Williams’s discussion of “male weepies,” is particularly fruitful for thinking about these films.37 Through their focus on brutalized Italian men who experience pain and trauma and yet remain empathetic in the face of other people’s suffering, these works compel their viewers to feel pity for those performing fascist imperialism—a pity that the national public can turn onto itself. Who are the sympathetic perpetrators so movingly featured on screen, these men with so much weight to carry on their shoulders, if not the Blackshirt race itself? In obscuring the real cause of the painful reality they put on display, Un pilota ritorna and L’uomo dalla croce continue to mediate convenient alibis for a whole nation as the time of reckoning came ever closer.

Un pilota ritorna is based on a scenario by Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son, and centers on the first deployment of Gino Rossati (Massimo Girotti) in the Royal Italian Air Force.

Interior. Middle-class house. An older woman is giving a piano lesson to a young girl. There are a few pictures on the piano: pictures of a child at different ages, a picture of a young man in a military uniform. The girl asks her teacher if the man is her child, and she replies that he is her son, her only son, who is now a soldier. Cross-fade.

Rossati, one of Italy’s many sons serving their nation, arrives at his air base. He meets his colleagues and then goes out with them for a night in town. The soldiers chitchat with some women who read for them a newspaper article waxing poetic about the winged heroes who cross the skies, these modern knights who serve their nation in order for tomorrow to be, finally . . . Rossati, the rookie, is enjoying being treated as a hero, but the commanding officer, Trisotti (Gaetano Masier), silences their praise: “Do not bother us with this stuff,” he instructs the women, who stop reading the newspaper article. Through this early scene, the film verbalizes its own intervention: do not bother the public with the official and worn-out rhetoric of state propaganda. As Peter Brunette argues, a fundamental accomplishment of Rossellini’s first solo feature film is to challenge the glorification of combat and soldiers.38 Daily life at the air base is mediated as trivial and dull, with soldiers complaining about their shifts and assignments before complying with the work with which they have been tasked—in the end, they are only following orders. But war-waging itself is presented as something mundane, uninteresting, and utterly non-epic: a job among others. To conjure the banality of war, Rossellini relies on a combination of ellipses and repetitions. The elliptical style through which he narrates the combat operations has the function of stripping war of any and all grandeur. By recycling the same footage to recount Rossati’s different missions, the director mediates it as something cliché and repetitive.

Mission 1. Rossati’s squad flies over the Mediterranean and bombs Greece. Some targets are destroyed. Mission 2. Rossati’s squad crosses the Mediterranean again and bombs Greece again: some other targets are destroyed, but Trisotti dies in the air battle that ensues. Mission 3. Another day, another Mediterranean crossing, another bombing mission, another fight with enemy forces: Rossati’s plane is downed and the young pilot becomes a prisoner of war.

In the camp, Italian immigrants who had settled in Greece and Italian soldiers who had invaded it await their destiny alongside Greek refugees. Fallen from grace, fallen from the sky, Rossati is now part of a homeless multitude yearning for safety and traversing a maimed landscape marred by bombs, blood, and tears. Rossati’s change of status and perspective is accompanied by a dramatic change in the film’s audiovisual profile. As the Germans advance and the Greek–British army withdraws, the prisoners and refugees are transferred from location to location, and Rossellini follows their plight through long panoramic shots—including a very effective and immersive 360-degree pan—lodging the desperate mass of human beings in the ruined environment that surrounds them.

By now, Rossellini has renounced the “aerial view,” the distanced disinterest with regard to the destructiveness of war that, as Noa Steimatsky maps, characterized not only earlier aviator films but also Marinetti’s and the futurists’ take on war.39 “Long silences with a grandiose rhythm made of almost nothing, full of dazed gazes”—this is how Renzo Rossellini, who curated the film’s score, describes the second part of Un pilota ritorna. In this regard, Mino Argentieri emphasizes Rossellini’s work as an important step in the development of an antinarrative stance and analytic gaze that will then lead to neorealism’s characteristic slow pace.40 In fact, in the segments of Un pilota ritorna that take place in Greece (which were actually shot close to Rome), narration gives way to description, and action-cinema—to use Deleuzian categories—gives way to a cinema committed to registering the suffering brought about by war. This commitment is, however, partial and interested. It is partial because the only pain that matters in the film is Italian pain—they are the ones suffering in camps; they are the innocent victims of war. We don’t get to experience the suffering of Greek women forced into prostitution in exchange for food by the Italian soldiers, or the random executions that the Royal Army carried out to terrorize the population, effecting a governance by fear as it had done in Ethiopia.41 The commitment is interested because by embedding wounded Italian bodies into a wounded landscape, Rossellini naturalizes Italian pain, turning—again—a suffering Italian humanity into a synecdoche for the whole of humanity and consequently remediating the violence done against Italians as something unnatural. What is remarkable is that for the film, those performing crimes against nature and humanity are not only the Brits. The Germans are also cast in the role of monsters.

A child is sick but there are no medicines to cure him or food to nourish him: the Brits have destroyed everything. A German Stuka bomber attacks the Brits who are shepherding the column of displaced people through the ruined lands of Europe without any regard for the civilians in the convoy. In both cases, shot-reverse-shot patterns confirm the sense of clear distinction between victims and tormenters, between the kind of people that Italians are and the folks from northern Europe. This war is not between Greece and Italy anymore: Greeks and Italians are part of a battle they are not waging; they are the targets, the collateral damage of an inhumane conflict scorching the earth. An Italian soldier needs to have his leg amputated. Performing the surgery is an Italian doctor who resettled in Greece. The doctor asks: “Chi vuole assistere?”—who wants to assist, to help with the procedure, but also who wants to attend, to bear witness? Rossati volunteers, and by following him in his performance as assistant nurse, the public occupies the praiseworthy position of the compassionate witness. A Greek soldier is also there, surveying the intervention from afar. He can hardly hold back his tears when he hears the screams of the Italian soldier undergoing surgery without anesthesia. How can Italians be bad if even the enemy feels for them? Moreover, given that the Greek enemy feels for Italians, Greeks cannot be the real enemy. Through the flash of sympathy felt by the Greek soldier toward an Italian one, Un pilota ritorna overturns existing geopolitical allegiances and unifies colonized and colonizer as part of a compassionate, suffering Mediterranean humanity from which the heartless Germans and Brits are excluded. This is why the film, notwithstanding its tear-jerking representation of war, cannot be understood as an anti-imperial film. By means of an orgy of pity and self-pity, thanks to its abjectification of northern European whiteness, through its sympathetic representation of Italian soldiers doing their jobs, through Girotti’s moving performance, Un pilota ritorna represses the possibility of acknowledging Italians in their role of “architects of the tragedy” in which Rossellini’s realism immerses the public.42 But the film also attempts to bear witness to the righteousness of fascist imperialism: since Greeks and Italians share the same humanity, since they are una faccia una razza—“one face, one race,” as the fascist aggressors promised the aggrieved Greek population and the film confirms by means of casting choices—they belong together; they ought to be part of the same sociopolitical formation.

And yet, by putting so much emphasis on Italian goodness—on the fact that war is something that Italians do but that does not compromise the integrity or the humanity of Italy’s sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers—the film leaves crucial questions unanswered: Why would a good race get involved with all this? Why would the smiling and happy child that we know Rossati to be from his family pictures subject himself to so much pain and violence? Why, after having fled captivity and making it back to his homeland at the end of the film, should he go back to war making? How can he be at peace with himself after all that he has seen and heard, after having experienced what the war does to peoples and places on the ground—not through the newspaper cutouts Rossellini uses to recount the progress of Greece’s occupation? If war is only a job, as the film’s visual strategies establish, why would Italians pick up such an occupation? Just to bring together Greeks and Italians?

When Un pilota ritorna went into production, the illusion of a quick and easy war of expansion had already evaporated. People were starting to ask questions—and Rossellini’s solo debut attests to this climate of doubt. In order to affectively authorize the war, to get the population through more sacrifices, to keep them obeying orders, to keep them bombing, killing, destroying, invading, and fighting, a larger-than-life enemy had to be looming over Italy. New existential threats were needed, crueler and even more dangerous than England. Twenty years after the March on Rome, Rossellini’s L’uomo dalla croce brings fascist cinema to a close by returning to its original public enemy: the barbaric and depraved communists who are represented, unsurprisingly, as bearing the stigmata of racial degeneration with their broad faces, high foreheads, sunken eyes, and protuberant noses. In working with set designer Gastone Medin and embracing the stylization of Communism as a biospiritual illness that Medin had already articulated in Blasetti’s Sole! (Sun, 1929), with L’uomo dalla croce Rossellini answers the questions that Un pilota ritorna and the nation raised, ultimately blessing Fascism’s war by reframing it as a Christian crusade against the degenerate red infidel race.43

For the last film of his fascist trilogy, Rossellini worked with another key player in the regime’s apparatus. After collaborating with the Duce’s son on Un pilota ritorna, for L’uomo dalla croce it was the pundit Asvero Gravelli. With the periodical he edited, Antieuropa, Gravelli launched a campaign of hate against liberals, Americans, Jews, feminists, queers, and Communists—whom he singled out as the carriers of a contagious disease that was provoking the agony of the Italian race and that would ultimately lead to the cancellation of Western civilization—while lauding a blend of Fascism and Catholicism as the only possible antidote to the global pandemic afflicting humanity.44 L’uomo dalla croce projects the redemptive force of fascist Christianity by recounting the story of an Italian chaplain (Alberto Tavazzi) caught up in the Russian campaign. The film’s lead character was inspired by Father Reginaldo Giuliani, who, as part of the squadristi cattolici (Catholic paramilitary squads), followed D’Annunzio in the Fiume expedition of 1919, then marched on Rome with Mussolini in 1922, and finally died in East Africa while giving comfort to the Italian colonial army brutalizing Ethiopia. By means of its titular character, this work reimagines the Italian army as a group of compassionate men who are not invading a foreign nation but liberating its people from godless oppressors.

By means of parallel editing, L’uomo dalla croce tells two stories at the same time: the grand narrative of Fascism’s reclamation of the Communist desolate land; and the microhistory of the chaplain, who teaches the native population how to pray, baptizes a newborn, and even converts two Communist leaders to Catholicism. The religious microhistory of which the chaplain is the protagonist is precisely what gives meaning to the larger political history featured in the film and what affectively justifies the war and more sacrifices. With his words and actions, the chaplain shows what Italians are made of but also why they are doing what they are doing: they are here on another humanitarian mission, to bring back to life people who, having fallen victim to an evil lie, are dead inside. The enemy that Fascism confronts is death, and the regime is waging war for life, to prevent the deadly virus of Communism from spreading further and condemning even more souls to eternal damnation. This is the responsibility the regime has taken up—that we need to take up—and this weight is conveyed in the film through a powerful scene in which we see the chaplain bringing to safety an injured man, carrying him on his shoulders, just as Rossatti had done with the amputee soldier in Un pilota ritorna (Figure 25).

The last sequence of L’uomo dalla croce makes its effort to “spiritualize” the regime’s war making so as to redeem Fascism and fascists especially apparent. As the Italian liberators close in on a village occupied by the evil enemy, the chaplain sees a wounded Communist leader agonizing on the battlefield. Under heavy crossfire, the army chaplain crawls to Fyodor and teaches the hardcore atheist the word of God: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name . . . ,” they recite together. Fyodor dies redeemed, but the chaplain is fatally shot. Lying in the mud, about to breathe his last breath, the chaplain raises his head to see what is going on around him. Micro- and macrohistories meet again, but now it is political history that provides meaning to personal stories. Through a 360-degree pan from the POV of the dying chaplain, L’uomo dalla croce makes the spectator identify with him while also embedding his sacrifice in the larger movement of the fascist redemptive crusade.

The chaplain sees the Italian army winning the battle and liberating the village. He can die in peace, surrounded by the sights and sounds of the fascist war apparatus advancing and continuing its reclamation of corrupted peoples and contaminated environments. The chaplain lets himself collapse. The camera tilts down to match the movement of his lifeless head falling to the ground. It then closes in on the red cross badge on his uniform, similarly to what had happened at the end of La nave bianca. As if the point was not clear enough, an intertitle guides the spectators’ interpretation of the film’s ending: “This film is dedicated to the memory of all the military chaplains fallen in the crusade against the godless, in defense of the homeland and to bring the light of truth and justice even in the land of the barbaric enemy.” According to Brunette, against the grain of such an intertitle, the final images and sounds of the film offer their own counterrhetoric. He writes: “the forlorn music and the sad, sweeping movement of the camera over the smoking remains of the village signal an obvious world-weariness at the horror and destruction of war.”45 There is no doubt that Rossellini is not interested in romanticizing or glorifying war. Yet in blaming the racialized other for the destruction taking place around us, in creating a Manichean opposition between good and evil, in pitching a pious Fascism against a degenerate Communism, in conjuring the horizon of race wars, L’uomo dalla croce affectively outlines a clear divide between just and unjust peoples, just and unjust violence, exactly at a moment when opposition to the regime was growing stronger.

It is true that L’uomo dalla croce conjures the dream of a united humanity that has overcome divisions.46 But the way it advances this dream confirms racialized hierarchies and caesuras within the human realm. The unification it proposes can in fact only happen on the condition that the inhuman part of humanity, the not-quite-humans who are sick and need to be healed, change their way of life and accept the truths brandished by those who are enlightened. The similar visual rhetoric employed to portray the chaplain’s approach to Fyodor and the forward movement of the Italian troops confirms that, for the film, there is perfect harmony between the colonizer and the converter, between the Church’s pastoral mission and that taken up by the fascist state. One can of course argue that L’uomo dalla croce is a betrayal of the Christian humanism that Rossellini gets right in other films. Yet another interpretation is perhaps that Rossellini’s film is manifesting the structural entanglement between Catholic proselytism and the long tradition of colonial racialization and otherizing that promotes the most brutal conquests under the banner of civilizing missions.

Any form of civilizing campaign relies on the pretense that those who are carrying out the violence are not the true enemies. This is also how L’uomo dalla croce justifies the Christian–fascist crusade: “I am not the enemy,” promises the chaplain to a Bolshevik leader. The barrage of images of the barbaric and immoral, repulsive and degenerate communist horde does not leave any doubt regarding who the real monster and the real hero are in the brutal race war projected on the big screen. On the one hand, as Marla Stone shows, Rossellini’s film triggers the greatest possible anxiety as to what might accompany the red race’s victory in the war.47 On the other hand, it delivers once again, as Italian realism had been busy doing since Sole!, the national body politic to the regime by means of racialized feelings and racialized landscapes. In projecting the real as a stage of an epochal race war, L’uomo della croce cannot but amplify the feeling that Fascism and fascist living are the only chance of salvation for an endangered Italian humanity.

However, what if Italy’s existential threat was not constituted by phantomatic “them” but by us? What if there was no saving grace in Mussolini nor in the race that the regime, and with it national cinema, had been trying so insistently to make? In the next two chapters, I look at how Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti occupied cinema in order to favor patterns of affects that might release the people from the fascist state’s deadly grip.