Notes
Preface and Acknowledgments
Benedetto Croce, “The Fascist Germ Still Lives,” New York Times, November 28, 1943; Benedetto Croce, “Chi è fascista?,” Il Giornale di Napoli, October 24, 1944; Benedetto Croce, “La libertà italiana nella libertà del mondo: Discorso al primo Congresso dei partiti uniti nei Comitati di liberazione,” in Scritti e discorsi politici, vol. 1, ed. Angela Carella (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993), 54–62.
Claudio Fogu, “Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory,” in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 147–76.
See Giacomo Lichtner, Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), especially 3–41 and 129–53; and Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 1–20.
Introduction
See Elaine Mancini, Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930–1935 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985).
David Forgacs, ed., Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, “Preface,” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), vii–xiv; Jacqueline Reich, “Mussolini at the Movies,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 3–29.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–86.
Antonio Gramsci, “The Concept of Passive Revolution,” “Elements of Politics,” and “Sociology and Political Science,” in Selection from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 106–14, 144–47, and 244.
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974/75): 39–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/1211632.
Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially 225–45; Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially 114–19; Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1943 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986): 63–70, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781838710170.0008; Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.1999.0018; Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso Books, 2002); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 33–74; Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Performativity, Materiality, and the Racial Body,” Latino Studies Journal 11, no. 3 (2000): 74–99.
See, for instance, bell hooks, Writing beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013), 4–5.
Rhiannon Welch, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 1–33.
Jane Schneider, “The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism in Italy,” in Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 1–26; Nelson Moe, The View from the Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Pasquale Verdicchio, “The Preclusion of Postcolonial Discourse in Southern Italy,” in Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 191–212; Pasquale Verdicchio, “Introduction,” in The Southern Question, by Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2006); Miguel Mellino, “Deprovincializing Italy: Notes on Race, Racialization, and Italy’s Coloniality,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 83–102.
Cesare Lombroso, The Criminal Man, ed. and trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), originally published as L’uomo delinquente: Studiato in rapporto alla antropologia, alla medicina legale ed alle discipline carcerarie; con incisioni (Milan: Hoepli, 1876). See also Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920,” in Schneider, Italy’s “Southern Question,” 99–116; and Silvana Patriarca, “How Many Italies? Representing the South in Official Statistics,” in Schneider, Italy’s “Southern Question,” 99–117.
David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 98–132; Walter Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 155–67, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162498.
See de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 1–3.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–20.
Gaia Giuliani, Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 65–108. On Fascism’s racial imaginary, see also Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 35–153; and Mauro Raspanti, “I razzismi del fascismo,” in La menzogna della razza: Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, ed. Centro Furio Jesi (Bologna: Grafis, 1994), 73–89.
Emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), 69–70, quoted in Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, 44. On the role of sentiments for biopolitical projects of nation building in the romantic tradition, see Alistair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf, eds., “Romanticism and Biopolitics,” special issue of A Romantic Circles Praxis (December 2012).
I derive the “fare razza” from Welch, Vital Subjects, 70. In her formidable book, an invaluable resource for my own thinking about Italian history and culture, Welch traces how this expression—originally used in regard to animal breeding—came to encapsulate the racializing and reproductive imperatives of the Italian colonial-capitalist order.
See Eden K. McLean, Mussolini’s Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018); James Hay, “Revisiting the Grand Hotel (and Its Place in the Cultural Economy of Fascist Italy),” in Moving Images / Stopping Places, ed. David B. Clarke, Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, and Marcus A. Doel (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 13–47.
André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 16–40; Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
David Forgacs, “Sex in the Cinema: Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films, 1930–1943,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 143.
Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
Catherine O’Rawe, Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 70–72; Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42–88.
Shelleen Greene, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
Richard Dyer, White, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2017), 13.
Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 65–70.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–46.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 168. On the effectiveness of entryism as a political tactic, see de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 225–45.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City 11, no. 3 (2007): 313–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810701668969.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). On the relation between Foucault and Althusser, see Warren Montag, “‘The Soul Is the Prison of the Body’: Althusser and Foucault, 1970–1975,” Yale French Studies, no. 88 (1995): 53–77, https://doi.org/10.2307/2930102.
Michel Foucault, “Film, History, and Popular Memory,” in Foucault at the Movies, ed. and trans. Clare O’Farrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 103–23. On the relation between Foucault and Cahiers du Cinéma, see Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma (New York: Verso Books, 2009), 90–100.
Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, “Situating the Lectures,” in “Society Must Be Defended,” by Michel Foucault, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 273–79.
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 25.
Antonio Gramsci, “Some Considerations on the Southern Question,” in The Southern Question, 24.
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 56–57.
Foucault, 57.
See, for instance, Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 1–33.
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 55–73; Timothy Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 43–63.
Lee Grieveson, “On Governmentality and Screens,” Screen 50, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 180–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn079; Mark B. N. Hansen, “Foucault and Media: A Missed Encounter?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (June 20, 2012): 497–528, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1596254; Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828.
Hansen, “Foucault and Media,” 498.
Hunter Hargraves, “The Urgency and Affects of Media Studies,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (2018): 137–42, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0010; Paola Bonifazio, Schooling in Modernity: The Politics of Sponsored Films in Postwar Italy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014), 3–24.
Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 26–46.
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 10.
Michel Foucault, “Preface to the English Edition,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin, 2009), xi–xiv.
1. The Government of the Ungovernable
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 119.
Stephanie Malia Hom, “On the Origins of Making Italy: Massimo D’Azeglio and ‘Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli Italiani,’” Italian Culture 31, no. 1 (2013): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1179/0161462212Z.00000000012; see also Rhiannon Welch, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 75–178.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21–63.
Gualtiero Fabbri, Al Cinematografo, ed. Sergio Raffaelli (1907; repr., Rome: Associazione italiana per le ricerche di storia del cinema, 1993); Luigi Pirandello, Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1925; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), first published in serial format in the journal La nuova antologia in 1915 with the title “Si gira” (Shoot), published as a book in 1916, and rereleased with slight revisions and a new title, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Milan: Mondadori, 1925). Translations from Fabbri, Al Cinematografo, are mine.
Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 1–19; Shelleen Greene, Equivocal Subjects (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–20.
See Luca Giuliani, “From Wonder to Propaganda: The Technological Context of Italian Silent Cinema,” in Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, ed. Giorgio Bertellini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 135–42.
John P. Welle, “Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 1907–1920,” Film History 12, no. 3 (January 2000): 288–99, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815358; Gavriel Moses, The Nickel Was for the Movies: Film in the Novel from Pirandello to Puig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 99. See also Davide Turconi, “Prefazione,” in Cinema scritto: Il catalogo delle riviste italiane di cinema, 1907–1944, ed. Riccardo Redi (Rome: Associazione italiana per le ricerche di storia del cinema, 1992), vii–ix.
Pietro Tonini, “L’Editore: Presentazione,” in Fabbri, Al Cinematografo, 9.
Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 41.
See Sergio Raffaelli, “Un pioniere,” in Fabbri, Al Cinematografo, 81–102.
John David Rhodes, “‘Our Beautiful and Glorious Art Lives’: The Rhetoric of Nationalism in Early Italian Film Periodicals,” Film History 12, no. 3 (2000): 308–21, www.jstor.org/stable/3815360; Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 7–26.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 2–19.
Fabbri, Al Cinematografo, 22. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in text.
On the spread of movie halls in Italy, see Elena Mosconi, “Uno spazio composito: Il politeama,” in Spettatori italiani: Riti e ambienti del consumo cinematografico (1900–1950), ed. Francesco Casetti and Elena Mosconi (Rome: Carocci, 2006), 17–29.
Guido Cincotti, “Il risorgimento nel cinema,” in Il Risorgimento italiano nel teatro e nel cinema, ed. Giovanni Calendoli (Rome: Editalia, 1962), 129–71.
Welch, Vital Subjects, 191.
Welch, 26.
Alfredo Niceforo and Scipio Sighele, La mala vita a Roma (Turin: Frassati, 1898), 185.
Miguel Mellino, “Deprovincializing Italy: Notes on Race, Racialization, and Italy’s Coloniality,” in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 83–102.
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 95–137.
Antonio Gramsci, “Some Considerations on the Southern Question,” in The Southern Question, ed. and trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2006).
Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome: Laterza, 1975).
Pirandello, Shoot!, 93. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in text.
Gaetano Salvemini, Il ministro della mala vita (Rome: La voce, 1919). On the relationship between the crisis of Giolitti’s liberal governance and the rise of the fascist state, see Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello Stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo (Rome: Laterza, 1982).
Fabrizio De Donno, “La Razza Ario-Mediterranea: Ideas of Race and Citizenship in Colonial and Fascist Italy, 1885–1941,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 8, no. 3 (2006): 394–412, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698010600955958.
Giuseppe Sergi, The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of European Peoples (London: Walter Scott, 1909); Giuseppe Sergi, Arii e Italici: Attorno all’Italia preistorica (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1898): in these works, Sergi uses “stirpe” and “razza” interchangeably. On Sergi’s broad influence and impact, see Fedra Pizzato, “Per una storia antropologica della nazione: Mito mediterraneao e construzione nazionale in Giuseppe Sergi (1880–1919),” Storia del pensiero politico, no. 1 (June–April 2015): 25–52, http://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.4479/79421.
See Gavriel Moses, “‘Gubbio in Gabbia’: Pirandello’s Cameraman and the Entrapments of Film Vision,” MLN 94, no. 1 (January 1979): 36–60, https://doi.org/10.2307/2906329; Gavriel Moses, “Film Theory as Literary Genre in Pirandello and the Film-Novel,” Annali d’Italianistica, no. 6 (1988): 38–68, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24004190; Alessandro Vettori, “Serafino Gubbio’s Candid Camera,” MLN 113, no. 1 (January 1998): 79–107, https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.1998.0017; Francesco Casetti, “Italian Early Film ‘Theories’: Borders and Crossings,” in Bertellini, Italian Silent Cinema, 275–84; Michael Subialka, “The Meaning of Acting in the Age of Cinema: Benjamin, Pirandello, and the Italian Diva,” Comparative Literature 68, no. 3 (September 2016): 312–31, https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-3631587; and Tom Gunning, “Introduction: The Diva, the Tiger, and the Three-Legged Spider,” in Pirandello, Shoot!, vii–xiv.
Fiora Bassanese, Understanding Luigi Pirandello (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 70–74.
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 7–10.
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), especially 53–82.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 31–32; Robert S. Dombroski, La totalità dell’artificio: Ideologia e forma nel romanzo di Pirandello (Padua: Liviana, 1978).
See Thomas Harrison, Essayism: Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 197.
Bernard Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 238–70.
Michael Syrimis, The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 199–240.
Alberto Asor Rosa, La cultura, book 2 of Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, vol. 4, Dall’Unità ad oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1975); Giuseppe Panella, “Pirandello fascista ovvero Del demiurgo indispensabile,” in La scrittura memorabile: Leonardo Sciascia e la letteratura come forma di vita (Avellino: Delta 3 Edizioni, 2012), 97–122.
See Gian Venè, Pirandello fascista: La coscienza borghese tra ribellione e rivoluzione (Venice: Marsilio, 1981). The first scholar to make the connection between Pirandello’s art and his politics was Adriano Tilgher in 1923—the year before Fascism’s inception—who drew Pirandello’s Fascism out of his opposition between life and form. Scholars have usually discarded Tilgher’s interpretation, but—as Luca Barattoni has recently argued—this has more to do with the attempt to save Pirandello than to understand his work. See Adriano Tilgher, Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, preceduti da un saggio su l’arte come originalità e i problemi dell’arte (Rome: Libreria di scienze e lettere, 1928); and Luca Barattoni, “Ritornare a Tilgher: Bergsonian Themes and the Human Condition in the Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator,” Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 45, no. 1 (March 2011): 80–99, https://doi.org/10.1177/001458581104500104.
Luigi Pirandello, “La vita creata,” in Saggi e interventi, ed. Ferdinando Taviani (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), 1249; Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 184–87.
Étienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism” and “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1991), 17–28 and 37–68.
2. Workers Entering the Military-Industrial Complex
Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” Senses of Cinema, no. 21 (July 2002), http://sensesofcinema.com. On Farocki’s piece, see also Karen Pinkus, Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 45–46.
Luigi Pirandello, “La vita creata,” in Saggi e interventi, ed. Ferdinando Taviani (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), 1249.
Franco Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa in Italia: La Terni dal 1884 al 1962 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 233–44. On Terni, see also Alessandro Portelli’s oral histories, Biografia di una città (Turin: Einaudi, 1985) and La città dell’acciaio: Due secoli di storia operaia (Rome: Donzelli, 2017).
For a more detailed description of the genealogy of Acciaio, see Elaine Mancini, Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930–1935 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985), 70–85; and Claudio Camerini, ed., Acciaio: Un film degli anni trenta: Pagine inedite di una storia italiana (Rome: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1990).
Jean A. Gili, Stato fascista e cinematografia: Repressione e promozione (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 100–130.
See Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995).
Vincenzo Buccheri, Stile Cines: Studi sul cinema italiano 1930–1934 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2004), 21–26; Gian Piero Brunetta, “Les ferments realistes dans le cinéma italien de l’epoque fasciste,” in Le cinéma italien, ed. Aldo Bernardini and Jean A. Gili (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1986). On cinema as a vernacular producing specific experiences of the real, see Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.1999.0018.
Luigi Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Milan: Mondadori, 1925).
Luigi Pirandello, Gioca, Pietro!, booklet distributed with Scenario 2, no. 1 (January 1933).
Piero Garofalo, “Seeing Red: The Soviet Influence on Italian Cinema in the Thirties,” in Re-viewing Fascism, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 223–49.
See Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film—Advertising—Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 55–130.
Bucchieri, Stile Cines, 69–70.
Luigi Pirandello, “Se il film parlante abolirà il teatro?,” Corriere della sera, June 19, 1929.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 184–87; Siegfried Kracauer, “Film of 1928,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 318.
Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity, 139.
Rossano Vittori, “Una trama di Pirandello tradita dalla sceneggiatura,” Cinema Nuovo, no. 295 (June 1985): 32–38. For accounts of the artistic divergences between Pirandello on one side, and Ruttmann, Cecchi, and Soldati on the other, see Giorgio Bertellini, “Dubbing L’Arte Muta: Poetic Layerings around Italian Cinema’s Transition to Sound,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 49–56.
Garofalo, “Seeing Red,” 243.
Garofalo, 241.
Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament, 78.
See Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity, 138–72.
Alberto Spaini, “A Pure but Intelligible Art,” International Review of Educational Cinematography 5, no. 6 (June 1933): 409–10.
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Picador, 1980), 73–105.
James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 102.
Furio Jesi, Germania segreta (Milan: Silva, 1967); Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra: Con tre inediti e un’intervista (Rome: Nottetempo, 2011).
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 291–312, https://doi.org/10.1086/448535.
Jesi, Germania segreta, 106.
Bruno Vespa, Perché l’Italia amò Mussolini (Rome: Mondadori, 2020).
3. White, Red, Blackshirt
Benito Mussolini, “Il discorso alla ‘Sciesa’ di Milano,” in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 18, Dalla conferenza di Cannes alla Marcia su Roma, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Dulio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1956), 433–40. For an exemplary foreclosure of Fascism’s racism, see Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1961).
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 60.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Rhiannon Welch, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 22; Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 273–79; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 55–56.
See Carlo Celli, “Alessandro Blasetti and Representations of Fascism in the 1930’s,” Italian Culture 16, no. 2 (1998): 99–109, https://doi.org/10.1179/itc.1998.16.2.99.
Stephen Gundle and Michela Zegna, “Art, Entertainment and Politics: Alessandro Blasetti and the Rise of the Italian Film Industry, 1929–1959,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 40, no. 1 (2020): 6–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2020.1715592.
Alessandro Blasetti, “Lettera aperta ai banchieri italiani,” Lo schermo, August 1926, cited in Riccardo Redi, “Sole film della rinascita,” in Sole: Soggetto, sceneggiatura, note per la realizzazione, ed. Adriano Aprà and Riccardo Redi (Rome: Di Giacomo Editore, 1985), 16.
Fredric Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 2007), 213–314.
Alfredo Niceforo and Scipio Sighele, La mala vita a Roma (Turin: Frassati, 1898); Luigi Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Milan: Mondadori, 1925).
LUCE president Giacomo Paulucci de’ Calboli discusses the connection between the “Great Rome” zoning plan and the decision to build Cinecittà in the city’s southern outskirts in “La città del cinema,” Cinema, no. 1 (July 10, 1936): 12–14.
Steen Bo Frandsen, “‘The War That We Prefer’: The Reclamation of the Pontine Marshes and Fascist Expansion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2, no. 3 (2001): 69–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/714005458.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, “Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Pontine Marshes,” differences 27, no. 1 (2016): 94, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-3522769.
Stewart-Steinberg, 108.
Federico Caprotti, Mussolini’s Cities: Internal Colonialism in Italy, 1930–1939 (Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2007); Mia Fuller, “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Fascist Plans for the Colonial City of Addis Ababa and the Colonizing Suburb of EUR ’42,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (1996): 397–418, http://www.jstor.org/stable/261172.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
See Gianfranco Graziani, ed., Pratiche basse e telefoni bianchi: Cinema italiano 1923–1943 (Pescara: Traccie, 1986), 60. Admitting the influence of Ferri, Blasetti mischaracterizes this racial scientist as a “liberal” and Sole! as a liberal film. In fact, Ferri was initially a socialist, as were most Italian racial scientists, and then embraced Fascism after World War II.
On mechanical reproduction as a means of surveillance and identification, see John Tagg, “Power and Photography: A Means of Surveillance,” in Culture, Ideology and Social Process: A Reader, ed. Tony Bennett, Graham Martin, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott (London: Open University, 1981), 285–308.
Aldo Vergano, “La sceneggiatura,” in Aprà and Redi, Sole, 61–112.
Graziani, Pratiche basse e telefoni bianchi, 60.
Lara Pucci, “Remapping the Rural: The Ideological Geographies of Strapaese,” in Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls?, ed. Andrea Dalle Vacche (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 184.
Natasha Chang, The Crisis Woman: Body Politics and the Modern Woman in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 3.
Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore; Ada Negri, “Cinematografo,” Corriere della Sera, November 27, 1928.
Gaia Giuliani, “L’Italiano Negro: The Politics of Colour in Early Twentieth-Century Italy,” Interventions 16, no. 4 (2014): 577, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.851828.
James Hay, “Revisiting the Grand Hotel (and Its Place in the Cultural Economy of Fascist Italy),” in Moving Images / Stopping Places, ed. David B. Clarke, Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, and Marcus A. Doel (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 13–47.
Richard Dyer, White, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2017), 207–23.
Jameson, “The Existence of Italy.”
4. The Shame of Escapism
Riccardo Redi, “Sole film della rinascita,” in Sole: Soggetto, sceneggiatura, note per la realizzazione, ed. Adriano Aprà and Riccardo Redi (Rome: Di Giacomo Editore, 1985), 15–19.
Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1943 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 2–4; Lara Pucci, “Remapping the Rural: The Ideological Geographies of Strapaese,” in Film, Art, New Media: Museum without Walls?, ed. Andrea Dalle Vacche (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 178–95.
Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 60. On “polyvalent mobility” as a tool of racial government, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 89.
Emanuel Levinas, On Escape: De l’évasion, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 37; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 221.
Lisa Guenther, “Shame and the Temporality of Social Life,” Continental Philosophy Review, no. 44 (2011): 23–29, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9164-y; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), 109.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
Alberto Farassino, “Camerini, au-delà du cinéma italien,” in Mario Camerini, ed. Alberto Farassino (Locarno: Editions du Festival international du film de Locarno, 1992), 17, translation mine. For the biographical information regarding Camerini, I rely on Stephen Gundle, Mussolini’s Dream Factory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 145–50.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 35.
The connection between regimes of premature death and racializing practices is explored by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. Ronald John Johnston, Peter James Taylor, and Michael Watts (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 261–74.
The expression “logic of coloniality” is derived from Walter Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March–May 2007): 449–514, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647. Mignolo uses this expression to point out racial modernity’s impulse to control and colonize (literally and figuratively) all aspects of human living.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema italiano di regime: Da “La canzone dell’amore” a “Ossessione,” digital edition (Rome: Laterza, 2015), location 5779.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 31–38; Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 637–48, especially 640–42, https://doi.org/10.2307/40145557.
Silvan Tomkins, “Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 135.
For more on dopo-lavoro as a realm of control and discipline, see Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 24–60.
Farassino, “Camerini, au-delà du cinéma italien,” 18.
Piero Garofalo, “Seeing Red: The Soviet Influence on Italian Cinema in the Thirties,” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 239.
After Kif Tebbi, Camerini worked abroad for a while (Germany, France, and the United States), and thus Rotaie can be thought of as an anthology attesting to the director’s proficiency in different cinematic idioms and jargons. See Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30.
On the critical reception of Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . , see Francesco Savio, Ma l’amore no: Realismo, formalismo, propaganda e telefoni bianchi nel cinema italiano di regime, 1930–1943 (Venice: Sonzogno, 1975), xiv.
I talk more about De Benedetti in chapter 6, when discussing his contributions to the first films directed by De Sica.
Filippo Sacchi, “Rassegna cinematografica,” Corriere della sera, October 7, 1932, translation mine.
Francesco Savio, Cinecittà anni trenta (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979), 208.
James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); James Hay, “Revisiting the Grand Hotel (and Its Place in the Cultural Economy of Fascist Italy),” in Moving Images / Stopping Places, ed. David B. Clarke, Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, and Marcus A. Doel (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 13–47.
Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, 21–43.
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 394.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 80–88. See also Jacqueline Reich, “Consuming Ideologies: Fascism, Commodification, and Female Subjectivity in Mario Camerini’s Grandi magazzini,” Annali d’Italianistica 16 (1998): 195–212, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24007515.
Barbara Spackman, “Shopping for Autarchy: Fascism and Reproductive Fantasy in Mario Camerini’s Grandi Magazzini,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 276–92.
See Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 161.
5. The White Italian Mediterranean
See Olga Khazan, “How White Supremacists Use Victimhood to Recruit,” The Atlantic, August 15, 2017; and Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Quoted in Khazan, “How White Supremacists Use Victimhood to Recruit.”
Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60.
Elisabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Angelica Pesarini, “When the Mediterranean ‘Became’ Black: Diasporic Hopes and (Post)Colonial Traumas,” in The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship, ed. Gabriele Proglio, Camilla Hawthorne, Ida Danewid, P. Khalil Saucier, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Angelica Pesarini, Timothy Raeymaekers, Giulia Grechi, and Vivian Gerrand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 23.
Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Claudio Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Valerie McGuire, Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 4, https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.
Ida Danewid, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 7 (2017): 1674–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123.
Nicola Labanca, “Exceptional Italy? The Many Ends of the Italian Colonial Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, ed. Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 123–43.
Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, N.Y.: Telos Press, 2015).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 137.
David Rodogno, “Le nouvel ordre fasciste en Méditerranée, 1940–1943: Présupposés idéologiques, visions et velléités,” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 55, no. 3 (2008): 138–56, https://doi.org/10.3917/rhmc.553.0138.
See Giuseppe Bottai, Diario, 1935–1944 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), 141.
Giuliana Minghelli, Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero (New York: Routledge, 2013), 52–53.
This is true not only for Fantasia sottomarina but also for the other three shorts taking place in the animal world that Rossellini realized under Fascism: La vispa Teresa (Lively Teresa, 1939), Il tacchino prepotente (The Prepotent Turkey, 1939) and Il ruscello di Ripasottile (Ripasottile’s Creek, 1941). See Luca Caminati, Roberto Rossellini documentarista: Una cultura della realtà (Rome: Carocci, 2012), 34–37.
Enrique Seknadje-Askénazi, Roberto Rossellini et la seconde guerre mondiale: Un cinéaste entre propagande et réalisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 1.
Guido Aristarco, “Film di questi giorni,” Cinema, n.s., no. 5 (December 30, 1948): 156–57; Francesco De Robertis, “Libertas, Unitas, Caritas,” Cinema, n.s., no. 7 (January 30, 1949): 212.
Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).
On atmospheric film, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 233.
See Francesco Zucconi, “La forma del mare: Il cinema di Francesco De Robertis e la crisi del Mediterraneo,” Fata Morgana Web, March 4, 2019, https://www.fatamorganaweb.it.
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–16, 33–45.
D’Annunzio’s play was turned into a film by his son Gabriellino in 1921.
“Manifesto della razza,” in Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista, by Roberto Maiocchi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999).
Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web, 233–35.
Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema italiano di regime: Da “La canzone dell’amore” a “Ossessione,” digital edition (Rome: Laterza, 2015), location 3374; André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 17. Bazin mentions Uomini sul fondo with its French title (SOS 13) and describes it as a film that, as with La nave bianca, makes no concessions to the regime.
Samuel Agbamu, “Mare Nostrum: Italy and the Mediterranean of Ancient Rome in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Fascism 8, no. 2 (2019): 250–74, https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00802001.
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, La donna nera: “Consenso” femminile e fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), 156.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Fascist War Trilogy,” in Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, ed. David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 24.
David Forgacs, Rome Open City (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 62–63.
Ben-Ghiat, “The Fascist War Trilogy,” 24.
Naoki Sakai, “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?,” Social Identities 11, no. 3 (May 2005): 177–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630500256910.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 73, quoted in Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 7.
Gabriele Proglio, Camilla Hawthorne, Ida Danewid, P. Khalil Saucier, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Angelica Pesarini, Timothy Raeymaekers, Giulia Grechi, and Vivian Gerrand, “Introduction,” in Proglio et al., The Black Mediterranean, 23. On the Black Mediterranean, see Alessandra Di Maio, “The Mediterranean; or, Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy: Andrea Segre’s A Sud di Lampedusa (2006),” in The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, ed. Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 41–52; SA Smythe, “Black Italianità: Citizenship and Belonging in the Black Mediterranean,” California Italian Studies 9, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.5070/C391042328; Pesarini, “When the Mediterranean ‘Became’ Black”; and Camilla Hawthorne, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022).
Pesarini, “When the Mediterranean ‘Became’ Black.” On the colors of the Mediterranean, see also Danewid, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean”; and Gabriele Proglio, “Is the Mediterranean a White Italian-European Sea? The Multiplication of Borders in the Production of Historical Subjectivity,” Interventions 20, no. 3 (2018): 406–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1421025.
Shelleen Greene, Equivocal Subjects (London: Continuum, 2012), 116–84.
Catherine O’Rawe, Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 70–72; Catherine O’Rawe, “Back for Good: Melodrama and the Returning Soldier in Post-war Italian Cinema,” Modern Italy 22, no. 2 (2017): 123–42, https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.18; Dana Renga, Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 1–38; Williams, “Film Bodies.”
Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 21.
Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 17.
Renzo Rossellini, “Al fratello,” Cinema, no. 158 (January 25, 1943): 62; Mino Argentieri, Il cinema in guerra: Arte, comunicazione e propaganda in Italia, 1940–1944 (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1998), 274.
In a 1953 note published in Cinema Nuovo, Renzo Renzi proposed to explore these themes in a film. The idea warranted Renzi and Guido Aristarco, Cinema Nuovo’s editor in chief, a seven-month sentence in military prison. Renzo Renzi, “L’armata s’agapò,” Cinema Nuovo 2, no. 4 (February 1, 1953): 73–75, republished in Piero Calamandrei, Renzo Renzi, and Guido Aristarco, eds., Dall’Arcadia a Peschiera: Ol processo s’agapò (Rome: Laterza, 1954).
Ben-Ghiat, “The Fascist War Trilogy,” 32.
See Peter Bondanella, The Films of Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32–41.
See, for instance, Asvero Gravelli, Razza in Agonia (Rome: Nuova Europa, 1939).
Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, 32.
Argentieri, Il cinema in guerra, 120–30.
Marla Stone, “Italian Fascism’s Soviet Enemy and the Propaganda of Hate, 1941–1943,” Journal of Hate Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 73–97, http://doi.org/10.33972/jhs.114.
6. De Sica’s Genre Trouble
Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 25–35.
Agamben, 44.
Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella: Or Entertainment for Children, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 41–43.
André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 61–78.
David Bruni, Dalla parte del publico: Aldo De Benedetti sceneggiatore (Rome: Bulzoni, 2011), 134–39.
Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 122–210.
Giorgio Almirante, “Fotogrammi: Discussioni sul cinema italiano,” Il Tevere, March 9–10, 1943, 3.
Enzo Maurri, Rose scarlatte e telefoni bianchi (Rome: Abete, 1981), 27–32.
David Forgacs, “Sex in the Cinema: Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films, 1930–1943,” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 141–71.
Giuseppe De Santis, “Film di questi giorni,” Cinema, no. 20 (April 4, 1942): 198–99; Giuseppe De Santis, “Film di questi giorni,” Cinema, no. 168 (June 25, 1943): 374–75.
Alan O’Leary, “The Phenomenology of the Cinepanettone,” Italian Studies 66, no. 3 (2011): 431–43, https://doi.org/10.1179/007516311X13134938380526; Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, “Comedy Has Issues,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 233–49, https://doi.org/10.1086/689666.
Arpad Szakolczai, Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena (New York: Routledge, 2013), 4. The concept of a global reactionary cycle is derived from Alberto Di Nicola, “L’Italia nel ciclo politico reazionario,” Dinamo Press, February 14, 2018, https://www.dinamopress.it.
See Emma Bond, “Discourses of Italian Colonialism on the Global Stage: The Collections of the Wolfsonian-FIU” (presentation, American Association for Italian Studies, Sorrento, Italy, June 14–17, 2018).
See Elaine Mancini, Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930–1935 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 92–93.
Carlo Celli, “The Legacy of Mario Camerini in Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948),” Cinema Journal 40, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 3–17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225867.
Mino Argentieri, Risate di regime (Venice: Marsilio, 1991).
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mansfield Centre, Conn.: Martino Publishing, 2014).
Emily Herring, “Laughter Is Vital,” aeon, July 7, 2020, https://aeon.co.
See John Morreal, “Philosophy of Humor,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu.
On Montessori, see Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 326–64; and Erica Moretti, The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children’s Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), 18–69. On French feminism, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of ‘L’Ecriture Feminine,’” Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 247–63, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177523.
Ramsey McGlazer, “Learning by Hart: Gender, Image, and Ideology in Vittorio De Sica’s Maddalena zero in condotta,” The Italianist 36, no. 2 (2016): 187–213, https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2016.1176703.
McGlazer, 195.
Celli, “The Legacy of Mario Camerini,” 13.
Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931–1943 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 46–49.
McGlazer arrives at the opposite conclusion in his reading of these moments from Maddalena, arguing that the teacher’s “soaring rhetoric and passionate cadences colour, even while they contrast with, the faces and bodies [of Harman and his cousin] we behold again.” See McGlazer, “Learning by Hart,” 190.
I discuss Un garibaldino al convento at length in Lorenzo Fabbri, “‘Non è ancora venuto il momento di cantare’: Un garibaldino al convento tra revisionismo storico e impegno antifascista,” in Cinema e Risorgimento: Visioni e re-visioni, ed. Fulvio Orsitto (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2012), 69–81.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (First Version),” trans. Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room, no. 39 (Spring 2010): 11–38.
See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October, no. 109 (Summer 2004): 3–45, https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287041886511.
On reenchantment as a political strategy, see Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2018); for a critique of it, see Jason Crawford, “The Trouble with Re-enchantment,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 7, 2020, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org.
Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects),” Cahiers du Genre 53, no. 2 (2012): 77–98, https://doi.org/10.3917/cdge.053.0077.
Landy, Fascism in Film, 53–55; Jacqueline Reich, “Reading, Writing, and Rebellion: Collectivity, Specularity, and Sexuality in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934–1943,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 238.
McGlazer, “Learning by Hart,” 209–10.
Castor oil is a very powerful laxative, and political opponents would be obliged to drink a whole bottle without being allowed to use the restroom. After they inevitably shit their pants, they would be paraded through the streets and exposed to public mockery—another example of how laughter can be weaponized for the worst.
Reich, “Reading, Writing, and Rebellion,” 245.
On parrhesia, see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II; Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2012), 1–22.
Aldo De Benedetti, “Scusatemi ma le commedie so scriverle soltanto così . . .” [Apologies but I only know how to write comedies like this], Il dramma 12, no. 247 (December 1936): 23–24.
7. Queer Antifascism
Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 1–34.
David Forgacs, “Sex in the Cinema: Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films, 1930–1943,” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 141–71.
André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 16–40.
Ennio Di Nolfo, “Intimations of Neorealism in the Fascist Ventennio,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 93.
Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 31–31–117; Tom Gunning, “‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 32 (Fall 1993): 3–12; William Van Watson, “Luchino Visconti’s (Homosexual) Ossessione,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 172–93; Giuliana Minghelli, “Haunted Frames: History and Landscape in Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione,” Italica 85, nos. 2–3 (2008): 173–96, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40505801. On the Cinema cell realism, see Orio Caldiron, ed., Il lungo viaggio del cinema italiano: Antologia di “Cinema” 1936–1943 (Venice: Marsilio, 1965); Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (London: Continuum, 2009), 55–60; Di Nolfo, “Intimations of Neorealism in the Fascist Ventennio”; and David Overbey, introduction to Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, ed. David Overbey (London: Talisman Books, 1978), 10–16. Key sources for understanding Bazin’s and Baudry’s opposite takes on the ontology and politics of realism in cinema are Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality”; Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16; and Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974/75): 39–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/1211632.
Jonathan Mullins, “Desiring Desire in Visconti’s Ossessione,” Journal of Romance Studies 12, no. 2 (2012): 33–58, https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.12.2.33.
Sergio J. Pacifici, “Notes toward a Definition of Neorealism,” Yale French Studies, no. 17 (1956): 44–53, https://doi.org/10.2307/2929117; Duncan Petrie, “A New Art for a New Society? The Emergence and Development of Film Schools in Europe,” in The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945, ed. Malte Hagener (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 268–82.
Maurizio Rava, “I popoli africani dinanzi allo schermo,” Cinema, no. 1 (July 10, 1936): 9–11. For a broader discussion of Fascism’s politics of natality and the role that cinema played in its enforcement, see Shelleen Greene, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), 50–117.
Rava, “I popoli africani dinanzi allo schermo.”
See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 95–137.
Vittorio Mussolini, “Ordine e disciplina,” Cinema, no. 71 (June 10, 1939): 355; Vittorio Mussolini, “Razza italiana e cinema italiano,” Cinema, no. 53 (September 10, 1938): 143. See also the following works by Vittorio Mussolini: “Emancipazione del cinema italiano,” Cinema, no. 6 (September 25, 1936): 213–14; “Cinema per gli indigeni,” Cinema, no. 64 (February 25, 1939): 109; “Cinema di guerra,” Cinema, no. 96 (June 25, 1940): 423; and “Constatazioni,” Cinema, no. 117 (May 10, 1941): 297. For a longer engagement with Mussolini as a film theorist and scenario writer, see Giovanni Sedita, “Vittorio Mussolini, Hollywood and Neorealism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15, no. 3 (2010): 431–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/13545711003768618.
Vittorio Mussolini, “In cerca della formula italiana al cinema,” Cinema, no. 15 (February 10, 1937): 88–89.
Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: Verso, 1979), 120.
Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema italiano tra le due guerre: Fascismo e politica cinematografica (Palermo: Mursia, 1975), 44, translation mine. For the history of the Cinema cell, I rely on Gianni Puccini, “Storia di Cinema,” in Caldiron, Il lungo viaggio del cinema italiano, lxxxiii.
The political registry of antifascist activities is available online at http://dati.acs.beniculturali.it/CPC/.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 168. On the effectiveness of entryism as a political tactic, see Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 225–45; on Fascism’s strategic “aesthetic pluralism,” see Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 65–70.
See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 32–33.
Giuseppe De Santis, “Per un paesaggio italiano,” Cinema, no. 116 (April 25, 1941): 262–63. English translations for De Santis’s “Per un paesaggio italiano” and for two other essays I discuss in this chapter (Alicata and De Santis’s “Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano” and Visconti’s “Cinema antropomorfico”) can be found in Overbey, Springtime in Italy, 83–86, 125–30, and 131–38.
Mussolini, “Razza italiana e cinema italiano,” 9. The illustrious scientists evoked by Mussolini are in all probability the ones who penned and signed the “Manifesto della razza,” which had been published two short months earlier.
De Santis, “Per un paesaggio italiano,” 262.
De Santis, “Il linguaggio dei rapporti,” Cinema, no. 132 (December 25, 1941): 388, translation mine.
Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 79–85.
See Derek Duncan, “Ossessione,” in European Cinema: An Introduction, ed. Jill Forbes and Sarah Street (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 95–108.
Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 19–27.
Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, “Verità e poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano,” Cinema, no. 127 (October 10, 1941): 216–17.
Umberto Barbaro, “Documento e didattico (1939),” in Neorealismo e realismo, vol. 2 (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1976), 495–99; Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, “Ancora su Verga e il cinema italiano,” Cinema, no. 130 (November 25, 1941): 314.
Noa Steimatsky, “Photographic Verismo, Cinematic Adaptation, and the Staging of Neorealistic Landscape,” in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), 207.
See Pietro Ingrao, “Luchino Visconti: L’antifascismo e il cinema,” Rinascita, no. 13 (March 26, 1976): 33–34; and Mario Alicata, “Lingua e popolo,” in Intellettuali e vita politica (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1975), 60–61.
On the importance of new national heroes for progressive movements, see Mario Alicata, “Ambiente e società nel racconto cinematografico,” Cinema, no. 135 (February 10, 1942): 74–75.
Alicata and De Santis, “Verità e poesia,” 217, translation mine.
Fausto Montesanti, “Della ispirazione cinematografica,” Cinema, no. 129 (November 10, 1941): 280–81.
Luchino Visconti, “Cadaveri,” Cinema, no. 119 (June 10, 1941): 445.
Luchino Visconti, “Tradizione e invenzione” (1941), in Luchino Visconti: Un profilo critico, ed. Lino Miccichè (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 78–79, translation mine.
Mario Alicata, Lettere e taccuini di Regina Coeli, ed. Giorgio Amendola (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 42; Luchino Visconti, “Cinema antropomorfico,” Cinema, nos. 173–74 (September 25, 1943): 108–9. For a more detailed discussion of Visconti’s primitivistic fascination with Verga and Sicily, see Lorenzo Fabbri, “Chrono-Maps: The Time of the South in Antonio Gramsci, Luchino Visconti, and Emanuele Crialese,” Senses of Cinema, no. 81 (2016), https://www.sensesofcinema.com.
Umberto Barbaro, “‘Neo-realismo’ (1943) and ‘Realismo e moralità’ (1943),” in Neorealismo e realismo, vol. 2 (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1976), 500–509. For a contemporary account of the reactions to Ossessione, see Massimo Mida, “A proposito di Ossessione,” Cinema, no. 169 (July 10, 1943): 19–20; for a more recent one, see Henry Bacon, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14–16.
Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.
Alexander García Düttmann, Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 85–132; Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 160; Alexander García Düttmann, “Melodrama and Laughter: On Visconti” (conference presentation, The Positive Negative—Cinema and Comedy, Berlin, May 5–6, 2017).
Bacon, Visconti, 16–25.
Carlo Vercellone, “The Anomaly and Exemplariness of the Italian Welfare State,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 81–98.
De Santis, “Quando Visconti girava Ossessione tra Ferrara e Pontelagoscuro e io . . . ,” Bologna incontri: Mensile dell’Ente Provinciale per il Turismo di Bologna, April 1983, 39–42. Parts of this essay appeared in English: see Giuseppe De Santis, “Visconti’s Interpretation of Cain’s Setting in Ossessione,” trans. Luciana Bohne, Film Criticism 9, no. 3 (1985): 23–32, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44019015.
Minghelli, “Haunted Frames.”
De Santis, “Visconti’s Interpretation of Cain’s Setting in Ossessione,” 31.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
See Mario Alicata, “Ricordi,” in Il cinema italiano dal fascismo all’antifascismo, ed. Giorgio Tinazzi (Venice: Marsilio, 1966). Alicata blamed Visconti for Spagnolo’s “moral ambiguity,” possibly alluding to the character’s implicit homosexuality.
Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 54.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–5.
David Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas (New York: Continuum, 2011), 69–71; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 90–96.
Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 29.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–49.
Van Watson, “Luchino Visconti’s (Homosexual) Ossessione,” 178–80; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
Editorial Office, “Note,” Cinema, no. 170 (July 25, 1943): 33.
For onscreen parapraxis as a way to ignite agency in the spectatorship, see Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–31.
See Catherine O’Rawe, “Gender, Genre, and Stardom: Fatality in Neorealist Cinema,” in The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, ed. Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 127–42; Lino Miccichè, Visconti e il neorealismo (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 58–59n63. See also Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 328; and, for the troubled exhibition history of Ossessione, Gianni Rondolino, Luchino Visconti (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1981), 114–24.
See Giacomo Lichtner, Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 171–214; and Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 69–108.
Conclusion
Catherine O’Rawe, “‘I padri e i maestri’: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies,” Italian Studies 63, no. 2 (2008): 178, https://doi.org/10.1179/007516308X344342. For a precise review of the status of Italian film studies confirming neorealism’s persisting centrality in the field, see Dana Renga, “Italian Screen Studies in the Anglophone Context: 2008–2013,” The Italianist 34, no. 2 (2014): 242–49, https://doi.org/10.1179/0261434014Z.00000000077.
The discussion of U.S. postwar hegemony, geopolitical areas, and area studies I develop in this chapter is deeply indebted to Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, “The End of Area,” Positions: Asia Critique 27, no. 1 (2019): 1–31, https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-7251793.
André Bazin, “In Defense of Rossellini,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 99.
André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema?, 2:16–40; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 205–16; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 1–13.
Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), xvii.
Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe, “Against Realism: On a ‘Certain Tendency’ in Italian Film Criticism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16, no. 1 (2011): 107–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2011.530767. For reactions to this intervention, see Millicent Marcus, “Responses: Against Realism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16, no. 1 (2011): 121–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2011.530767; and Charles L. Leavitt IV, “Cronaca, Narrativa, and the Unstable Foundations of the Institution of Neorealism,” Italian Culture 31, no. 1 (2013): 28–46, https://doi.org/10.1179/0161462212Z.00000000014.
Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 18.
Bazin, 19.
See Shelleen Greene, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012), 129–40.
Christopher Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 184; Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Cesare Casarino, “Three Theses on the Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, Biopolitics),” in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 166.
See Jacques Rancière, “Falling Bodies: Rossellini’s Physics,” in Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg, 2006), 125–42; and Alessia Ricciardi, “The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorealism from Bazin to Godard,” Romanic Review 97, nos. 3–4 (May 2006): 483–500, https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-97.3-4.483.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 97.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 210.
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 17–22.
Cesare Zavattini, “Alcune idee sul cinema,” in Neorealismo Ecc., ed. Mino Argentieri (Milan: Bompiani, 1979), 99. For an English translation, see Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” trans. Pier Luigi Lanza, Sight & Sound 23, no. 2 (1953): 66, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520957411-042.
André Bazin, “Bicycle Thief,” in What Is Cinema?, 2:60.
“I myself have made some rather naïve statements in the past about De Sica’s sentimentality”: André Bazin, “Cruel Naples,” in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York: Continuum, 2011), 162. In André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, see also Bazin’s reviews, specifically “A Saint Becomes a Saint Only after the Fact: Heaven over the Marshes,” 89–93; and “Neorealism, Opera, and Propaganda,” 94–102.
André Bazin, “Umberto D: A Great Work,” in What Is Cinema?, 2:82.
Bazin, 82.
Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” 21.
Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 21–22.
Luigi Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Milan: Mondadori, 1925).
Jacques Rancière, “From One Image to Another? Deleuze and the Ages of Cinema,” in Film Fables, 107–24.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 205–6.
Leavitt, “Cronaca, Narrativa, and the Unstable Foundations of the Institution of Neorealism,” 41.
Peter Bondanella, The Films of Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 1–24.
André Bazin, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la liberation,” Esprit 1, no. 141 (January 1948): 73, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24250145.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), especially 1–37.
Bazin, “Le réalisme cinématographique et l’école italienne de la liberation,” 83. For an unabridged and unauthorized translation of Bazin’s essay on neorealism, see André Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of Liberation,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: caboose, 2009), 215–49.
Ricciardi, “The Italian Redemption of Cinema,” 495.
Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 47.
Noa Steimatsky, “The Cinecittà Refugee Camp (1944–1950),” October, no. 128 (Spring 2009): 27, https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.128.1.22.
Francesco Filippi, Ma perché siamo ancora fascisti? (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2020), 17–149.
Benedetto Croce, “The Fascist Germ Still Lives,” New York Times, November 28, 1943; Benedetto Croce, “Intorno ai criteri dell’‘epurazione,’” in Scritti e discorsi politici, vol. 1, ed. Angela Carella (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993), 50–53; Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 780, https://doi.org/10.1086/448181.
See David Forgacs, Rome Open City (London: British Film Institute, 2000); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Liberation: Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past, 1945–50,” in Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 83–101. For a comparison of the representation of sex work in Rossellini’s and Mattòli’s films, see Danielle Hipkins, “Were Sisters Doing It for Themselves? Prostitutes, Brothels and Discredited Masculinity in Postwar Italian Cinema,” in War-Torn Tales: Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II, ed. Danielle Hipkins and Gill Plain (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 80–103.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 207; Charles L. Leavitt IV, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). See also Salvatore Ambrosino, “Il cinema ricominica: Attori e registi fra ‘continuita’ e ‘frattura,’” in Neorealismo: Cinema italiano, 1945–1949, ed. Alberto Farassino (Turin: EDT, 1989), 60–77.
Mario Cannella, “Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism,” Screen 14, no. 4 (1973): 9, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/14.4.5. For a discussion of Cannella’s position in relation to the emergence of the New Left and the critique of late 1960s “compromesso storico,” see Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 196–97.