Draining the Swamp

Alessandro Blasetti was born in Rome in 1900, and at age seventeen he completed his first feature film, La crociata degli innocenti (The Crusade of the Innocents), a lost historical drama based on a script by Gabriele D’Annunzio. Blasetti then turned to film criticism, denouncing in his columns the disarray into which the Italian film industry had fallen and exposing the lack of vision of top producers and administrators as the cause of foreign dominance of the national market.4 By the end of the 1920s, 80 percent of the features distributed in Italy were produced in the United States, and Blasetti was concerned about the impact of imported films not only on Italian cinema but also on Italian life. Did both face extinction due to such a formidable invasion? Would American film annihilate domestic production and then go on to impose on the national public foreign models of sociality and belonging?

To counter the threat of Americanization, Blasetti initially pursued a sort of independent, low-budget political cinema, as he was convinced that national film could not improve its market position or do anything to keep Italy Italian until the apparatus was controlled by either private investors or state-appointed administrators. For Blasetti, cinema, like all the arts, had to be funded by the state and supported by private patrons but also had to retain its freedom from both politics and the economy. Paradoxically, only by remaining independent would cinema generate financial and political gains. Writing against what in today’s critical landscape we would dub “auteurism,” Blasetti insisted that film was a collective endeavor—for two reasons. First, to make good movies, a collective of professionals and talents had to work together freely and collaboratively. Second, good movies were movies that simultaneously entertained and bettered the collectivity. As Stephen Gundle and Michela Zegna argue, Blasetti articulated the synergy between cinema, spectacle, industry, and politics earlier and more consciously than anyone else—including the hierarch Luigi Freddi, who had participated in the March on Rome and is most often credited for the rebirth of national film as fascist cinema.5

Although Blasetti held the LUCE Institute in high esteem, he considered the separation between entertainment and useful cinema to a large extent artificial and forced. For him, fiction films could be deployed in defense of authentic national life more effectively than documentaries or newsreels. The Americans, the Germans, the French, and so on: every race (“razza”) had expressed its own cinema and was in turn expressed by cinema—except for the Italians. It was thus time to move forth with a new cinema that would manifest the Italian race, that would amplify the core features of a race that film, and with it the world, had so far disregarded.6 Blasetti’s stance was that this new race that showed itself onscreen would acquire consistency offscreen, and the ethno-nation Fascism was talking about would then be made into something effective and concrete, something relevant and that mattered: not just a fantasy or a discourse or a possibility but as a real historical force.

Blasetti’s position on cinematic representation anticipates the insights on the reality effect articulated by Fredric Jameson in his cryptically titled 1992 essay “The Existence of Italy.” Juxtaposing Marxist historiography and a Heideggerian appreciation of art’s worldmaking power, Jameson suggests that the historical function of realism under capitalist modernity is to concoct representations of reality that elicit the novel forms of subjectivity needed for such a reality to actually come into being.7 Something similar happens in Blasetti: in the director’s semiotics of cinema, the referent of cinematic representation (the new Italian race) is not something that exists already but something that film allows to happen. Cinema for him was, in a certain sense, an apparatus presenting Italy’s racial future.

There were, however, two major obstacles preventing this cinematic reveal of the Italian race, which would eventually lead to a different Italian real. For starters, Italy lacked the production companies willing to contribute to the cinematic production of new Italians and a new Italy. Second, since it was still barely in its infancy, the Italian race could not yet express itself cinematically, being deficient in autochthonous talents and professionals. To deal with the second issue and teach young Italians film language, at the end of the 1920s Blasetti set up the first filmmaking courses in Italy at the public conservatory of Santa Cecilia. Having burned bridges with most of the key players in Italian film for his scathing criticism of the industry, and with the regime still officially unconvinced of fiction cinema’s biopolitical affordances, to address the first issue Blasetti created his own production company to finally be able to feature the Italian race on the big screen. He raised some money from wealthy fascist sympathizers and forward-thinking hierarchs, but the majority of the budget was “crowdfunded.” From the pages of Cinematografo, Blasetti issued a plea that each reader contribute what would amount to $100 today for a new Italian cinema. Three hundred of them responded to the call, and in 1929, the film cooperative Augustus released its one and only movie before going bankrupt.

Sole! (Sun, 1929), one of the last silent films shot in Italy, swiftly elevated Blasetti’s status. Only the first reel remains, but even from the eleven minutes (256 meters) conserved at the Cineteca di Stato it is clear why this film was hailed as a revolution. Without money for fancy sets or stars but with a crew of young talent supporting his vision (Aldo Vergano, Goffredo Alessandrini, Gastone Medin), Blasetti had no choice but to bring the camera outside and shoot mainly on location, relying on B-list actors for the lead roles and employing locals as extras. Liberated from the norms and practices of the studio system, Blasetti’s camera ventures through the Lazio marshes, pastures, and encampments to raise enthusiasm around what Mussolini dubbed “the war that we prefer”: the settler-colonial reclamation of the Pontine Marshes near Rome, which was just getting started.

In popular culture and public opinion, Rome was the gateway to a darker Italy and bleaker Italians. Indeed, the city was still associated with tropes of criminality, decay, and racial degeneration. We might recall the racist depiction of the Roman underground—primitive, backward, quasi-African—from Alfredo Niceforo and Scipio Sighele’s La mala vita a Roma as well as the stench and chaos that permeated the city in Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore.8 Mussolini was committed to enhancing Rome’s standing, so that the capital of the soon-to-be fascist empire would be a worthy successor of Julius Caesar’s Rome and the Rome of the popes. Rome was gutted, and large-scale projects transformed its center. Via dell’Impero—today Via dei Fori Imperiali—was to connect Piazza Venezia, the location of Mussolini’s office, and Altare della Patria, the monument celebrating modern Italy’s liberation and unification, to the Colosseum, to establish a link between the nation’s glorious past and its present. Yet this was not quite enough. Mussolini wanted to build a brand-new fascist Rome whose white marbles would outshine ancient Rome’s ruins and the Cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica. He identified the almost depopulated areas that now constitute the city’s southern outskirts as the perfect site for the regime’s urban development ambitions. This is where Fascism would build its monumental cinema-city, Cinecittà, and later the EUR neighborhood with its iconic Square Colosseum.9

Even farther south was the swampland that neither ancient Rome nor the Church had been able to reclaim. As Steen Bo Frandsen suggests, the sanitizing of this wild territory was connected to the urban development plan for a “Great Rome,” on the one hand, and with Fascism’s logic of coloniality on the other.10 The reclamation of the Pontine Marshes was in fact promoted as the first battle in the regime’s endeavor to civilize southern peoples and save them from the ruinous conditions into which they had fallen after centuries of exploitative government by wicked national elites or foreign rulers.

The Mussolini Law of 1928, as Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg traces, called for an ambitious bonifica (sanitation, reclamation) of thousands of acres of land, in both southern Italy and Africa, in order to transform what were painted as empty spaces and retrograde human stocks into integral components of a fascist empire. With the ten-year anniversary of the March on Rome nearing, “special significance was given to the three hundred and ten square miles of marshland” south of the nation’s capital.11 The region was infested by malaria-carrying mosquitos and had to be drained and sanitized, but something also had to be done with the decayed bodies stranded there. There were few permanent settlements in the region, and its inhabitants (no more than two thousand people, mainly shepherds, woodcutters, and their families) were suffering the consequences of an unhealthy environment, living—the regime insisted—in a heinous state of moral and physical abjection. Accordingly, more than 100,000 settlers were relocated to the swamps, both forcibly and voluntarily, in order to transform this toxic environment and its degraded stock into a morally and physically healthier species of Italians: the homesteaders were mostly World War I veterans and peasant farmers from the “industrious” Veneto. Stewart-Steinberg writes:

Their orders were to settle the lands and actively contribute to the regime’s various battles: the autarchic “battle of wheat” and other products geared to self-sufficiency, the demographic battle of births, and finally also the defense of the Italic race, for the latter was supported by the idea that population transfer and therefore cross-breeding between the variously imagined “Italic” stocks (stirpi) would, just like the reclamation of lands, produce a vigorous new people capable and strong enough for further colonial ventures.12

The reclamation of the Pontine Marshes was really built up as a monument to the regime’s capacity to bring light even to the darkest of lands and to enlighten even the most backward of peoples. As Federico Caprotti suggests in his work on fascist ideal cities, the faux medieval burgs and rationalist architecture in white marble emerging from the swampland were to be a sort of shiny model landscape showcasing the brighter world that Mussolini was fighting to build in dark Italy but also in Black Africa. There was, Mia Fuller’s research confirms, a clear and direct entanglement between Fascism’s internal and external colonial ambitions, and in the regime’s dreams, Asmara and Addis Ababa were to be remade to resemble the EUR, Sabaudia, or Littoria.13 But also the white people emerging from the marsh were to be models. Out of the reclaimed southern fields, Blackshirt whiteness would spring: in fact, the new stock breed there would be modern and civilized, proving that southern Italians were not Black, but they would not be elite white either, given their work ethic, grittiness, nonbourgeois attitudes, and readiness to sacrifice. This sort of race would serve as a perfect model for the kind of subjects that even darker bodies, Black bodies, could aspire to become.

To affectively authorize Fascism’s coloniality as a civilizing and worldmaking enterprise, Blasetti starts Sole! with a closed gate. The camera confronts the marshes, and the opening title card presents this wrecked landscape as the field of eternal strife between evolution and degeneration. As the gate opens, the exploration of this dark, gloomy borderland and its people begins. A series of cross-fades moves the viewer across the deadly spaces of the malarious land: there are men toiling in the mud, skulls and rotting carcasses of large animals, herds of wild buffalo stomping on people and destroying everything in their way, a toxic territory and an environment in ruin. Yet the “march of progress,” as the title card dubs it, can finally begin: the bonificatori—the “reclaimers,” that is, the colonists in charge of reclaiming this devastated milieu—have arrived and will soon get to work. To force on the public a propagandistic experience of the sanitation efforts, Blasetti makes the spectators embrace the perspective of the reclamation teams venturing into this wild Italian south. First, he positions the camera on a raft surveying the marshes. Then, he moves it to a train running on a newly inaugurated railroad and hauling the materials and the labor force that will be needed to complete the civilizing mission. The spectators, in this case, do not merely see the marshes through the settlers’ point of view. They are also made to share the regime’s perspective on the work that will be done there. The verticality that Blasetti articulates by elevating the camera from the level of the mud and the water to the train’s locomotive sanctions Fascism’s colonization efforts as something naturally springing forth from the landscapes that they intervene on: Sole! solicits the regime’s intervention as necessary given the very nature of the places, but also the faces, about to be targeted.

Piero Garofalo writes about the influence of Soviet cinema on the film’s aesthetic and imaginary, but its references also include ethnographic documentary, which introduced the ways of “primitive” peoples to “modern” publics, and above all the Western, with its mythology of the frontier and of the pioneers fighting bandits and winning over, or suppressing, defiant darker-skinned natives. The colonists do, in fact, teach the marsh people hard work and modern techniques, and—in an impressive dolly shot—the camera moves around an industrious settlement, documenting with its dynamism the incredible progress made once the locals interiorize the true Italian ingenuity and work ethic. This is an important scene not only for its technical complexity and affective import but also because it will serve as a blueprint for how to mediate the encounter between progressed fascist settlers and backward native bodies in the father lands that Fascism set out to reclaim. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat shows, both LUCE newsreels and narrative films downplayed the violence of Italian colonialism and manifested Italy’s presence in Africa as a beacon of civility, modernity, and morality.14 In Sole!, Fascism is conveyed in the same manner: bearing not destruction but culture.

In an interview from the 1960s, Blasetti remarked that the work of Enrico Ferri was a crucial reference for him while writing and shooting this film. Ferri was a Fascist Party senator who insisted that racial degeneration was the result of a combination of natural predispositions and environmental conditions. Ferri’s influence on the project comes through in the insistence with which the film connects the fascist conquest of a degraded landscape with the moral enlightenment of the people living there, who need to be cultivated, reclaimed exactly as the barren, underdeveloped environment in which they are embedded.15 Even the lighting in Sole! contributes to advancing its ecofascism. The dramatic chiaroscuro set design, curated by Medin, effectively expands on the film’s title and brings the point home: where there was darkness and blackness, now there are glimmers of sun and light.

However, this work of enlightenment does not proceed unbothered. The Mussolini-led march toward brighter times comes to an abrupt end due to the swamp people’s resistance. To mediate such a standstill of progress and change, Blasetti’s camera—which had been very mobile and forward-moving until then—halts and becomes still. A group of hunters has gathered in assembly to question the homesteaders’ intentions, concerned about the changes that they bring about: will drinking, for instance, be banned? Through a series of close-ups, Blasetti captures the signs of moral vice and biological decay in these men’s faces: huge earrings, buboes, sores, scars, rotten teeth. A young man, Silvestro (Vittorio Vaser), is especially distrustful. After examining the order to vacate their dwellings so that the sanitation process can continue, Silvestro turns dramatically to the camera, inciting his mates to oppose the invaders and defend their land and way of life. He then rushes to the house of the community leader, Marco (Vasco Creti), in order to summon him to the uprising, but Marco is not there.

Silvestro takes this opportunity to corner Marco’s virginal daughter Giovanna (Dria Paola), and this assault is another way in which Blasetti conveys that antifascism is a dangerous form of degeneration, that it is abject desire motivating the stock of Italians who foment conflict and challenge the regime’s campaigns. Through Giovanna’s point of view, the public sees Silvestro menacingly advancing forward—emotionless eyes, a sinister grin, black hat, a dark shadow cast on his face and with total blackness in the background. The frame composition, a frontal medium close-up, and the black backdrop make Silvestro look like one of the portraits from Lombroso’s criminal anthropology studies. But there is also a resonance with the closing shot from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) that visually conveys what the plot narrates: those who oppose Fascism are violent criminals and pathological subjects (Figure 8).

Silvestro is profiled, identified as a deviant by the cinematographic apparatus here, and Blasetti again uses the camera to discriminate between who is a racially appropriate Italian and who is not.16 When in fact earlier Sole! had featured the engineer head of the development team, Dr. Rinaldi (Marcello Spada), it captured him well lit, in a lateral close-up as he is busy advancing the reclamation works. He is not a mugshot; he is not a threat. Dr. Rinaldi, like the other colonists, emanates an aura of enlightenment, uprightness, health, and morality that is paramount for the film’s operation: to remediate the swamp into a battlefield between the Italian race that remains and the one to come. This clash between the racial past and future of Italy follows the expected chromatic pattern: darkness on one side, light on the other—with a ray of sun shining on Rinaldi’s forehead and rendering him luminescent. The last fifty minutes of the film are lost, so we do not get to see how this confrontation plays out. But it is possible to reconstruct what might have happened after Silvestro’s heinous attempt on Giovanna from the screenplay by Vergano as well as from film stills and reviews published in magazines from the time.17

Giovanna’s father gets home just in time to prevent her from being raped by the depraved agitator, exorcising the threat of miscegenation. Father and daughter then rush to meet Dr. Rinaldi to figure out what is going on, if the homesteaders’ concerns are on point. Rinaldi convinces Marco and Giovanna that no abuse is taking place: it is in everyone’s interest for the swamp to be drained. Rinaldi and Giovanna are falling in love. Silvestro, resentful at having to give up his land and the woman he covets to an outsider, organizes an assassination attempt against Rinaldi with the collaboration of a crass woman who is the antithesis of the pure and chaste Giovanna. But at the last minute, Silvestro recognizes Dr. Rinaldi: they fought side by side during the Great War and Rinaldi even saved Silvestro’s life. Silvestro finally understands that there are not two separate groups or factions. Natives and developers are one: they are Italians; they are hard workers; they are one race. The clashes between locals and bonificatori, colonized and colonizers, end: Rinaldi and Giovanna will start a family; and the savage natives finally step into the light, step into Blackshirt whiteness, evolving from hunter-gatherers into rural workers.

Sole! was highly appreciated by the press and by the young film enthusiasts gravitating around the Cine-GUFS, the university film clubs created by Fascism in the early 1930s. When Blasetti claimed that not only Italian cinema but also neorealism came out of the swamps, he was not completely delusional.18 The experience of Sole!, with its decision to sidestep the studio system and create a direct connection between the apparatus and the soil, would be incredibly influential not only for the development of fascist realism and of imperial cinema but also for the new realist wave of the 1940s and 1950s. The mark of Blasetti can be felt distinctly, especially in Luchino Visconti’s, Roberto Rossellini’s, and Giuseppe De Santis’s own postfascist “eco-cinemas”—I am thinking not only of the melodramatic capture of the marshes in Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) and Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), or of the camera that flows with the wind and the river in Paisà (Paisan, 1946), but also of the politicized landscapes from La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), Stromboli (1949), or Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (No Peace under the Olive Tree, 1950).

Notwithstanding the praise it garnered, Blasetti’s independent film could not secure adequate distribution. Augustus closed down, and Blasetti, having been poached by Cines, finally agreed to shoot talkies. Like many others, he had initially branded these a foreign genre and too radical a deviation from traditional Italian cinema, which as we know had blossomed during the silent era. Blasetti ended up directing fifteen sound films under the regime, experimenting with different registers and alternating between purely commercial productions and films that, like Terra madre (Mother Land, 1931) and Vecchia guardia (Old Guard, 1935), supported Fascism’s endeavor to make a race that would get to work for the regime. What is notable about these films (besides their artistic merits) is that in order to mobilize the people and stage Fascism’s redemptive power, they resort to racialized tropes and racializing moves that are incredibly similar to those that characterize contemporary right-wing populisms. In fact, Terra madre and Vecchia guardia populistically stoke resentment against “white” elites and blame them for the country’s ruination—even for the spread of the red threat and the birth of antifa thugs. With the marshes drained, Blasetti singles out another kind of swamp as responsible for endangering the nation.

Eschewing the Elites

Terra madre picks up where Sole! ended: there is still a lot to do for the fascist utopia to come into full bloom. A somber chant rises from the titular “mother land” bordering the swamp, and with it the noises of rural labor. This is one of Blasetti’s first sound films, and the use of diegetic sound, as Lara Pucci notes, is impressive. Pickaxes hitting the earth, the thudding hooves of charging cattle, and the footsteps of the peasants working the soil resonate with the surrounding landscape to aurally mediate “the physical and symbolic solidity of this place and the connectedness of its inhabitants to it.”19 There is a materiality, a weight, to this location that makes it feel real but also right. The humble peasants—men and women, young and old—are a sturdy, gritty stock. Hardworking, dedicated to the fields, they toil until dusk, relentless, resolute, to prepare the soil for the crops. Labor is both naturalized as an integral feature of the Italian landscape and a defining trait of the people’s identity. Yet there is a problem: the farmstead lacks modern machines, and thus the peasants cannot work as efficiently and productively as they would want to. In light of the identitarian features of Terra madre, this also means that these peasants, by not working as effectively as they could, fall short of attaining their true selves.

Eating their supper in a modest hut, catching some warmth from the fireplace, the peasants complain about the lack of investment and attention from the young aristocrat who owns the farm. Unlike his late father, he wastes most of his time in the city and does not seem to understand that the estate needs someone who can command, someone who will provide the workers with the guidance and resources they need to do their jobs. In a virtuoso two-minute sequence combining pans and lateral tracking shots, Blasetti moves the camera through the gloomy room, capturing the natural commitment of these rural Italians to labor but also a growing suspicion toward the new padrone (master, boss). Is he the guide that the land needs? The Duke (Sandro Salvini) is about to inspect the estate, and the farm laborers are looking forward to discussing with him what comes next.

A motorcade now invades the tranquil countryside, exciting the stock and the people. The Duke is not alone. He came from the city with his friends, who look like a different breed from the Italians working in the fields. They are fashionable, pale, cosmopolitan, fake, artificial; we are a few miles away from Rome, but to them this is a completely foreign land. The city crowd cannot respect the sanctity of the place. The Duke’s latest girlfriend, Daisy (Isa Pola), cannot stand farm life. Skinny, bougie, vain, she sleeps in, and—smothered in white linen beddings, laces, and perfumes—treats the locals as servants, incessantly ringing the bell she keeps on her nightstand to demand their services. In the film, Daisy functions as the embodiment of the donna-crisi, or “crisis-woman”—in the fascist imagination a dangerous type of well-to-do modern woman with “an extremely thin and consequently sterile body that purportedly confirmed her cosmopolitan, non-domestic, non-maternal, and non-fascist interest.”20 How could someone like this, and with such a strange name for a good Italian woman, fit in and belong amid the fields and the workers that feed a nation?

Unlike his girlfriend, the Duke is happy. In rural Italy, he feels at home and among his people. During one of his long horse rides surveying and reconnecting with his land and stock, the Duke hears a prayer in the distance and slowly makes his way to what looks like a mobile tabernacle where a country priest is officiating mass. Following the Duke, the camera moves discreetly so as not to profane the sacred space. A dolly shot captures the devotion of the peasants as they invoke the Virgin Mary for protection and forgiveness. The Duke dismounts his high horse, putting himself at the level of his workers and joining them in their prayers. Through a scale progression from close-up to medium shots to full shots, Blasetti moves the camera away from the religious gathering, closing the sequence with a pan over this pious assemblage. The Duke is on the margins, but for the first time we see him in a choral scene gathering with his own workers. He takes particular interest in a young, voluptuous, but pious peasant, who in the next scene pretends not to know who he is and flirtatiously questions his intentions. Emilia (Leda Gloria) is the daughter of the estate manager, and since her mother died, she has been taking care of her younger siblings when not working in the fields. Throughout the film, shot-reverse-shot patterns establish that Emilia is the total opposite of Daisy (Figure 9): already her name showcases her organic connection with the Italian land—Emilia Romagna is the region where the Duce was born.

In a medium shot framing Emilia and the Duke holding hands and whispering to each other as lovers would do, the young woman complains that their master has abandoned them. Everything is going to ruin without him: the swamps are advancing again; workers’ morale is hitting new lows and their dissatisfaction is ever growing. The Duke resents the charges, but Emilia does not back down: “If the master were an intelligent man, with the right vision, if he belonged to our race [razza] and had something in his heart, he would agree with me.” The Duke sighs and replies: “So it appears your master does not belong to the same race [razza] as you.” Emilia, maternal, reassures him: since the padrone was born here, it will only take a few steps on this land to remind him of who he is, where, and with whom he belongs (Figure 10). The southern fields are presented here as a space where Italian men will reclaim their white patriarchal masculinity, and with it their authentic racial affiliations. As Fascism moved from internal to external colonialism, films such as Blasetti’s Aldebaran (1935), Camerini’s Il grande appello (The Great Appeal, 1935), Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco (White Squadron, 1936), or Alessandrini’s Luciano Serra, pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938) began attributing the same restorative function to other Souths—the African colonies—and to other fields: the warfront.

Blasetti insisted that his decision to shoot on location, outdoors as much as possible, and to eschew stars in favor of what I would call “native performers” as extras was meant to rehabilitate Italian film practices and challenge the market dominance of manufactured sentimental comedies and melodramas. When one of the city dwellers in Terra madre dares to suggest that the estate could be turned into a movie set, Blasetti is trying to establish a distance between his own intervention and the sort of fictions the public was familiar with. The argument was the same as that made by Pirandello in Quaderni and by Ada Negri in the 1928 short story “Cinematografo”: current cinema, with its operatic passions and fantasy travels in foreign worlds, was compromising the Italian moral fiber, making the most naive and impressionable spectators fall for foreign pleasures, desires, and lifestyles that could only lead to ruin or death.21 In the face of an attack against the Italian spirit, film had to do its part. Italian society was as usual under siege, and thus, as usual, had to be defended.

Nevertheless, despite the textual and paratextual outrage against genre fiction and commercial cinema, Blasetti’s ecofascist realism does not actually shun generic conventions (the same would hold true for Pirandello and Negri, but also neorealism). On the one hand, Blasetti is committed to remediate Terra madre as a different kind of cinema: not a fiction, but something serious, concrete, relevant, and “real.” On the other hand, he politicizes the romantic and melodramatic register in order to mediate—through the love story between the Duca and Emilia—a quasi-erotic attachment between the Duce and rural Italy.

The fact that the Duke connects with Emilia during a Mass is important. After the reconciliation with the Church sanctioned in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, Fascism could embrace Catholic traditionalism as a fundamental building block of its racialized identity politics. Italy was a fascist and a Christian nation, with the Catholic Church and the Fascist Party collaboratively caring for the spiritual and physical health of the body politic. But the signing of the Lateran Treaty also cast a new light on the Catholic peasant masses and the lifeworld associated with them. The South, and rural Italy more broadly, was no longer what it still was in Sole!; it was no longer the backward “Other within” that had to be civilized and whose retrograde superstitions had to be redressed. On the contrary, peasant men and women, rural fertile mothers and unsophisticated fathers—hardworking, faithful, committed, observant, their skin marked by the grit and many hours in the fields—were hailed by the regime as an emblem of racial virtue and a stronghold of Italian tradition, an antidote to the depraved modernity enjoyed by the elites, whose pale skin was so rarely kissed by the sun. Rural Italians, an embarrassment for the ruling blocs under liberalism and branded as darker bodies, became a state-sanctioned treasure and were celebrated as a source of pride. In order to appeal to rural masses, Fascism gave dignity and importance to identities and subjectivities that liberal capitalism disdained; it proposed, Gaia Giuliani writes, a project of race-nation-empire in which even underclass Italians could feel included, valued, and recognized. Not only did the regime develop a socioeconomic order where “warfare, industrial production, and urban and infrastructural development went together with traditional family life and agricultural production.”22 It also conveyed that to move forward, the Italian race needed to look backward—and hence, in a key move to understand the success of its populism, elected as authentic Italians those who were earlier chastised for their lagging behind. The drag was, in a sense, the future for the Italian race.

In such a context, Giuliani continues, the contadina (peasant woman)—with her patriarchal values, maternal instincts, and bursting reproductive sexuality—became a particularly important trope in fascist discourse. This mode of life was eroticized as the embodiment of a racially appropriate Italian femininity, an antidote to liberal, foreign, northern European toxic womanhood that was key to generating the healthy, strong, dynamic, ordered, and disciplined stock that the homeland needed. The body of the woman was a fundamental battlefield for Fascism because through it passed the spiritual and biological destiny of the ethno-nation.

Thus, the rural mass scene from Terra madre, one of the first cinematic implantations of Christianity in the Italian landscape and the beginning of the love story between the peasant world and a duke, is important for two reasons. First, it celebrates the recent reconciliation between Roman Catholicism and the Italian state. Second, and conversely, it sets up a strife between two very different kinds of Italian people, giving the Duca/Duce the opportunity to show everyone, the public especially, his true allegiances. In fact, he must decide which nation, which men and women, which razza—to use the film’s own terminology—to embrace and support. Will he side with Emilia and her rural breed or Daisy and her city crowd?

Following a chromatic strategy that is in line with Fascism’s bid on the “darker Italy,” with its antimodern, “grittier” iteration of white supremacy appealing to the subaltern masses, in Terra madre high bright white and ivory brand improper behaviors, while darker tones and more “rustic” textures of white are associated with the lifestyles that ought to be prized. The contrast between Emilia and Daisy is especially apparent: the first, brunette and olive skinned, is usually featured garbed in black garments or traditional religious clothing and captured through sober and somber lighting, giving her a distinct material depth; and the second—blonde, pale, blue eyes—is depicted as always draped in satin, furs, and often through high key lighting, which flattens her out. As James Hay suggests, smooth, silky whiteness and monochromatic luminescent lighting often functioned in Italian film under the regime as markers of privilege.23 In Terra madre, they are used to flag predatory subject positions, behaviors, and environments, which were those traditionally associated with urban cosmopolitan elites who had self-identified as northern European white.

In his overview of whiteness in film history, Richard Dyer notes that in contemporary horror cinema, white characters are often the bringers of death. Dyer connects this trope with Karl Marx’s appropriation of vampire mythology: the unproductive upper classes are vampires that need to suck the life out of the working people in order to live on.24 The elites in Terra madre are characterized by a similar nefariousness, and they are even pictured through visual strategies that anticipate the stylistic choices of contemporary Marxian horrors. We can think, for instance, of the blinding whiteness that Daisy from Blasetti’s film and Rose (Allison Williams) from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) share (Figure 11).

However, in Peele’s comedy horror, but also in films such as Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), or Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), elites are condemned within the context of a larger take on the economic and power structures responsible for creating a class of bloodsuckers and an exploited underclass of workers. In Terra madre, on the contrary, there is no structural critique of white privilege, only moralistic outrage against privileged elites. It is for this very reason that Blasetti’s film, a sort of hillbilly elegy in its own right, has nothing progressive about it; it serves instead as a weapon foreclosing class struggle and to sustain Blackshirt supremacy in national life. Hardworking Italians do not need to take up arms and transform the system: they just need to find someone of their own breed to whom they can entrust themselves for protection. They need a Duce, or to stay with the film’s metaphor, a duca. Ultimately, then, Blasetti’s representation of peasants’ work ethic, moral fiber, and lifestyle serves to salvage the very structures responsible for the alienation and exploitation of subaltern Italy by the haute bourgeoise and state power. Terra madre not only directs the public to take pride in hard work and sacrifice, elevating them into a blessing in disguise; it also harnesses a sense of precariousness and insecurity that calls for a savior.

We know that biopolitics and state racism entail a shift in how rulers are perceived by the people they seek to control. In order for the state to assume the pastoral function previously fulfilled by the Church, the sovereign ought to be accepted as a benevolent authority who knows the land and the people, has their best interests in mind, and is thus able to care for them in the face of any and all threats. So the people need to feel imperiled but also to believe that those in charge will lead them to safety and do them good. In the fascist pastoral of Terra madre, Blasetti affectively conveys that the Duce is precisely the guide that the true Italian race needs in order to prosper, by showing off the Duke’s skills as a master cowboy (“bovaro”), drawing from the popular LUCE iconography of Mussolini working in the fields.

Gathered around the corral where the cowherds have mustered the cattle to be measured and branded, elite and subaltern Italians meet. The “white” people look with superiority and repugnance at the “primitive” way in which the stock is handled and the branding conducted. The Duke does not approve of this attitude and mingles with the dark-skinned peasants, who, in contrast, are celebrating such a crucial event in the life of a farmstead. The influence of the Western and the association between the American and Italian frontiers are again evident. The Duke sits on the fence with a glowing Emilia. Excited, as if to reclaim his own masculinity and mastery, he jumps into the pen and tackles a buffalo, grabbing the powerful animal by the horns and wrestling it to the ground, so that its body can be marked and claimed. Blasetti immerses the viewer in the ring and enmeshes us in this intense fight. Lateral tracking shots moving in antithetical directions capture the opposite reactions of the two Italian breeds present at the scene. The workers are excited, proud, supportive, and enthusiastic; the elites are disgusted and baffled. Now that he has shown his capacity to harness the power of the land, the peasants—addressing the camera directly—beg the Duke to stay and take care of them: as the stock, as the public, they have been claimed. Still, the Duke decides to leave the somber folk meals of the Italian countryside for the well-lit but sterile poker tables, the lies and affairs that the rich—and childless—enjoy in the city (Figure 12).

But his race needs him. The Duca had decided to sell the property to his friends. What he does not know is that they have no intention of supporting the farmstead: they are involved in a shady development plan to evict the peasants, demolish their shantytown, create a road connecting the estate to the highway, and turn the farm into a retreat of sorts. To speed up the eviction of the peasants and the renovations, the buyers set the estate ablaze. Emilia reaches the Duke on the phone; he rushes back from the city and saves rural Italy from the city elites, and with it a child who is trapped in a burning stable. He renounces urban life forever and returns where and with whom he belongs. Finally, he is back in charge—we even see him adopting Mussolini’s infamous stance, hands on his hips and his gaze toward the future: the Duca/Duce has straightened up his allegiances; nothing can go wrong now.

At the end of the film, we are back where we started, where everything starts: on the fields, at work. Emilia and Marco (she is now on a first-name basis with the Duke) toil together, always surrounded by children. Marco does not want her to work the land anymore; now that he and the machines are around, women need to stay home and provide a different kind of labor to the community. Emilia playfully protests: she wants to keep working. Marco insists that one day he will get the strong-willed contadina to say yes to him. Emilia blushes and runs away, only to turn around after a few meters to invite the Duke to come along. As Emilia and Marco run toward the horizon together, the camera pans left, showcasing an Italian countryside in full bloom and assembling a picture-perfect homage to heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. The swamp has been drained; the “white threat” is neutralized. Pickaxes and shovels break through the soil: thanks to everyone’s hard work, thanks to the recognition of peasants and owners that they are part of the same race that shares the same values and priorities, the motherland is being plowed and will soon bear fruit. Emilia, the maternal woman, will too. The future of the race is safe and bright.

Reopening Italy

To model the gendered workforce that the regime needed for its efforts, Terra madre romanticized the prosperous destiny seeded by the collaboration between good bosses and productive masses. With Vecchia guardia, Blasetti continues to weaponize the apparatus to simultaneously make and mobilize an Italian race. Yet in this case, he changes registers—shifting from romance to epic—to tell a cautionary tale of what happens to a place when the racial unity of capital and labor is compromised, leading to an eruption of class conflict. In this film from 1935, Blasetti travels back in time to 1922 to paint a brutalist picture of Italy under the yoke of careless liberal rulers who allowed the red threat to spread across Italy and shut down the country. From the metaphor of the swamp in Terra madre to the insistence in Vecchia guardia that there can be no future or history beyond the horizon of labor, and that being closed for business is both a disgrace and a betrayal of national identity, the tropes and imaginaries from 1930s Italian Fascism continue to resonate with those from twenty-first-century America.

Vecchia guardia takes place in the days leading up to the March on Rome. We are again in southern rural Lazio, around Frosinone, and everything has come to a halt. The communist thugs have infiltrated the quaint village where the young boy Mario (Franco Brambilla) lives with his family. His father, Dottor Cardini (Gianfranco Giachetti), is the head physician at the local psychiatric hospital, and his older brother Roberto (Mino Doro), a veteran, is now a high school teacher still waiting for an assignment. Schools have been ordered to stay closed for safety reasons in light of the explosive sociopolitical situation, but Roberto is not idle. He is a militiaman, head of a combat team of proud Italian boys who gear up every day and go out to hunt down the rebels—rich and poor united against the common enemy. Mario idolizes his big brother and is eager to join Roberto’s squadraccia (militia squad) in their punitive expeditions. Mario always wears the Balilla uniform, a clear sign that being a Blackshirt is more than a political choice; it is an identitarian feature—the core of authentic Italianity. With the Christian cross and war memorabilia in the background, he promises Roberto that he will do his part to get Italy going again. For the film, Communism is not merely an economic or political danger; it is a biological threat to the very existence of an Italian race. Everything has stopped due to the spread of the red virus—not just the production of material goods but also the reproduction of the nation’s body. Roberto would like to start a family, but how can he plan a life under these conditions? And he’s not the only one suffering: with the whole of the public sector shut down, unemployment is through the roof. The good Italian people are hurting. Futurity is being sabotaged. For Blasetti, an inoperative environment is a ruined space, and the slow times of the film’s beginning effectively convey the sense that Communism inevitably leads to the bankruptcy of history.

Things take a turn for the worse when the male nurses from the psychiatric ward decide to go on strike, after months of waiting for Rome to respond to their demands. They are not bad people, just frustrated and disappointed. Dottor Cardini sees this—sees them—and tries to mediate. He calls il ministero (the ministry), but no one answers. He makes the rounds of the local politicians, but to no avail. The apparatuses of liberal Italy are unable or uninterested in protecting national life from the looming catastrophe. The mayor is attending to his estate, where he exploits the workers and does not allow the peasants’ children to taste even a single grape. The school principal dedicates more time to pursuing his students sexually than to taking the steps necessary for the schools to reopen. No one in charge registers that the situation is deteriorating and that the people are about to explode. Without an efficient government and without leaders who care, the town goes mad. The patients escape the psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the Reds are getting stronger and have almost taken over the town. Blasetti works hard here to demonize demands for socioeconomic justice and to paint a positive picture of fascist repression.

Roberto’s militia squad is presented as the one and only force opposing the thugs who are keeping the town hostage. Even the police are useless and prefer not to intervene. One day, Roberto and his men conclude that children cannot be kept out of class anymore: they will reopen the local school, even if protesters and rebels have already assembled to fight back against this decision. A violent clash between communist thugs and Blackshirt heroes erupts. Finally, after a scene of street violence reminiscent of the infamous Ku Klux Klan sequence in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Roberto’s squadraccia is able to momentarily prevail. With the collaboration of the teachers, they get the kids back into the classroom, standing at the school’s gate and defending the right of young Italians to learn and grow. The presence of Roberto’s unit is enough to disperse the crowd of rebels who were planning to break into the school and impose a new shutdown. But when night falls, the threat returns. When the saboteurs reach the power plant, the town is left completely in the dark. A small-scale civil war erupts. Things cannot go on like this any longer. Analogously to Sole! and Terra madre, Vecchia guardia asks the public to pick sides, to decide on which side of the political color line to stand: with the Blackshirts who reopen Italy or the Reds, these “enemies of the people” who compromise Italian futurity.

Mario decides that it is time he joined the righteous battle to restore order, and he is killed in action. Blasetti’s camera is surprisingly still through the first hour of Vecchia guardia, so when the camera starts moving after Mario’s death, its motions become charged with incredible meaning. Blasetti, in total control of film language and technique, sets up a great moment of cinematic emotional manipulation: pulling in twice on Mario’s corpse, he forces the public to face the sacrifice of this little Italian patriot and confront what it means for the collectivity (Figure 13).

Mario is brought home with all honors, and the town falls into absolute silence. Even the Communists back off. This is too much: the life of a child is sacred, we are reminded by a nun in tears. Through long descriptive pans of Mario’s room, Blasetti conjures the eerie emptiness that his death has left behind. But Mario has not departed. After his death, Blasetti incorporates a POV shot from the perspective of Mario’s body lying in rest in his fascist youth uniform, as the town pays him homage, affirming Mario’s continued presence and articulating the sense of a communion between living and dead; between past, present, and future. Mario is still with us, the film establishes; he remains as part of a larger history that the living will be proud to fight for and build in his name.

At Mario’s funeral, the wind makes the cypresses weep, producing the impression that the landscape itself is partaking in fascist mourning and, by extension, naturalizing Fascism as something embedded in Italy’s very nature. But this environmental sorrow is soon muted by the Blackshirts’ belligerent invocations of Mario’s name as they perform the fascist roll call: “Mario Cardini—presente, presente, presente.” Mario is present as a memory, an example, a warning, and a call to arms. The trajectory initiated by his sacrifice cannot stop. The film’s rhythm intensifies, and the camera movements track how Mario’s sacrifice is transforming the town’s political and human environment. There are no opposing factions anymore; the protagonist of Vecchia guardia now becomes the collectivity, the one Italian race united against its common enemies. The whole community now dresses in black, and fascist anthems are heard on every corner. Accompanied by the ghost of his dead son, who is inciting him, “Forza papà, forza papà” (Courage dad, courage), even Dottor Cardini joins the convoy launching the assault against those who endanger the biological survival of the true Italian people. It is time to storm Rome; it is time to take back Italy. The film’s closing card reads: “together with the living marched the dead who were born again at Mussolini’s call.”

In presenting the days leading up to the March on Rome as a vigilia (eve)—a term that Italian speakers mainly use to refer to the night before Christmas—the opening title card of Vecchia guardia immediately begins memorializing the fascist insurgency as a miraculous event. The closing card completes this canonization of Fascism by casting Mussolini in the role of lifesaver and even metaphorical redeemer of dead children, that is, of the aborted possibilities of life, of futurity. In this way, Blasetti turns fascist history into a wondrous happening the public should be proud to be part of, something in which it would want to participate.

But why use so much heavy-handedness in characterizing fascist power as a saving grace? What was the point of remarking so emphatically that Fascism had saved the nation from the white swamp and red virus? Why put in so much effort to make the people identify with Blackshirt armed squads and violence?

When Vecchia guardia came out in 1935, Fascism had quashed even the last glimmers of opposition. With Gramsci on his deathbed and Palmiro Togliatti in Moscow, Mussolini was stronger than ever. If we remain at the level of representation—what the film shows and tells—it is difficult then to understand Blasetti’s operation. But if we consider the affects and subject positions this filmic device triggers with its ecofascist representation of Italian environments under siege, then things might make more sense. This film—and the same could be said about Blasetti’s other historical reenactments, most notably 1860 (1934) and Ettore Fieramosca (1938)—is more about Italy’s future wars than its past battles. With Fascism about to accelerate from nation- to empire-building, the country had to commit to even more heroic endeavors. The Italian people’s allegiance to the regime had to be more unwavering than ever, given what was lying ahead.

The ethno-nation that rose up in 1922 thanks to Mussolini had to get out of its workwear and don the uniform—to assure Italy’s survival, keep other children alive, liberate other peoples from wicked rulers, bring light and prosperity to other dark localities, and fight the red virus at its root. The Old Guard had fulfilled its duty; now it was time for the New Guard to do its part. Franco Brambilla, the child actor who played Mario in Vecchia guardia, was born in Rome the year of the great fascist march on Italy’s capital and died at twenty fighting for Fascism on the Eastern Front. This was the new race that Fascism made and Blasetti’s new cinema so insistently expressed on the screens. Fredric Jameson is right: the fictional lives that realism concocts do not always remain mere fictions.25