Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon

Rome, November 10, 1937. The groundbreaking ceremony for the new headquarters of the L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE) Institute, the public corporation devoted to the production of newsreels and educational films, is scheduled for the afternoon. The previous spring, a few feet away, on the day celebrating the mythical founding of ancient Rome, Benito Mussolini inaugurated the Cinecittà public studios. Soon the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Experimental Center of Cinematography)—the first state-funded film school in the West—will begin construction just across the street. This transformation of Rome’s eastern outskirts into a monumental film production hub bears witness to a major shift in Fascism’s attitude toward popular culture, and narrative cinema in particular. Although in fact Mussolini’s rise to power dates back to 1922, it is only in the early 1930s that that the regime became invested in the film industry, orchestrating—through financial stimuli, policy interventions, and infrastructure development—the comeback of Italian cinema from its post–World War I crisis.1 In a sense, then, the 1937 inauguration of the LUCE construction yard in Piazza di Cinecittà also constitutes a celebration of the rebirth of Italian film as fascist national cinema.

For the occasion, Cinecittà Square has been transformed into a giant open-air theater, with VIP boxes from which personalities from show business and party leaders can comfortably enjoy the ceremony. Benito Mussolini himself will break ground for the LUCE headquarters. But the site is also a set. There are Italian flags and fascist banners everywhere; army officers and policemen in dress uniform; an askari, a native soldier serving in Italian East Africa’s multiethnic colonial police; a delegation of construction workers; schoolgirls wearing white, and members of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the fascist youth organization, in their black shirts; common people bustling in excitement. Movie cameras are everywhere, eager to capture Mussolini’s grand arrival and the impression he will make on the crowd. The motorcade makes its way through the construction site. Mussolini steps out of his Alfa Romeo. Cinecittà Square explodes with joy.

The Duce salutes the armed forces, greets the people in attendance and the construction workers, then ventures down the walkway leading to the pit where he will lay the foundation stone. Once he signs the act of foundation, Mussolini places it in a white marble shrine. Father Tacchi Venturi, the liaison between Italy and the Vatican, consecrates the shrine before lowering it into the ground and giving one last blessing to the imposing film hub being erected in the capital of the fascist empire. Dominating the scene, on the berm surrounding the construction site, is a thirty-five-foot cutout of Mussolini himself behind a movie camera, peering through the viewfinder and posing as a consummate director. Spelled out in white capital letters beneath the larger-than-life icon is the infamous motto “Cinema is the strongest weapon,” followed by a reproduction of the Duce’s own signature (Figure 1).

The suggestive equivalency, a riff on the Leninist claim that film constitutes the most relevant of the arts, is often evoked in surveys of the fascist mediascape. Its staging at Piazza di Cinecittà in November 1937 is featured, for instance, on the cover of two influential treatments of popular culture during the Ventennio: David Forgacs’s edited volume Rethinking Italian Fascism and Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Fascist Modernities.2 Notwithstanding their prominent display of the slogan and precise histories of fascist media, not even these prominent studies significantly consider the meaning of the cinematographic apparatus’s assimilation to a weapon. Is it a catchy propagandistic slogan? An analogy? Or can such a claim be taken literally? If cinema is really a weapon, which sort of weapon might it be? How does this weapon work? In which confrontation, battle, fight, or war would it be deployed?

Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo’s Re-viewing Fascism suggests some answers to these questions: “When Benito Mussolini proclaimed ‘Cinema is the strongest weapon,’” the back cover of their edited book reads, “he was only telling half of the story.” According to Reich and Garofalo, Mussolini’s announcement of the weaponization of cinema was, in essence, false posturing. Reich in particular supports this claim by arguing that Fascism differed from Nazism in that it never sought to hegemonize national culture and it lacked a precise ideology to begin with.3 For Reich, Mussolini did not merely fail to exert control over the arts; he never sought to control the cultural industry as he lacked a set worldview or vision of Italy to impose upon it. Considering this context of ideological confusion and nonhegemonized media, how can one take seriously Mussolini’s proclamation that cinema is a weapon? In “Mussolini at the Movies,” Reich does not mention Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Lacan, or Louis Althusser. Nevertheless, given her insistence on the anti-ideological and nonhegemonic nature of fascist command, Reich’s intervention constitutes an important challenge to the possibility of viewing Italian cinema under Fascism through the lens of Marxist ideology critique—that is, a challenge to the foundational framework for the development of the discipline of film studies in the 1970s.

The discussion of cinema as an apparatus of ideological warfare dates precisely to that juncture, when journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Screen took notice of Althusser’s blend of Gramsci and Lacan. What was particularly generative about a text like “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was its granting culture and the imaginary of a greater impact on historical dynamics than the economic functionalism of orthodox Marxism.4 Notably, Althusser highlighted how capitalist rule cannot be assured by violence and repression alone but rather must be supplemented by subjects’ quasi-voluntary servitude to state power. For Althusser, this servitude to the capitalist state—“consent,” in Gramsci’s terms—is brokered by acting on collective consciousness and carried out through institutions that, under the state’s control, articulate a fake representation of life under capitalism that rationalizes even its most exploitative and abhorrent features.5 This is the realm of ideological warfare. The weapons through which this conflict is fought are apparatuses that, by trapping individuals in an inauthentic rendering of reality, persuade them to preserve the current economic, political, and social relations. Althusser contends that it is only after overcoming the worldview imposed upon them by the state that individuals will become free to fight for better lives.

Applied to the study of filmic textuality, Althusser’s framework led to brilliant analyses of the “reality effect” through which the cinema hides its ideological operations and achieves the illusion of audiovisual referentiality. In discussing the basic function of the cinematographic apparatus, Jean-Louis Baudry, for instance, famously described the movie theater as a Platonic cave that captures spectators in a web of deceptive projections, and spectators as disembodied larval beings who cannot but recognize/misrecognize themselves and their world when hailed by the screen.6 Even more strongly than Althusser’s original ideology critique, apparatus theory makes political progress dependent on aware mental processes and the liberation of the collective consciousness from state-sanctioned truths about the world.

In the 1990s, Barbara Spackman, Karen Pinkus, Marcia Landy, and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi—among others—drew upon the post-Althusserian Marxism of Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau to elaborate a more embodied, sensorial, and haptic take on how capitalist rule was secured in fascist Italy. Yet even their innovative interventions in this last instance uphold the framework that Victoria de Grazia articulated in her key book The Culture of Consent: since behaviors are consequences of conscious beliefs, coming to grips with Fascism, coming to terms with the fascistization of the national masses, entails studying the ideas and discourses that the regime convinced the Italian population to hold.7

Reich takes a completely different route. She rejects altogether the very terms of ideology critique and apparatus theory. In this regard, “Mussolini at the Movies” is another important confirmation of what media archaeologies by Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Giuliana Bruno, and Jonathan Crary also unearthed: with its generalizations about cinema’s basic function and mode of functioning, a model based on ideology, hegemony, consent, and consciousness does not stand the test of film history.8 Reich is correct when she concludes that Fascism did not work ideologically, that it was never preoccupied with articulating a rational, somehow consistent worldview that could legitimize the abject lives Italians were living. Mussolini was always more interested in commanding how national subjects acted than in influencing what they thought or believed. His admiration for Gustave Le Bon’s “crowd psychology” is well documented, but also well known is his appreciation of Fascism as an electrifying network of myths rather than as a precise doctrine or ideology. The regime treated the population as flesh to be emotionally moved, not as disincarnate eyes and ears to be rationally shown and told. Given what new archival research has revealed about film production in Italy between 1922 and 1943, it is truly a stretch to posit that entertainment cinema under the regime functioned as a weapon of hegemony in the way that ideological state apparatuses work in Althusser. However, Reich’s conclusion that Fascism was uncommitted to weaponizing cinema and popular culture might be further nuanced.

Can it be that in fascist Italy, film and media were deployed in a battle that was not ideological or carried out through ideas or consciousness? After rejecting traditional explanations of fascist command based on hegemony or consent, the Blackshirt Ventennio still needs to be made sense of, so as to avoid the risk of dismissively archiving it as madness. The inauguration of the LUCE construction site is one such crucial scene because it provides important cues to how Fascism ruled through film as well as to the war in which cinema was weaponized.

A central absence in this primal scene of fascist cinema is that of the king: the head of the Italian state, Victor Emmanuel III, is nowhere to be found. The stage is left to the ministers of the executive branch and foremost to the leader of the government, Benito Mussolini. The DUX sign present on the scene announces that the prime minister is literally responsible for guiding the people forward. The schoolgirls and the Balilla squad evoke the new nation that the Duce has been fathering. Father Tacchi Venturi attests to the closeness between Mussolini’s government of the people and the spiritual power exercised by the Catholic pastorate over its flock: it is with the Church’s blessing that Mussolini is laying the foundations for a renewed Italian cinema. There are the armed forces—police and army—representing the security apparatus that has been instrumental in advancing Mussolini’s fight to redress Italian lives. The Blackshirt militia, another great asset for the fascist disciplining of the body politic, is also present on the scene. But above all, there are the Italian people—industrious, energetic, united, and enthusiastic—who have come together to celebrate Mussolini. They have gathered because, as his gigantic cutout attests, the Duce is quite familiar with the movie camera; he understands film, and based on his expertise he has been restructuring the cinematographic apparatus. The cranes looming beyond Mussolini’s photographic reproduction indicate that much more is being erected under fascist power. In the focal point of the scene, the motto identifying film as a weapon is set between a team of construction workers and a line of police in dress uniforms, framing cinema simultaneously as a tool of nation building and a device of social control. The askari remains still, yet the part this character plays in this show of remediation is key (Figure 2). Standing in front of a mobile projection truck that will bring national film to the margins of the nation and to the colonies, this Black African body is exhibited as living proof of cinema’s force to reclaim even those lives that have been racialized as most backward. But through his radical difference vis-à-vis everyone else on site, a difference that the newsreel constructs through montage and camera movements, the African soldier also conveys that the Italians assembled here are a non-Black, not-colonized, and not-backward body politic: they are a modern people with an imperial reach, a people that under Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and were readying to take on the world.

I am so drawn to this carefully staged performance as its mise-en-scène and emblems conjure a weaponization of media that eschews the horizons of ideology critique and apparatus theory. Through its figures of race, gender, and class; by means of its attention to natality, colonialism, and reproductive futurity; in light of its emphasis on the symbiotic relation between the Dux, the church, the common people, and the police, the inauguration of LUCE connects the cinema with the constellation of practices and machines that Michel Foucault associates with the realm of biopolitical warfare—that is, with the struggle undertaken by modern colonial-capitalist states to govern and put to work their subjects not thanks to consent building or persuasion but by exerting direct control over individuals’ biological and affective existence, that is, without going through the mediation of cognition or conscious mental processes.

While “Italian theory” has often presented biopolitical warfare as a homogenizing enterprise, Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus insists on the need to take notice of the raced, gendered, and classed dimension of biopolitics, so as to better appreciate its structural complicity with the machinations of racial capitalism. Working in the tradition of Black feminism and arguing against Giorgio Agamben, Weheliye shows that the apparatuses of biopolitics are not interested in producing undifferentiated bare lives; they bring into existence the specific embodiments of race and gender that the capitalist-patriarchal-colonial order requires to sustain itself. For this precise reason, biopolitical rule—Weheliye concludes—is intrinsically discriminatory and differential. As Jonathan Xavier Inda also argues, the biopolitical state is not concerned with protecting life in general but always with securing particular ways of being a body, with subjects that are made live, let die, or killed on the basis of the naturalized socio-racial group wherein they have been profiled.9 Biopolitical warfare should be thus more precisely understood as the battle to create different forms of what, via Weheliye, we could dub racialized assemblages, raced forms of living that have been implanted with a distinct set of abilities, duties, norms, desires, pleasures, and commitments—with the ultimate goal of maximizing socioeconomic (re)productivity. Under biopolitics, differences do not disappear but are instead exploited to guarantee the reproduction of what bell hooks dubs “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”10

In Piazza di Cinecittà, on November 10, 1937, biopolitics and biopolitical warfare are everywhere. The newsreel of the event shows a set that is also a construction site. It puts on display a diverse mass of people assembled thanks to the technologies of fascist governance. It presents the Duce as the leader able to bind together—while carefully separating—white Italians and Black Africans, men and women, the rich and the poor, the elites and the masses. Simultaneously, the newsreel also remediates cinema as the most reliable apparatus for fulfilling Fascism’s project of unifying and putting to work a population that had been considered for so long impossible to discipline. The metaphor of cinema as a weapon starts to make more sense when one considers this emphasis on the medium’s ability to gather an ordered Italy. In Piazza di Cinecittà, the cinematographic apparatus is ultimately cast as a device that, by means of color, soundscape, lighting, montage, camera angles, camera movements, frame composition, and mise-en-scène, could refashion a diverse multitude of living beings into the docile gendered racial assemblage Fascism demanded them to be. National cinema, on this occasion, stages itself as the fundamental asset in the struggle to determine the species of subjects that Italians are and the kind of nation that Italy is.

“Cinema is the strongest weapon” is then no empty slogan. It is a guiding thread that can be used to investigate the apparatus’s contributions to fascist efforts to make a racially proper Italian assemblage and also to the revolt against Blackshirt state racism. It is an answer, in its own way, to the vexed question “What Is Cinema?”—an answer that affords alternative genealogies of the medium and prompts us to reconsider how audiovisual forms bore on modern Italy’s national history, so as to possibly better evaluate how media impact our transnational, postmodern here and now.

The history of modern Italy—the history of Italy as a modern capitalist nation-state—begins in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a series of wars waged by the House of Savoy against Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Bourbons, and the Pontifical States with the intent of turning the peninsula, Sicily, and Sardinia into one united kingdom. Yet, as Rhiannon Welch traces in her brilliant Vital Subjects, the Risorgimento promise of a unified national space and a pacified national society was still to be achieved when Fascism rose to power.11 The country was rife with differences and fractures that felt insurmountable, and since the turn of the century national political culture and literature alike betrayed growing societal concerns about how long this Kingdom of Italy was going to survive if it kept existing in such a fraught and conflictual state. Welch connects the anxious nationalism and sense of disjointedness haunting early twentieth-century Italy to the entangled economic order, political system, and racial imaginary that characterized the liberal nation.

Building upon Gramsci, scholars such as Jane Schneider, Nelson Moe, Pasquale Verdicchio, and Miguel Mellino have contested the traditional apologetic tone of previous writing on the Risorgimento, suggesting that the so-called liberation of Italy as carried out under the hegemony of the Savoy family (which originated from France) and of northern liberal elites should be considered part of a larger colonial project of territorial expansion, resource extraction, and forced subjugation of urban and rural masses racialized as quasi-African.12 Expanding on this tradition of thought, Welch argues that the tears in the national fabric that were so disconcerting for public opinion were caused by capitalist exploitation but were understood to be the consequences of the population’s heterogeneous racial background and specifically by the pernicious presence in the country of a pathological breed. If we look at Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man)—the most vivid manifestation of the bipartisan racism characteristic of the liberal postunification order (Lombroso was a socialist)—we see that the founder of Italian racial anthropology does not even consider Italy as one singular lifeworld but rather as a series of incompatible ethnic folds, each characterized by a different social reality and a different stage of civilization.13

A noble minority of Italians shared the blood, customs, and whiteness of other north European stocks, while a multitude of darker and shorter Italians—the indolent, backward peasants and the delinquent, wayward proletarians—constituted a threat to society as they were biologically disposed to delinquency. This kind of gaze reiterated mainstream French, German, English, and U.S. anti-southern stereotypes about an insurmountable biocultural divide between northern and Mediterranean Europes and manifested itself in a regime of quasi-segregation where subaltern Italians were symbolically and materially excluded from belonging in the nation they were toiling to sustain. A very strict color line divided the upper classes from the popular masses, and the existence of a sort of minoritized majority, of an unassimilated proletarian multitude, worked against the grain of the historical project that liberalism was pursuing: turning Italy into a great modern European nation-state. As David Theo Goldberg and Walter Mignolo imply, in the imaginary of the time, “becoming modern” for a Western territorial formation entailed both evolving into a compact sociopolitical assemblage and rising to the rank of colonial power.14 After the conquest of Eritrea in 1890, the 1896 loss against Ethiopia at Adwa as well as the social unrest—regicide, strikes—that marked turn-of-the-century Italy signaled thus to the ruling blocs that modernizing Italy was going to be a strenuous struggle. The relative economic growth and social peace characterizing the early twentieth century, a period that also included the colonization of Libya (1911), only postponed the confrontation with the structural problem afflicting the Kingdom of Italy under liberal rule and which manifested in the aftermath of World War I: the state had not enough of a firm grip over its subjects, and its mix of paternalism, laxism, and authoritarianism was not sufficient to manage conflicts between social parts and hence assure the survival of a modern, that is, colonial and capitalist, Italy.15 As I specify in chapter 1, the feeling was that something new, something different was needed to secure the country’s intersectional system of exploitation at home and abroad.

There is indeed a paradigmatic shift that marks the passage from liberal laissez-faire state governmentality to fascist biopolitical interventionism. This threshold from liberal to fascist history is constituted by the systemic realization that an Italian modernity—which one should understand not merely as the industrialization of the country but also the internal colonization of the population and its deployment for colonial expansion—would be unsustainable as long as the current racial order, governmental logic, and political technologies dominated Italy. Liberalism’s divisive elitism, coupled with its extractive capitalism and hands-off approach to government, were ultimately considered obstacles to the mobilization of the country, the urban and rural masses especially, for building a strong bourgeois nation and global empire.

Hence, on the one hand, it is important to historicize Mussolini’s rule as something that grew out of the sociopolitical order that liberalism opened up in the wake of Italy’s unification—that is, the colonial-capitalist order. On the other hand, the commitment to read Fascism in context, to write a longue durée genealogy of the Blackshirt regime and exorcise the “parenthesis” trope, should not entail a disregard for the innovative aspects of fascist rule, for the fact that Mussolini’s advent constituted an event in national history that radically changed how Italy was put together and pushed it, as Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg argues, in a postliberal direction.16

A central aspect of the postliberal state that Fascism arranged was its totalitarian dimension, the more aggressive and capillary ways in which it bid on individual bodies and the body politic alike. Violence was not a last recourse but rather a fundamental political technology as, for Fascism and its supporters, authentic Italian living was under attack from internal and external enemies who had compromised the health of the nation and, fostering conflicts, were preventing Italy from being the organized totality it was destined to be. But violence was only one of the tools through which to intervene in collective life. Repression was to be supplemented by a global and far-reaching effort to enable one strong united Italian ethno-nation.

The fascist totalitarian rearticulation of sovereignty coincided, in fact, with a rejection of the divisive and division-fostering ethnic racism of the liberal era. There were not two ethnically distinct and ethically incompatible racial groups in Italy; Italians were one race, and under Mussolini they will rise again, the regime assured, leading to what Gaia Giuliani brilliantly describes as the gradual recoloring of Italy.17 Blackness and backwardness were displaced outside the country, in the Africa that Fascism promised to civilize and turn into an asset that would feed the starving Italian masses. Simultaneously, these national masses underwent a process of whitening as they stopped being reproached as the threatening racial Other within. Mussolini not only silenced those evoking biological fractures keeping the country divided by establishing that Italians were a specific, singular biospiritual unicum; he also elevated the industrial and agrarian masses who had been earlier profiled as quasi-African to the status of true Italians, the ones the new government was fighting for and with. Articulating a grittier version of white supremacy, an anti-elitist populist white supremacy catering to subaltern classes, the regime hailed Italy as a proletarian and rural sea-bound people that were ready to work hard, and even go to war, to reclaim the place in history and in the world that they deserved.

Italians were, after all, the glorious race that had birthed Western civilization, the regime claimed through references to the Roman Empire, the Church, and the Renaissance. Thus, for Fascism, even if Italy could not make claims to phenotypical whiteness, even if Italians could not flaunt the sort of white modernity exhibited by northern European countries, Italy had to be granted the respect, the prestige, but also the colonial supremacy that white nations were entitled to. Italians’ contributions to world culture, history, and the arts made them a race peer to, if not superior to, phenotypically white and nominally more modern European nations. For too long this great stock was prevented from showcasing its prowess, ingenuity, and industriousness—that is, from deploying its specific iteration of whiteness. But now, thanks to Fascism, Italy might complete the rebirth started with the Risorgimento wars, correcting incongruous behavior and freeing itself from the yoke of racially inappropriate projects of community and belonging. What was bringing Italian life down was not racial difference (the myth of the “two Italies”) but biological degeneration caused by foreign influence and internal decay.

To effect the body politic’s resurgence and the ethno-nation’s most autochthonous potentialities, Fascism launched a series of massive social health campaigns that had the objective of reclaiming the general condition of the population, so as to make Italy bigger, stronger, more productive, and more competitive on the world stage. The Battle for Births—promoting natalism, imposing taxes on bachelors, and offering economic and employment advantages to prolific couples—was meant to reverse the depopulation trend of the liberal years (mass migration, World War I, the flu pandemic) and provide Italy with the hands and wombs it needed to birth its glorious future. The Battle for Land cleared and reclaimed vast marshland areas and committed to provide new homes and fields to Italians living in hunger and neglect. The Battle for Grain ramped up cereal production, feeding a growing Italy while making it food independent. The Racial Laws from 1938 relaunched the war to protect the true people, forbidding interracial relations with Jewish Italians and Black colonized subjects in order to exorcise the risk of transnational solidarities and keep the biological body of the ethno-nation pure. They also excluded Jewish Italians from participating in public life to defend society from their pernicious influence. But there was an even more fundamental battle that Fascism was fighting.

Many centuries of external rule, the liberal catastrophe, and then the Red Scare had developed in Italian bodies an obstinate resilience against taking up the commitments and responsibilities, desires and lifestyles that, according to the regime, were proper to the Italian race. As he explicated in a 1933 interview, for Mussolini, a race was not only a biological reality but also an emotion, meaning that for a collectivity of individuals to behave as a race, as a smooth-working sociopolitical assemblage, these individuals had to feel that they were part of a single organism whose survival was dependent on the cooperation of all its components.18 The regime’s concern was that Italians did not feel like one race, and without this sentiment of belonging to a common history, project, and destiny—to be one and the same, notwithstanding all the localisms and differences—the fascist care for the nation’s biological body would backfire. In line with Romanticism’s antirationalistic understanding of how social bonds and communities are formed, building upon liberal-era theorizations of the relationship between embodiment and subjection, the regime was convinced that acting on people’s feelings would have a more significant impact on how they behaved than precise ideologies or even new formulations of racial identity. Thus, among the battles that the regime took up, there was also the fight to implant in the body politic affects and emotions that would lead the Italian masses to behave as the sort of race Fascism had been claiming they were. Already on the eve of the March on Rome, Mussolini clarified that the war to redress national life that the Blackshirts were taking up was going to be conducted by means of a diverse array of political strategies and governmental apparatuses, through violence and religion but also through politics and the arts. The regime’s involvement in the rebirth of Italian cinematographic art ought to be understood, I hold, precisely against the backdrop of this multimedia biopolitical effort to fare razza—to make race, to intervene on the biological and spiritual body of the nation so as to breed the life-forms necessary for heteronormative, capitalist, and colonial Italy, that is, for a whitened and modernized nation, to reproduce itself.19

Without a doubt, the regime’s 1930s commitments to the film industry were not exclusively a matter of governance and geopolitics. In the post-1929 context of economic stagnation and credit crisis, the support for national film was meant to stimulate the gross national product by enabling a virtuous circle between the consumption and production of “made in Italy” narratives. But the investment in cinema was also motivated by the desire to turn recreational activities into occasions for disciplining what was considered a recalcitrant race in need of much schooling. Just as board games were used to form children into fascist and colonialist subjects, cinema was eyed as a resource to form a people still in its infancy. In this regard, James Hay highlights how the regime’s interest in commercial filmmaking reveals the essential link between government and media, power and leisure, that would define the final decade of Fascism’s political laboratory.20

The traditional outlook on fascist media holds that the regime benefited especially from escapist films distracting the public from the dreariness of life under Mussolini. Notwithstanding the radical differences in their frameworks, influential readers of Italian cinema such as André Bazin, Millicent Marcus, and Gilles Deleuze conjure a direct relation between fascist command and escapist cinema—especially popular rom-coms from the 1930s modeled on coeval Hungarian stage plays and Hollywood hits.21 Replete with images of opulence and liberality, cinema under Fascism has often been presented as a device of mass distraction, a way to provide spectators with a dream-space where they could forget about all the prohibitions and limitations that the regime imposed on them in real life. In his “Sex in the Cinema,” Forgacs highlights a structural analogy between this account of the labor of cinematic figuration during the Ventennio and worn-out descriptions of the Ventennio itself. Both Fascism and its cinema are understood in line with what has been dubbed the “repressive hypothesis,” that is, through ideology critique’s claim that power is exercised mainly through restrictions, denials, and erasures.22 Whereas Fascism is reduced to a violent dictatorship betraying true Italian identity, fascist cinema is described as an apparatus denying access to true Italian reality. But, Forgacs concludes, there is a double fallacy at play here: first, in the idea that there are realities and identities independent from circuits of power-knowledge-affect; and second, that Fascism operated through political technologies that falsified these preexisting realities and identities.

To correct these oversights, “Sex in the Cinema” stresses the necessity to devote more attention to the productive dimension of both the regime and its media, so as to appreciate their long-lasting impact on Italians’ behaviors and dispositions. Expanding on Forgacs’s effort to bridge Gramsci and Foucault, central questions of this book are: Can the feelings harnessed by cinema under the regime help us account for—though not justify or excuse—Italians’ widespread collaboration with Fascism? Might a connection be established between the forms of affect that mainstream cinema concocted and the life-forms that Mussolini battled to assemble? In Fascist Modernities and Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, Ben-Ghiat shows that realism had an especially important nation- and empire-building function in fascist culture, as this genre—in both literature and film—came to be invested with the function of modeling how “real” Italians ought to live, love, and die.23 Further interrogating Ben-Ghiat’s argument, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon ponders how the different iterations of realism—respectively elaborated by Walter Ruttmann, Alessandro Blasetti, Mario Camerini, Francesco De Robertis, and Roberto Rossellini—mattered to Italy’s peculiar racial whiteness by mediating the sense of everyone’s place, role, and job in the nation-empire the regime strived to create.

Considering the Italian and fascist reliance on feelings for making race, my approach to realism and the cinematic apparatus privileges their affective affordances—their power to arrange intense audiovisual experiences about national reality by capturing bodies in oppressive deployments of gender, class, and community. Especially in scholarship about Italian cinema, realism and melodrama have been read in opposition, with—as Catherine O’Rawe argues—melodrama being dismissed as the womanly, overaffected, and degraded “other” vis-à-vis masculine and sober realism. Following Linda Williams, I show that realism, as any cinematic register, works melodramatically, that is, by triggering emotions in the spectatorial body. Accordingly, I pay particular attention to how, paraphrasing Williams, reality effects can be deployed to harness racial affects. I am keen in this regard to show how filmmaking strategies usually hailed as tokens of an honest, immediate, ethical cinema (for instance: long takes, location shooting, and use of nonprofessional actors) arranged exploitative simulations of national life that confirmed the sensation of a sociopolitical organism on the brink and thus strengthened the regime’s rule over the body politic.24 Turning Italian locations—factories, waterfalls, cities, the swamp, the countryside, and the Mediterranean sea—into battlefields between proper and improper lives, the works I discuss articulate affective geographies of fear and hope that deliver the people to Mussolini and subject them to the project of an ordered, greater Italy. It is for this reason that I treat even films that are not explicitly about empire or race as machines that are complicit with Fascism’s plans of internal colonization and external colonialism.

Shelleen Greene has already started to unpack the fundamental role that cinema plays in enabling deployments of Italian racial identity that negotiate the country’s relation to global white supremacy. Greene’s pivotal Equivocal Subjects advances the study of Italian cinema’s involvement with race and racism by focusing on racialization processes that, similarly to those described by Edward Said in Orientalism, specify the features of whiteness through a dialectical opposition with spaces and peoples racialized as Other.25 In this book, I take notice of a different cinematic modality of making a white race: not by opposition but by accumulation. By doing so, I extend to the study of Italian film culture the framework articulated by Richard Dyer in his groundbreaking book White: accept that race is a key apparatus in the development of modern history, accept that the modern world is a racial world, and thus see racialization at work even in movies that do not feature Black people, works that do not explicitly thematize racial difference but rather deal with, for instance, Italian life. It is unquestionable that whiteness is predicated on racial difference: in order for white people to exist, Blackness needs to be a fact; nonwhite people ought to be woven into existence as well. Yet, in seeing whiteness only when the specter of Blackness is conjured, one runs the risk of upholding the traditional color-blindness of film and media studies and missing how, racism being a structural phenomenon, “whiteness reproduces itself in all texts all of the time.”26 It is precisely in order to account for the unmarked but ubiquitous production of white lives upon which Western modern history is predicated that Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon recognizes a systemic effort to thicken spectators’ racialized sense of self in the host of seemingly apolitical films featuring common Italian workers, peasants, teachers, nurses, mothers, fathers, delivery boys, and salesgirls that characterize fascist cinema.

In writing about “fascist cinema,” I do not imply that the regime attempted a takeover of film production within the country. We have seen with Reich that hegemony was not a central feature of fascist rule, and Hay confirms that the regime, to govern, relied heavily on initiatives and players that were not under state control. Although Mussolini fashioned himself as a director, the fascist state acted more in the guise of a producer financing “worthy” scripts and filmmakers. When Fascism tried to force a synchronization between the cinematographic apparatus and the other technologies of biopolitical governance it relied on to assemble a white body politic, things did not go well. The lack of success of films like Giovanni Forzano’s Camicia nera (Blackshirt, 1933), one of the few fiction films produced by LUCE, and Walter Ruttmann’s concurrent Acciaio (Steel), a film strongly desired by the fascist apparatus I discuss in chapter 2, attests how the regime was more adept at fostering ideal conditions for cinema to do its part than at imposing projects and directors on production companies.

This relative independence of the film industry from what Marla Stone dubs the “patron state” left room for some tactical maneuvering of the cinematographic apparatus.27 Indeed, it was not only the Blackshirts who were invested in film. With the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Fascism had created a state-of-the-art facility where young Italians could learn how to make movies. But knowledge is power, and the very training they were imparted also allowed them to experiment with film form and elaborate alternative deployments of the apparatus. Aware that no political system—even the most complete totalitarianism—is ever able to eliminate resistance, in this book I do not only examine cinema’s contributions to fascist history. I also analyze how, starting with the end of the 1930s, cinema was occupied by groups unhappy with fascist life, who sought to disrupt what, thanks to Lauren Berlant, one might describe as the “cruel optimism” that bound the people to the regime.28

Fascist Italy, for me, is hence not only an admonitory tale; it is also an archive of resistance. After looking at how representations of Italians at work enabled racialized ways of feeling that contributed to Mussolini’s social eugenics efforts, imperial projects, and colonial violence, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon eschews excavating skeletons from the closet of memory, in favor of narrating the stories of the defiant gay, Communist, Jewish, and quasi-feminist Italians who, in fascist Italy, acted like the media activists of today: they infiltrated the culture industry, redeployed audiovisual forms, and shouldered the cinematographic apparatus as a weapon of resistance against fascist race-making. They engaged, in other words, in what Gramsci might have considered a “war of position” against Mussolini’s rule—a conflict that takes place within the realm of cultural fantasies, to pave the way for real changes in sociopolitical life.29

In approaching the fascist mediascape as the battlefield of an aesthetic-political conflict between different projects of national identity, I achieve—ideally—two results. On the one hand, my book contributes to the ongoing endeavors to push the study of Italian visual culture outside an area studies model and reposition it at the forefront of global discussions on the relation between power systems, media forms, and subject formations. By reading Mussolini’s regime as an attempt to secure the capitalist-colonial order in Italy, I “deprovincialize Fascism,” so to speak, and situate what happened then and there in a transnational history of racial capitalism that is also and still our history.

On the other hand, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon furthers the turn to the body in film theory and cultural studies associated with the waning of ideology critique, by considering the role that formal processes of affective mediation play in practices of state governance and state racism as well as in progressive efforts to defy the destructive white normality that biopolitics enables. It is true that feminist theorists—Silvia Federici and Sara Ahmed, among others—have indeed done groundbreaking work on the politics of emotion.30 However, the importance of mediated feelings for racialization processes is an aspect of biopolitical governance that seems to me still fairly understudied and yet key for understanding the historical reality in which we live. We often forget that Foucault’s analytics of biopower, a theory in which media and affects play a crucial but unacknowledged role, stems precisely from the question of how to resist burgeoning new iterations of state racism and fascism.

Truth Functions as a Weapon

The 1970s marked a decisive shift in Foucault’s research trajectory. After the failure of the 1968 protests, in a climate of generalized counterrevolution, with state-enforced violence on the rise in France and the United States, Foucault grew concerned about ever more invasive strategies of social control and the ways that state institutions always more decisively discriminated between lives that matter and disposable bodies. In this regard, Brady Thomas Heiner documents how at the basis of Foucault’s political thought there might be a disavowed appropriation of African American radicalism. Can it be a mere coincidence that Foucault started developing his analytics of power after a trip to northern California during which he became acquainted with the theories and practices developed by the Black Panther Party (BPP)? There are two aspects of the BPP’s framework that are particularly germane to Foucault’s own critique of state power: the identification of racism as a crucial means of state governance rather than a mere superstructure, and the acknowledgment that Fascism is not a phenomenon relegated to the past but rather a reality inscribed at the very heart of modern capitalism.31 According to Heiner, it is precisely the Black experience of the (white) United States as a racial quasi-fascist state that forms the basis for Foucault’s so-called biopolitical turn. The preoccupation with how institutions produce and hierarchize embodied subjects would lead Foucault to emphasize, in his late work on the ancient “care of the self,” the need to experiment with systems of existence that withdraw from the state and the network of its governmental apparatuses. In the 1970s, this concern materialized in the effort to develop an understanding of power and of state sovereignty that avoided the limitations that Foucault recognized in Marxism. One of the first major results of this confrontation with Marxist theory is Discipline and Punish.32

Notwithstanding the absence of explicit references to “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” there is little doubt that Foucault’s intervention from 1975 constitutes a reaction to Althusser. In his 1970 essay, as mentioned, Althusser stressed the importance of consent for the capitalist states’ government. In response, Discipline and Punish holds that political power does not necessarily need persuasion or cognitive legitimation to be effective. This is the case because the state—to safeguard the capitalist mode of production—prominently relies on technologies that bear directly upon bodies’ materiality, potentialities, and forces: bodies to be surveilled, bodies to be measured, bodies to be trained, bodies to be maimed, bodies to be healed. For Discipline and Punish, embodiment, not ideology, is the ultimate foundation of the modern state’s authority. Foucault deemed the explanation of subjection developed by Althusser (and consequently his political proposal) to be too close to the social contract model, since it overstated the impact of people’s ideas, opinions, and intentions on sociopolitical dynamics and underemphasized the importance of the material conditions of their bodily existence. However, Foucault’s skepticism about consent building does not necessary entail dismissing mediation as a relevant site for the manufacture of docile capitalist subjects.

I have always been troubled by three passages in Discipline and Punish. The first is when Foucault characterizes the Enlightenment discourse (rights, egalitarian framework) as the “bright side” of discipline, implying a correlation between forms of cultural imaginaries and modes of social control. The second is when Foucault insists that the transition from early hands-off modern sovereignty to biopolitics also entailed a shift in the state’s code of social acceptability and in the ways that the people felt about kings and queens: the monarchy now cared about the people; it was not to be feared. In the third, Foucault connects the reappraisal of the penal apparatus in nineteenth-century France with the coeval mass circulation, in newspapers and popular literature, of panicked stories seeking to tear apart the solidarity that existed between delinquents and the lower social strata. These passages are as important as they are troubling because they reintroduce in the margins of Discipline and Punish something that the book’s radical anti-Althusserian stance repeatedly and explicitly excludes: that representation and mediation matter even in disciplinary societies; that signs, truths, narratives, fables, spectacles, and other symbolic forms affecting people’s dispositions play an important role in modern society.

In this regard, consider the 1974 interview in Cahiers du Cinéma between Foucault and Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney, and Serge Toubiana—younger members of the journal’s editorial board eager to move away from the uncompromising Marxism-Leninism of Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni.33 Responding to questions about the representation of World War II and the resistance in contemporary French cinema, Foucault offers broader considerations on the relation between politics and media. First, he notes the importance of a whole host of apparatuses that reprogram popular memory and naturalize specific relationships between social forces for contemporary state governance. As examples of these appareils supporting state power, Foucault mentions schools but also media: popular literature and cheap books, television, and the cinema. Second, Foucault argues that classic Marxism, in light of its economic functionalism and historical determinism, neglects the “affective, erotic attachment” that state formations harness in their subjects through rituals and other political technologies. This is particularly evident for Foucault in Marxism’s description of Nazi Fascism as a repressive dictatorship; this definition, he observes, leaves out the enormous issue of power’s seductiveness, of the relationship between state power, capitalism, and the desires of the masses. How is the state’s grip on how people live—on how they govern themselves and others, on what they do to themselves and others—engendered?

This question is not something that Foucault ever believed to have completely figured out. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani comment that Foucault never wrote his definitive statement on power, and that he discussed the issue mainly in interviews and seminars, precisely because he felt that his research on the foundations of state never quite came together.34 However, in his 1976 course at the Collège de France, “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault does provide glimpses of an alternative (to) apparatus theory, one that recognizes the importance of mediation for state command and capitalist rule—as Althusser did—but parts ways with ideology critique’s cognitivism. In so doing, he presents a theory of power that enmeshes state authority not with ideological apparatuses and persuasion but rather with the racialization of media and affects.

Foucault opens “Society Must Be Defended” by admitting he was experiencing an impasse. In the first session, he announces that he will use the seminar as an opportunity to pause on some problems that he has been working on for quite some time but that he still considers insufficiently elaborated. Foucault seems frustrated that his different research projects remain fragmentary, as if he were trying to piece together parts of a larger mechanism he could not quite figure out. Remarks on the birth of prisons and penal procedures and on the history of madness and psychiatric power, elements for a genealogy of modern sexuality, considerations on technologies of normalization and the treatment of the “abnormal”: Foucault’s local critiques and local attacks were couched in the larger context of the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” a period in which intellectuals opposed the practices of medicine, psychiatry, criminology, and so forth by giving voice to systems of experience that official discourses disqualified as too naive or irrational to matter. The knowledge of the patient, of the prisoner: these were marginalized experiences that stood in opposition to state-sanctioned truths and their power effects. After all, Foucault suggests, we are destined to live and die in certain ways by the state’s discourses and truths—so it made sense to oppose state government by invoking powerful counterdiscourses and countertruths about history, reality, and society.35

Why not go on like this? Why not keep accumulating fragments and raising localized challenges to established power-knowledge-affect networks? Because the political situation had changed, and the field of struggle no longer looked quite the same as before. “Society Must Be Defended” and Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics come “after”: after the 1960s, after the experience of antipsychiatry, after Foucault’s involvement with prison liberation struggles, after the realization that racism did not end with decolonization and the civil rights movement, after the establishment in France of a conservative government resulting from the alliance between neoliberal capital and xenophobic factions of the Right. Amid intellectuals’ commitment to enable a common front with the wretched of the earth, the people had embraced the counterrevolution and condoned even the most egregious forms of state violence. How could this happen? How had the state defeated the insurrection and secured the capitalist order? Foucault’s dilemmas in “Society Must Be Defended” are the same raised by Gramsci after the defeat of the red biennium and the rise of Mussolini: Why do the people, even and especially the subaltern, side with the bosses, with those who have ruined them and are the “overseers of capitalist exploitation”?36 Foucault had been working in the perspective that politics was war continued by other means. Now, in retreat, there was a need to review the battlefield, understand better the skirmishes at hand, so as to strategize more effective tactics of engagement. In suggesting that the racialization of sensibility that accompanied the birth of the great European nation-states in the early modern period is still the event one must contend with in order to confront sovereignty in the present, Foucault allows us to see that the war going on in society is a race war, and thus that the fundamental battle to take up is that against racism.

Commenting on the new world histories composed by French and English historians starting from the late sixteenth century, Foucault notes that the Europe of the time suddenly became populated by races no one had written about before. The Franks, the Gauls, the Celts, the Angles, and the Saxons: new peoples, new ancestors, new victors, and new vanquished appeared in memory, history, and reality. Foucault admonishes readers not to jump to conclusions and assume that these stories were “the sad brainchild of a few intellectuals who were indeed marginalized long ago,” gloomy texts reaching only “nostalgic aristocrats or scholars in a library.”37 The new forms of historical imagination were quite popular, circulating not only among a declining aristocracy but also among the emerging bourgeoisie and humble people resentful of their abusive rulers. This historical discourse was not interested in judging the past but rather sought to revive the forgotten battles from which the order of the present had originated. In telling their war tales, Edward Coke and John Lilburne in England or Henri de Boulainvilliers and Nicolas Fréret in France paired erudite knowledge of historical facts with mythological elements linked to different European ancestries—elements that Foucault characterizes as quite clumsy. And yet clumsiness should not be mistaken for ineffectiveness. These new histories of the past were generating new ways of experiencing the world; they were generating a society dominated by racial fears and racial allegiances so strong as to defy all other existing bonds and kinships.

The basic elements of European life (somatic, linguistic, and religious differences) were suddenly rewritten through the narrative frame of an army of opposing races, incompatible and distinct biospiritual organisms fighting each other for survival. Tales of the victories of the ancient giants; of the twilight of the gods; of invaders at the borders, or sleeper cells already present in the homeland; of the rights and privileges of the authentic national people being flouted by cunning invaders; mythologies of kings who were forgotten in inaccessible caves; of a plot to rekindle war and drive out the usurpers; of the monstrous other hiding among the innocent and of the armored knights who would come and save them: these discourses were appropriated by the new historians as building blocks to mediate a novel experience of the world. This was an experience of marginalization and bitterness, of terror, of conspiracy, but also an experience marked by a thirst for vengeance and the most extravagant expectations about the future. The discourse of history functioned thus, Foucault suggests, as a machine generating hopes and fears, attachments and resentments, as an apparatus where the anxiety over what and who was to come was intertwined with the longing for “the emperor of the last years, the dux novus, the new leader, the new guide, the new Führer; the idea of the fifth monarchy, the third empire or the Third Reich, the man who will be both the beast of the Apocalypse and the savior of the poor.”38

Foucault’s jump cut from the reinvention of race in seventeenth-century Europe to twentieth-century Nazi Fascism is extreme and has been rightly criticized for creating an implicit hierarchy of mass massacres, prioritizing one horrific manifestation of state racism over other abhorrent iterations of racial violence, such as slavery and settler or extractive colonialism.39 Yet with this provocative gesture connecting the birth of modern Europe with what is usually perceived as the “worst” in Western history, Foucault flags something crucial: state racism is not the result of a sudden malaise that abruptly attacked the West but rather a possibility inscribed in the racialized imaginary and racializing affects that took over proto-capitalist and proto-colonial Europe.

In this regard, Ann Laura Stoler emphasizes that a key merit of Foucault’s genealogies of biopolitics is that they confuted the scapegoat theory of race. Scapegoat theories imply that racism originates under economic and social distress. For Foucault, instead, racial violence is not the exception but the rule: “the expression of an underlying discourse of permanent social war” that is integral to nation-states in their entanglement with capitalist exploitation and colonial appropriation. In fact, the biopolitical state, the state that produces the sort of lives that racial capitalism requires, can only take root within an environment both framed and experienced as the strife between authentic and inauthentic heritages, between—to use Timothy Campbell’s terminology—proper and improper lives.40

What, ultimately, does “biopolitics” name? Biopolitics does not refer to a strategy of government confined in time and space. Rather, it signals a particular form of relationality forged between the state and its subjects in a variety of geographical localities and historical realities. Although there are dramatic differences in the specific geohistorical iterations of biopolitics and in the forms of feeling that sustain them, one cannot ignore the consistent structural inscription of racial antagonism in the political systems and technologies of Western modernity. Notwithstanding prominent differences in strategy and modus operandi, the machines and interventions of modern state power are connected to one fundamental and unquestionable horizon of expectations: that the responsibility of the state, the task of politics, or the duty of the sovereign is to protect the authentic national people, the productive and docile subjects, by immunizing the community against presumed bioracial threats posed by internal or external enemies. But if states are intrinsically racial states, then national subjects are intrinsically racial subjects: they are the subjects whom state racism will defend against others and the subjects who will wage state racism against others.

Consequently, for Foucault the birth of modern statehood does not coincide with a glorious moment of pacification but with the inception of a new form of war. This war is not a war happening exclusively at the borders of the state, to protect the “natural” shape of the country. It is a war that takes place at the heart of the nation, to ensure the survival of the true people—of the right breed of body politic. At the origins of the great European nation-states, hence, there is no universalism, no ecumenism, whether religious, philosophical, or juridical. There is only a generalized and subterranean racism affording the full rights to live only to the bodies that contribute to sociopolitical reproduction. Indeed, as soon as the state is invested with the task of policing and protecting life, as soon as it becomes the broker of individual identities, the manager of bodily productive and reproductive forces, the state acquires the prerogative of discriminating, neutralizing, and suppressing all noncompliant modes of being a subject. As we read at the end of “Society Must Be Defended,” the fundamental truth under biopolitics, under contemporary state power, is that we are under attack and that everyone needs to do their part to make the nation healthier and the state stronger.

Before concrete biopolitical warfare and real biopolitical machines, there are accounts of a society in a state of siege. Before subjects who kill and die for the state, there is an impersonal horizon of social bellicosity. Before actual race wars, there are conspiracy theories and fake news about the threatening Other looming in. It is for this reason that in the time of biopolitics—which is our time—Foucault contends that truth cannot evade relationships of force and is deployed exclusively as a weapon, insofar as the announcement of the existential danger faced by society constitutes a call to arms that unifies, compacts, coalesces, and mobilizes.41 What is under attack is not things but a way of life, not a territory but the population, and the people who receive the news about the impending threat are themselves crucial characters in the story being told: this is their history that is unfolding, and on their actions the future depends. Under biopolitics, the truth thus functions as a weapon because it conjures a reality where men and women ought to take a stance, claim a side of the race line, and fight for the survival of the authentic national people with whom they now identify.

Truth “est un plus de force,” Foucault writes: truth is a supplementary force with its own specificity. The specific force of truth consists in its capacity to choreograph movements and emotions, to orchestrate affects and actions, to assimilate and redeploy. As it was for Friedrich Nietzsche, for Foucault “the truth” is something that has to do with the body, with experiences of subjugation and subjectification, with resentments and investments, rather than with the abstract realm of consciousness, persuasion, and consent. Accordingly, the force of true discourse is the force of a ritual: it is the force to fascinate, terrorize, and mobilize; the force to dazzle and to bind; the force to impose obligations on the living. It is the force to make bodies feel. Ultimately, what is truth’s audiovisual force to affect existences and capture them in racialized ways of seeing and talking if not discourse’s biopower—its power to form, inform, and reform life?

In this regard, it might indeed be a missed opportunity that still relatively few scholars have used Foucault’s treatment of the affective thrust of biopolitical truth-weapons to investigate audiovisual media’s bearings on our racial histories. In a still-relevant 2009 essay in Screen, Lee Grieveson argues that ideology critique continues to dominate film and media studies precisely due to the field’s lack of engagement with Foucault. A few years later, Mark Hansen echoed Grieveson’s conclusions, specifying that Gilles Deleuze is to blame for the missed encounter between Foucault and media scholarship as well as for apparatus theory’s enduring prominence in the exploration of audiovisual forms’ impact on forms of identity and subjectivity.42

In his “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze stressed how, in a postdisciplinary universe, power invests the body beneath the level of consciousness and interpellation, transforming the stable subjects produced by the ideological apparatuses of the past into the fluid, flexible, divided, and precarious beings of late capitalism. Hansen argues that Deleuze’s emphasis on the disappearance of the subject and the rise of bodies without identity might have contributed to foreclosing a possible path “from Foucault’s theorization of discipline to a media-theoretical appreciation for his final work on governance and subjectification.”43 It is true, Deleuze’s dismissal of subjectivity as a relevant category for reading the present favored a cleavage in film and media research between the study of old media’s subjects and the study of new media’s affects, between attention to structures of identity and attention to the body, between a focus on representation and a focus on the haptic—as if the only way of overcoming the disembodied formal readings of apparatus theory consisted of chronicling immediate bodily sensations. What remains to be fully considered regarding the affective turn in media scholarship field is how, by harnessing affects and affecting bodies, language—including film language—also modulates specific subject positions.

The situation has changed in significant ways since Grieveson’s and Hansen’s reviews of the field. In a Cinema Journal essay from 2018, Hunter Hargraves writes about a new generation of film and media scholars making innovative arguments about embodied representation, tracing the relation between the cinema’s affects, its forms, and its politics in both historically specific and speculative ways. Paola Bonifazio’s Schooling in Modernity is to date the most generative contribution in this direction.44 Influenced by Antonio Negri’s analysis of information capitalism, Bonifazio traces how post–World War II Italian educational films eased the population into the forms of living most appropriate for the new geopolitical order and the concurrently burgeoning consumerist economy.

Throughout its analysis of the biopolitical dimension of educational cinema, Schooling in Modernity reads for history—the history of Italy, the history of Italian affects, the history of Italian identity, and the history of the nation’s industrial apparatus. But it only cursorily reads for film form. Bonifazio’s approach and mine differ in distance of reading in addition to treating a different set of archives. Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon couples cinema historiography with closer engagements with filmic texts to accentuate how, by means of its forms, the cinema affects the people and how this formal force to affect is paramount for grasping the apparatus’s contribution to racialized identity politics and biopolitical warfare. Like Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon is interested in recognizing the specific forms of affect that film forms afford.45 But whereas Brinkema confines her analysis to the realm of filmic textuality, tentatively and provisionally I relate the forms of affect generated by cinema to extracinematic formations: to figures of Italian subjectivity, intimacy, sociality, history, and state racism.

The brilliance of apparatus theory—the wisdom of Comolli, Baudry, Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, and Stephen Heath—consisted in treating cinema simultaneously as a language and as a weapon, as art and power, as form and force. It is true that the way out of its impasses is not to divorce affectivity from formalism, signification, and mediation. But neither is it to retreat, as Brinkema does, into the realm of deconstruction and dismiss, in the name of “reading,” the very legitimacy of twinning aesthetics and politics. Rather, in my view at least, the way out is to take seriously Foucault’s conclusion that the modern subject of state biopower and of capitalist-colonial economy is a historical formation that emerges in the folds of racialized truths, media, and affects.

Remember that Foucault began “Society Must Be Defended” by asking what it meant that modern politics was the continuation of war by other means. He obliquely arrives at the conclusion that biopolitics, the fight to produce a compliant body politic, is the continuation of race wars through other political technologies. Yet given his own emphasis on the importance of truth regimes and practices of mediation for biopolitical command, might we also venture to conclude that politics is race war continued through other media?

Moving from the Gutenberg galaxy to the Lumière galaxy, from the media environment in which biopolitical sovereignty originated in early modern Europe to that where Fascism sprouted in the twentieth century, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon ponders the cinematographic apparatus as a powerful affect-generating device that, by amplifying the sensation of an ongoing race war and conjuring ecofascist landscapes of community and belonging, played a crucial role in Mussolini’s bid on Italy and Italians. But before addressing film’s deployment as a tool of government under the regime, I take a step back to connect the weaponization of cinema as a technology to make and manage race in fascist Italy to prefascist discussions of the impact that the new medium could have in the new nation’s existence.

In chapter 1, “The Government of the Ungovernable,” I consider two early film novels—Gualtiero Fabbri’s Al Cinematografo (At the Movies, 1907) and Luigi Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1915)—to show that already in liberal Italy, film started to be remediated into a political weapon that, by shooting (down) the wicked desires that were considered to be compromising the population’s racial health, could save the country from the perceived threats of decay and self-annihilation. Through this genealogy, I establish that Fascism is not an unexpected disease that took over Italy but a phenomenon that has deep roots in Italian sociopolitical history. I further document how the imbrication of cinema and race is “structural” as it dates to the first years of the film in Italy. As a popular saying from the turn of the century promised, “Italy is made, now it is time to make Italians.” It is precisely against the backdrop of this anxiety to fashion authentic national subjects, that is, racially appropriate Italians, that Fabbri’s and Pirandello’s novels stage cinema’s power to remake lives.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine representations of labor that characterize national film at the moment of its rebirth and beyond to explore how, by capturing Italians at work, directors such as Ruttmann, Blasetti, and Camerini endeavored to employ the nation in the regime’s plans of social normalization and imperial expansion. Drawing upon Furio Jesi, Fredric Jameson, and Emmanuel Levinas, in this cluster I unpack the relationship between labor as a film subject and the subjectification of Italian labor to Fascism. Ruttmann’s 1933 Acciaio (which was based on a scenario by Pirandello); Blasetti’s Sole! (Sun, 1929), Terra madre (Mother Land, 1931), and Vecchia guardia (Old Guard, 1935); and Camerini’s Rotaie (Rails, 1930), Gli uomini che mascalzoni . . . (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932), Il signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937), and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939) are in fact all busy sanctioning hard work, (re)productivity, and obedience as core features of Italian racial identity, that is, of Blackshirt whiteness. Yet these films put to work different forms of affect, different film forms, to enable sociopolitical docility. Thus, in these chapters, I also map the contrasting audiovisual strategies and affective registers that Italian realism mobilized in support of fascist command.

Chapter 5, “The White Italian Mediterranean,” moves from the Italian land to the sea surrounding the fascist ethno-nation to investigate how the paradigm through which national reality was rendered and fascist rule sustained changed in conjunction with Italy’s entry into World War II. In earlier fascist realist films, the enemies of the Blackshirt race came from within, in the guise of either improper Italian desires or improper Italian Italians. Navy Captain Francesco De Robertis’s Uomini sul fondo (S.O.S Submarine, 1940) and La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941) by De Robertis and Rossellini instead pitch the danger as coming from without—amplifying by means of “corpo-realism” the embodied sensation of a body politic being choked to death, of an innocent but victimized Italian race that had to do whatever it took to protect itself against the threats lurking in Mediterranean waters. I demonstrate this precise way of feeling about Italy and the sea in the coda to this chapter through Rossellini’s Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942) and L’uomo dalla croce (The Man with the Cross, 1943), the perfect launching pad for what I describe as the regime’s melodramatic imperialism.

Chapter 6 turns to the romantic comedies that Vittorio De Sica authored, with the crucial input of Italian Jewish playwright Aldo De Benedetti, under Fascism. These pre-neorealist, pre–Cesare Zavattini films by De Sica have been traditionally overlooked in postwar film criticism as juvenile concessions to the industry of mass distraction. But if the postwar assessment of these popular rom-coms is correct, why did Giuseppe De Santis—a filmmaker member of the underground Communist Party actively involved in the resistance against Mussolini—quite enthusiastically praise De Sica’s seemingly frivolous genre fictions? Is there more to these rom-coms than—possibly blinded by virtue of Bazin’s pro-realist prejudices—we have been able to see? Taking my cue from Agamben’s discussion of comedy as anti-disciplinarian register, in “De Sica’s Genre Trouble,” I rely on Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin to show how laughter can be appropriated to fight sexism and racism, to challenge heteronormativity and the status quo.

In chapter 7, “Queer Antifascism,” I reconstruct the ways in which Ossessione (Obsession, 1943)—the film that ensued from the collaboration between Luchino Visconti and the Communist cell that infiltrated the journal Cinema—brought together realism and melodrama to conjure the dramatic urgency of adopting “foreign” lifestyles in order for Italians to avoid more pain, more deaths. In the classic formula of Italian cinema, the conversion to the gendered norms of tradition is staged as the cure for a race in crisis. In Ossessione, on the contrary, redemption comes in the guise of a withdrawal from conventional sociosexual values, suggesting that in order to truly overcome a destructive present, the nation had to transcend the borders of heteronormativity and reproductive futurity.

Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon closes with a panoramic shot of liberated Italy, discussing the role that postwar national cinema played and might still play in foreclosing more transformative confrontations with what the regime was, why it took root in Italy, and how it ended. First, I highlight a shared component in Bazin’s and Deleuze’s treatments of neorealism—their emphasis on postwar Italian film as a liberation of cinema—as a revolutionary, antinarrative, speculative register that breaks away from the deceitful and inauthentic film forms of the past. Then, I suggest that neorealism is still such a central reference in Italian cultural history precisely because its zero-degree aesthetic streamlines the convenient feeling of a nation at its year zero, of a redeemed, brutalized, and childlike people finally set free from fascist madness and ready to return to its real self, to go back to work. Fascism had been formally defeated; the exploitation of cinema as a key apparatus for governing our racial histories and racialized bodies was far from over.

Ultimately, then, this book tells the story of a struggle—the struggle between incompatible modes of capturing and projecting the truth about a nation, between alternative projects of national identity and belonging. What I hope emerges from this study is a theory of media that directly bears on our understanding of biopolitical command and of the fight against it, not only in fascist Italy. By reconstructing how the cinematographic apparatus amplified truths and affects that had a decisive bearing on national life, I aim to provide an insight on affective mediation as a crucial battlefield for racial capitalism, a sphere we need to survey with care in order to reckon with biopolitical states’ ongoing endeavors to control who we are and how we are together—what we live for and what we die for.

A concern raised about Foucault’s genealogies of biopolitics and state racism is that they might foreclose the possibility of resistance, as they stress power’s capacity to redirect and assimilate even the most radical attacks on its authority. But by highlighting the primacy of the medial over the political, by showing that knowledge production happens in society and that the state can only reappropriate it, Foucault is far from negating resistance: on the contrary, he redefines its scale and space. For Foucault, we cannot start from the state to change society; we need to start from society to change the state. We need to start from what Foucault, through Deleuze, had dubbed the “minor,” from the mediated affects in which we move and that move us, so as to effect new practices of care of the self and others.46 Revisiting Mussolini’s regime in the light of race management and biopolitical warfare, and biopolitics in the light of the fascist weaponization of media for governing the Italian race, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon concludes that “to resist” entails mediating attachments and investments that could project us beyond the affective horizon undergirding modern sovereignty: that society is under attack from the racial enemy that comes from within and without, and that state power will help the people on the brink of extinction.

Therefore, this book shows, if we wish to prevent history from repeating itself, we need to challenge the racialized backdrop against which our national lives and histories unfold. This means taking up not only Donald Trump’s or Giorgia Meloni’s fascisms but also the “fascism in all of us,” the racism in our affects and our media that are weaponized so easily for the worst.47