In the wake of Nazi Fascism’s collapse, Italy and Germany reckoned with their atrocious shared pasts in very different ways. In Nuremberg, the trials set up by the Allied forces would summon the most prominent members of the Nazi state apparatus and oblige a whole people to appear before the concentration camps. Italy’s explosive sociopolitical situation and its status as a border zone between East and West, the Global North and the Global South, contributed to preventing a similarly public—although incomplete—confrontation with history. Due to the country’s particular geopolitical role, after the execution of Benito Mussolini and the Allied takeover of Italy, the pressure to return to normal life mounted: it was time to let go of the revolutionary passions and radical ambitions that had characterized the years of the resistance and the civil war. It was time to cease addressing Fascism, overcome divisions, move on, and return to normality. In portraying the Italian people as Mussolini’s victims rather than his accomplices, postwar national culture and film favored this process of normalization and geopolitical realignment based on a suppression of memory and responsibility, and introduced into the global public imagination the account of Fascism elaborated by liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce during the Nazi occupation of the country. In influential political speeches as well as impactful opinion pieces in the New York Times and Il Giornale di Napoli, the public intellectual had in fact argued there was no need to arraign fascist Italy, insofar as Mussolini’s dictatorship had been a mere parenthesis in the country’s life, the effect of a foreign virus that had spread across Italy after World War I and temporally compromised an otherwise healthy body politic.1

Croce’s treatment of Italian Fascism resonates eerily with how mainstream public discourse has framed the resurgence of right-wing extremism in countries like Italy or the United States a full century after Mussolini’s rise to power. The popular support for explicitly racist and discriminatory agendas was and is still often painted as an abjection into which the population is bullied, tricked, or fooled. This is not a mere oversight. As Claudio Fogu argues, the avoidance of the systemic reasons behind people’s embrace of the radical right is a move that exorcises more transformative engagements with the trajectories of Western history under racial capitalism.2 And while there are still glimmers of hope that the current fascist new wave will be addressed rather than avoided, the Blackshirt Ventennio was quickly bracketed as a momentary insanity from which a brutalized nation, through incredible sacrifices, had redeemed itself. The partisans’ insurrection against Nazi Fascism came to stand for a collective recovery from the fascist madness and was presented as evidence that Italians were ultimately brava gente, “good people” who—under the influence of a few deranged individuals—had just lost their minds for a while. By displacing guilt for the regime onto a few contaminating agents, this mythology compartmentalized Fascism and obfuscated its structural connection to the imaginaries and processes upon which the Italian nation-state was founded in the late nineteenth century.

The geopolitically convenient tale about Fascism that Croce articulated and that neorealism projected worldwide underwent severe scrutiny in the 1970s, when—in a context of radical sociopolitical turmoil—a new generation in national auteur cinema challenged sedimented ways of feeling about Italy. Films such as Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970), Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), or Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975) disrupt the brava gente narrative by exposing Italians as a people hostage to deviant desires and repugnant pleasures. Informed by Herbert Marcuse’s Freudo-Marxism, Bernardo Bertolucci, Liliana Cavani, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Lina Wertmüller resort to sexualized tropes of evil to reveal the “sins of the fathers” and stage the nation’s disturbing fascination with Fascism.3 Besides establishing questionable links between fascist rule, nonconforming sexual practices, and mental illness, in staging Fascism as an abjection, the account of the regime proposed after 1968 continues to other it as an abomination.

Notwithstanding their differences, the post–World War II “good people” legend and the “sick folks” discourse articulated by Italian film in the 1970s resort to a medical and ableist imaginary to understand Fascism because they perceive it as a perversion, not a manifestation, of national history and identity. In treating a historical phenomenon as an exception—a pathology—neither framework can ultimately confront what is most frightening about Mussolini’s rule: the banality of its evil. The millions of Italians who performed Fascism were not a “basket of deplorables,” mentally ill, depraved, or sadistic. They were, for the most part, unexceptional, considerate, sane, upright, trivial, banal individuals. Thus emerges a host of unanswered questions that “the worst” in Italian history still challenges us to address: Why did ordinary citizens, folks who found no pleasure in inflicting or receiving pain, collaborate with colonialism, white supremacy, antisemitism, chemical warfare, and totalitarianism? How did such toxicity become so widespread? Upon what memories and imaginaries was this deadly normality undergirded? In which media forms and forms of affect was it couched?

These are not easy questions to take up, especially when pondering national history also entails pausing on the story of one’s own family. My grandfather, born in 1918, was drafted into the military just before Italy’s entry into World War II. He was first deployed in Greece, then sent to Africa after the end of the Balkans Campaign. After the 1943 armistice, Corrado refused to follow Mussolini to Salò and stayed in the Royal Army, this time battling the Nazi occupation of Italy and the Italian Social Republic puppet state. Wounded on the battlefield, he was captured by the Nazis and transferred to Dachau. Having survived the detention camp, in the 1950s Corrado fell in love with a single mother who had served as a partisan courier during the resistance and became a father to her daughter, my mom. My grandfather died a few short months after I was born, so I never had the chance to ask him the questions I have about his implication with the regime. But I did ask my grandmother, when I was perhaps fifteen, why nonno Corrado initially had fought for Fascism: Why didn’t he defect or something? Babi served under Mussolini, she said, because he felt that by doing so he was serving his people.

Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy is an attempt to get to the root of the fears and anxieties, hopes and desires, resentments and attachments, expectations and aspirations that shaped my grandfather’s commitment to Fascism, which was also the commitment of too many Italian men and women. Now, as always, the questions of why normal folks become involved with nefarious sociopolitical projects for the sake of their people—and thus what it means to be a people—are crucial ones to raise.

I wouldn’t have been able to ask the questions in this book without a community around me. Writing Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon has been a struggle at times, and I could not have made it through without Jennifer Row by my side.

At Cornell University, Timothy Campbell, Karen Pinkus, Kevin Attell, and Naoki Sakai were fundamental interlocutors in the early phases of this project. I will always cherish the year I spent at the Society for the Humanities, and the inspiring conversations in the A.D. White House with Timothy Murray, Vivian Choi, Bishnu Ghosh, Bhaskar Sarkar, Antoine Traisnel, and Ingrid Diran. Without the warmth and brilliance of Elisabeth Fay, Andrea Righi, Simona Antonacci, Caroline Ferraris-Besso, Elizabeth Wijaya, Michela Baraldi, and Mark Wilson, my Ithaca winters would have been incredibly gloomier.

At the University of Minnesota, Susanna Ferlito, Cesare Casarino, Joseph Farag, Maggie Hennefeld, Travis Workman, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Sonali Pahwa, Ainsley Boe, and Jason McGrath have been perfect colleagues—I am very lucky for the community I have found in the Twin Cities. Invited lectures at the University of Notre Dame (thank you, Charles Leavitt!) and at Rutgers University provided me key opportunities to talk through my ideas. Valeria Dalle Donne from the Cineteca di Bologna, Tracy Bergstrom from the Wagstaff Archive at the University of Notre Dame, Laura Ceccarelli at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and Matteo Zannone and Paola Angelucci from the Archivio Storico Instituto Luce in Rome all provided invaluable help in navigating archival resources. Marie McDonough’s feedback was essential for nuancing my intervention, and I am very grateful for all the time she spent on my manuscript. Editorial assistance from Sarah Watkins and Mariam Wassif was crucial to get this book ready for publication, and chapter 6 was translated into English thanks to generous support from Amanda Minervini. I am the most obliged to the De Benedetti and Muzi family for opening their home to me during Covid-19 to access playwright Aldo De Benedetti’s private archive. I also feel fortunate for the support that, in different phases of writing, I received from Noa Steimatsky, Karl Schoonover, Alessia Ricciardi, and Dana Renga. Special thanks go to Rhiannon Welch, for the generosity and graciousness of her comments on early versions of my argument.

But my biggest grazie is owed to my family . . . Jennie, Daniela, Annalisa, Giorgio, Franco, Vittorio: your support is what makes everything—not only this book—possible.