Ruth Ben Ghiat, "Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film"

Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist FilmAuthor(s): Ruth Ben-GhiatSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 109-144Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344079Accessed: 11/02/2009 06:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CriticalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344079?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Introduction

In a 1932 essay filed from Berlin, the critic Giovanni Battista Angioletti warned Italians of the dire fate that awaited them if they succumbed to the seductions of foreign models of modernity:

you will be an element, an atom of the crowd ... surrounded by four million men similar to yourself, who have your same thoughts.... You will see the green fields and open sky only on Saturdays and Sundays. You will never know your neighbors, and for your whole life you will be a complete unknown in the city where you live.1

The association of modernity with spiritual imprisonment and standard- ization was a commonplace of cultural discourse in interwar Europe.

I wish to thank Mara Blasetti for sharing her father's print, film, and photographic archives with me. Her gracious hospitality and friendship made researching this essay a

pleasurable experience. I am also grateful to Irene Proietti and Signora Paola Castagna of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Edoardo Ceccuti and Luigi Oggianu of the Istituto LUCE, and Giuseppe D'Errico of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome. Franco Pirone, Lorenzo Pirone, and Cinzia Mule provided valuable "technical assistance" with videotaping. Mario Biagioli, Richard Bosworth, Lisa Tiersten, and J. M. S. Willette took time to read the

essay and improved it with their comments, and Aaron Gillette was generous with biblio-

graphical information. Research for this work was made possible by funding from the

Fulbright Commission and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

1. Giovanni Battista Angioletti, "Folle e scenari Berlinesi," L'Italia letteraria, 7 Feb. 1932, p. 3.

Critical Inquiry 23 (Autumn 1996) ? 1996 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/96/2301-0001$01.00. All rights reserved.

109

110 Ruth Ben-Ghiat Italian Fascist Film

Rapid technological change, shifting boundaries between public and

private spheres, and the advent of mass consumerism raised anxieties

among intellectuals that cut across confines of ideology as well as geogra- phy. For those living under Mussolini's dictatorship, as for those living in the democracies of France and Weimar Germany, mass civilization appeared as a destroyer of boundaries between individuals, social classes, nations, sexes, and races.2

While the mix of fear and fascination that this new social, economic, and cultural landscape summoned up in intellectuals has been aptly de- scribed by historians of interwar Germany and France, the ambivalent

reception of modernity in interwar Italy has received far less attention.3

Only in the last decade have scholars on both sides of the Atlantic begun to investigate how and to what extent the presence of Mussolini's dicta-

torship mediated the experience of modernity and the development of modernism in Italy.4 Most recently, historians such as Emilio Gentile and Walter Adamson have argued that fascism was a "political modernism"

2. See, for example, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Mesure de la France (Paris, 1922) and La Suite dans les idees (Paris, 1927); Jose Ortega y Gasset, La rebeli6n de las masas (Madrid, 1930); Karl Jaspers, Die Geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin, 1931); Filippo Burzio, II demiurgo e la crisi occidentale (Milan, 1933); and Emmanuel Berl, Mort de la pensee bourgeoise (Paris, 1929).

3. Recent works on France include Michela Nacci, "Societa e politica nella cultura della crisi francese fra le due guerre," Intersezioni 4 (Apr. 1984): 85-123; Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche: L'Ideologiefasciste en France (Paris, 1983), trans. David Maisel, under the title Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley, 1986); and Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994). On Germany, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Wei- mar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984), and Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994).

4. See Emilio Gentile, "Impending Modernity: Fascism and the Ambivalent Image of the United States," Journal of Contemporary History 28 (Jan. 1993): 7-30 and "The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism," trans. Lawrence Rainey, Modern-

ism/Modernity 1 (Sept. 1994): 55-87; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: "18BL" and the The- ater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, Calif., 1996) and "Border Crossings: Italian/German Peregrinations of the Theater of Totality," Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 80-123; Marla Stone, "Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution," Journal of Contemporary History 28 (Apr. 1993): 215-44; Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Han- over, N.H., 1992); and "Fascist Aesthetics," special issue of theJournal of Contemporary History 31 (Apr. 1996). The connections between modernism and early fascism are explored in Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, Calif., 1993), and Walter L. Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is assistant professor of history at Fordham Univer- sity. She has published articles on Italian fascist culture and on the memory of Italian fascism. Her forthcoming book is entitled Fascist Modernities: Culture, Power, and the Nation in Italy, 1922-45.

Autumn 1996 111

that institutionalized key tenets of avant-garde thought such as the cult of youth, the primacy of myth, and the idea of a "spiritual revolution."5 Yet fascism also translated into official doctrine the racist and misogynist sentiments that informed so many fin-de-siecle projects for political and cultural renewal.6 The fears of degeneration and social anarchy that surrounded the construction of political, scientific, and cultural discourses of modernity found expression under Mussolini's dictatorship in social

policies such as the demographic crusade and the campaigns against mis-

cegenation and against the Jews. Indeed, if the Blackshirts couched their movement in a rhetoric of revolution, they also made it clear that fascist

modernity would mean not social liberation but a return to social order. The notion of a mass society that would protect class, gender, and racial boundaries held a strong appeal for intellectuals whose desire for a modern Italy was accompanied by an equally strong fear of the blurring of social and sexual hierarchies.7 The genius of Mussolini, one writer boasted in an article on "mass life," was to have developed a system "that allows each personality to retain its perfect contours, because we assign each person in the social scale a specific place."8

In the following pages, I will explore the ways that the cinema con- tributed to the definition and dissemination of an Italian fascist discourse about modernity and mass society. Of course, many different models of modernity competed for legitimacy under the dictatorship, but all of them posited fascism as a regime that, unlike capitalism and communism, would protect the values of hierarchy and discipline. The films examined here portray modern existence as rife with destabilizing desires for social and sexual emancipation and suggest ways that the technologies of vision and mass organization made possible by modernity could be used to regulate and neutralize those desires. Although fascism appears as an agent of modernization in these films, modernization is understood as a disci-

plining process that would normalize Italians' thoughts, vision, and behavior. Each of these movies asserts the need to harness the energies and

5. Gentile, "The Conquest of Modernity," p. 58, italics removed; quoted in Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, p. 248.

6. For a comparative study that analyzes French, Italian, and English responses to the threat of social and racial anarchy, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1989).

7. For statements of the fascist model of mass society, see Rino Longhitano, Rivoluzione nazionale (Catania, 1932); "Appunti per la definizione di un atteggiamento," Orpheus 9 (Nov. 1933): 1-5; Domenico Carella, "Collettivismo e personalita," Saggiatore 3 (July 1933): 193-99; Giuseppe Bottai, "Statismo corporativo," Critica fascista, 1 Feb. 1933, pp. 84-85; Alberto Mondadori, "Collettivismo," Camminare, 1 Apr. 1934, p. 1; and Augusto de Marsan- ich, Civiltd di masse (Florence, 1940). The canonical statement of this concept of collectivism can be found in Benito Mussolini, "La dottrina del fascismo," in Enciclopedia italiana, ed. Gioacchino Volpe, 35 vols. (Rome, 1932), 14:847-50.

8. Umberto Bernasconi, "Vita di masse," Gioventuifascista, 1 May 1935, p. 11.

Critical Inquiry

112 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

tools of progress and use them to restore traditional social and sexual roles. Together, they shed light on the role film played in recontextualiz-

ing the concept of modernity under the Italian dictatorship. My essay begins with two assumptions about the origins and nature

of fascist visions of mass society. First, fascist attitudes regarding the level- ing potential of modernity had their roots in fin-de-siecle fears of the crowd as a carrier of political and social anarchy. In Italy, Scipio Sighele had declared crowds to be pathological organisms that bred disease and uncontrollable criminal behavior, while French sociologist Gustave Le Bon's 1895 book The Crowd popularized these arguments and indicted the crowd for destroying racial hierarchies as well. Since even cultivated professionals became "barbarian ... creature[s] acting by instinct" in a crowd, Le Bon asserted, mass politics would cause the disintegration of the social fabric and, ultimately, the degeneration of the white race.9 Le Bon's ideas found new popularity in interwar Italy thanks to Mussolini, who openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to the Frenchman in

speeches and interviews. Indeed, il Duce's conception of the masses as a "herd" that must be conquered and domesticated and his persistent fears that the white race would be submerged by peoples of color owed much to the writings of Le Bon and other prewar prophets of social apoca- lypse.'0

Second, fascist intellectuals shared a gendered conception of mass society and politics that influenced their representations of modernity. In this case as well, Italians drew upon established discursive traditions that made women into emblems of the political and social evils of modernity."

9. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, trans. pub., ed. Robert A.

Nye (1895; New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), p. 52. For Scipio Sighele's ideas on the crowd, see his Lintelligenza della folla (Turin, 1903) and I delitti della folla (Turin, 1910). On Le Bon's concerns about degeneration, see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, pp. 90-93. On the function of the crowd in fin-de-siecle society, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1981); Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psy- chology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London, 1975); and Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).

10. Le Bon personally sent his books to Mussolini, and Mussolini praised The Crowd as "an excellent work to which I frequently refer" (quoted in Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, p. 178; see this work for a discussion of Mussolini's relationship with Le Bon). For examples of Mussolini's attitude toward the masses, see his "Forza e consenso" and "Ai

metallurgici lombardi," Scritti e discorsi, ed. Valentino Piccoli, 12 vols. (Milan, 1934-39), 3:77 and 3:38, and his declarations in Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (Milan, 1932). Italian crowd psychology and its influence on Mussolini's view of mass politics is discussed in Simo- netta Falaschi, "The Aestheticization of Politics: A Study of Power in Mussolini's Italy" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1992), pp. 100-105. For il Duce's fear of the decline of the white race, see his "Prefazione," in Richard Korherr, Regresso delle nascite: Morte dei popoli (Rome, 1928), pp. 7-23 and "La razza bianca muore?" Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, 44 vols. (Rome, 1951-78), 26:312-14.

11. On the association of women and modernity, see Patrice Petro,Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1989); Victoria de Grazia,

Italian Fascist Film

Critical Inquiry Autumn 1996

Mussolini, as had Sighele and Le Bon thirty years earlier, compared dem- ocratic mass politics to a hysterical and syphilitic woman, and fascist ideo-

logues and social planners redeployed Cesare Lombroso's research that

provided "proof" of the pathological and atavistic nature of female sexu-

ality.12 The pervasive identification of women with the anarchic and in- stinctive impulses of the crowd made the subordination of the female sex an integral part of the fascist "return to order" from the inception of the

regime. Liberal Italy emerged in fascist propaganda as a society "entirely permeated with feminine sentimentalisms," which had relegated men to the role of "slaves and puppets of women."'3 In contrast, the March on Rome signified a "return of male authority" and the advent of a new historical climate marked by "force, collectivism, and discipline." 14 In this context, the regime's natalist policies, which ranked women according to their procreative possibilities, may be viewed as an attempt to regulate female sexual energies that, one commentator asserted, "would produce an inestimable chaos if freely exercised."15 Italian movies played a central

part in the construction and circulation of this gendered discourse about modernity. Conflating sexual and social forms of power, they set up an opposition between an ideal, male-bounded modernity marked by disci-

pline, hierarchy, and the subordination or exclusion of women, and a

How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, 1992); Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Cul- ture as Woman: Modernism's Other," After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmod- ernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), pp. 44-62; and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern," Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986): 220-29.

12. For Mussolini's conflation of women, disease, and democracy, see his "Governo" and "Abbasso il Parlamento!" Scritti e discorsi, 2:23 and 1:36; for his identification of the mass as female, see Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, p. 65. A "scientific" discussion of the similarities between women and "primitive peoples" may be found in Mario F. Cannella, Principi di

psicologia razziale (Florence, 1941), pp. 201-34. Lombroso's misogyny is discussed by Nancy A. Harrowitz, Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln, Nebr., 1994), pp. 15-40. For connections between Lombrosian and fascist antifeminism, see Piero Meldini, Sposa e madre esemplare: Ideologia e politica della donna e dellafamiglia durante ilfascismo (Florence, 1975), pp. 26-34.

13. Giuseppe Maggiore, "Maschilita del fascismo," Vita nuova 1 (Feb. 1927): 33; Mario Palazzi, "Autorita dell'uomo," Criticafascista, 15 May 1933, p. 184.

14. Palazzi, "Autorita dell'uomo," p. 184; untitled project statement of the Quadrante group of architects for the Concorso per il Palazzo del Littorio, published in Quadrante, nos. 16-17 (Aug.-Sept. 1933): 14.

15. Daria Banfi Malaguzzi, Femminilita contemporanea (Milan, 1928), p. 17. For similar statements throughout the fascist period, see Aldo Spinelli, La crisi della societd borghese (Ur- bino, 1943), p. 44, and Manlio Pompei, "Donne e culle," Criticafascista, 15 Mar. 1930, pp. 121-22. On the regime's natalist policies, see David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduc- tion, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, N.J., 1994); de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women; Alex- ander De Grand, "Women under Italian Fascism," HistoricalJournal 19 (Dec. 1976): 947-68; and Lesley Caldwell, "Reproducers of the Nation: Women and the Family in Fascist Policy," in Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism, and Culture, ed. David Forgacs (London, 1986), pp. 110-41.

113

114 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

negative modernity that linked female strength to moral corruption, political impotence, and social turbulence.

The fascists came to power at a time when the expansion of consumer capitalism and the reconfiguration of social identities made the

regulation of mass culture and mass leisure a pressing issue for governments throughout Europe.16 The films discussed in this essay reveal how some Italian intellectuals articulated their anxieties over how to maintain social order in mass society. The first two movies I examine, Alessandro Blasetti's Terra madre (Mother Earth, 1931) and Raffaele Matarazzo's Treno

popolare (Popular Train, 1933), showcase the regime's attempts to forestall the development of a new culture of social emancipation by steering Ital- ians toward models of interaction and recreation that would reinforce rather than undermine existing hierarchies of power. Starting in the late 1920s, Mussolini's government pursued a comprehensive strategy of mass organizing designed to break down class and regional alliances and reach social groups that had remained largely immune from the influence of the regime. Through organizations such as the Opera Nazionale

Dopolavoro (OND), which sponsored tourist outings, festivals, and exhibitions for the lower classes, the fascists sought to create a nationally specific mass culture that utilized modern strategies of mobilization to reaffirm popular traditions and traditional social practices.17 Of course, fascist mass organizing was not without its hazards; as the exiled editors of the communist journal Stato operaio observed, the expanded public sphere of the fascist state had created many new opportunities for social interaction and, potentially, for political encounters as well.18 Thus fascist officials intended not only to mobilize Italians but to reprogram their behavior by having them participate in a series of highly structured spectacles (folk festivals, exhibitions, parades, sporting events) whose form and content celebrated the virtues of hierarchy and order.19

In the latter part of the essay, I discuss Corrado D'Errico's II cammino

degli eroi (The Path of the Heroes, 1936) and Guido Brignone's Sotto la croce del Sud (Under the Southern Cross, 1938), two films about the 1936 conquest of Ethiopia. My intent here is to investigate how the fascist concerns about the anarchic potential of modernity found expression in a colonial con-

16. For the way European governments responded to the threat posed by American

cinema, for example, see de Grazia, "Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Chal-

lenge to European Cinemas, 1920-60,"Journal of Modern History 61 (Mar. 1989): 53-87, and Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 1994).

17. On the Dopolavoro, see de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Lei- sure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981).

18. See "Andare al popolo," Stato operaio 6 (Jan.-Feb. 1932): 49. 19. On fascist exhibitions as a form of political spectacle, see Stone, "The Politics of

Cultural Production: The Exhibition in Fascist Italy, 1928-1942" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton

University, 1990).


Autumn 1996 115

text. Scholars of Italian fascism have tended to compartmentalize the re-

gime's domestic and foreign initiatives and have often presented Ethiopia as the start of a distinctly different phase of the regime.20 Yet many of the issues that characterize colonial culture, such as the conflation of sexual and geographic conquest in the trope of reclaiming the soil, have their roots in the ideology and social policy of earlier years. In a sense, Ethiopia became a new forum for the expression of fantasies and fears that were central to the fascist imaginary from the start of the regime. The conquest of Ethiopia was represented as a modernizing enterprise that would im-

pose order on chaos and reverse social and racial decadence, much as the March on Rome was alleged to have done at home. Yet the Italian victory in Ethiopia raised new disciplinary concerns for fascist officials, who drew

upon well-established notions of the pathological and destructive nature of the mass in formulating their analyses of the threat to social order in the colony. While preventing insurrections was officially the top priority for the regime, controlling the behavior of Italian soldiers to prevent mis-

cegenation was no less a concern, since many fascists considered miscegenation a "plague" that would lead to the degeneration of the Italian race and, eventually, to the decline of Western civilization.21 The terror of racial mixing prompted the development of new exclusionary mechanisms to maintain the purity of the national body. Starting in 1936, Italian poli- ticians, ethnographers, scientists, and other intellectuals elaborated a

comprehensive racial policy (politica di razza), which affected both cultural discourse and social policy. Biology, not culture, now became the de-

termining factor in definitions of national identity, and race appeared as a new marker of difference in both high and low culture. Italian colonial films that advocated the rechanneling of sexual energies into labor reflect the increased concern with bodily discipline in the post-1935 period. These films temper their exhortations to conquer new terrain with warn-

ings against the consequences of unchecked desire. In the process, they lay bare the contradictions at the heart of fascist ideology-between individual initiative and collective duty, revolution and reaction, conquest and continence-that would haunt the regime for the duration of the

dictatorship. The aesthetics of these films also evince the tension within fascism

between the desire to expand outward and modernize and the impulse to retreat into autarchic visions of national purity. Starting in the late 1920s, Blasetti and other filmmakers and critics began a vigorous cam-

20. For a critique of this attitude from historians of foreign policy, see MacGregor Knox, "The Fascist Regime, Its Foreign Policy, and Its Wars: An 'Anti-Anti-Fascist' Ortho-

doxy?" Contemporary European History 4 (Nov. 1995): 347-65, and R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 1860-1960 (New York, 1995).

21. Carlo Bellofiore, "I problemi razziali dell'Impero," Etiopia 3 (Apr. 1939): 57. See Angelo Piccioli, "La razza e l'impero," Etiopia 4 (Sept. 1940): 4.

Critical Inquiry


paign aimed at reviving the national film as a tool of domestic propaganda and international influence. Before World War I, Italy had been a leading exporter of films throughout Europe and America.22 But the restricted economic climate of the postwar period, together with competi- tion from American and German films, had caused annual film production to fall to just eleven by 1928 and had sparked an exodus of Italian actors, technicians, and directors to the cinema production centers of France, Germany, and America.23 Writing in both the trade press and in mass circulation dailies, Blasetti, Matarazzo, and other intellectuals ap- pealed to the government to provide structures and financial assistance for the Italian cinema and for their peers to develop a recognizably national film product that could compete with Hollywood both at home and abroad. What expressionism had been to the German industry in the

early 1920s, realism represented for the Italians a decade later: the prom- ise of a unique film style that could carve out a niche for the country on the international market.24 With its emphasis on outdoor shooting and its use of amateur actors, the realist style, proponents argued, would

provide a nationally specific alternative to American films, with their elaborate sets, divas, and standardized production.25 Of course, realism summoned up the spectre of Soviet cinema, and a debate ensued in the

press over the suitability of Russian films as aesthetic and technical models. Many fascist intellectuals felt that the formal brilliance of Soviet films was offset by their openly propagandistic content, which, it was believed, would alienate the sophisticated audiences of Western Europe.26 The les- son to be drawn from this, Blasetti argued, was that Italians should ori-

22. On the early film industry, see Maria Adriana Prolo, Storia del cinema muto italiano (Milan, 1951), and Aldo Bernardini, Cinema muto italiano, 3 vols. (Rome, 1980). A detailed examination of the Neapolitan cinema industry and the role of women in early Italian film is given in Giuliana Bruno's provocative study, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, N.J., 1993).

23. This statistic is from Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (London, 1972), p. 51. See also Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 1895-1945 (Rome, 1979). On Italian filmmakers' careers abroad, see Elaine Man- cini, "The Free Years of the Fascist Film Industry: 1930-1935" (Ph.D. diss., New York Uni- versity, 1981), pp. 31-32.

24. On the question of a national film style in interwar Germany, see Heide Fehren- bach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. 12-50, and Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin. On the problem of national film cultures, see Philip Rosen, "History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Prob- lems in the Study of National Cinemas," Iris, no. 2 (1984): 69-84.

25. Interestingly enough, none of the commentators mention pre-World War I Nea-

politan films, such as those by Elvira Notari, that were shot in the open with amateur actors. On this tradition and the repression of its memory, see Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map.

26. See "Eisenstein allontanato dalla Francia," Il tevere, 30 Mar. 1930, p. 11; the edito- rial note in Lo schermo, 15 Jan. 1927, p. 4; and Bruno Quaiot, "Sergei Eisenstein," Cinemato- grafo, 8July 1928, p. 11.


ent their production toward "entertainment films" that concealed their political messages within a compelling dramatic or comedic narrative.27

Ironically, this drive to develop a national aesthetic that would influence domestic audiences and increase prestige abroad led Blasetti and other filmmakers to study dominant foreign film cultures with an eye to reinscribing successful elements from each into their works. The re-

sulting textual hybridity of the films testifies to the contradictions and

complications that beset the fascist project of making a truly national cinema. The works I examine show the tension between commercial concerns and political ideology that characterized Italian cinema under the

dictatorship and make clear how the quest to entertain as well as persuade led fascist filmmakers to saturate the screens of Italy with images of that very dangerous modernity the regime had vowed to eschew.

Reclaiming Modernity: Blasetti's Terra madre

An analysis of Terra madre can clarify how the fascist conflation of sexual and social power dynamics helped elaborate a gendered discourse about modernity. Blasetti's first work, Sole (Sun, 1929), focused on the fascist reclamation of the Pontine marshes as a way of celebrating the

regime's moral and social systemization of Italy. Inaugurating a trope that would circulate through fascist cultural production for the duration of the dictatorship, Blasetti presented the murky, disease-ridden swamps as emblems of the stagnant political climate and unhealthy feminized

society of liberal Italy. Blasetti's next work, the expressionist-influenced Resurrectio (Resurrection, 1931), focused on the fascist project of redeeming Italian males from degrading foreign models of sexual politics. The mo- tifs of Sole and Resurrectio come together in Terra madre, which is structured around parallel narratives of salvation.28

While Blasetti always denied that Soviet films had any influence on his work, the framing and editing techniques of his early films display a debt to contemporary Russian cinema. Yet in those instances when he most obviously makes recourse to the Soviet model, as in his close shots of peasant faces in Terra madre, the director acts to recode such images for

27. Alessandro Blasetti, "Dopo i primi films LUCE," Lo schermo, 6 Nov. 1926, p. 3. See Blasetti, "Guerra nostra," Cinematografo, 12 June 1927, p. 3 and "Non confondiamo,"

Cinematografo, 2 Oct. 1927, p. 3. 28. Only ten minutes of the film Sole still exist. The scenario, script, and director's

notes for Sole are published in Alberto Boero, Sole: Soggetto, sceneggiatura, note per la realizza- zione, ed. Adriano Apra and Riccardo Redi (Rome, 1985). For an analysis of Terra madre in the context of Blasetti's career, see Mancini's chapter on Blasetti in "The Free Years of the Fascist Film Industry," pp. 99-120. For an introduction to Blasetti's works, see Luca Ver- done, Ifilm di Alessandro Blasetti (Rome, 1989).

117

118 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

viewers as Italian by combining them with folk music or, in other cases, Catholic symbolism. Terra madre was one of the first sound films made in

Italy, and Blasetti's use of music here declared an intention to use sound not merely for entertainment, as Americans did in the musical, but as an ideological tool as well. Thus the establishing shot of Terra madre, an

overtly Soviet-style close-up of picks tilling the soil, is accompanied by the strains of a peasant choir. This frame also foregrounds the theme of reclamation (of Italy, of femininity, of masculinity, of modernity) that constitutes the ideological axis of the film. The peasant workers inform us that the land is languishing because their absentee landlord, Marco, prefers his decadent urban lifestyle and sends no money for modern im-

provements. They wish out loud for "a good boss [padrone] who knows how to command." The estate thus appears as a synecdoche for Italy before the advent of fascism-a sterile, disoriented country that suffers from an absence of leadership and collective purpose.

When Marco does arrive at the estate with his fiancee, Daisy, and an

entourage of blase city friends, Blasetti loses no time in communicating Marco's shameful status as a dominated male who is ambivalent about his heritage and the obligations it entails. As Marco wanders through the

great hall of the mansion, the director shoots him from above, causing him to appear dwarfed by the coats of armor, statues, and other symbols of his family's powerful past. However, when Marco goes upstairs to sur-

vey the estate, he begins to acquire stature and confidence. Like the other filmmakers discussed here, Blasetti uses a panoramic cinematography at

strategic points to draw an analogy between control of the gaze and the

possession of power. Slow pans of the rolling landscape convey Marco's view from the "master" bedroom and suggest that, paradoxically, he will

gain control of his destiny only after he has accepted the duties imposed upon him by his gender and social station.29

To establish a link in viewers' minds between social and sexual forms of power, Blasetti associates Marco's hesitancy to adopt the role of patriar- chal padrone with the submissive position he has assumed in his love life.

Daisy openly derides the estate as a primitive relic, but Marco never puts her in her place, as prevailing male codes of honor would require him to do. He even agrees to sell his ancestral home to speculators in order to

please her. Daisy's narrative function as a "dangerous woman" who ma-

nipulates Marco through her sexual power was established by Blasetti and his collaborators in the film's scenario, which describes Daisy as "a woman who dominates arrogantly through the allure of her French-

perfumed femininity."30 The finished film extends this characterization,

29. On the importance accorded to visual domination of the landscape in imperialist ideology, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992), and Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1994).

30. Foerster, Goffredo Alessandrini, and Blasetti, "Richiamo alla terra," scenario for Terra madre, p. 17, in Archivio Blasetti, Rome, box "Terra madre."



making Daisy the symbol of a pernicious modernity that aimed to subvert established gender roles in Italy as fascists believed it had in America and in the Weimar Republic.31

If Marco suffers silently under Daisy's domination, he is able to as- sume an authoritative manner from the start with Emilia, a young peasant woman, whom Blasetti describes in the shooting script as a "fresh and natural country beauty."32 Touring his lands on horseback, Marco chances upon an open-air peasant mass and spies Emilia as she helps a child to pray that their new padrone will stay on the land. Blasetti thus

presents Emilia as a woman defined by spirituality, maternity, and an ac-

ceptance of "natural" hierarchies of power-the ideal new woman of fascist Italy. As Vito Zagarrio has observed in his analysis of Terra madre, the scenes of the outdoor mass are dense with images pulled from both American westerns and Soviet films such as Alexander Dovzhenko's Zem-

lya (Earth, 1930); and once again folk music plays an important role in

recontextualizing these images as Italian.33 When Marco calls Emilia to him, using the familiar tu form to accentuate his superior status, she stands extremely close to him, gazing up into his eyes, while Blasetti cuts to a head shot that emphasizes his physical dominance over her. Marco's

changing sexual and social identity is further underscored when he wres- tles a bull to the ground during the annual branding of livestock on the estate. His performance elicits orgiastic cheers from the peasants and seals their conviction that he is the strong and virile leader of whom they have dreamt.

To convince Marco to stay on the land, the peasants organize a folk celebration, orfesta, in his honor. The scenes of thefesta advance a model of popular leisure unsullied by the practices of foreign mass culture and offer insight into the desires and fears that underlay the regime's strate-

gies of mass organizing in the provinces.34 Indeed, Blasetti filmed Terra madre during a government-sponsored "revival" of popular traditions that glorified rural lifestyles at a time of low grain output and an exodus from the countryside. Organized by the OND, this program established numerous ethnographic museums and cast hundreds of thousands of Italian peasants as participants in popular festivals, dance contests, and

31. For fascist perceptions of the excessive power of women abroad, see Angioletti, "Sogni e storture della Germania," L'Italia letteraria, 24 Jan. 1932, p. 3, and Corrado Alvaro, "II clima intellettuale a Berlino," 'Italia letteraria, 28 July 1929, p. 1.

32. Blasetti, shooting script for Terra madre, p. 42, in Archivio Blasetti, box "Terra madre."

33. See Vito Zagarrio, "Ideology Elsewhere: Contradictory Models of Italian Fascist Cinema," in Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History, ed. Robert Sklar and Charles Mus- ser (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 149-72.

34. The press highlighted in particular the participation of the famous regional chorus I Canterini Romagnoli in the film. The Trieste daily Piccolo della sera, 13 Jan. 1931, p. 12, published a list of songs the chorus would perform. The advertisements and press releases can be found in Archivio Blasetti, box "Terra madre."

119


costume exhibitions. Paradoxically, the "revival of traditions," as it was known, was designed to demonstrate the modernity of fascism. Relegat- ing the rural masses to the category of "ethnographic other" proclaimed the regime's mastery and possession of the past and its domination over contemporary forces of regionalist separatism and mass disorder.35 Fas- cist folkloric spectacles such as the 1928 Mostra del Costume, held in Ven- ice's Piazza San Marco, were carefully orchestrated affairs in which Italian peasants exhibited the dress of "forgotten" local cultures while surrounded by government officials and enclosed within architectural markers of seigneurial power.36 Regime officials and fascist folklorists viewed these events as training sessions in psychological and bodily discipline for Italian peasants, who, it was hoped, would finally learn the value of order, hierarchy, and fatigue.37

To heighten the contrast between this brand of mass leisure and the decadent practices fascists associated with foreign models of modernity, Blasetti juxtaposes the festa with a party that Daisy and her friends are throwing for Marco inside the mansion at the same time. For the party, which features swing music, beautiful gowns, champagne, and a sleek grand piano, the director uses continuity editing and long shots to allow the audience full immersion in and enjoyment of the glamorous ambi- ence. This segment functioned, Blasetti stated in an interview, to contrast

35. On the OND's "revival of traditions," see de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, and Stefano Cavazza, "La folkloristica italiana e il fascismo: I1 Comitato Nazionale per le Arti Popolari," La ricercafolklorica (Apr. 1987): 109-22 and "Feste popolari durante il fascismo," in II tempo libero nell'Italia unita, ed. Fiorenza Tarozzi and Angelo Varni (Bologna, 1992), pp. 99-119. My thanks to Cavazza for providing me with copies of his work.

36. The literature on exhibitions and festivals as "shows of force" designed to affirm authority is now quite vast. I have found the following studies especially helpful: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Objects of Ethnography" and Ivan Karp, "Festivals," in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washing- ton, D.C., 1991), pp. 386-443 and 279-87, and Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Com- plex," in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 123-54. On the Mostra del Costume and similar initiatives, see Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, Costumi, musica, danze, e feste popolari italiane (Rome, 1931). For the functions of exhibitions in fascist Italy, see Mas- simo Tozzi Fontana, "II ruolo delle mostre etnografiche in Italia nella organizzazione del consenso, 1936-1940," Italia contemporanea (Oct.-Dec. 1979): 97-103, and Stone, "The Poli- tics of Cultural Production." For the regime's manipulation of public spaces to reinforce symbolic authority, see Diane Y. Ghirardo, "Architecture and Theater: The Street in Fascist Italy," in "Event" Arts and Art Events, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988), pp. 175-99.

37. See Enrico Beretta (head of the OND), "La rinascita delle feste pubbliche italiane attraverso l'Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro," speech of Sept. 1930, and Emilio Bodrero, "L'Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro e la rinascita delle feste pubbliche italiane," in Opera Nazi- onale Dopolavoro, Costumi, musica, danze, efeste popolari italiane, pp. 78 and 9-10, and Amy A. Bernardy, introduction to Emma Calderini, I1 costume popolare in Italia (Milan, 1934), pp. 17-65.


the artificiality and shallowness of urban pastimes and superficial modern entertainments to the "natural" and "spontaneous" nature of the festa outside.38 Ironically, though, it is the peasantfesta that stands out for its ritualized nature. Blasetti's cinematography alternates abruptly between middle-ground shots that focus attention on the costumes and close-ups that place the physiognomies of rural Italy on show. The folk dances at the center of these scenes are highly stylized and take place within a tightly formed circle of peasants who are in turn encircled by the column- bounded courtyard of the mansion.39 Blasetti's notes in his shooting script reveal that, like the organizers of OND's folkloric spectacles, he took care to enclose his peasant performers within imposing emblems of traditional authority. "The camera must be placed behind two columns," he instructed his cameraman Carlo Montouri, "and from this position must take in the entire peasant group that is surrounded by an old colon- nade of the purest classical style."40

Marco is flattered by this homage and by the attentions he has received from Emilia during the evening but lacks the force to oppose Daisy. He agrees to go ahead with the sale of the estate, and he and his friends return to the city to attend a late-night party at Daisy's house. A phone call informing Marco of a fire on the estate gives him a chance to redeem himself; he rushes back to the country, plunges into the flames, and saves a child's life. This action frees him from a past of social and sexual domination, and he takes possession of the soil and its peasants, yelling, "these lands are mine and will remain mine! Everyone to their duties!"

As the film draws to a close, Blasetti adopts a didactic tone and returns to open-air shots and other markers of the realist style. The camera shows audiences a gleaming estate equipped with the latest in agricul- tural technology, and the director makes viewers sit through a long documentary sequence of tractors tilling the soil.41 The machines drive home the point that once purged of all associations with political unrest and female emancipation, modernity can be a positive force. As the final scenes make clear, under Marco's leadership the estate has become a

38. Blasetti, quoted in Ugo Ugoletti, "Quattro parole con Alessandro Blasetti," Cin- ema-Illustrazione, 4 Mar. 1931, p. 15; see Blasetti's notes in his shooting script for Terra madre.

39. Several reviewers criticized this mannered and staged quality of the folk-dance scenes and accused Blasetti of aestheticizing peasants and their traditions. See "Terra madre," review of Terra madre, in Gazzetta del popolo, 5 Mar. 1931, p. 5, and "Un film italiano: Terra madre," review of Terra madre, in Gazzetta di Venezia, 4 Mar. 1931, p. 7.

40. Blasetti, shooting script for Terra madre, p. 39. 41. The didactic quality of Terra madre made it popular among fascist officials, who

viewed it as an advertisement for the regime's push to modernize the Italian countryside. In December 1931 the film was shown in Washington D.C. as part of a formal presentation by the Italian commercial attache to the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Economics. See the notice given in Gazzetta di Venezia, 16 Dec. 1931, p. 7.

121


model for a new Italy in which modernization will strengthen rather than undermine traditional social roles.42 When Marco sees Emilia pitching hay, he tells her to go indoors, adding, "didn't we say that when the machines arrived the women were supposed to stop working? ... Don't you want a child someday?" At this, Emilia runs off into the fields, with Marco close behind. A handful of hay thrown over the screen for propriety's sake obscures our view of the couple, but there is little doubt that Emilia, like the soil, will soon be bearing life.43 Marco's conquest of Emilia com-

pletes the cycle of reclamation by confirming the return of his social and sexual power and reminds viewers that fascist modernity means the defeat of nonmaternal forms of female desire.

Mapping the Boundaries of Desire: Matarazzo's Treno popolare

If Terra madre offered Italians a fantasy of orderly power relations and leisure activities in the countryside, Treno popolare mapped out new forms of recreation and social interaction for the urban working class. One of the most vocal participants in the campaign to revitalize the Ital- ian cinema, Matarazzo viewed films as agents of indoctrination at home and as ambassadors of the fascist revolution abroad. He exhorted his

peers to make films that depicted the grand accomplishments of the

regime so that other nations would "appreciate our true value and stop producing defamatory material about our country."44 But like Blasetti he felt that the effectiveness of the new national cinema would depend on the ability of directors to couch their political messages in entertaining narratives. Treno popolare represents his response to this challenge. To ad- vertise the modernity of fascism, Matarazzo chose to focus on the OND's

program of"popular trains," which offered salaried employees cheap day fares to the countryside. Like other mass tourism initiatives of the thirties, the subsidized trips aimed to forge a sense of national identity by ex-

posing Italians to their "collective" cultural and historical heritage.45 If Treno popolare was lauded by one critic as "the film of our new

42. On the film as a defense of patriarchy and property, see Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1930-1943 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 123-26. On the film's promotion of a new model of modernization, see James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. 137-40.

43. While some film scholars have concluded that Marco and Emilia get married, there is no allusion to this in the film. The original treatment and all versions of the script also leave the relationship ambiguous.

44. Raffaello Matarazzo, "Roma avra un suo centro di cultura e di studi cinemato-

grafici," II tevere, 30 Mar. 1930, p. 10. See also the interview with the film's screenwriter, Gastone Bosio, "Nuove iniziative di giovani," La stampa, 12 Sept. 1933, p. 11.

45. On the popular trains and other fascist programs for mass tourism, see de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, pp. 180-81. The relationship between tourism and national identity in fascist Italy is also discussed by Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 1860-1960.

Autumn 1996 123

collective life," it also reveals the concern many fascists felt about the social anarchy that presumably would acccompany that life.46 Although the

popular trains did offer working-class Italians a break from routine, their

putative purpose, like the folkloric spectacles for peasants, was to incul- cate discipline. Designed as a corrective to unstructured pastimes such as urban loitering and fldnerie, the OND outings followed a rigorous sched- ule that prohibited "improvised activities" and overly individualized itineraries.47 In the minds of fascist officials, they offered a measure of control over the populace that was impossible within the amusement

park, the arcade, and other sites of mass culture. Yet as with other government initiatives that mobilized sections of the population in new ways, the outings also encouraged the development of the very sorts of autono- mous and emancipated behaviors the regime sought to curtail. Mata- razzo's film showcases the tensions and temptations that came with the

exploration of new terrain and looks with humor upon Italians' attempts to use these trips as occasions for infidelities and other evasions of daily life. But it also points out to future OND travellers which social and sexual boundaries must not be transgressed, reminding them that increased mobility brings new disciplinary demands as well.

Stylistically, Treno popolare exemplifies the experimentation engen- dered in fascist filmmakers by the double mandate to persuade and entertain. The film is a rather awkward blend of romantic comedy and didactic documentary, and Matarazzo seems to use the nonfiction segments to divest himself of his educative responsibilities-for example, in several long sequences giving audiences real-time guided tours of national monuments. Matarazzo, who began his career as a nonfiction film- maker, also uses the documentary scenes that open and close the film to ground the fictional narrative in a context of historical "authenticity."48 Yet the contrast between the glamorous actors and the peasant extras who surround them merely emphasizes the constructed nature of the fiction film. The way these juxtapositions create tears in the diegetic fabric of Treno popolare is especially evident in the film's opening segment. Matarazzo begins with real-time documentary footage that shows Italians buying their tickets for their day trip to Orvieto. The sober and deliberate

46. Enrico Roma, review of Trenopopolare, in Cinema-Illustrazione, 29 Nov. 1933; rpt. in 100 anni di nuovo cinema italiano, ed. Stefania Parigi (Pesaro, 1994), p. 259.

47. As one OND rulebook stated, "improvised activities" were banned on official outings since they "fail[ed] to correspond to those fundamental principles of discipline that must guide every activity of the regime" (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, "Disposizioni per escursionisti," Bollettino mensile: Ordinamenti, programmi, e regolamenti dell'OND 1 [Nov.-Dec. 1927]; quoted in de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, p. 184).

48. Matarazzo worked for Emilio Cecchi at the Cines studio. His first shorts, Littoria and Mussolinia di Sardegna, informed the public about the regime's land reclamation projects. On the latter film, see Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, pp. 213-14. Treno popolare and Matarazzo's career in general are discussed in Angela Prudenzi, Raffaello Matarazzo (Florence, 1991).

Critical Inquiry


mood of these scenes, which is underscored by the absence of dialogue and by slow pans of unsmiling travellers, is abruptly broken when the

protagonists, Carlo, Lina, and Giovanni, all portrayed by professional actors, are introduced as they board the train. The film then assumes a much lighter tone, allowing viewers to begin their own escapist adventure; but this journey into fantasy is one that Matarazzo's self-imposed mandate to educate the masses will require him to repeatedly interrupt.

As the protagonists settle in for their trip, the director immediately establishes a hierarchy of power among them based on their sexual identities. Carlo's clothing and his athletic physique show that he symbolizes fascist modernity. Instead of the rather stiff suits, ties, and hats worn by all the other men on board, Carlo sports a white polo shirt, summer suit, and white shoes. His masculinity and his superior status are confirmed when a young couple, Lina and Giovanni, sit in front of him. An establish-

ing shot in deep focus cuts to a series of shots from Carlo's point of view. As Lina stands before him, arranging her bags on the shelf above her seat, the camera-eye travels up and down her body at close range. This

leisurely pan shot establishes complicity and identity of interest between the narrator and Carlo and marks Lina to audiences as sexually available. Carlo's bold stare may also be construed as an affront to Giovanni, since it transgresses masculine codes of honor that considered women to be the

possessions of the men who accompanied them. With his straw boating hat, bow tie, and meek and comically inept manner, Giovanni evokes

contemporary American comedy idols such as Harold Lloyd and Stan Laurel; in the context of fascist ideology, his anachronistic attire and submissive demeanor make him a symbol of the sexual and political impotence of liberal Italy. Indeed, Giovanni's failure to challenge Carlo's gaze establishes him to audiences as a good candidate for the title of cornuto (cuckold) and as an individual who lacks the vision necessary to exercise

power. The train, whose front is emblazoned with a largefascio, takes off for

Orvieto accompanied by a popular tune (written by the young Nino Rota) that celebrates the "happy confusion" of the Dopolavoro outings. Despite the song's light theme, it has an important disciplinary purpose within the film. It not only serves as a transition between segments of the narrative but also functions like a factory whistle for the workers on screen, giving them aural cues that urge them en masse on to the next part of their collective day.

As the train hurtles down the tracks, we learn that Lina and Giovanni are merely coworkers and see her greet his confession of love with deri- sion and question his masculinity, as the following lines make clear:

Lina: You know, I have never travelled alone with a man. Giovanni: But I am not... Lina: ... a man?

Autumn 1996 125

Intent on conquest, Carlo takes every opportunity to show Lina that he is as capable as Giovanni is hapless. When Giovanni is unable to open a bottle of water, even with the aid of a corkscrew, Carlo does it for him and capably fashions drinking cups out of newspaper. Lina refuses the

cup and drinks directly from the bottle, looking Carlo straight in the eye to gauge his reaction. When she has finished, she announces that she loves to travel. Matarazzo thus establishes an association between geographic mobility-a desire to explore the national body-and sexual freedom. For women characters, travel evokes the possibility of social and sexual emancipation, while for Carlo and other men the exploration of new terrain is conflated with sexual conquest. Indeed, the passengers on the train include a man who is using the outing as an opportunity to

spend time with his young mistress. Although by the end of the film the man has been restored to his wife, who followed her husband onto the train, the message to male and female spectators is that participation in the public activities of the regime can facilitate the realization of private fantasies.

When the train arrives at Orvieto, audiences get a taste of the regi- mented behavior that figured in official fantasies about mass leisure under the dictatorship. Instead of pausing to stretch their legs or decide on individual itineraries, the whole group rushes with the greatest urgency to catch the tram to town in order to visit Orvieto's beautiful cathedral. Matarazzo makes it clear that group life under Mussolini protects individual and class boundaries. Italians were not to emulate theflaneurs of bour-

geois democracy, who spent their off-hours as spectators "at the margin" of the collective spaces of modernity.49 Nor were Russian and American models of mass culture acceptable, as they would lead to the effacement of one's personality. Only fascism, many Italian intellectuals believed, allowed individuals to experience the "happy confusion" of the group without losing their identities. Matarazzo's film translates this model of the individual/collective relationship into visual language. When the musical refrain signals the arrival of lunchtime, all of the travellers choose to

picnic on the same small area of grass, but the small groups keep a careful distance from one another, using picnic blankets to mark off their terri- tories.

After lunch, while the other travellers take their siestas, Carlo and Lina set out on a bike ride, a transgressive outing that allows them to test both their self-control and the limits of the freedoms allotted them within the fascist collective. When they reach a lake, Carlo takes Lina out in a rowboat, saying "let's allow ourselves to be guided by the current." This invitation to unstructured adventure is well received by the exuberant

49. The quotation is from Walter Benjamin's study of Baudelaire's conception of mo-

dernity, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1983), p. 170.

Critical Inquiry

126 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Lina, judging by her body language; Matarazzo depicts her leaning back in the boat in a position of receptiveness to all that "the current" might bring. Throughout the film, Lina has been presented as both a sexual

object and a woman who is emancipated and self-confident. Her demure floral dress is that of a modest office worker, but her platinum hair, glamorous makeup, and assertive demeanor signal her potential to become a sexually and socially disruptive element. Thus, when she asserts her

autonomy by attempting to row the boat herself, the script calls for her to fall in the water, whereupon she is rescued by Carlo. Chastened by the

episode, Lina is ready to be returned to "nature"; her first kiss with Carlo comes as she stands shivering in the bushes on the sand. The two then

repair to a conveniently placed hut, wearing only their underwear, to wait for their clothes to dry.

By the end of the film, both Carlo and Lina have proved their worth as emblems of the fascist style of modernity. Although Carlo faced a tempting situation with Lina in a state of undress, he restricts himself to the role of gallant guide and gets them both back to the train on time for departure. Whereas the male protagonist of Terra madre was allowed a sexual conquest within the narrative to mark the restoration of his masculinity, the already virile Carlo stands out in Treno popolare for his ability to curb his desire. His escapade causes some excitement but in the end does not disturb the "happy confusion" of the day. Lina, too, fulfills her didactic function within the narrative. As the train departs for Rome, she snug- gles up against Carlo, implying that in their future relationship she will be properly subordinate to him. But for most of the film she has been presented to spectators in sympathetic terms as a modern woman not afraid to take advantage of opportunities for pleasure, even when they come in the context of an educational outing sponsored by the regime. Aesthetically, too, Matarazzo's film delivers a mixed message. As the movie ends, he again introduces documentary footage of the fascio- bedecked popular train as it brings the characters and viewers back into the domain of"real life." At the last moment, though, the director returns to the genre of romantic comedy by focusing on Giovanni as he timidly offers a candy to a young woman. Coming in a first film by an ardent proponent of the national cinema, this American-style ending exemplifies how profit motives and intertextual influences often bedeviled projects for aesthetic autarchy under the dictatorship.

Fascist Modernity and Colonial Conquest

"Roads and bridges, hospitals and pharmacies, electricity and cinema: at one fell swoop, fascism has given [Africa] all the bounties and fruits of progress and civilization," boasted the journalist Giuseppe Lom-


Autumn 1996 127

brassa just two months into the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.50 Like other

European imperialists, the Italians presented their colonial war as a mission of modernization that would deliver the Africans from backward- ness, slavery, and chaos.5' Fascist newspapers and newsreels depicted Italian soldiers and civil engineers working tirelessly to improve the local infrastructure, while colonial theorists exalted the regime's implementa- tion of a new demographic brand of colonialism that would begin to reverse the racial balance of power in Africa by establishing a permanent colony of Italian settlers.52 But fascist modernization, in the colonial context, also mandated the neutralization of those agents of degeneration that had supposedly already caused a crisis in Europe. In 1932, Mussolini had warned Italians that the modern age could see "the entire civilization of the white race become weak and disintegrate, engulfed by senseless disorder and unfathomable despair."53 After the invasion of Ethiopia, these anxieties were echoed and exploited by regime officials, who justi- fied the colonial war as an operation meant to safeguard racial hierarchies and extend the "return to order" that the March on Rome had

begun at home.54 The evaluations of colonial experts regarding the disciplinary prob-

lems posed by the indigenous populations reveal the extent to which pre- existing sentiments about the pathological nature of the other gave shape to the untidy baggage of fear that Italians took with them to Ethiopia. Africans, like women, were viewed as unrestrainable, overly sentimental, devoid of logic, prone to criminal behavior, and possessed of a dangerous

50. Giuseppe Lombrassa, "II senno dei tigrini," Lo schermo (Nov. 1935): 31. 51. See Salvatore Villari, "Rapporti coi sottomessi," Criticafascista, 1 Aug. 1936, pp.

308-10; Renato Loffredo, "LItalia liberatrice di schiavi," Gioventu fascista, 15 Dec. 1937, p. 5; and Dante Benedetti, "L'Italia e la schiavitiu in Abissinia," Gioventufascista, 15 Jan. 1936, p. 12. On the fascist conquest of Ethiopia, see A. J. Barker, The Civilizing Mission: The Italo-

Ethiopian War 1935-36 (London, 1968), and Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa orientale, 4 vols. (Rome, 1976-84).

52. For discussions of fascist "demographic" colonialism, see Il Doganiere, "Imperial- ismo, perche no?" Criticafascista, 1 Nov. 1935, p. 25; G. M. Sangiorgi, "La potenza nell'Im-

pero e' nella colonizzazione demografica," Africa italiana 1 (Nov. 1938): 5; Prospector, "La colonizzazione nell'Impero," Africa italiana 1 (Nov. 1938): 22-24; Turco, "Colonizzazione

positiva," Gioventu fascista, 31 July 1936, p. 6; and Gaetano Napolitano, "I1 tramonto del colonialismo," Criticafascista, 1 June 1936, pp. 225-26. On the Italian colonization of Ethio-

pia, see Alberto Sbacchi, II colonialismo italiano in Etiopia, 1936-40 (Milan, 1980), and Haile M. Larebo, The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia, 1935-1941

(New York, 1994). 53. Mussolini, "Decidersi!" Ilpopolo d'Italia, 12 Jan. 1932; rpt. in Scritti e discorsi, 8:11. 54. See, for example, Francesco Orestano, "Adunanza inaugurale," Cesare M. de Vec-

chi di Val Cismon, "I: Politica sociale verso gli indigeni e modi di collaborazione con essi," and Maurizio Rava (ex-Governor of Somalia), "IV: Politica sociale verso gli indigeni e modi di collaborazione con essi," in Convegno di scienze morali e storiche: LAfrica, 2 vols. (Rome, 1939), 1:38-50, 1:707-28, and 1:757-76; and Luigi Goglia, "Note sul razzismo coloniale fascista," Storia contemporanea 19 (Dec. 1988): 1223-66.

Critical Inquiry

128 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

and excessive sexuality.55 These perceptions led authorities such as Raf- faele di Lauro, professor of colonial history and policy at the University of Rome, to worry that the rapid modernization of East Africa would awaken uncontrollable needs in the native populations, which would in turn lead to "disorder, chaos and corruption" (G, p. 89; see p. 59). The fascist obsession with maintaining hierarchies within social and racial

groups also influenced Italian attitudes towards colonial rule. A good number of officials and colonial experts felt that assimilationism on the French model would lead to a loss of white prestige- and influence by encouraging the colonized to mimic their European rulers. To prevent insurrections, they advised Italian settlers to practice a politics of difference that would continually remind the East Africans of their inferior status on the evolutionary scale.56

Similar anxieties over the maintenance of racial boundaries lay behind the numerous initiatives undertaken after 1935 to bring order to the ethnic map of the empire. Those Italians who had envisioned East Africa as an easily classifiable land of black others were horrified to find what one termed a "confused mass of races" living there.57 They observed that the Africans' indifference to "natural" barriers that were supposed to keep different peoples apart had created an "unimaginable ethnic confusion" that was responsible for the social chaos of the realm.58 Ethnogra- phers such as Raffaele Corso, who had earlier mapped Italian regional populations as part of the regime's "revival of traditions," now began to investigate the inhabitants of East Africa. A census of the tribes was

planned, the results of which would compose a massive ethnographic atlas of Italian East Africa. In addition, state entities such as the Italian

Academy, the Ministry of Italian East Africa, and the National Council of Research sponsored ethnographic missions to Ethiopia.59 Africans were

55. See Raffaele di Lauro, II govero delle genti di colore (Milan, 1940), hereafter abbreviated G; and Cannella, Principi di psicologia razziale. On the overlapping and intertwining of

stereotypes regarding blacks and women, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), p. 107.

56. Opposition to mimicry and assimilation is expressed by Rava, "I popoli africani dinanzi al schermo," Cinema, 10 July 1936, p. 9; Martino M. Moreno, "Politica di razza e

politica coloniale italiana," Gli annali dell'Africa italiana 2 (June 1939): 455-67; and G, pp. 32-38. As di Lauro says, "a good savage is a hundred times preferable-from an aesthetic

viewpoint as well-to a negro who wears a top hat" (G, p. 38). On this subject, see Sbacchi, II colonialismo italiano in Etiopia, 1936-1940, pp. 217-41.

57. Emilio Canevari, "La guerra e finita," Criticafascista, 15 May 1936, p. 210. 58. Orestano, "Adunanza inaugurale," p. 44. See Lidio Cipriani, Un assurdo etnico:

L'impero etiopico (Florence, 1935). 59. On the mission of colonial ethnography, see A. Mordini, "Stato attuale delle ricer-

che etnografiche (cultura materiale)," Etiopia 3 (Mar. 1938): 23-25, and Raffaele Corso, "Conoscenze etnographiche dell'impero," Africa italiana 2 (May 1939): 23-28 and Africa italiana: Genti e costumi (Naples, 1940). For the results of one such ethnographic mission to the Lake Tana area, see Cipriani, Missione di studio al lago Tana (Rome, 1940). On these

expeditions, see Francesco Surdich, "Le spedizioni scientifiche italiane in Africa orientale e



put on show for Italians at home through newsreels, photo essays, and

ethnographic exhibits that displayed physiognomies, costumes, and folk-

ways. The results of this reordering campaign were demonstrated in periodicals such as Etiopia and Africa italiana, which identified and classified the different "racial types" that could be found in the empire.60 The

development and exhibition of these taxonomies of colonial knowledge formed part of a two-pronged strategy designed to proclaim the regime's dominance over its new subjects and to ensure the retention of that

power in the future. As di Lauro concluded, "in order to exert his power effectively, the dominator must first of all be well acquainted with the dominated"; "that which one does not know, one cannot dominate" (G, pp. 44, 58).61

The increased fears of disorder also led to a new phase in the ongo- ing fascist campaign to remake the national character. The most optimis- tic observers maintained that the experience of combat and the collective nature of military life would cause such questionable traits as "moodi- ness,"62 "impulsiveness," and "romanticism" to disappear.63 The new Ital- ian, one official proclaimed in December 1935, "no longer became a soldier ... he is a soldier, naturally."64 The development of internal cen-

sorship mechanisms was also deemed vital for the success of the colonial

enterprise after the close of the war. In his manual II governo delle genti di colore (Governing Peoples of Color), di Lauro lists drunkenness, ogling Afri- can women, gratuitous violence, screaming, impatience, and excessive

laughing as behaviors that would damage Italian "prestige" and lead to

episodes of insubordination (G, p. 86).65 The attempt to remake the national body in the image of European "civility" also extended to attire. In this area, di Lauro counted on the long-standing Italian concern to fare bellafigura, instructing those in the colonies to "take care with your cloth-

ing; err on the side of vanity... If you have to receive dirty or rag-clad natives, dress elegantly, as though you were going to receive a beautiful woman" (G, p. 86). The inculcation of sexual discipline among soldiers and settlers was a more complicated matter, since official messages advo-

in Libia durante il periodo fascista," in Le guerre coloniali delfascismo, ed. Del Boca (Rome, 1991), pp. 443-68.

60. Piccioli, "La razza e l'Impero," p. 4; Dr. Guido Guidi, "Razze e popoli dell'A.O.," Etiopia 4 (Apr. 1940): 36.

61. On the role of ethnography in building support for fascist colonialism, see Mario

Lospinoso, "Gli studi etnologici in Italia all'epoca della conquista etiopica," in A.A.V.V., Ma- trici culturali delfascismo (Rome, 1977), pp. 225-44.

62. Gianni Granzotto, "La vita d'Africa e il costume degli italiani," Criticafascista, 15

June 1938, p. 229. 63. G. A. Fanelli, "Fine del volontarismo romantico," Criticafascista, 1 Feb. 1936, p.

100. See Sangiorgi, "La potenza dell'Impero e' nella colonizzazione demografica." 64. Bottai, "Soldato fascista," Criticafascista, 1 Dec. 1935, p. 34. 65. According to the author, African notables viewed laughing in men as a sign of an

infantile and feminized character.

129

130 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

cating the regulation of desire contrasted wildly with the sexualized rhetoric of imperialism that pervaded the fascist press. Yet some intellectuals persisted in their campaign to construct a new male sexual identity that would be defined by the ability to discipline the instincts in the service of a greater ideal. Even first-hour fascists like Giuseppe Bottai, then gover- nor of Rome, downplayed the heroic figure of the rowdy squadrista and praised the soldier "who knows how to keep the attributes of his virility firmly in place."66

The Aesthetics of Order: D'Errico's I1 cammino degli eroi

The conquest of Ethiopia also opened a new phase in the regime's attempt to use films as tools of domestic persuasion and international influence. Cinema, fascist officials and publicists argued, had the task of inculcating an "imperial and racial consciousness" that would encourage Italians to emigrate to East Africa and provide them with a set of norms for the regulation of social and sexual behavior once they were there.67 Movie cameras, termed "battleships on wheels" by one commentator, were also viewed as important arms in the campaign to conquer both Africans and the foreign public by demonstrating the beneficial effects of Italian colonization.68 II cammino degli eroi, a 1936 documentary produced for international distribution by the documentary production center Isti- tuto LUCE, was made to fulfill this multiple mandate. Composed of footage shot by LUCE's Africa unit and edited by D'Errico, the film is divided into twelve sections. Each "chapter" of the narrative is preceded by a graphic that illustrates symbolically the concepts that will be expounded in the next segment of the film. The graphics are joined with an Italian voice-over and, for foreign audiences, with French and German interti- tles. The images and their accompanying narratives are designed to di- vert, in both senses of the word. Coming at intervals of five minutes, they are meant to lighten the film and prevent viewers from feeling bored and perceiving it as overly didactic. But they are also designed to guide viewers' understanding of the war by providing an ideological context for the images that follow. In a sense, the entire film is an exercise in diversion, since the putative topic of the film-the military conflict-occupies only

66. Bottai, "Soldato fascista," p. 34. See Palazzi, "Autorita dell'uomo," and Maggiore, "Maschilita del fascismo."

67. "Il cinema dell'Impero," Lo schermo (June 1936): 12. See Lombrassa, "Il senno dei tigrini."

68. See Vero Roberti, "Le corazzate con le rotelle ...," Lo schermo (Apr. 1938): 26. Rava, in "I popoli africani dinanzi al schermo," felt that if Italian commercial films were censored heavily, Africans could be allowed to see them. II Duce's son Vittorio Mussolini, on the other hand, was adamant that the regime must develop special films for Ethiopians; he recommended documentaries made in the native languages. See Vittorio Mussolini, "Cin- ema per gli indigeni," Cinema, 10 Jan. 1939, p. 109.



two of its twelve sections. Although the war provides a pretext for D'Er- rico to make the film, actual fighting is relegated to the status of subtext in a narrative that celebrates the fascist ability to domesticate the energies of modernity and make them serve the regime.69

As the credits roll, a graphic is shown that depicts a movie camera

planted between two cacti on a hill that overlooks a vast expanse of desert. This image emphasizes the connections between the control of vision and the possession of power and lays bare D'Errico's intention to use this film to naturalize fascist claims to domination in East Africa. To further reinforce the message that the camera will operate within the narrative as a symbol of fascist control, the establishing shot of the film shows a bust of Mussolini on the face of a mountain, surveying the desert from his own

high ground (fig. 1).70 If the latter frame identifies the gaze of authority as masculine, the former declares the regime's intention to use cinema as a frontline weapon in its battle for control of Ethiopia. The next hour of the film, however, reneges on this transparently imperialist beginning, as D'Errico goes on to depict the Italian presence in Ethiopia as an altruistic, "civilizing" mission. The LUCE footage presents the fascists as benevolent caregivers who utilize the implements of modern warfare solely for humanitarian ends. The Italians appear as laborers rather than soldiers, and military materiel is used for civil purposes only. Grenades and tanks clear forests and swamps, while planes drop not bombs but mailbags and

freshly baked bread. The men give African women and children water and vaccinations and cure toothaches in streamlined mobile dentistry units. The military conflict becomes a brief episode that begins when un- grateful Africans interrupt the fascists' civilizing mission.

Il cammino degli eroi exemplifies how the heightened fears over social disorder that came with the invasion of Ethiopia produced texts that more openly prescribed the normalizing aims of the regime. Indeed, D'Errico's work is less about the conquest of Africans than about the conquest of Italians, who are cast in a master narrative that equates modernization with the acquisition of discipline. The "heroes" in this movie are not depicted as pioneers or adventurers, as one might expect from the title, but as faceless laborers who have learned to subjugate their individual desires to suit the needs of the collectivity. Technology, too, is mastered in this film, which boasts of the regime's success in dominating the machine and subordinating it to the military aims of the dictatorship. Much of the movie, in fact, is devoted to monotonous footage of smoothly

69. On this film, see Mino Argentieri, L'occhio del regime: Informazione e propaganda nel cinema delfascismo (Florence, 1979), p. 119; Jean A. Gili, Statofascista e cinematografia: Repres- sione epromozione (Rome, 1981), pp. 86-87; and Mancini, "The Free Years of the Italian Film Industry," pp. 140-42.

70. The photograph reproduced here is not taken from D'Errico's film, which depicts a face sculpted into the desert wall, but is one example of several freestanding Mussolini heads created in the Ethiopian desert.

131

C

jt S

'I? *i( C

U

5-.. bE C

2?s V

C:

:::? VC ?"?'"::" 2

' ?.:?? .i L

2ri~~

C oiixii'ii:i

'I. :.. ' it

..~ - <r: ,il

.#..


running machines producing canned food, airplane parts, and other ne- cessities of war. During these sequences, the narrator boasts of the "perfect organization" and "efficient structures" that support the colonial

enterprise. In II cammino degli eroi, image and text come together to create an aesthetics of order that is meant to mirror the mentality and behavior of the reformed Italian worker-soldier. D'Errico's vision of a new national collective that runs on assembly-line rhythms is close to that of certain National Socialist intellectuals who drew, like D'Errico, upon the pro- ductivist and rationalizing imperatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit.7'

D'Errico came to colonial filmmaking from the ranks of the theatrical and cinematic avant-garde.72 His first film, the documentary short Strami- lano (Supermilan, 1929), resembles formalist "city films" by Walter Rutt- mann and other avant-garde directors. D'Errico utilized split screens and other creative montage techniques to render the multiple perspectives and chaotic rhythms of modernity. Within the director's development as a fascist intellectual, then, II cammino degli eroi may be considered an act of self-discipline. Disavowing his former avant-garde vision of modernity as chaos and fragmentation, he embraced a visually and ideologically overdetermined universe of hierarchy and structure.73 At one point, D'Er- rico appropriates the Russian constructivist technique of baring the de- vice to illustrate how cinema may further the disciplinary aims of the

regime. He devotes an entire sequence to the activities of LUCE cameramen and shows them shooting the aerial and ground footage that com-

poses the film. This is not done to expose the fabricated nature of the

71. I am thinking here of Leni Riefenstahl and Ernst Jiinger, and of the vision that

guided the efforts of the Nazi Bureau of Beauty of Labor. On the links between the Neue Sachlichkeit and Nazi ideology, see Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Peter Reichel, Der schdne Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich, 1991), pp. 101-13; Anson G. Rabinbach, "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich," Journal of Contem-

porary History 11 (Oct. 1976): 43-74; and Barry Fulks, "Walter Ruttmann, the Avant-Garde Film, and Nazi Modernism," Film and History (May 1984): 26-35.

72. D'Errico's play Vestita di rosso e nero was performed at Anton Giulio Bragaglia's experimental Teatro degli Indipendenti in Rome in February 1926. D'Errico also contrib- uted to fascist avant-garde periodicals such as 2000, Spirito nuovo, and L'Interplanetario that discussed movements such as surrealism, Russian imagism, and the Neue Sachlichkeit. On these avant-garde circles of the 1920s and their connections with Russian, French, and Ger- man trends, see Umberto Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista: Comunismo e avanguardie artistiche nel- I'Italia degli anni venti (Naples, 1981).

73. D'Errico accompanied this visual gesture with an article that constitutes a formal declaration of submission to the state. See Corrado D'Errico, "LUCE A.O.," Lo schermo (Apr. 1936): 11-13, and the article of Giuseppe Croce, another LUCE documentarist who served in East Africa, "In A.O. col reparto fotocinematografico dell'LUCE," Lo schermo (July 1936): 13-14. After completing II cammino degli eroi, D'Errico continued to retreat from experimental techniques, dedicating himself to feature films for commercial distribution. His 1939 movie about small-town innocence, Stella del mare, shows no trace of his avant-garde past. D'Errico's film foreshadowed an "official" disavowal of avant-garde film that appeared in the journal of the state-run Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. See Jacopo Comin, "Appunti sul cinema d'avanguardia," Bianco e nero, 31 Jan. 1938, pp. 6-33.

133

134 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

film, as would be the case in constructivism, but rather to emphasize the total integration of cinema into the ranks of the regime. Even as the cameramen observe the troops in battle, D'Errico tells audiences, they are themselves being observed by a higher authority. This chain of surveil- lance ends, of course, with Mussolini, who had reminded all Italian directors of his uncontested vantage point when he inaugurated Istituto LUCE (fig. 2).

After ten segments that exalt the humanitarian and modernizing nature of the Italian presence in Africa, D'Errico introduces the military conflict. A graphic of a black-skinned man with a ferocious expression, wild hair, and a shield appears on screen, while the narrator informs us that "criminal and thoughtless savage hordes" had threatened to disrupt the civilizing process by waging a "bloody aggression" against the Italians. In the brief battle scenes, the Italians and Ethiopians appear evenly matched, so only a montage of victory parades in Rome and Addis Ababa makes manifest the identity of the winner. Attentive to foreign public opinion, though, D'Errico chooses to close the film with a demonstration of the benefits of the Italian colonization; East Africa has been trans- formed from a desert into a garden. Local shepherds stroll through green fields, and tractors till the now fertile earth. The messages of sur- veillance and aggression that marked the start of the film have been bur- ied, replaced by a rhetoric of benevolence and by images that proclaim, as in Terra madre, that fascist modernization involves no disruption of the social order.

As a vehicle of a gendered discourse about modernity, though, II cammino degli eroi goes far beyond Terra madre and Treno popolare. Produced

during the first phase of economic autarchy in Italy, the film depicts a

society that is sexually self-regulating as well. Apart from a few glimpses of nurses on hospital ships, white women are entirely absent from this film. The erasure of the female presence seems to have solved all disci-

plinary problems; in their off-duty moments the soldiers do laundry, mend clothes, and bake bread calmly and silently. But the frenzied pace of the montage in this film, like the obsessively efficient pace the workers

keep up on screen, indicates that sublimated desire provides the highest- grade fuel for the fascist military-industrial machine. In D'Errico's film, technology is no longer merely an extension of the male body to facilitate the conquest of femininized others. Here, as in other military films of the later fascist period, it becomes a compensatory sphere for displaced erotic tendencies. A 1938 profile of cameramen in the colonies, for example, presented the cinematographer Ubaldo Arata as a man "who doesn't be- lieve in women and gives himself to his camera with the trust of one who knows he will not be betrayed."74

74. Caption to a photograph of Ubaldo Arata in Franco Ciampitti, "Arata, Brizzi, Mon- tuori, e Terzano," Lo schermo (Mar. 1938): 31. Arata had just finished the colonial epic Lu-


Autumn 1996 135

In the early thirties, filmmakers looked warily at women as potential agents of degeneration and social disruption but kept them in the picture as potential procreators and nurturers. After 1935, Italy's immersion in

military conflicts increased the collective obsession with discipline and lent new urgency to the old association of women with decadent and un- restrained behavior. II cammino degli eroi presents a fantasy of a fascist

modernity where women are present only through allusion and meta-

phor-as mothers who must have produced those on screen, as landscapes that must be mastered. The "path of the heroes," in this context, leads to the perfection of internal disciplinary mechanisms and the definitive defeat of women, Africans, and all other emblems of female desire.

Biology as Destiny: Brignone's Sotto la croce del sud

As fascist officials knew, D'Errico's vision of Italian soldiers as celibate worker bees had little correspondence with the realities of colonial life. Homosexual relationships remained, as always, an undiscussed topic, but

miscegenation received much attention in the press as a practice that would cause African men to lose respect for Italians and would lead to rebellions.75 More generally, miscegenation became a keyword under the

dictatorship that evoked a wide variety of amorphous fears about the social chaos that would result from the transgression of boundaries. Stereo-

types about the pathological potential of women and peoples of color

overlapped, which meant that miscegenation also raised unconscious anxieties over a "savage" female sexuality that would engulf and annihi- late the male.76 These apocalyptic scenarios were disseminated in both the specialized and popular press and formed an integral part of fascist colonial discourse. Authorities such as Martino M. Moreno, General Di- rector of Political Affairs at the Ministry of Italian East Africa, warned that

miscegenation would lead to degeneration and collective madness for

ciano Serra, pilota (Alessandrini, 1937) and would serve as cameraman on Roberto Rossellini's antifascist film Open City (1945) five years later.

75. See Bellofiore, "I problemi razziali dell'Impero," and Eudemon, "II meticcio nella Carta dell'Impero," Etiopia 2 (15 Sept.-15 Oct. 1937): 6-8. The importance of maintaining "prestige" as a strategy of imperial rule was central to the colonial policy developed by the Duke Amedeo di Savoia, governor-general of Italian East Africa after November 1937. He shunned rule by force as counterproductive and felt that consensus for Italian authority would only be achieved by a peaceful "collaboration" between paternalistic Italians and

respectful Africans. Italians, in this scheme, were responsible for setting a standard of deco- rous behavior. On this point, see Sbacchi, II colonialismo italiano in Etiopia, 1936-1940, pp. 218-27.

76. On miscegenation as a symbol of social and sexual disorder, see Gilman, Difference and Pathology, p. 107; for the meanings of the black body within Italian imperialist ideology, see Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis, 1995), pp. 22-81.

Critical Inquiry

U- *^ 1

. - I

9 - ---- ,

C14

E 0

C

-C

0 C

o,

C .=

GM

-

(M

L4


Italians, since "the native element tends to absorb the white element, both

physically and morally."77 Like many fascist initiatives to reform Italians' behavior, this cam-

paign of fear had little practical effect. Many Italians, in fact, had sexual

relationships with African women in Ethiopia. It was not uncommon for colonial officials (whose wives had remained in Italy) to cohabit with in-

digenous women, and brothels, set up with seed money from these same officials, did a brisk business, attracting long lines of soldiers day and

night.78 In Rome, the regime attempted to counter this phenomenon, known as madamismo, by urging colonists to bring their wives with them and by establishing its own brothels filled with women recruited from the ranks of Italian prostitutes and domestic servants. But these measures did little to change the situation, and neither did a 1937 law that made

miscegenation an offense punishable by five years in prison for the man.79

Prospective women settlers received their own admonitions against ceding to temptation in Africa. Journalists warned that Ethiopia was pop- ulated by men of"beautiful appearance and noble bearing," while speak- ers at colonial preparation courses reminded female audiences that heat caused women to "put up less resistance to men" and counseled them to avoid stimulants of all types.80 "Colonial hygiene," a set of strategies de-

signed to help women win "the battle against penetration by germs," formed the centerpiece of these programs ("IC," p. 18). Drawing on established views that black sexuality was "naturally" diseased, colonial ex-

perts reminded women that germs could come in human forms as well.8'

Propriety required that antimiscegenation messages to women be masked

77. Moreno, "Politica di razza e politica coloniale italiana," p. 462. For similar statements by other scholars and colonial officials, see Cipriani, "III: Razze africane e civilta

dell'Europa," and Angiolo Mori, "XIV: Politica sociale verso gli indigeni," in Convegno di scienze morali e storiche, 1:594-99 and 2:902-8, and G. Cipriani was director of the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, Mori was Secretary General of the Government and professor of colonial law at the Istituto Orientale in Naples, and di Lauro was professor of colonial history and policy at the University of Rome. For similar statements in the fascist

press, see many articles in the periodical La difesa della razza, such as Mario Baccigalupi, "I delitti contro il prestigio di razza," La difesa della razza, 20 Dec. 1939, pp. 30-33, and Nicola Marchitto, "Difesa della razza e politica coloniale: Bianchi e neri," La difesa della razza, 5 Jan. 1939, pp. 20-21.

78. On prostitution in East Africa and the involvement of fascist officials in brothels, see Sbacchi, II colonialismo italiano in Etiopia, 1936-1940, pp. 224-41.

79. This law (no. 880 of 19 Apr. 1937) assigned no punishment to the woman. On racial legislation and the issue of miscegenation in Italian East Africa, see ibid., and Luigi Preti, Imperofascista, africani ed ebrei (Milan, 1968), pp. 87-121. For a cynical description of the conditions at one well-known brothel that employed Italian women, see Luigi Barzini, Jr., "Ethiopia: Enter Madame," Esquire 5 (June 1936): 64, 137.

80. Adolfo Dolmetta, "La funzione della donna nella politica razziale," Criticafascista, 15 May 1939, p. 220; Dr. Vincenzo Landolfi, "Igiene coloniale," in Corso di preparazione coloniale per la donna (Naples, 1937), p. 18; hereafter abbreviated "IC"; see p. 22.

81. Margherita del Re defined natives as "breeding-pools of microorganisms ... who

pollute our well water with carrion and putrefied waste products" (Margherita del Re, "Eco-

137

138 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

in scientific discourse, as Doctor Vincenzo Landolfi's 1937 lecture on "colonial hygiene" to a group of Neapolitan women makes clear. Landolfi warned his audience that "germs will penetrate more deeply in the or-

ganism when they find in the organic conditions of the individual a favor- able terrain for their reception and reproduction" ("IC," p. 24).

The last film I will examine, Brignone's Sotto la croce del sud, was made in the midst of this campaign against unregulated desire in the colonies and reflects the atmosphere of mild hysteria that accompanied all fascist discussions of miscegenation. Mailui, the female protagonist, has all the attributes of"dangerous women" as defined by both positivist and fascist antifeminists: she is of mixed racial heritage, has worked as a prostitute, and possesses a vigorous and magnetic sexuality. In this way Mailu

(played by the white Italian actress Doris Duranti, who made a career out of such "exotic" roles) stands as a symbol of the threat all women and blacks posed to the social and sexual order of the regime. The opening frames of the film introduce Mailu as a woman of Western and decadent tastes. In a hazy room, a slim and elegant woman drinks whisky, smokes

cigarettes, and plays romantic music on her gramophone.82 Yet this is a diva with a difference; her boudoir is decorated with tribal cloths and baskets, she is dressed in a robe of African cloth, and she is adorned with exotic jewelry and a Coptic Christian cross. Her elaborately braided hair, exotic features, and dark skin mark her as an outsider who mimics Euro-

pean culture.83 Mailiu's marginality to Italian standards of bourgeois propriety is further underscored in the next scene, when audiences learn that she lives with the abusive colonial speculator Simone, who stands for the sort of exploitative and violent colonialism the fascists professed to abhor. To allow Simone to fulfill his narrative function without tarnishing the national image, Brignone gives him a foreign-sounding last name

(Aeropoulos), as if to imply that his mixed heritage may be responsible for his criminal instincts.

Brignone contrasts the immorality of Mailui and Simone with the

"honesty" of the Italian colonists who have come to cultivate land in East Africa. Ironically, Brignone filmed Sotto la croce del sud on location in the Sidamo region of Ethiopia, where the fascist government had acquired the land it gave to settlers by expropriating it from Amharic notables.84

nomia domestica coloniale," in Corso di preparazione coloniale per la donna, p. 52). See also

Augusta Perricone Viola, "Come vestire in colonia?" Africa italiana 2 (Dec. 1939): vii-viii. 82. On this point, see Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, p. 193. 83. The Coptic Christian cross, in particular, would be a powerful symbol of Mailu's

marginality to Italian audiences. Within the context of the film, it is a good indicator of the

presence of mimicry as Homi Bhabha defines it: "a difference that is almost the same, but not

quite" (Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," Octo- ber, no. 28 [Spring 1984]: 126).

84. For this and similar initiatives, see Sbacchi, Il colonialismo italiano in Etiopia, 1936- 1940, pp. 257-66.


Autumn 1996 139

In the film, of course, this fact goes unmentioned, and audiences learn instead that Marco, the group's leader, legally purchased the land before the war. All of the on-screen settlers are veterans of the recent conflict; they form a cross-section of social classes and age groups. When the colonists arrive at Marco's estate, they find Simone squatting on the premises, and in an unlikely gesture designed to demonstrate his benevolence, Marco allows Simone and Mailu to remain. The estate thus becomes a microcosm of Italian East Africa, where close and constant contact between white men and black women was the rule.

Interviewed about his film after its release, Brignone noted that he had made it to alert Italians to the temptations they would face in the colonies. Africa, he warned, "is a sweet sickness [un dolce male] that pene- trates your blood so that you can no longer free yourself from it."85

Among the settlers in the film, the young engineer Paolo stands as a symbol of the disciplined, technocratic modernity of fascism, who, nonethe- less, is also the one to be drawn to the exotic Mailu. Their initial meeting and conversation titillates the normally serious Paolo, and he tells his fel- low colonists, "boys, tonight we're going to have an orgy!" Setting up a

pattern that will be followed throughout the film, they choose to interpret his invitation to pleasure in a nonsexual manner, replying, "great! To-

night we drink!" Paolo, however, cannot sublimate his feelings through drinking, as

he has become a slave to his desire for Mailiu. Brignone combines sugges- tive dialogue with pointedly symbolic scenography to underscore this reverse colonization. The couple is depicted surrounded by blooming flowers and cacti, and Mailui's dangerous otherness is conveyed through a syncretic iconography of African necklaces, Middle Eastern earrings, Chinese slippers, and bamboo parasols. In one exchange, she tells Paolo that she has a "vagabond soul" and displays her emancipated nature by asserting her control over her sexuality.

Mailu: I close my eyes and let my soul go where it will. Paolo: That could be dangerous. Mailui: Yes, it can happen that the soul is attracted by some un-

known force, but I recognize it immediately when it happens and command my soul to change course.

To further heighten the atmosphere of exoticism and sexual tension, Brignone introduces documentary footage of an East African fertility ritual into the narrative. Young men and bare-breasted young women face each other in two parallel lines. Against a background of chants and

rhythmic drumming, the two lines converge and simulate copulation, with the men brushing their lips over the women's noses as they bob up

85. Guido Brignone, quoted in Francesco Callari, interview with Brignone, "I1 cine-

matografia italiana e l'impero," Film, 11 May 1940; hereafter abbreviated "C."

Critical Inquiry


and down. At this point the camera cuts to a head shot of one couple only. When the pair has been isolated from the rest of the group, Bri-

gnone switches to an extreme shot that brings viewers just inches from the couple's faces. In the context of the film's ideological agenda, the clip is designed to present black sexuality to Italians as bizarre and dangerous. It also asserts the fascists' ability to probe and master the Ethiopians by placing them onstage to perform what to Western audiences would be coded as an extremely private and erotic act.86

To underscore the association between the open sexuality of the ritual and the threat posed by Mailu, Brignone cuts back and forth between the Africans and Paolo and Mailu, who watch the spectacle from separate porches of the main house. Paolo, unable to contain his desire any longer, goes to Mailu, who is lying back in a chaise with her arms behind her head, and kisses her passionately. Marco, deciding that Paolo's transgressive flirtation has gone far enough, orders Mailu off the estate. Si- mone, too, decides to abandon Mailu. He flees after setting fire to the estate, and in the dramatic sequence that follows, Brignone capitalizes on ingrained Italian fears of insurrection and annihilation by the other. Simone is pursued through the bush by a large crowd of spear-wielding Africans, and Brignone draws out the scene by inserting lingering close-

ups of Simone's panicked and very pale face. Although the Africans are

pursuing Simone on Marco's orders, the lengthy chase turns the evil Si- mone into an emblematic white male victim of the black masses. Indeed, Simone falls into quicksand and, as Paolo and the Ethiopians watch, is engulfed by the primordial womb of Africa. The conflation of Africa with destructive and inchoate female forces is reinforced when Brignone cuts back to a distraught Mailui, preparing to depart from the estate. As she

packs her suitcases, she tells Paolo that "these are good people who must think of work. My presence here is like a poison." The disease metaphor reinforces established notions of the disastrous consequences that supposedly come from miscegenation and the emancipation of female desire; Mailu's sexuality has caused death and destruction and, as she herself admits, is ultimately pathological. The last frame of the film brings into the open the homosocial feelings that constitute the deep structure of so many fascist colonial films; as Marco and Paolo watch her go, Marco puts his arm around Paolo and says, "now let's go back to work."

86. The choice to include such "exotic" footage was undoubtedly made for commercial reasons as well. After the proclamation of empire, in fact, colonial journalists and filmmakers such as Romolo Marcellini began to urge their peers to capitalize on the novelty Africans would represent for Western viewers, who were familiar only with American blacks. As Marcellini asserted in Lo schermo, the review of the Istituto LUCE, "our blacks are won-

derfully different. We have a new and exclusive black product to launch on the market" (Romolo Marcellini, "I nostri negri," Lo schermo [Oct. 1936]: 20). See Ferbo, "I1 film coloniale," Lo schermo (Oct. 1937): 26.

Autumn 1996 141

Like II cammino degli eroi, Brignone's film envisions fascist modernity as a male-bounded site of technology and labor. Within the film, Mailu functions not only as a particularly economical sign of difference, but also as a symbol of that other modernity-amorphous, chaotic, and un-

healthy-that the fascists so feared. Mailu cannot be domesticated and rehabilitated to help meet the race-affirming demographic goals of the fascist collective, as was Lina in Treno popolare. Moreover, her ambiguous racial identity, Western habits, and her past as a prostitute preclude her

participation in fertility rites and other rituals of African society. Mailui remains in a liminal and thus uncontrollable zone; because she cannot be dominated and placed onstage, she must simply be removed from vision. This exclusion of women from the scene of colonial authority in II cammino degli eroi and Sotto la croce del sud mirrors the regime's attempts in the late thirties to expel women from the labor force and to confine them to the home. At the same time, new figures emerged to share the burden of

representing the forces of chaos and degeneration within fascist discourse. Starting in 1938, Jews joined Africans and mixed-race individuals such as Mailu as embodiments of pathology and crime. An intricately constructed subject who subsumed the identities of women, blacks, and the mass, "the Jew" emerged in the press by the end of the fascist regime as the preeminent emblem of that modernity "without bounds" that the

dictatorship worked so hard to defeat.87 As a morality tale about the dangers of this other modernity, Sotto la

croce del sud shares many thematic elements with other films of the thirties. In his extensive use of outdoor locations and amateur actors (in this case East Africans, several of whom had lines in the film), as well as his integration of documentary footage into a fictional narrative, Brignone made use of realist codes of representation in a way not dissimilar to Blasetti, Matarazzo, and other feature filmmakers. When the film was shown at the 1938 Biennale International Film Festival in Venice, though, it met with a storm of criticism. Many reviewers felt that the steamy scenes between Paolo and Mailu, coupled with the footage of the fertility ritual, would incite forbidden desires rather than quell them. Others criticized Brignone for according a racially mixed woman such centrality and

power within the narrative and argued that he had made Italian males

87. Fascist views of the role of Jews in Italian culture include La questione ebraica in un secolo di cultura italiana dal 1800 al 1915, ed. Roberto Mazzetti (Modena, 1938), and many articles in La difesa della razza, such as Edoardo Zavattari, "Ambiente naturale e caratteri bio- psichici della razza italiana," La difesa della razza, 5 Aug. 1935, pp. 24-25. On constructions of the Jew in Italian culture prior to 1938, see Lynn M. Gunzberg, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (Berkeley, 1992), and on the slippage between blacks and Jews in fascist ideology and discourse, see Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, pp. 46-50. Fascist anti-Semitic legislation is discussed in Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin, 1988), and recorded in Tito Staderini, Legislazioneper la difesa della razza: Raccolta deiprovvedi- menti legislativi e ministeriali coordinati ed annotati (Rome, 1940).

Critical Inquiry

142 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

look "ridiculous" (quoted in "C," p. 3).88 Brignone later stated that the film's poor reception left him "bitter and disillusioned" and reminded reviewers that the film had been made to call attention to the disciplinary concerns raised by the prospect of permanency in the colonies. "In Af- rica," he noted, "one must always remember that one is white and, moreover, Italian and fascist" (quoted in "C," p. 3). In the end, Brignone's work met a fate similar to that which he had engineered for his protagonist Mailui: labelled as dangerous, it was rejected as a representation of Italianness.89 The reaction to Brignone's film reveals how insecure many fascists remained after fifteen years in power about the regime's ability to remake Italians into paragons of psychological and bodily discipline.

Conclusion

Italian fascism, Bottai once observed, was an experiment "conducted ... on a razor's edge."90 From the late twenties, when Mussolini had con- solidated his hold on Italy's government, the fascists pursued a putatively populist agenda that recast social institutions and reconfigured both public and private spheres. Yet, as Bottai's comment reveals, the government was haunted by the question of how to control the emancipatory tendencies that modernization and mass mobilization would bring. The fascist solution to this dilemma was to try to make mass organizations and leisure

pastimes reinforce rather than undercut traditional notions of authority. Under the dictatorship, the public spaces of interwar modernity-trains, mass tourist outings, sporting events, exhibitions, the factory-would become sites of reeducation designed to produce behaviors that reaffirmed

existing class and gender hierarchies. Ultimately, this project met with mixed success at best, since participation in the collective activities sponsored by the regime often encouraged the development of those very values-such as individual initiative-that the regime worked to extir-

pate. Italian women, for example, often gained a sense of autonomy and

personal accomplishment from their participation in fascist sport and social-welfare initiatives that diluted and ultimately undercut the regime's natalist and antifeminist propaganda.91 Thus the new public sphere of fascism became a locus of activities that fulfilled private goals and mediated Italians' relationships with the regime. The influence of commercial

88. For objections to the film, see "Sotto la croce del sud," Bianco e nero, 30 Sept. 1938, pp. 95-97; Sandro De Feo, II Messaggero, 1 Sept. 1938, p. 11; "Sotto la croce del sud, nuovo film d'Africa," Film, 3 Sept. 1938; and Vice, II Popolo d'Italia, 8 Oct. 1938, p. 10.

89. After its initial reviews in 1938, the film was never mentioned in the frequent summaries and stocktaking articles on the Italian cinema that appeared in official publica- tions such as Cinema and Bianco e nero in the last years of the regime.

90. Bottai, II consiglio nazionale delle corporazioni (Milan, 1933), p. 28. 91. On this point, see de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women.



culture, which offered models of behavior quite at odds with those propa- gated by the regime, also bedeviled the fascist attempt to carry out a "se- lective modernization," in which economic development would not be

accompanied by social emancipation. The cinema provides a particularly focused lens through which to

examine the limitations and paradoxes that marked fascist projects for a "national" modernity. In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the cinema played a central role in the dissemination of a gendered discourse about mass culture. Likened by intellectuals to a prostitute for its venal quality and its capacity to corrupt and seduce, the cinema was also identified with women due to the large numbers of women spectators it attracted. As Giuliana Bruno has pointed out, films liberated the female gaze, af-

fording women a mobile and panoramic vision of society that outside the

space of the theatre remained the province of the male.92 Like real-life streetwalkers, the cinema was subjected to regulation under Mussolini, who intended to domesticate it and turn it into "the most powerful weapon of the regime."93 But the cinema proved to be a double-edged sword, as commercial concerns and the belief that propaganda would best be received in the form of entertainment led directors to fill their films with femmes fatales and other symbols of that "decadent" moder-

nity the regime had pledged to defeat. The showcasing of emancipated behaviors and attitudes mitigated these films' effectiveness as agents of traditional values, especially among female spectators.94 These same fac- tors complicated the achievement of aesthetic autarchy under fascism; the "national" films produced under Mussolini show a heavy influence at a formal level of American and other dominant cinematic cultures that had proven to be successful with audiences.

Ideologically, too, the films examined in this essay expose the contradictions that characterized Mussolini's "revolution of reaction." Whether

they focus on the domestic or colonial realms, the films' incitements to activism and conquest are almost always accompanied by prescriptive messages about the virtues of temperance and the containment of desire. Indeed, discipline is posited as a precondition for the success of national schemes of modernization. In this regard, the fascists were not unique- the containment of social and sexual energies had been integral to the formation of bourgeois and nationalist identities in modern Europe, and the need to regulate bodily instincts stood at the center of Fordist as well

92. See Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, pp. 49-53. 93. This statement was emblazoned on the facade of the structure set up for the inau-

guration of the Istituto LUCE (see fig. 2). 94. For an example of this inconsistency and its significance for female spectatorship

under fascism, see Jacqueline Reich, "Reading, Writing, and Rebellion: Collectivity, Specu- larity, and Sexuality in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934-43," in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis, 1995), pp. 220-51.

143

144 Ruth Ben-Ghiat

as fascist visions of progress.95 Under Mussolini's dictatorship, though, the disciplinary imperatives of nationalism and consumer capitalism com- bined with pervasive fears of "degeneration" to create an obsession with social, sexual, and racial order. In the end, larger social and economic developments connected to modernization foiled the regime's attempts to reverse the trajectory of social emancipation in Italy. But the films of the 1930s clarify how fascist intellectuals used the language of cinema to

convey what the writer Corrado Alvaro termed "our special way of deal-

ing with the problems of modernity."96 More than other forms of cultural

production, the cinema brings into focus the complex interplay of influences that complicated the project of creating a "national" culture and

modernity under the dictatorship.

95. Both Fordism and Taylorism implied a removal of irrational and unregulated energies from the productive process, and Ford extended this discipline of the body to sexual life as well. On this subject, see Peter Wollen, "Cinema/Americanism/the Robot," in

Modernity and Mass Culture, ed. James Naremore and Brantlinger (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), pp. 42-69. For a contemporary view, see Antonio Gramsci's penetrating observations on Fordism in his essay "Americanism and Fordism," Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), pp. 277-318. On the regulation of sexuality that accompanied nationalist movements, see George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).

96. Alvaro, "Opinioni sul romanso," Corriere podano, 3 Sept. 1932, p. 12.


Documents

Ruth Ben Ghiat, "Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film"