Steven Ricci,
Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
ISBN: 0 520 23310 7
US$24.95 (pb)
233pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

The recent wave of scholarly monographs about cinema in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and Fascist Italy suggest two things: that European cinema in the interwar period can no longer be approached through the simple binaries of entertainment and propaganda and that the regimes’ different approaches to mass entertainment and mass mobilization must be assessed in relation to both the Hollywood studio system and the fascist state apparatus. Steven Ricci’s examination of “the relationship between the rise of fascism and the experience of cinema in Italy” (p. 3) between 1922 and 1943 contributes to this revisionist project by providing a useful overview of the economic, political, and social forces that informed Italian cinema culture during this still greatly understudied and occasionally misrepresented period. Complementing the ideology critical approach of earlier studies, his new book emphasizes film’s contribution to the transformation of the public sphere and the making of modernism and modernity and highlights the state’s highly strategic and often contradictory role in balancing the demands of art cinema, film propaganda, and commercial cinema.

Accordingly, in Chapter 1, Ricci revisits the existing histories of Italian cinema under fascism and discusses their tendency either to exclude the fascist period from historical narratives or to distinguish among the early neorealist films, a few propaganda films, and an undistinguished large group of entertainment films. Historical amnesia characterized the critical assessment of Italy cinema during the postwar years, with the alternatives of continuity vs. discontinuity often displaced into the question of authorship, as has been the case of Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti. Offering a historical overview of industry practices from the beginning of cinema to through the early 1940s, Chapter 2 assesses the institutional relationship between cinema and the fascist state and highlights the ongoing negotiation between fascist ideology and Hollywood cinema. Focusing on a uniquely Italian genre, Chapter 3 examines the role of the so-called strongman cycle (e.g., Il Condottiere, Scipione l’africano) during the 1920s and connects the films’ emphasis on action and physicality to the reorganization of leisure time in the fascist state. The genre’s essentializing qualities, Ricci argues, played a key role in the resurrection of the historical epic as a manifestation of fascist manifest destiny. Chapter 4 examines the relationship to Hollywood as one of economic interdependence and intratextual dialogue. From the marketing of fascism in the United States (e.g., in the 1932 documentary Mussolini Speaks) to its representation in a series of features films (e.g., by Mario Camerini), “America” stood for the incorporation and appropriation of generic conventions and star personas but, through the underlying patterns of reception, also opened up a space for resistant, counter-hegemonic readings. Accordingly, in Chapter 5, Ricci’s description of Italian cinema from 1922-43 as an ongoing negotiation between local institutional practices and the global conditions of film production and reception opens up his findings toward decidedly contemporary concerns and perspectives.

Because of its not entirely convincing mixture of comprehensive overviews plus one case study, Ricci’s book is read best in conjunction with earlier studies such as Marcia Landy’s Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (1986) or James Hay’s Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: the Passing of the Rex (1987). Similarly, the questions raised in Cinema and Fascism about the intersection of fascism, popular culture, and mass spectacle are answered best in dialogue with the kind of cultural studies work done by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Mabel Berezin, Victoria de Grazia, Karen Pinkus, and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi. Last but not least, his book belongs to broader trends in the study of European cinema of the interwar years that have emphasized the continuities of popular culture and the embeddedness of cinema in the longer histories of modernity. Despite the key role of neorealism in the emergence of postwar European art cinema, Italian cinema during the fascist period is not, as Ricci claims, the only site of theoretical inquiry and historical revision in the study of “the aesthetic properties of realism, cinema as artistic form, historical narration in relation to historical memory, art cinema, and concepts of authorship, cultural production, and ideology” (p. 1). Acknowledging this fact would have strengthened his argument and shed more light on the economic, social, and political negotiations shared by Italian cinema with other European cinema of the period. Nonetheless, despite these minor flaws, Ricci’s study offers a useful introduction to anyone interested in the history of Italian cinema and the relationship between film and fascism.

Sabine Hake,
University of Texas, United States

Created on: Thursday, 4 September 2008