Looking back on the myth of the Great War: Anti-rhetoric, war culture and film in Fascist Italy

In: Media, war & conflict, Band 7, Heft 3, S. 342-364

Abstract

The First World War (WWI) constituted a fundamental event for the stabilisation of Fascism both as an ideology and as a regime. However, 1930s Italian cinema resisted the Fascist vision of the conflict to a certain extent. In this article, the author argues that Italian war films of the period avoided in part the Fascist myth of the Great War, while being fully inserted in the official film circuits of the time. Examining the films' commercial imperatives and production history, the author demonstrates that the event constituted a paradoxical form of taboo in fiction cinema. Contrary to other film forms (newsreels and documentary), the industrial nature of fiction cinema and its link with international film production allowed for a relative space of freedom. Based on film analysis as well as archival material and textual sources, the article shows how this film production conflicts with the Fascist celebration of WWI. Concerned with understanding their initial reception context, it focuses in particular on the problematic nature of these films as put forward by certain observers at the time. Characterised by a lack of triumphalism and rhetoric, the cinematic representation of WWI was instead associated with extrinsic values that ran parallel to or even conflicted with the selective memory of the conflict imposed by Fascism. Despite this, these films contributed to the war culture of the regime, consequently testifying to the weakness of Fascist militant cinema, perceptible at the very heart of the image of WWI it created.