From neorealism's resolve to Berlusconian revisionist melodramas, this book examines cinema's role in constructing memories of Fascist Italy. Italian cinema has both reflected and shaped popular perceptions of Fascism, reinforcing or challenging stereotypes, remembering selectively and silently forgetting the most shameful pages of Italy's history.

When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.

"This study considers Italian filmmaking during the Fascist era and offers an original and revealing approach to the interwar years. Steven Ricci directly confronts a long-standing dilemma faced by cultural historians: while made during a period of totalitarian government, these films are neither propagandistic nor openly "Fascist." Instead, the Italian Fascist regime attempted to build ideological consensus by erasing markers of class and regional difference and by circulating terms for an imaginary national identity. Cinema and Fascism investigates the complex relationship between the totalitarian regime and Italian cinema. It looks at the films themselves, the industry, and the role of cinema in daily life, and offers new insights into this important but neglected period in cinema history." -- Book cover.

This cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship discusses the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. The work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past.

Bringing together scholars from the Italian and English-speaking worlds, Bosworth and Dogliani's edited book reviews the history of the memory and representation of Fascism after 1945. Ranging in their study from patriotic monuments to sado-masochistic films, the essays here collected ask how and why and when Mussolini's dictatorship mattered after the event, and so provide a fascinating study of the relationship between a traumatic past and the changing present and future.

Italian cinema is one of this country's postwar success stories; the memory of Fascism one of its ongoing challenges. This book proposes to read these two stories together, looking at the treatment of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship in a series of works by Italian filmmakers. The work of Italian directors has much to tell us about the ways in which the memory of the Italian dictatorship was processed by postwar society. The focus on the 1970s, when a climate of political instability made fascism a theme charged with contemporary relevance for postwar society. Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernado Bertolucci were among the directors whose films participated in the re-evaliation of the years of dictatorship in the wake of the late 1960s. These films returned to a historical period which had been elided from collective memory, at a time when fascism and antifascism were also key terms in the political debate. The work of these filmmakers is revealing not only for what it tells us about postwar perceptions of Fascism, but the ways in which democratic society and its values were defined in opposition to the memory of Mussolini's rule.

The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference. Focused on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945, this book examines the development of an Italian star system and evaluates its place in film production and distribution. The performances and careers of several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari, and Alida Valli, are closely analyzed in terms of their relationships to the political sphere and broader commercial culture, with consideration of their fates in the aftermath of Fascism. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema.