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Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon
Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy
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A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance.
Looking at Italy’s national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film’s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism.
Exploiting realism’s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini’s biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism’s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussolini’s notion that “cinema is the regime’s strongest weapon” by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology.
Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italy’s celebrated neorealist movement and the structural ties it shares with its predecessor. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, authoritarianism, and politics, he presents an urgent examination into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society.
See the publisher website: University of Minnesota Press
> On a related topic:
Traveling Auteurs (2024)
The Geopolitics of Postwar Italian Cinema
Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda (2022)
A Political History of Italian Food TV
Mussolini's Dream Factory (2015)
Film Stardom in Fascist Italy
Schooling in Modernity (2014)
The Politics of Sponsored Films in Postwar Italy
Vital Crises in Italian Cinema (2013)
Iconography, Stylistics, Politics
Fame Amid the Ruins (2025)
Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism
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