Download or read book Mussolini s Theatre written by Patricia Gaborik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vividly written portrait of Benito Mussolini, whose passion for the theatre profoundly shaped his ideology and actions as head of fascist Italy This consistently illuminating book transforms our understanding of fascism as a whole, and will have strong appeal to readers in both theatre studies and modern Italian history.
Download or read book Staging Fascism written by Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On an April evening in Florence in 1934, before twenty thousand spectators, the mass spectacle 18BL was presented, involving two thousand amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry and cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations, and six photoelectric units. However titantic its scale, 18BL's ambitions were even greater: to institute a revolutionary fascist theater of the future, a modern theatre of and for the masses that would end the crisis of the bourgeois theatre. This is the complete story of the event, a colossal failure to critics and spectators alike, which the fascist government took pains to expunge from the annals of the regime. The detailed reconstruction of these various aspects of 18BL serves as a springboard for a larger inquiry into the place of media, technology, and machinery in the fascist imagination, particularly in its links to fascist models of narrative, historiography, spectacle, and subjectivity.
Download or read book Re viewing Fascism written by Jacqueline Reich and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-07 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mussolini s Dream Factory written by Stephen Gundle and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-12-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Divo and the Duce written by Giorgio Bertellini and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority. This is the first volume in the new Cinema Cultures in Contact series, coedited by Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Abel, and Matthew Solomon.
Download or read book Fascism and Theatre written by Günter Berghaus and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1920s, an endless flow of studies has analyzed the political systems of fascism, theseizure of power, the nature of the regimes, the atrocities committed, and, finally, the wars waged against other countries. However, much less attention has been paid to the strategies of persuasion employed by the regimes to win over the masses for their cause. Among these, fascist propaganda has traditionally been seen as the key means of influencing public opinion. Only recently has the "fascination with Fascism" become a topic of enquiry that has also formed the guiding interest of this volume: it offers, for the first time, a comparative analysis of the forms and functions of theater in countries governed by fascist or para-fascist regimes. By examining a wide spectrum of theatrical manifestations in a number of States with a varying degree of fascistization, these studies establish some of the similarities and differences between the theatrical cultures of several cultures in the interwar period.
Download or read book Mussolini s Dream Factory written by Stephen Gundle and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first extended analysis of film stardom in Fascist Italy, focusing on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945. The author examines the development of an Italian star system, evaluates its place in film production and distribution, and explores its relationships with the political sphere and with broader commercial culture. The popular press, along with other evidence, is used to assess the extent of public engagement with film stars. Several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari and Alida Valli, are closely analysed in terms of their screen performances and professional trajectories, including their fates in the aftermath of the Fascist regime. The book makes an original contribution to the understanding of Italian Fascism and the cinema of the period by tackling a field hitherto neglected, despite it being deemed important enough by the regime to warrant sustained attention and interference. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema. Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. His books include "Between Hollywood and Moscow: the Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-91" (2000), "Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy" (2007), "Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War" (2008, with David Forgacs), "Glamour: A History" (2008) and "Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s" (2011). He is co-editor, with Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri, of "The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians" (2013).
Download or read book Cinema and Fascism written by Steven Ricci and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Cinema is the Strongest Weapon written by Lorenzo Fabbri and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-12-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Download or read book Italian Fascism s Empire Cinema written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini’s government that took as their subjects or settings Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship.
Download or read book Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre written by Susan Bassnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Fascism and Resistance in Italian Cinema written by DOMINIC. GAVIN and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Path to Victory written by Douglas Porch and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mediterranean theater in World War II has long been overlooked by historians who believe it was little more than a string of small-scale battles--sideshows that were of minor importance in a war whose outcome was decided in the clashes of mammoth tank armies in northern Europe. But in this ground-breaking new book, one of our finest military historians argues that the Mediterranean was World War II's pivotal theater. Douglas Porch examines the Mediterranean as an integrated arena, one in which events in Syria and Suez influenced the survival of Gibraltar. Without a Mediterranean alternative, the Western Allies would probably have committed to a premature cross-Channel invasion in 1943 that might well have cost them the war. Brilliantly argued, with vivid portraits of Churchill, Montgomery, FDR, Rommel, and Mussolini, this original, accessible, and compelling account of a little-known theater emphasizes the importance of the Mediterranean in the ultimate Allied victory in Europe in World War II.
Download or read book National Theatres in a Changing Europe written by S. Wilmer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-02-21 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the ways in which national theatres have formed and evolved over time, this new collection highlights the difficulties these institutions encounter today, in an environment where nationalism and national identity are increasingly contested by global, transnational and local agendas, and where economic forces create conflicting demands.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Theatre written by Don B. Wilmeth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of the authoritative, multi-volume Cambridge History of American Theatre, first published in 1999, begins in the post-Civil War period and traces the development of American theatre up to 1945. It covers all aspects of theatre from plays and playwrights, through actors and acting, to theatre groups and directors. Topics examined include vaudeville and popular entertainment, European influences, theatre in and beyond New York, the rise of the Little Theatre movement, changing audiences, modernism, the Federal Theatre movement, scenography, stagecraft, and architecture. Contextualising chapters explore the role of theatre within the context of American social and cultural history, and the role of American theatre in relation to theatre in Europe and beyond. This definitive history of American theatre includes contributions from the following distinguished academics - Thomas Postlewait, John Frick, Tice L. Miller, Ronald Wainscott, Brenda Murphy, Mark Fearnow, Brooks McNamara, Thomas Riis, Daniel J. Watermeier, Mary C. Henderson, and Warren Kliewer.
Download or read book Fascist Spectacle written by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.
Download or read book The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema written by Jacqueline Reich and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian film star Bartolomeo Pagano's "Maciste" played a key role in his nation’s narratives of identity during World War I and after. Jacqueline Reich traces the racial, class, and national transformations undergone by this Italian strongman from African slave in Cabiria (1914), his first film, to bourgeois gentleman, to Alpine soldier of the Great War, to colonial officer in Italy's African adventures. Reich reveals Maciste as a figure who both reflected classical ideals of masculine beauty and virility (later taken up by Mussolini and used for political purposes) and embodied the model Italian citizen. The 12 films at the center of the book, recently restored and newly accessible to a wider public, together with relevant extra-cinematic materials, provide a rich resource for understanding the spread of discourses on masculinity, and national and racial identities during a turbulent period in Italian history. The volume includes an illustrated appendix documenting the restoration and preservation of these cinematic treasures.
