Europe on Screen, 1932-1943
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Europe on screen, 1932-1943 Projecting a new European Fascist continent in the newsreels of the Luce Institute Umberto Famulari Royal Holloway, University of London School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures PhD in Italian Studies I, Umberto Famulari, hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always stated. 12/07/2017 Abstract This thesis is the first investigation of the Luce Institute’s (LUCE) newsreels, which were filmed throughout Europe during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. The project focuses on analysing all LUCE’s productions in four European countries in specific periods of time (Greece 1939–1940; Spain 1932–1943; Albania 1939–1943; Germany 1933–1942). All of these nations were at the core of Fascist foreign policy in Europe, and were central to LUCE’s strategic plans. Dozens of newsreels were filmed and subsequently distributed in Italian cinemas; they showed the rampant Fascist interventionism in 1930s Europe, and the diplomatic relationships of the Duce’s regime with Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco. The newsreels conveyed to the audience the idea that the Italian Fascist regime was building a network of allies to foster the expansion of Fascism in Europe, in order to defeat the European liberal democracies. The thesis shows that the newsreels were a genre that mixed the realism of news and documentary film with fabricated elements typical of political advertisements and commercials. If on the one hand these productions were partially inspired by the Cine-Pravda of Dziga Vertov, on the other, they widely anticipated techniques that characterized the Nazi newsreels. Through thousands of these non-fiction films, the Duce’s regime portrayed Europe as a continent that was about to be conquered by Fascism and was becoming a utopian and illusory projection of Mussolini’s Italy. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………... .................. p.1 CHAPTER 1: Luce's newsreels in the media landscape ................................................... p.9 1.1 Newsreels: Between news and documentary ................................................................ p.9 1.2 Searching for “truth” in the newsreels ........................................................................ p.14 1.3 The aesthetic of the giornale Luce: between journalism and propaganda .................. p.18 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ p.29 CHAPTER 2: A tale of two countries: Screening Greece before and after the Italian invasion………………………………………………………………………. ................ p.31 2.1 Touristic gaze and colonial ambitions: Greek Islands in Fascist cinemas .................. p.32 2.2 The cinematic construction of the Italian-Greek alliance ........................................... p.48 2.3 How to win a war in the cinema theatres…………………………………………………………………………………...p.58 2.3.1 Real bombing but only cinematic victories ............................................................. p.62 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ p.73 Chapter 3: Defining an ally: The construction of Spain as a satellite of the Fascist regime in the Italian cinemas................................................................ ........................................ p.75 3.1 Approaching the enemy: Projecting life and leaders under Republican Spain ........... p.78 3.1.2 The cinematic idyllic Spanish countryside .............................................................. p.88 3 3.2 Dominating the crowds on screen: The gradual evolution of the representation of Francisco Franco ............................................................................................................... p.98 3.2.1 Promoting a new ally: The Generalissimo Franco in the newsreels ...................... p.101 3.2.2 Projecting a foreign dictator in the Italian cinemas: El Caudillo ........................... p.109 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... p.118 Chapter 4: Albania on Italian screens: A utopian Italian Empire in Europe….. ........... p.121 4.1 The cinematic construction of Galeazzo Ciano’s leadership in Tirana .................... p.124 4.2 The transformation of Ciano into a new Duce .......................................................... p.132 4.3 Promoting reclamation and reconstruction: the case of Albania under Fascism ...... p.141 4.4 Public hygiene on Italian screens: The battle against malaria in Albania ................ p.156 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... p.165 Chapter 5: Screening the construction of the Nazi–Fascist alliance……... .................. p.167 5.1 The evolution of the image of the Führer on Italian screens .................................... p.169 5.2 Projecting and re-enacting the Middle Ages during Hitler’s visit to Florence ......... p.187 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... p.196 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………. ............ p.199 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………… ............. p.206 4 Introduction Since the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in 1922, cinema and Fascist propaganda were directly related and intertwined. Although it is undoubtedly true that Italian cinema under the Fascist regime reached its creative peak only after the inauguration of the studios of Cinecittà in 1936, it is necessary to emphasize that the Duce had already been filmed in 1923 and in 1924 in two documentaries which were entitled A Noi and III Anniversario della marcia su Roma solennemente celebrato a Milano.1 Hundreds of propaganda newsreels and documentaries were produced and screened in Italian cinema theatres by the state-funded Luce Institute (LUCE) and, after the mid-1930s, also by Industria Cortometraggi Milano (INCOM), a private company headed by Luigi Freddi with the objective to dismantle LUCE’s monopoly in relation to documentary filmmaking and to bring it under the more stringent control of the Ministry of the Popular Culture. There is limited but growing scholarship regarding LUCE’s productions. It is worth mentioning that Philip Cannistraro in 1975 and Mino Argentieri in 1979 wrote pioneering studies on the structure of LUCE.2 Elaine Mancini was one of the very first scholars to write a chapter in a book about Fascist cinema in relation to LUCE’s role as a propaganda machine.3 Ernesto G. Laura’s book (only available in Italian) entitled Le Stagioni dell’Aquila is an exhaustive description of LUCE’s activities and political organization.4 More recently, Silvio Carta has studied the representation of Sardinia in the documentaries produced by LUCE. Carta writes that ‘these documentary films present Sardinia as a nude territory on which the demiurge-like 1 Archive of the Luce Institute, Rome, consulted on 15 May 2016. 2 Philip Cannistraro, La Fabbrica del Consenso. Fascismo e Mass Media (Roma: Laterza, 1975); Mino Argentieri, L’Occhio del Regime: Informazione e Propaganda nel Cinema del Fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1979). 3 Elaine Mancini, Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930-1945 (Ann Arbour: UMI Press, 1985) 4 Ernesto G. Laura, Le Stagioni dell’Aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Roma: Immagini dello Spettacolo, 1999). 1 project of Fascist modernization inscribes its own history’.5 Eugenia Paulicelli, in her book about Italian fashion and cinema, describes how the Fascist regime used newsreels to promote the Italian textile and clothing industry, ‘capturing the details of cut, fabric, wearability and glamor’.6 Giuseppe Fidotta examines a series of LUCE’s documentaries entitled Cronache dell’Impero/Chronicles of the Empire. As Fidotta notes, these productions ‘aimed at attesting the activities that the regime was carrying out in the recently conquered East-Italian African territories’.7 Fidotta is also the author of an interesting examination of the use of ‘animated maps in relation to ideology and propaganda in Fascist documentaries’.8 Although Fidotta looked at the production of LUCE as a propaganda tool that portrayed foreign nations and the colonies on screen, there is no study that focuses on the importance of LUCE’s newsreels as a systematic and sprawling source of mediated information in relation to foreign policy. This thesis aims to be the first attempt to show how the daily bulletin of LUCE’s newsreels contributed to the cinematic construction of a utopian European Fascist continent that was a reflection of Fascist Italy. An extensive investigation into the newsreels is necessary to understand how non-fiction films showed Mussolini’s view of international relations and the construction of alliances with foreign leaders. From the beginning of the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s, LUCE concentrated its resources on the production of newsreels that focused on three main pillars: The battle for grain, reclamation of the marshes, and overall modernization of the country’s infrastructure. This propaganda strategy was necessary in order to maintain robust support in the rural areas of the nation, which were also those with the highest number of inhabitants. Mussolini was 5 Silvio Carta, ‘Sardinia in Fascist Documentary Films (1922-1945)’, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media