Mussolini's Dream Factory
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Mussolini's Dream Factory

Film Stardom in Fascist Italy

Stephen Gundle

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eBook - ePub

Mussolini's Dream Factory

Film Stardom in Fascist Italy

Stephen Gundle

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About This Book

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.

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Information

Year
2013
ISBN
9781782382454

PART I

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Fascism, Cinema and Stardom

1

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Italian Cinema under Fascism
On the morning of 29 January 1936, Mussolini travelled by car from his office at Palazzo Venezia to the outlying Quadraro district of Rome. The purpose of the trip was to lay the foundation stone of what would become the largest studio complex in Europe, eclipsing even the German UFA studios in Berlin.1 The dictator liked to be associated with ambitious projects and his presence at the start of the process of construction of the planned new ‘city of cinema’ was carefully stage-managed. Mussolini performed the ceremony surrounded by senior officials including the director general for cinema Luigi Freddi and the Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, as well as the president of the Cines company (and member of parliament) Carlo Roncoroni, and others. All the key participants were attired in Fascist uniform. Lining the path leading to the site of the laying of the stone on the Via Tuscolana were soldiers, young members of the Balilla organisation and representatives of other Fascist organisations. A large temporary wall behind them had been painted with the slogan that the Duce had appropriated from Lenin: ‘Cinema is the most powerful weapon’. Atop the wall, the labourers who would build the city of cinema cheered and waved their spades high. Engaged on double pay, they were expected to work fast to complete the new complex in short order. Towering over them was a large cut-out image of Mussolini operating a movie camera. Although the Duce was more accustomed to posing in front of the camera rather than working behind it, the suggestion was that the regime would from now on be an active player in determining what Italians would see on their movie screens.
After years of crisis and tentative attempts to revive Italian cinema following its virtual collapse in the 1920s, finally the regime took the industry firmly in hand with the intention of establishing it on solid bases and harnessing it to its project of national development. The decision to create what would become known as CinecittĂ  was taken following a series of measures to develop institutions and measures to support cinema. Among those who had promoted these from at least the early 1930s were Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of Corporations, Freddi, the director Alessandro Blasetti, and other film professionals. Before 1934 there were no state bodies responsible for propaganda in areas such as film, radio, theatre and literature.2 However, in that year the press office of the prime minister was expanded and turned by Ciano, who headed it, into an under-secretariat for press and propaganda that was divided into directorates dealing with the domestic and foreign press. Directorates for cinema and tourism were added later that year, with an inspectorate for theatre being created several months after that. Subsequently, the under-secretariat was turned into the Ministry of Press and Propaganda. Under the direction of Dino Alfieri, this would be renamed the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1937.
Discussion about the possible construction of a film studio complex had not originally been seen as integral to these developments. Indeed, in the end, the commitment of vast sums of money, ‘tens of millions’ according to Blasetti,3 occurred quickly. The event that precipitated this move was the fire that one night in September 1935 destroyed the four Roman studios of Cines, the largest production company in Italy. Dramatically reported by the newsreels of the Luce Institute, the fire was a deadly blow to the fragile structures of the Italian film industry. Virtually all the Italian films of any value that had been released in the sound era had been made in the Cines studios, which had been inaugurated in 1930. Freddi was the first to realise the need for a strategic response, and it was on his initiative that the first plans were drawn up for the modern studio complex he had dreamed of for Italy since he was invited to conduct a fact-finding visit to Hollywood. For the man who would be most responsible for developing and implementing the regime’s priorities in relation to cinema,4 it was essential that the state take an active and guiding role in promoting film production. A precondition of this was ensuring that facilities of sufficient quality and technical sophistication existed for films worthy of the Fascist era to be made.
Shortly after work officially began on CinecittĂ , further foundation stones were laid. One of these was for the new buildings of the state-owned photography and newsreel service, the Luce Institute, which were located within the grounds of CinecittĂ . The second, on the other side of the Via Tuscolana, was for the permanent home of Centro sperimentale di cinematografia (Experimental Film Centre), the official school for training actors, directors and technical personnel. Headed by Luigi Chiarini, the Centro had been in existence since 1935 but had been occupying unsuitable facilities.
The location of these institutions in close proximity to each other and scarcely a stone’s throw from the centre of power (eighteen minutes by car from Termini station), in addition to the scale of investment in them, was proof of the regime’s systematic involvement in a medium that until the early 1930s had not been deemed worthy of much attention. One factor in the radical change of attitude was the example offered by Nazi Germany’s swift centralisation of all propaganda functions in a single ministry. This was a manifestation of an ‘organic and totalitarian’ approach that, the Nazis boasted, would now mark state policy. But it was also a sign of the developing perception that the expansion of cinema as a leisure activity and the cultural specificity of the medium in the sound era presented challenges that Fascism could not ignore. A regime that was concerned with the inculcation of an aggressive nationalist spirit in the population and with the promotion abroad of the idea that Italy would once again be a beacon of Western civilisation was compelled to face several issues. Among these were the role of cinema in spreading knowledge of the national past and cultural heritage, the contribution it could make to building a sense of national belonging through the spread of images of places, faces and customs, and its potentially controversial part in expanding familiarity with foreign cultures. The place of stars in this was not limited to one aspect, since, as bearers of a range of possible ideas and notions going from the nation to gender, or even simply how to speak, walk and dress, they could function in different ways. The question of stars will be tackled in the chapters that follow while, in this chapter, some broader issues about the nature of cinema in the Fascist period will be addressed.

The Role of the State

Fascists were accustomed to marking the birth of Rome on 21 April with the sort of pomp and ceremony that had become the regime’s hallmark. That the creation of Cinecittà was seen from the start as an imperial project was evident from the fact that this very date was chosen to inaugurate the studio complex. The laying of the foundation stone had already proclaimed that the studios were being built ‘so that Fascist Italy will spread more rapidly in the world the civilisation of Rome’, as one of the first promotional posters announced. Just fifteen months later Cinecittà was completed. The speed of the work can be gauged by the fact that the Centro sperimentale – a much smaller project – was not ready until January 1940. In the end, Mussolini was unable to perform the inauguration until the end of April due to days of torrential rain. Even on 28 April, the appointed day, it rained in the morning leading to fears of a further postponement. Suddenly, at midday, the rain stopped and the clouds cleared, giving way to radiant sunshine. At 5.00 P.M. Mussolini arrived accompanied by party secretary Achille Starace, the president of the Luce Institute Giacomo Paulucci de Calboli Barone, Roncoroni and Freddi. There to greet them were the Duce’s film-mad son Vittorio, the technicians and officials who had created the complex, including the architect Gino Peressutti, and numerous members of a variety of Fascist organisations who, with their presence, turned the square in front of the main buildings into a parade ground. Mussolini spent several hours at the studios and witnessed work on Scipione l’Africano (Scipio the African, Carmine Gallone, 1937), a propaganda blockbuster set in imperial Rome that the government itself had financed since its theme of African conquest dovetailed with its own policy. Among the other films whose making he witnessed were the light comedy Il feroce saladino (The Ferocious Saladin, Mario Bonnard, 1937), starring the Sicilian comic Angelo Musco and a young starlet named Alida Valli. Far from being a propaganda project, this film was inspired by a craze for collecting illustrated cards set off by a radio comedy sponsored by the Perugina and Balilla companies.5 Among the characters featured on the cards were the three musketeers and the ‘ferocious Saladin’ who gave the film its title. The contrast between the two films could hardly have been greater and the fact that Mussolini happily saw both attests to the variety of impulses and purposes that governed the Fascist approach to cinema.
Blasetti was among those who had called for a major investment and he was not disappointed. ‘Freddi, Roncoroni and Peressuti, the three main executors of the order of the Duce that has given us Cinecittà, point of departure of decisive value to begin to work seriously, could not have beaten all the records they have beaten if they had not been able to spend millions without hesitation, millions as long as necessary’, he noted.6 The project was informed by Freddi’s studies of the layout of Hollywood studios and Peressutti’s own ideas, formed during a tour in November 1936 of the major European studios. Mussolini’s own involvement in the project was considerable. Although he had never previously expressed much interest in cinema, he followed progress closely, calling in Peressutti for briefings on numerous occasions. The studio complex would become the jewel in Fascism’s crown. Constructed in record time, it was a true city that included its own medical and postal services, fire station, restaurants, dwellings for portering staff, sports facilities, rest and recreational areas for actors and technical personnel, greenhouses and library. A new tram line, soon dubbed ‘the train of the stars’ even though it was mainly used by production crew, was established linking Rome’s Termini station to the studios. In just thirty-five minutes it was possible to reach Rome’s new Mecca of cinema by public transport.
‘“Nothing has been spared” is the phrase that was heard most often on the day of the inauguration’, Blasetti wrote. ‘Nothing must be spared’ should now be the watchword, he added, to ensure that film production quality improved. He warned that, if corners were cut, then ‘in a couple of years, this prodigious Cinecittà will be seen as the most guilty effort of Sisifus of world cinema and will become simply an annexe of the nearby airfield’.7 In fact, he need not have worried since government interventions to support production would be substantial and consistent. Soon, around half of all films made in Italy would use the new complex. Cinecittà saw the making of fourteen films in 1937, twenty-three the following year, twenty-nine in 1939, forty-six in 1940, fifty-two in 1941 and forty-four in 1942.8 This expansion ensured that film-making, which had once been dispersed among Italy’...

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