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Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy

By (author) Lorenzo Fabbri

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A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussoliniâ€™s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance Â Looking at Italyâ€™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 filmâ€™s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism.Â Â Exploiting realismâ€™s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussoliniâ€™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 realismâ€™s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussoliniâ€™s notion that â€œcinema is the regimeâ€™s strongest weaponâ€ by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology.Â Â Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italyâ€™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. Â Â Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.