GSWS3045 - Screening Fascism

When and why did fascism first emerge? What social and political problems did it claim to address? Where did its ideas come from? And how did cinema help transform those ideas into powerful images that shaped both the Italian fascist regime and its political afterlives? To address these questions, this course explores how Italian fascism has been imagined and contested through cinema from its inception in 1920s Italy to the present. Italy was the political laboratory in which fascism was first invented—both as a term and as a political experiment—before becoming a global model of authoritarian power. Moving from the historical emergence of fascism in the wake of World War I to its cinematic articulation in propaganda films and newsreels of the 1920s, the course analyzes how cinema functioned as a laboratory in which fascism was aestheticized and rendered politically legible across the twentieth century.
The films studied range from fascist-era propaganda films such as Scipio The African (Gallone, 1937) and neorealist classics such as Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945) to the provocative art cinema of the 1970s, including works by Bertolucci, Cavani, and Pasolini, as well as contemporary films that revisit and reconfigure the legacy of fascism. The course approaches these films through multiple critical lenses, including gender and sexuality, race, class and nationalism, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Through close analysis of films, political manifestos, and historical documents, students will investigate how images produce consent and why the visual language of fascism remains a potent tool of political imaginaries in the digital age.