Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema [Paperback]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolinis government that took as their subjects or settings Italys 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.

Italian Fascisms Empire Cinema is the most subtle and detailed examination we have of a crucial element of the cultural practice of 'totalitarian' dictatorship, Italian-style.5/28/15Italian Fascisms Empire Cinema contributes to an important rethinking of an understudied aspect of Italian history. . . . One hopes that this provocative work is only the beginning of an overdue conversation, and that future contributions will move beyond the doors of Italian archives to consult voices/sources/documents from the colonies themselves.This new book splendidly confirms Ruth Ben-Ghiat's standing as the preeminent cultural historian of Italian Fascism in the English-speaking world today. She illuminates?not only?the drive for empire, along with the place of violence and history in the associated Fascist imaginary, but also key facets of cinematic modernity, the merging of documentary and fiction in the empire film aesthetic, and the antecedents of neo-realism. No one brings greater theoretical acumen, interpretive care, and contextual erudition to writing about film historically.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
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