Historical and Cultural Notes: Italy under Fascism
B
y the end of the 1920s, Italy had become a totalitarian state under the dicta-torship of Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime. In fascist Italy, individuals could survive only if they unquestioningly accepted the regime’s totalitarian dic-tates and, if they equally unquestioningly played the gender roles that the regime outlined for them in their social environment. The men were required to project a very virile image of masculinity and to respond promptly and enthusiastically to the military call of the regime that required them to fulfill its imperialistic goals.The women, on the other hand, were required to fulfill their reproductive role as mothers so as to provide the regime with as many future soldiers as possible.
A very active social program was put in place in order to promote demographic increase and financially reward the most prolific families.
Women were also publicly given another important role as providers of sex for the oversexed fascist males, with whose virility and sexual satisfaction the regime was constantly concerned. Bordellos controlled by the state were opened at that time, where female prostitutes were kept at the state’s expense with free medical care provided by the regime in order to ensure a safe exchange of sex for the fascist men involved.
In fascist times, women were thus assigned the two very specific traditional roles of mother and of prostitute. With this statement, I do not intend to suggest that fascist ideology invented these two roles for women, as women have played them in every culture and in all eras since the world began. Fascism simply made them more visible by insisting on rigidly categorizing its male and female citizens by rigorously assigning them fixed gender roles that also held a strong political significance.1
Italian Cinema in Fascist Times
In the 1930s, at the height of its political power, fascism discovered cinema to be a very effective propaganda tool that could visualize and effectively demonstrate what the regime required from its citizens. The cinematic genre preferred at the time was the documentary,2 a short-feature genre of film that Mussolini particu-larly liked, as, with its supposedly faithful representation of contemporary events, it could be easily used to publicize the social and military accomplishments of the fascist regime and to demonstrate visually the roles prescribed by the regime for its citizens. Madri d’Italia (Mothers of Italy; 1934) was one of such documen-taries that carefully outlined the exclusive role that the fascist regime projected for Italian women.3 This documentary seems to work for women just as well as Figli d’Italia: caduti in Africa (Sons of Italy: Fallen in Africa) was supposed to do for men. The overall goal of fascist documentaries was, indeed, to promote the regime’s totalitarian ideology that aimed at codifying the roles that Italian women and men should play in fascist Italy.
In such a totalitarian environment, film directors soon understood that, in order to survive, cinema had to become the most important instrument of pro-paganda that the regime could use in order to influence its citizens and to make them more aware of its controlling power.4 In order to help the regime accom-plish its goals, Italian cinema had to expand its exclusive documentary produc-tion by producing full-length feature films in order to attract and influence the masses with spectacular offerings. Italian directors responded, therefore, to the fascist regime’s request to fictionalize history in order to create recognizable links between the illustrious Italian historical past and contemporary fascist Italy, especially by proposing heroes in whom Italian spectators would recognize Mussolini, their fascist leader.5 In order to foster their propaganda goals, fascist authorities, moreover, showed a preference for historical feature films that pro-jected what the regime considered the perfect type of society upon which fascist Italy should be modeled, such as imperial Rome or the Renaissance city. The most significant among the historical films of the times were Scipione l’Africano (Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal; 1937) and Ettore Fieramosca (Ettore Fieramosca; 1938).
Scipione l’Africano, directed by Carmine Gallone, is a remarkable example of how fascist cinema used the history of Rome and its heroes to strengthen the con-nections between fascist Italy and imperial Rome. Ettore Fieramosca, directed by Alessandro Blasetti, on the other hand, attempted the same comparison between fascist Italy and Renaissance Italy.
In these times another genre of films, the “light comedy” ones, made its appear-ance in the Italian theaters. The comic films of this time had the goal to entertain their audiences, by portraying the everyday life of women and men who could be easily ridiculed for not fitting the standards of the codified gender behavior dictated by the regime. We will be analyzing a few of these films, such as Goffredo Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata (The Private Secretary; 1931) and Mario Cam-erini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are!; 1932), Il Signor Max (Mister Max; 1937), and I grandi magazzini (Department Store; 1939).
In the 1940s, as soon as fascist Italy joined Nazi Germany in World War II, the regime needed a different genre of films, the so-called war film, which aimed at building up fascist war propaganda even when the Italians were being defeated by the Allied forces in the African campaign or on the Russian front. Because of their military plots, these films obviously lack female protagonists, thus I will not analyze any of them, as they do not offer significant information for our research topic. In their stead, we will analyze some other films made in the early 1940s, which will prepare us for the neorealist movement that will make Italian cinema internationally recognized again.
Historical Films
Scipione l’Africano
The narrative strategies adopted by some historical films made in fascist times show the pressure that fascist gender ideology exercised on Italian cinema. Scipi-one l’Africano, for instance, while proposing the same historical situation; that is, the war between Carthage and Rome for the domination of the Mediterranean that Pastrone’s Cabiria (discussed in Chapter 1) had already focused upon, deals with its main male characters in a decidedly different way so as to highlight fascist gender ideology. Both films concentrate on the superhuman qualifications of the two military leaders of the opposing armies, Scipio of the Romans and Hannibal of the Carthaginians. The narrative strategies introduced in the fascist film pro-pose, however, new gender relationships that reveal the role-playing network that the regime had devised for both its male and female citizens.
Scipio in this film is presented as having all the positive qualities that a Roman or fascist leader should have (such as heroism, daring, military commitment, and strategic ability in battle planning, popularity, and nationalistic pride). In addi-tion, he is also endowed with the required type of masculinity (a topic that was ignored in Cabiria), as he is specifically charged with fathering children, a charac-teristic that was required by the fascist regime from all men, as Mussolini himself had proclaimed in one of his most publicized mottoes, “A man is not a man if he is not also a husband and a father.” This reveals the importance that fascism placed on men’s virility and on their reproductive role within the family.
In order to represent such an important masculine dimension essential to the regime’s project of increasing Italy’s demographic output, Scipio is positioned at both the beginning and closing of this film within a family environment. There he is welcome by a devoted wife fondly holding a baby in her arms and by a doting little son who plays soldiers with him. This new family role-playing required from the male hero is achieved by introducing in the plot a new female character who plays the wife and mother role that fascists recognized as essential for any “good” woman.
The addition of this new female character in the story of Scipio works on two levels: On one level, it reflects the fascist requirement for a family-engaged mas-culinity that Mussolini himself strongly endorsed. In spite of his long-lasting relationship with Claretta Petacci, his official lover, and his several affairs with
other less-publicized female companions, Mussolini always tried to highlight this fatherly image of masculinity by having his private life with his wife and children filmed and photographed as often as possible and publicized exten-sively in newsreels and newspapers. On the other level, the character of Scipio’s wife projected the role that every Italian woman in fascist times was expected to accept and desire for herself in real life; that is, to be the wife of a man who, besides protecting her by being a soldier, could also make her a mother. That, in fact, was the only worthy and acceptable role in life to which a “good” woman was allowed to aspire in fascist Italy.
In Pastrone’s Cabiria the two female protagonists were Cabiria, a little girl in need of the assistance of a daring hero, who turned into a beautiful and virtu-ous young bride by the end of the film, and Sophonisba, depicted as a sexy and dangerous woman. In Scipione l’Africano, we still find Sophonisba, but Cabiria is replaced by a new character, Velia, who plays quite a different role, even if she does share some of Cabiria’s main characteristics, such as virtue and kindness as well as her condition as slave.
Velia is a beautiful, young Roman woman of marrying age, betrothed to Urunte, a valiant Roman soldier. She lives in one of the Italian villages that were invaded and pillaged by Hannibal’s army that makes all its inhabitants their prisoners. As a prisoner, she is taken with the other village women to Hannibal’s headquarters where he sees her, becomes interested in her, and decides to keep her as his own slave. Velia becomes thus involved with Hannibal, the other main hero of the film, who displays toward her the virile, sexual drive that is traditionally seen as one of the essential traits of masculinity. Hannibal’s goal, however, is not to father chil-dren with her and create a regular family, but only to possess Velia sexually and humiliate her because she had dared to stand up to him and question his orders.
Velia’s main role in the narrative strategy of the film is to highlight Hanni-bal’s flaws as a man (lust without fathering children) and as a hero (self-conceit and exploitation of power). These flaws make him a much less heroic figure than Scipio, which prefigures his final defeat by the latter. At the same time, Velia’s virtue and faithfulness to Urunte propose her as another role model for Italian women, underlying the importance for a woman to be virtuous and renounce seductive-ness and personal power in order to be faithful to her man.
While both Scipio’s wife and Velia represent the type of “good” woman approved by fascist ideology, Sophonisba, instead, in both Cabiria and Scipione l’Africano, plays the role of a woman dangerous to men, as she knows how to use her seductiveness for her own personal power. While in Cabiria, Sophonisba is constructed as a complex character that combines both dangerous and heroic qualities, in Scipione l’Africano her role is reduced exclusively to that of a “bad”
woman, or one who is very dangerous to the men who fall under her spell. In this way, Sophonisba reflects more faithfully the fascist negative view of independent and controlling women, as women, according to fascist and patriarchal standards, should always be under the control of men as the proper objects of sexual drives.
Instead, Sophonisba, with her seductiveness, is the one who is in control of men—
of Siface first and of Massinissa later—and only Scipio’s virtue and authority can stand up to her, suspend her negative power, and take away her controlling influence
by making her a prisoner of the Romans. Scipione l’Africano, thus, demonstrates how fascist cinema clearly conveys the view of gender relationships that the regime has codified, especially in the role playing assigned to its male and female citizens.
Ettore Fieramosca
The cinematic strategies used in Blasetti’s Ettore Fieramosca (1938) convey similar ideological messages, even if the historical setting has changed from Imperial Rome to Renaissance Italy. The story is set during the time when Italy was the battleground for the Spanish and French armies, each with the goal of invading and conquer-ing the whole Italian peninsula. The film chooses to concentrate its action on and around a very strategically located Italian fortress that both Spain and France wanted to conquer. This fortress is ruled by a woman, Giovanna di Monreale. In the film discourse, then, to conquer the fortress is synonymous with conquering its female ruler. The narrative action is thus organized in terms of power and sex: whoever con-quers the woman will also possess the fortress and vice versa. This premise allows the film to exploit the typical lovemaking clichés used for seducing women, giving them political implications. Giovanna, even without knowing him personally, is impressed by the heroic deeds performed by Ettore Fieramosca in defense of her castle. Fiera-mosca is an unknown local Italian warrior who offers to protect Giovanna against the foreign troops attacking her castle. This rather simple love-power plot is com-plicated by the presence of the knight from Asti who wants to marry Giovanna and does not hesitate to take credit for the heroic deeds performed by Fieramosca, thus exploiting Fieramosca’s bravery to his own ends in order to win Giovanna’s admira-tion and attenadmira-tion. Once he has conquered Giovanna through his first act of decep-tion, the same knight moves on to conquer the fortress for the French with another, even worse, act of treason, which costs several of Giovanna’s people their lives.
Giovanna up to this point is presented as a very virtuous woman shown exclu-sively inside the walls of her castle and always dressed in white. In addition, she is framed mostly by herself with low-angle, tilted shots to convey her isolated supe-riority as a ruler and as a virtuous woman. Once she becomes aware of the decep-tion and treachery of the knight from Asti, Giovanna allows her own admiradecep-tion for Ettore Fieramosca to show. Within her status as a just and generous ruler, she rewards Fieramosca’s bravery and protects him from his deceitful enemies.
By this point, Giovanna is shown as a much more sociable character. No longer isolated, and no longer framed through low-angle tilts of the camera, she is shot frontally with several other characters around her, talking to and asking advice from the ones she trusts, as if to suggest that a ruler has to be able to live with her people and rule from among them rather than over them. This more human image of Giovanna is also enhanced by the fact that now she no longer dresses exclusively in white and does not hesitate to leave her castle when the need arises.
Eventually Giovanna allows herself to show her love for Fieramosca and to accept him as her husband because of his valor and unselfish love for her and her cause.
Indeed, Fieramosca loves Giovanna as a woman whose virtue and strength he admires. Even though he does not view her exclusively as a means to gain power
and political status, he too, however, has a political, nationalistic goal: to keep Giovanna and her fortress from falling into the hands of either the French or the Spanish. He also intends to start a family with her that would forever rule her land.
In this way, he also fulfills Giovanna’s equally nationalistic goal of maintaining Italian land independent of foreign rule. The story of Giovanna and Fieramosca thus succeeds in conveying a very important nationalistic message, one that was particularly significant in fascist Italy at the time when the regime was embrac-ing a strong nationalist ideology. At the same time, the film clearly conveys the fascist codified images of men and women by presenting Ettore as a very strong and successful military hero who channels his virility toward a family-fathering goal by loving Giovanna as a wife and future mother of his children. Giovanna on the other hand, after emerging at the beginning of the film as an unusual, heroic, and self-reliant female character, is later reduced to a more fascist-like female role, dependent on the assistance of a strong hero in order to be saved from destruction.
Her role as wife and future mother becomes therefore necessary for her, as well as for her fortress’s, survival. Strong, independent, and politically powerful women are hardly acceptable to fascist ideology, so Giovanna, although she comes across at first as strong and self-reliant, has to change in order to ensure success at the end. Thus, she turns into a more typical female character; that is, she assumes the more acceptable role of the wife of the hero and the future mother of his children.
Consequently, unlike Sophonisba, who was threatened with slavery and eventu-ally drawn to death because of her dangerous sexual power and of her politiceventu-ally incorrect anti-Roman ideology, Giovanna’s story has a different outcome. Because of her virtue and her politically correct nationalistic ideology, she is made a part-ner of Fieramosca’s glory and is allowed to conduct a contented woman’s life as wife and mother.
In both these historical films, fascist ideology clearly shapes the destiny of men and women according to the selective projection of male and female roles pro-posed by the regime and dictated by its militaristic and nationalistic goals. The following films will show similar gender-role projection, even if according to a more specific consideration of contemporary, everyday life.
“Light Comedy” Films
In earlier Italian films, the phenomenon of the working woman had hardly been considered, except in a few films by Elvira Notari in the 1910s that were centered on young working female protagonists, such as Chiarina, la modista (Little Claire, the Milliner; 1919) or Carmela, la sartina di Montepulciano (Carmela, the Little Dressmaker from Montepulciano; 1916).6
In the 1930s, plots based around working women as protagonists became sur-prisingly common. Italian cinema started proposing, in a comic key, a new image of woman whose space was no longer the family home but rather an office (as in Goffredo Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata), a shop, a hotel, or a department store (like in Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni, Il Signor Max, or I grandi magazzini).
This new image of woman was conveyed with the comedy genre that in lit-erature and theater had already been used for centuries to entertain the public with characters and situations that readers or spectators would consider inferior to themselves and their social situation and that were, therefore, easy objects of
This new image of woman was conveyed with the comedy genre that in lit-erature and theater had already been used for centuries to entertain the public with characters and situations that readers or spectators would consider inferior to themselves and their social situation and that were, therefore, easy objects of