Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon

Lorenzo Fabbri is an Imagine Fund Arts, Humanities, and Design Chair at the University of Minnesota.

• Preface and Acknowledgments. Fascism and Us Introduction. Race War through Other Media 1. The Government of the Ungovernable: Race and Cinema in Early Italian Film Novels 2. Workers Entering the Military-Industrial Complex: Pirandello’s and Ruttman’s Acciaio3. White, Red, Blackshirt: Blasetti’s Ecofascist Realism 4. The Shame of Escapism: Camerini’s Anthropological Machines 5. The White Italian Mediterranean: De Robertis, Rossellini, and Fascism’s Melodramatic Imperialism 6. De Sica’s Genre Trouble: Laughing Fascism Away? 7. Queer Antifascism: Visconti’s Ossessione and the Cinema Conspiracy against Ethno-Nationalism Conclusion. On Neorealism: The Ends of the Resistance and the Birth of an Area Notes Index

"Lorenzo Fabbri’s book demonstrates how Italian Fascism wielded the cinematic apparatus to mobilize Italians as a racialized assemblage who would identify with the regime's myriad colonizing projects at home and abroad. That same apparatus was amenable to being hijacked by the resistance (embodied by Visconti and De Sica) to formulate plural, antifascist ways of living. A refreshing and beautifully written work, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon adds considerable nuance to our understandings of how Fascism works, and is actively contested, through film."-Rhiannon Noel Welch, author of Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy   "A richly researched and politically urgent exploration of how cinema under Mussolini worked to assemble Italians into a fascist collectivity mobilized less by ideological consent than racial affect. By attending to filmmaking as race-making, from Luigi Pirandello to Roberto Rossellini, Lorenzo Fabbri illuminates how-building on liberal policies of internal colonization and external colonialism-Italian Fascism embarked on a biopolitical project to forge a unified, ‘whitened’ body politic committed to a melodramatic brand of imperialism. Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon unsettles film histories and theories that pivot on the ‘Year Zero’ of Italian neorealism, challenging us to rethink the entanglements of race, media, and authoritarianism while also attending to how cinema could be made useless for Fascism."-Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis