Fascism in Italian cinema since 1945 ; The politics and aesthetics of memory

The book fills a significant gap in its field, resolving to discuss the representations of Fascism that Italian filmmakers have articulated on screen from neorealism onwards. The bookwork complements Lichtner's previous analysis of Italian cinema’s treatment of a major historical phenomenon, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy. The key finding of Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945 is that, as much as the Resistance has traditionally been assigned the allegorical role of rebirth of the country (and of its cinema) in Italian film since Roma Città Aperta (Rossellini, 1945), the representation of the Fascist ventennio have been in most cases characterised by restraint and re-signification. This is a fundamental point of Lichtner’s work that can definitely be agreed upon.

This argument is supported by the identification of four stages in Italian cinema’s representation of Fascism: Resistance (comprised of the postwar neorealism images of Fascism and the 1950s satires of the regime by director Luigi Zampa), Reconstruction (as Lichtner labels the re-visitation of the 1922-1945 period in the films produced during Italy’s Economic Miracle), Revolution (the engaged films of the 1970s) and Revisionism. In the latter section Lichtner groups a number of recent films produced either for television or for the silver screen during the age of Berlusconi’s governments which attempted to mitigate Fascism’s negative connotations. Lichtner should be credited for being the first one to discuss these films in an academic context and for doing so without having the political climate that informed their production be the only factor in his assessment – in fact he defines the revisionism carried out in these films as “politicised confusion” rather than propaganda.