Description: "Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed under the rule of Benito Mussolini as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, and authoritarianism, Lorenzo Fabbri presents an urgent view into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society"--
Review Quotes:
"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
"Impeccably researched and elegantly written."--Film History
"Fabbri weaves a masterful interplay of suspense and payoff."--Critical Inquiry
"Even for those who are steeped in the scholarship of the field, Fabbri's work offers a wealth of new insights to spur rethinking of this pivotal cinematic period."--Italian Culture
"By mapping the entanglements of cinema with racial capitalism and authoritarian politics, this book makes a timely contribution that (re)links the past to the present. Fabbri writes about Italian history, but with a look to a global present destabilized by the resurgence of authoritarian populism." --Film Quarterly
"A thought-provoking critique of an often-glossed-over time in Italian cinema." --Journal of Film and Video