ABSTRACT
The central place of cinema in debates about national regeneration during wartime and in the immediate postwar period in Italy cannot be disputed. Mussolini famously declared that the “cinema constituted the regime’s most powerful weapon.”1 And the medium was recognized by many fascist offi cials early on as an important means of articulating and documenting an authentic national identity free from “dangerous foreign infi ltration.”2 The extensive debates in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s about cinema’s capacity to refl ect a coherent national identity, however, took place against the backdrop of an industry which, even during much of the fascist era, was dominated by American imports.3 When the infl ux of American fi lms (which had controlled up to 80 percent of the market) was dramatically curtailed in 1938, the question of what constituted a genuine Italian fi lm product remained a matter of debate. Although the concept of Neorealism was conceived as early as 1930 in Italy as a movement which sought to “break with bourgeois elite culture” and refl ect the regime’s populism, social commitment, and activism, applying the new movement’s precepts to the medium of fi lm proved to be diffi cult.4 Victoria de Grazia has
nationalidentityandrealism
convincingly argued that the protectionist policies which eventually squeezed out most American imports in the fi nal years of the fascist dictatorship were to an extent undermined by a revived domestic output which exhibited many of the same qualities-for example, “lack of substance,” “escapism,” “cosmopolitan glamour”—denounced by the regime in its discourse about Hollywood.5 If we understand the development of a national fi lm culture under fascism to be driven by the desire to forge a balance between ideological and commercial concerns, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat contends,6 then the commercial imperative can be seen as dominated by the goal of emulating, in the words of Mussolini’s son, Vittorio, “the technical virtuosity and fl uid narratives” of the Hollywood style. There was clearly a tension in the desire in the later years of the dictatorship to cut off all American imports while at the same time promoting a nationalist fi lm culture that was in many respects openly imitative of the Hollywood fi lm language and mode of production.7 One might even go so far as to say that Italian national cinema-a notion that hadn’t really been articulated in Italy until the late 1920s-became more “American,” so to speak, precisely in the years when the exclusion of Hollywood fi lms from the Italian market forced the native industry to produce fi lms which would satisfy the demand for the Hollywood style product to which Italian audiences had become accustomed.
