The Beauty, the Beast, the Goofy: Images of the Communist in Cold War Italy
Images of the Communist in Cold War Italy
This poster analyzes the battle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists during the early Cold War years. Without denying the critical role of high politics, or the rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the poster places the home-front at the center of its analysis. It adopts of a bottom-up perspective, and shifts the focus of attention away from governments and diplomacy, towards imagination and culture as agents of historical change. Looking beyond the institutional-administrative sphere of politics, the poster explores the aspirations, emotions, expectations and hopes formulated by Italians under conditions of existential and political uncertainty.
In operational terms, the poster draws on visual forms of propaganda pointedly representative of the subject: a set of political posters, propaganda films, and cartoons depicting Communists, produced by both Communist and anti-Communist sources. Along its way, the poster presents, among other, the following films: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Timiriazev Mission (1952), Carlo Lizzani’s Modena: A City of Red Emilia(1950); The Strategy of Lies (1948) produced by the Civic Committees (a grass-roots Catholic anti-Communist movement).
The aim of the poster it to map the principal coordinates of the cultural system of Cold War Italy, to show how images of Communists shaped the mentality of Italians, and how artistic and political representations were shaped by symbols and tropes found in religion, cultural memory, folklore and ancient traditions
The poster argues that images of Communists infused the Italian political community with new meanings, re-dressed the experience undergone by individuals and groups, affected people’s worldviews, and fostered the formation of bloc identities. It end the poster concludes that the main meaning of the Cold War was not the ideological alignment to external models but an internal contest between two parties over what the recent past meant and what would ensure a just and stable order for society, a symbolic contest expressing the desire to re-formulate the appropriate relationship between the individual and society – a relationship that required a high level of modification since the old world understanding had been irreparably shattered by the experience of World War II. Embedded in the narrative are a series of assumptions and questions that could be useful to scholars examining the intersection between culture and politics. In the end, such an effort could provide future scholars with a more sophisticated interpretative framework to explain the Cold War from a transnational perspective.