Newsreeling the Empire: Fascist Mass Cinematography and the Ethiopian War, 1935–41

In May 1936, Benito Mussolini announced the victory of the Ethiopian war and declared the Fascist empire. Historians of Modern Italy agree about the fact that, in those moments, the regime reached the highest level of internal consensus. One of the most effective tools used in fostering this consent, in spreading the dictator's voice, and in envisioning the Fascist utopia were newsreels and documentaries produced by the Istituto Nazionale Luce, the state-owned propaganda institution tasked with defning and disseminating Fascism's collective imaginary. This paper will focus on the consolidation of the regime's power by looking at how the Fascist dictatorship reworked reality and described itself within its newsreels and documentaries about the Ethiopian War. The myth of the Fascist Empire played a pivotal role in the definition of a new and consistent sense of Italian-Fascist belongings. In spite of these aims, the analysis of both the production's mechanisms and newsreels' content discloses original features, which address directly the fascist cultural phenomenon and all its ambiguities. This bifocal perspective also helps in setting up methodological tools for dealing with the entanglement between colonialism and the reframing of Italianness during the Fascist period. Thanks to the study of original archival records in Rome, Forlì, and Addis Ababa, I have reconstructed the organization and the activity of the Reparto Foto-Cinematografico Africa Orientale dell'Istituto Luce, its direct legitimation by Mussolini, and its controversial relationship with other cultural institutions such as the Ministero della Cultura Popolare. This historical account will show how different conceptions of modernity were mediated in Fascist cinematographic production, and how Fascism tried to mediate the vast array of inconsistent and transnational dynamics that surfaced in the relationship between Italians and mass culture.