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Mussolini's Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy Stephen Gundle Berghahn, 2013
In Mussolini's Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy Stephen Gundle examines how the Italian movie industry created its own star system as a counterpart to Hollywood's. American movies came to dominate Italian screens after the virtual collapse of the domestic film industry in the 1920s. In response, Benito Mussolini's fascist government began to subsidize film production as part of the regime's industrial and cultural strategy. This new partnership between the Italian government and the film industry would lead to the construction of what would become Cinecitta. The new state of the art production center in Rome was deemed important enough for Mussolini himself to attend the laying of its cornerstone in January of 1936. Mussolini's Dream Factory provides an overview of these efforts coupled with a critical assessment of the immediate and historical impact of the fascist period on the Italian cinema.
Mussolinin and his director general for cinema, Luigi Freddi,deemed the popularity of American movies and especially the embrace of Hollywood stars threatening to national values. However, according to Gundle, the Fascist government was conflicted on exactly how to combat Hollywood dominance over Italian film culture. While Cinecitta may have started as a public-private partnership, it ended up by the late 1930s as an instrument of the state. Nevertheless, Gundle argues that there was much less definitively fascist content in Italian movies of the era than might be supposed. Luigi Freddi, much like his German counterpart Joseph Goebbels, "was strongly opposed to the making of films that had an explicit propaganda purpose"(32). Perhaps surprisingly, only about 20% of films were the kind of historical epics extolling the Italian past that fascist ideologues favored. Historical films were also an important part of the Italian cinema of the 1910s so their relatively low output is surprising. Early feature-length historical epics like Cabiria (1914) were not just popular in Italy, but also popular and critically acclaimed abroad, including in the United States. But the Italian films of the fascist era were more often dramas...