Autumn 1996
Volume 23, Number 1

Italian fascism, Bottai once observed, was an experiment "conducted ... on a razor's edge."90 From the late twenties, when Mussolini had consolidated his hold on Italy's government, the fascists pursued a putatively populist agenda that recast social institutions and reconfigured both public and private spheres. Yet, as Bottai's comment reveals, the government was haunted by the question of how to control the emancipatory tendencies that modernization and mass mobilization would bring. The fascist solution to this dilemma was to try to make mass organizations and leisure pastimes reinforce rather than undercut traditional notions of authority. Under the dictatorship, the public spaces of interwar modernity--trains, mass tourist outings, sporting events, exhibitions, the factory--would become sites of reeducation designed to produce behaviors that reaffirmed existing class and gender hierarchies. Ultimately, this project met with mixed success at best, since participation in the collective activities sponsored by the regime often encouraged the development of those very values--such as individual initiative--that the regime worked to extirpate. Italian women, for example, often gained a sense of autonomy and personal accomplishment from their participation in fascist sport and social-welfare initiatives that diluted and ultimately undercut the regime's natalist and antifeminist propaganda. 91 Thus the new public sphere of fascism became a locus of activities that fulfilled private goals and mediated Italians' relationships with the regime. The influence of commercial culture, which offered models of behavior quite at odds with those propagated by the regime, also bedeviled the fascist attempt to carry out a "selective modernization," in which economic development would not be accompanied by social emancipation.

Fig. 2.--Inauguration of the Istituto LUCE, Rome, 1924.

The cinema provides a particularly focused lens through which to examine the limitations and paradoxes that marked fascist projects for a "national" modernity. In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the cinema played a central role in the dissemination of a gendered discourse about mass culture. Likened by intellectuals to a prostitute for its venal quality and its capacity to corrupt and seduce, the cinema was also identified with women due to the large numbers of women spectators it attracted. As Giuliana Bruno has pointed out, films liberated the female gaze, affording women a mobile and panoramic vision of society that outside the space of the theatre remained the province of the male.92 Like real-life streetwalkers, the cinema was subjected to regulation under Mussolini, who intended to domesticate it and turn it into "the most powerful weapon of the regime."93 But the cinema proved to be a double-edged sword, as commercial concerns and the belief that propaganda would best be received in the form of entertainment led directors to fill their films with femmes fatales and other symbols of that "decadent" modernity the regime had pledged to defeat. The showcasing of emancipated behaviors and attitudes mitigated these films' effectiveness as agents of traditional values, especially among female spectators.94 These same factors complicated the achievement of aesthetic autarchy under fascism; the "national" films produced under Mussolini show a heavy influence at a formal level of American and other dominant cinematic cultures that had proven to be successful with audiences. 90. Bottai, Il consiglio nazionale delle corporazioni (Milan, 1933), p. 28. 91. On this point, see de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women.

92. See Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, pp. 49Ð53.

93. This statement was emblazoned on the facade of the structure set up for the inauguration of the Istituto LUCE (see fig. 2).

94. For an example of this inconsistency and its significance for female spectatorship under fascism, see Jacqueline Reich, "Reading, Writing, and Rebellion: Collectivity, Specularity, and Sexuality in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934Ð43," in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis, 1995), pp. 220Ð51.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is assistant professor of history at Fordham University. She has published articles on Italian fascist culture and on the memory of Italian fascism. Her forthcoming book is entitled Fascist Modernities: Culture, Power, and the Nation in Italy, 1922Ð45.