IL TEATRO DELLE MERAVIGLIE

Sergio Toffetti

A retrospective on ‘fascist war film’ is a way for the Pesaro Film Festival to look back on fifty years of its own history. Retrospectives on Neorealist film were held 1974 through 1975, after which Lino Miccichè, Bruno Torri, Adriano Aprà, etc. sought to rethink the cinema produced in Italy before WWII, hypothesising a long-term paradigm. A semi- nar in Ancona in October 1976 helped to overcome the definitions “fascist” or “regime cinema,” or “cinema del ventennio,” which were exclusively associated with a political- moral commitment to mark an irreconcilable break with the cinema produced after the Liberation. “Cinema italiano 1929-1943” laid the historiographic foundations to consider actual continuity in film production and called for new philological research and access to film archives of those years. Three years later, during a retrospective on the thirties at the MoMA in New York, Adriano Aprà and Patrizia Pistagnesi reconciled the “telefoni bianchi” film genre with cinephilia, viewing it as part of the great season of international comedy. In 1976, Marc Ferro published Cinéma et Histoire. Published in Italy in 1980, it was to contribute to our own interdisciplinary studies which, despite being accurate in term of methodology, at times transpired an event-driven approach – possibly because prints were difficult to access, watching films takes time, and ‘mas- terpieces’ received the most attention. The rare titles discussed offered brilliant, albeit ‘ready-made’ analyses, a good reason for us to revisit the ‘war on celluloid.’
The establishment of a “Commission for war- and political cinema” at the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1941, presided over by the Minister Alessandro Pavolini, did not en- tirely succeed in redefining the previous policy for film pursued by Luigi Freddi from the Directorate-General for Cinema, i.e., to confine propaganda to Luce newsreels and leave feature films free to engage with audiences. Only fifteen strictly war films were ac- tually made until 1944. However, film production was biased towards eliciting a war- favourable climate, even though this was not so organic as it was in Hollywood (see Sergeant York by H. Hawks; Yankee Doodle Dandy by M. Curtiz; and Once upon a Honeymoon by L. McCarey). Italian relevant titles were the likes of L’assedio dell’Al- cazar by Augusto Genina, Piccolo alpino by Oreste Biancoli, or La Compagnia della teppa by the now largely forgotten Corrado D’Errico. In the latter, some young Mi- lanese who are against pro-French “bastard cousins” thwart Napoleon’s attempt to relocate Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà to the Louvre1, relying on their own “holy truncheons.” The war on celluloid began in Italy with a barely martial film, Francesco De Robertis’ S.O.S. Submarine (1941), a sequence of sunken submarines, hospital ships and trains, airplanes shot down, priests killed by “godless Reds,” and battles lost. If ever, the happy ending occurs thanks to individual sacrifice rather than the watchword launched by Benito Mussolini on June 10, 1940, which was recommended to be “categorical and binding for everyone: win! And we will win!” While newspapers, radio, and popular songs were actively promoting war mobilisation, cinema hesitates in front of a dual audience in the darkness of crowded movie theatres. On the one hand, institutional newsreels persistently championed the “Believe, obey, fight” motto; on the other hand, feature films appealed to spectators who were closer to “soft pacifists and sycophants” (in the Dux’s own words) more inclined to resilience than to fighting for victory. Lieu- tenant Commander Federico De Robertis first confronted actual warfare in Alfa Tau! (1942), in which ideology – staged through Mussolini-inspired inscriptions, or sailors in a choreographed row to give the proper fascist salute to the returning submarines – al- ternates with a chauvinistic, ‘strapaese’ depiction of daily life, including the various vernacular accents of the extras, which expose the sense of unity among the people at war. De Robertis pulls off an admirable understatement and resolves the most dra- matic scenes with symbolic formal solutions as “war should not be shown, but per- ceived.” Thus, the sinking of a submarine is announced by the commander taking the model off the map and putting it in a drawer; meanwhile, the nurse who has been anx- iously awaiting her fiancé’s return to base is informed of his death just by the officers’ glance alone. War belongs to everyone, in communal sacrifice: “Mummy is working in the fields and dad is at war,” says a child to an officer on leave in Naples. There, he has found a friend’s house destroyed: “Was it Saturday’s bombing?” he asks the men ex- cavating the debris, “No, Thursday’s.” A scene that recurs in Rome, Open City when Edoardo Passarelli asks Anna Magnani, “What about the Allies? Are they there or not?” “They are indeed,” answers Magnani with a puzzled, aching gaze at a bombed house, masterfully conveying the contrasting feelings of a people who virtually have to wish for being bombed in order to regain freedom.
War film took a sceptical stance towards the Rome-Berlin Axis. The single episode of “Italo-German comradeship” is to be found in Roberto Rossellini’s The White Ship, in which a small German orchestra attempts to relieve the wounded on deck – almost a reference to Camerata Richard, Mario Ruccione’s song celebrating Italy’s entry into the war: “Camerata Richard, benvenuto!/ dammi il sacco, si scivola, bada/ il ne- mico è là sulla strada... / Se mia madre a quest’ora pensasse / che ho trovato un amico vicino.../ Camerati d’una guerra / Camerati d’una sorte, / chi divide pane e morte, / non si scioglie sulla terra!”2 The film begins with live-action shots of sea battles off Punta Stilo on July 9 and Capo Teulada in November, 1940, which soon dispel the Italian strategic assumption of exercising sea and air control over the Mediterranean. Two elements link back to S.O.S. Submarine, i.e., the depiction of life on board and the attraction for a futuristic poetry of the machines, as the human figure is portrayed interacting with the dynamism of engines, devices, and weapons while the ship sails like a ‘hyper-protagonist’ (reminiscent of the imagery from Bat- tleship Potemkin). A constant in war cinema is the relationship with civilian popu- lations. In general, this is achieved by introducing a love interest, with a soldier and a woman embarking on a relationship in the aftermath of war events. This creates a strong dramaturgical tension. In The White Ship, the sailor misses the hoped-for date with the war godmother but then unexpectedly meets her on board the hospi- tal ship. The White Ship seems to be concerned less with the capacity of dominion over the Mare Nostrum than with tranquillising civilians (every soldier has a mother) and sending the message that, if their sons are hurt in the line of duty, then Mother Country will take care of them. By the time that the shooting was completed, Hailé Selassié had returned to Addis Ababa; a hint to the refugees from the colonies who are taken on board is then inserted into the dialogue, that is to say, the fortunes of war were already uncertain, but the mother country would not leave anyone behind. With all his spiritualist humanism, Rossellini has not always distanced himself from war, especially looking at The Man with the Cross (1943), as Tag Gallagher has polemically pointed out in his well-documented biography.3 A Pilot Returns (1942) was released under the auspices of the “Italian Youth of the Lictor.” The story by Tito Livio Mursino (an anagram of the name Vittorio Mussolini, director of the magazine Cinema) deals with the setbacks of the Italian campaign in Greece by aligning the military heroism of pilot Massimo Girotti, who has been shot down but is ready and willing to go back to the fight, with the civil heroism of the doctor who bravely assists Italian prisoners and displaced people. The same love and pride for one’s country is ‘married’ through the romantic relationship between Gino (a name referred to by Visconti in Obsession) and Anna, the doctor’s daughter, played by Michela Belmonte. From a historical perspective, it is striking that cruelty against Italians is attributed to the Greeks, in the same way that the ‘cinema of the Allies’ did to the Germans or Japanese. Reverse propaganda can also found in Bengasi, where drunken British soldiers murder peaceful Italian colonists, including a canary in its cage. Augusto Genina’s film is the masterpiece of Italian war cinema, with returning themes such as the fascination with colonial atmospheres already seen in Lo squadrone bianco, while the short-lived reconquest of the city by the Italo-Germans provides a backdrop for an intrigue made of espionage, bombings, conspiracies, British concentration camps, patriotic prostitutes, and tests of courage by Fosco Giachetti and Amedeo Nazzari, well-known positive heroes of the silver screen. The ending features only a lonely Nazi flag fluttering from Rommel’s army. After seeing the film in Venice, an ir- ritated Joseph Goebbels forbade its distribution in Germany, while Genina won the Mussolini Cup at the last wartime Biennale. It’s 1942: the Benghazi liberated on screen is already back in the hands of the British. Cinema must now contend with the Imperial possessions in Africa, which in the thirties had inspired some notable colonial films.4 On May 8, Italian movie theatres saw the release of Goffredo Alessan- drini’s Giarabub, an adaptation of an almost proverbial song by Ruccione, “Colon- nello, non voglio il pane / dammi il piombo del mio moschetto... / Colonnello non voglio encomi / sono morto per la mia terra / ma la fine dell’Inghilterra / incomincia da Giarabub”5 (there is no suitable footage left for projections, but the film is avail- able on YouTube). Meanwhile, the Libyan oasis on the border with Egypt had been lost for a year, and Alessandrini was left with the epic of defeat – one of the keys for interpreting fascist war film as a whole.
Still in 1942, a rare example of ‘spy war’ cinema was released, Alfredo Guarini’s Docu- mento Z3. Belgrade, 1941: Italian and Russian diplomats are competing for an al- liance with Yugoslavia. Isa Miranda, a beautiful, morbid Dalmatian woman, schemes with the Soviet political commissioner like a patriotic Tosca, while Claudio Gora, a dou- ble agent who is in love with her, reveals his affiliation with the Italian secret services at the end of the film.
On January 26, 1943, the remains of the Alpine Brigade “Tridentina” broke through the Soviet lines at Nikolaevka, leaving 40,000 between casualties, prisoners, and missing persons behind. Rossellini’s The Man with the Cross and Carlo Campogalliani’s Il treno crociato are released on February 3 and April 8 respectively, with the latter ‘repatriat- ing’ the wounded from Russia via a train from Lemberg (currently L’viv, Ukraine) with- out explicitly saying so. Between the realism of De Robertis and Rossellini, the skilful mise-en-scène of Genina, the melodrama of Alessandrini, and the ‘Hungarian com- edy’ of Guarini, Campogalliani finds a softer key through ‘mélo-comedy’ with a sub- plot involving a wounded lieutenant, a vapid Rossano Brazzi, whose mother - Ada Dondini, who had just starred in Piccolo mondo antico - prevents his happiness with Maria Mercader for her ‘humble origins.’ Sketches of military life abound: the grouchy doctor captain, the compassionate Red Cross nurse, the stolid and loyal attendant, among whom Elio Marcuzzi stood out, having just played the role of ‘the Spaniard’ in Obsession and shortly before getting killed by the Resistance army, wrongly accused of being a collaborationist. The happy ending at Brenner now leaves a sour taste, after learning from Nuto Revelli and Mario Rigoni Stern the truth about the kind of welcome given to our veterans from Russia.
Piero Costa’s Aeroporto was released on December 18, 1944. The only film produced by Salò about a war bound to be lost, it opens with an abandoned barrel – ironically recalling the Decalogue of the Fascist Soldier, “One serves the Fatherland even by standing guard at a petrol tank” – and then zooms out panning onto a wretched air- port. That evening, the aviators tell each other stories of daily war with camaraderie, chatting and flirting with their love interests. After that, the Allied forces occupy Pan- telleria. Piero Costa tackled the transition from July 25 to September 8 with an- tirhetorical tones – facts are well-known, openly digging up would not be appropriate. The soldiers mutter their comments about Mussolini’s fall, while the colonel –whose office boasts a stunning Futurist aeropainting and a model airplane bearing a hooked cross – shares his bewilderment with the officers corps: “And we who believed... fought... died...” In this end of game, the film closes while a new call for service is af- fixed. The characters respond enthusiastically and a new squadron takes off in effi- cient, modern aircraft. Beyond the happy ending, Aeroporto is characterised by an effective understatement and brings the era of fascist war cinema to an end while con- firming its structure: a modicum of rhetoric, a realistic portrayal of military actions, narratives interspersed with lighter segments, and a strong presence of elements from melodrama – virtually foreshadowing the salient components of Neorealism, an- nounced as already as 1943 in Mario Baffico’s I trecento della Settima with a story about the campaign against Albania. At the same time, documentaries and newsreels were telling a different story. We have selected seven of them: L’aviazione legionaria nella Guerra di Spagna by Domenico Paolella, Le nostre truppe a Bengasi edited by Basilio Franchina; never-released propaganda shorts found in the archives of the Ital- ian Cineteca Nazionale: Il bidello dei mari with Virgilio Riento explaining the naval blockade and Il teatro delle meraviglie, with Aldo Fabrizi reciting against “Perfidious Albion,” both directed by Flavio Calzavara; and Attenzione! by Giuseppe Amato, where Assia Noris and Vittorio De Sica warn about the enemy listening. Officine volanti FIAT Torino-Russia displays the industrial logistics of the Russian campaign, with second lieutenant Gianni Agnelli visiting. Lastly, Roland Sejko illustrates Italo Calvino’s short story L’entrata in guerra with footage from Istituto Luce.
The documentaries – with their realism based on detail and propaganda inventions – engage in a dialogue with the reality dramatised in fiction films.

1 The film raises a curiosity: the Compagnia della Teppa launches anti-French leaflets during Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira at La Scala. In the novella Senso by Camillo Boito there is no trace of patriotic leaflets during Il Trovatore. I wonder if Visconti saw D’Errico.
2 “Comrade Richard, welcome! / give me the sack, or you’ll slip, beware / the enemy is there on the road... / If my mother at this hour knew / that I found a close friend... / Comrades of a war / Comrades of a fate, / who shares bread and death, / will not melt on earth!”
3 The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. His Life and Films, Boston, Da Capo Press, 1998.
4 See The Last Roll-Call (1936) by Mario Camerini, Luciano Serra, Pilota (1938), Abuna Mes- sias (1939) by Goffredo Alessandrini, Sentinelle di bronzo (1937) by Romolo Marcellini.
5 “Colonel, I don’t want bread / give me the lead for my musket... / Colonel I don’t want com- mendations / I died for my land / but the end of England / begins at Jaghbub.”