The Empire Symphony Film: Fascist Documentary, Infrastructure, and the Avant-Garde

Abstract

The article focuses on Corrado D’Errico’s The Path of Our Heroes (Il cammino degli eroi), a 1936 compilation documentary comprising footage shot by the Istituto Luce’s East Africa Film Unit operators. By reconstructing the production history of the film, it draws attention to the integration of cinema into the Second Italian-Ethiopian war (and later the empire) and the influence of cinematic and artistic avant-gardes in the making of the imperial documentary. Through a formal analysis, the essay proposes the notion of “empire symphony film” to examine how the film strives to render visible, while being fully integrated to, the infrastructure of the empire. In doing so, it invites a reconsideration of 1930s Italian documentary cinema in light of the reconfiguration of militancy, film culture, and aesthetics prompted by the Ethiopian war.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Cecilia Valenti, Fabian Tietke, Elena Petricola, and the participants of the Mainz workshop “Italian Fascism and Its Colonial Archive” for their feedback on an earlier version of this essay. I want to extend my gratitude to Sergio Rigoletto, Luca Peretti, Francesco Pitassio, and Silvio Celli as well as to James Chapman and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ricci Steven, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 18.

2 Martin Benjamin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 44–73; Tarquini Alessandra, A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 116–20. See also Druick Zoë, ‘The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism, and the Formation of Film Studies’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16, no. 1 (2007): 80–97; Simone Giulia, ‘ ‘A League of Minds?’ Uses and Abuses of the League of the Nations’ Internationalism by Fascist Italy’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 28, no. 3 (2023): 259–277.

3 Brunetta Gian Piero, La Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia: 1932-2022 (Venice: Marsilio, 2022), 101–10.

4 On the Venice film festival’s early cosmopolitanism and later disavowal, see Ostrowska Dorota, ‘Making Film History at the Cannes Film Festival’, in Film Festivals: Theory, History, Method, Practice, ed. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredall and Skadi Loist (New York-London: Routledge, 2016), 18–33.

5 On the notion of Italian fascist film in relation to popular culture and cultural politics, see Hay James, Popular Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 238–46.

6 Pietrangeli Antonio, ‘Panoramique sur le cinéma italien’, La Revue du cinéma 13, (1948): 10–53; Venturini Franco, ‘Origini del neorealismo’, Bianco & Nero 11, no. 2 (1950): 31–54; Lizzani Carlo, Il cinema italiano (Florence: Parenti, 1953); Gromo Mario, Cinema italiano, 1903-1953 (Milan: Mondadori, 1953).

7 The film is available, in the 67-minute version with French and German intertitles, at https://patrimonio.archivioluce.com/luce-web/detail/IL3000087561/1/-48957.html, last accessed March 14, 2023. In 2008, the Istituto Luce released a re-edited 35-minute version of Il cammino degli eroi and included it among the bonus features of the DVD of the documentary Etiopia 1936: Alla conquista dell’Impero along with two other key (and similarly butchered) imperial documentaries, La fondazione della nuova Addis Abeba (“The Foundation of the New Addis Ababa,” Giovanni Marcucci, 1939) and Sulle orme dei nostri pionieri (“On the Footsteps of Our Pioneers,” Istituto Luce, 1936).

8 On the film festival as a contact zone, see Salazkina Masha, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023). See also, Nichols Bill, ‘Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit’, Film Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1994): 16–30.

9 De Valck Marijke, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 23–6.

10 Jaikumar Priya, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 21.

11 See Burdett Charles, Alessandra Ferrini, Gaia Giuliani et al, ‘Roundtable on Visuality, Race, and Nationhood in Italy’, Journal of Visual Culture 18, no. 1 (2019): 53–80. See also Thomas Julia Adeney and Geoff Eley, ed. Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Hom Stephanie Malia, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

12 For a thorough reconstruction of the history of the Unit, see Mancosu Gianmarco, Vedere l’Impero. L’Istituto Luce e il colonialismo fascista (Milan: Mimesis, 2022), 207–48, 299–315. See also Fidotta Giuseppe, ‘Ruling the Colonies with Sound: Technology and Noise in Cronache dell’Impero’, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 4, no. 1 (2016): 111–25; Ben-Ghiat Ruth, Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 63–72.

13 Among the former, Franco Martini and Renato Cartoni; almong the latter, Mario Damicelli, Renato Del Frate, and Antonio Leonviola. On the fascistization of film culture, see Mariani Andrea, ‘The Cineguf Years: Amateur Cinema and the Shaping of a Film Avant-Garde in Fascist Italy (1934-1943)’, Film History 30, no. 1 (2018): 30–57; Pitassio Francesco and Simone Venturini, ‘Building the Institution: Luigi Chiarini and Italian Film Culture in the 1930s’, in Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945, ed. Malte Hagener (Berghahn: Oxford-New York, 2014), 249–74.

14 Spaini Alberto, ‘Per un cinema coloniale’, Etiopia 1, no. 6 (1937): 109–11; see also ‘Il cinema per l’Impero’, Lo Schermo 2, no. 6 (1936): 12. All translations from Italian are mine.

15 The maneuver is partly documented in a letter sent by the head of the General Directorate of Cinematography Luigi Freddi to the president of the Istituto Luce Giacomo Paulucci di Calboli held at the State Archive of Forlì, Paulucci di Calboli Fond, f. 245, “Istituto Luce-Corrispondenze”.

16 Rhodes John David, ‘D’Errico’s Stramilano’, in The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, ed. Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher and Anthony Kinik (New York: Routledge, 2019), 96–105.

17 Central State Archives, President of the Council of Ministries, 1934-36, b. 1.1.11/997/2.2, “Giornalisti. Fascicoli personali,” sb. 13, “Ufficio Stampa di S.E. il Capo del Governo: D’Errico Corrado”.

18 Garofalo Pietro, ‘Seeing Red: The Soviet Influence on Italian Cinema in the Thirties’, in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943, ed. Pietro Garofalo and Jaqueline Reich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 223–49; Celli Silvio, ‘Nuove prospettive di ricerca’, Bianco & Nero 547, (2003): 27–50.

19 To the best of my knowledge, the only exception is Celli Silvio, Il cinema di Corrado D’Errico. M.A. Thesis, University of Bologna, 1994-1995.

20 See Marino Natalia and Emanuele Marino, L’Ovra a Cinecittà. Polizia politica e spie in camicia nera (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006).

21 See Landy Marcia, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in Italian Cinema, 1940-1943 (New York: SUNY University Press, 1998), 33–40.

22 On the Paramount- and Fox-inspired Rivista Luce, “Luce Review” (1934-35), see Sainati Augusto, ‘L’esperimento della ‘Rivista Luce’’, Bianco & Nero 547, (2003): 60–8. On the cinema’s fortieth-anniversary celebrations in 1935, see Mosconi Elena, ‘L’invenzione della tradizione. Le celebrazioni per il quarantennale del cinema’, L’invenzione del film (Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2006), 209–26.

23 Ben-Ghiat Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Los Angeles-Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 134. See also Celli Silvio, ‘L’Istituto Nazionale Luce’, in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 4, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Venice/Rome: Marsilio/Bianco & Nero, 2014), 427–36, 435.

24 D’Errico Corrado, ‘Stile Luce’, Lo Schermo 1, no. 7 (1936): 17–9.

25 Ibid., 17.

26 Grierson John, ‘First Principles of Documentary [1932-34]’, in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966 [1946]), 145–56. See also Stollery Martin, ‘John Grierson’s ‘First Principles’ as Origin and Beginning: The Emergence of the Documentary Tradition in the Field of Nonfiction Film’, Screen 58, no. 3 (2017): 309–31; Rice Tom, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 17–9.

27 D’Errico Corrado, ‘Stile Luce’, 18.

28 Idem.

29 In introducing a small anthology of theoretical essays from the period, Andrea Mariani and I characterized documentary film theory in interwar Italy as incidental, disconnected from more influential debates on the aesthetics and ontology of cinema, and relegated to relatively marginal venues such as youth, trade, and literary magazines. This is certainly the case of the D’Errico essay discussed here, for it was published in a popular magazine as part of a special issue advertising the achievements of Istituto Luce. See Fidotta Giuseppe and Andrea Mariani, ‘Teoria involontaria del documentario’, Filmidee 13, https://www.filmidee.it/2013/10/teoria-involontaria-del-documentario/, last accessed March 7, 2023. See also Fidotta Giuseppe and Andrea Mariani, ‘Senza Luce. Visioni ai confini del documentario italiano (1924-1943)’, Immagine 15, (2017): 7–19.

30 Interestingly, the most exhaustive history of the Istituto Luce features a section on Corrado D’Errico (and Giorgio Ferroni) titled “The Discovery of Direction.” Laura Ernesto G., Le stagioni dell’aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2000), 115–9.

31 Hay James, Popular Culture, cit., 205–8.

32 Mignemi Alberto, Immagine coordinata per un impero: Etiopia 1935-36 (Turin: Forma, 1984).

33 Apart from its premiere in Venice, substantial information about the film’s distribution has proven elusive. This knowledge gap is partly attributed to the subpar conditions of the Istituto Luce archives, a significant portion of which is located in Forlì (as indicated in note 15). It is striking how limited our understanding is regarding the dissemination of Istituto Luce’s documentaries, particularly when contrasted with the wealth of information available regarding its newsreel production. In light of this, research on this topic becomes increasingly imperative if we are to grasp the local and transnational dimensions of interwar documentary film culture in Italy.

34 Skvirsky Salomé Aguilera, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

35 The title of “greatest achievement of war cinema” comes from an advertisement appeared in Cinema 1, no. 12 (1936): 12. Celli Silvio, ‘Le guerre del Luce’, in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 5, ed. Orio Caldiron (Venice/Rome: Marsilio/Bianco & Nero, 2006), 62–76, 68. See also Caprotti Federico, ‘The Invisible War on Nature: The Abyssinian War in Newsreels and Documentaries in Fascist Italy’, Modern Italy 19, no. 3 (2014): 305–21.

36 Ben-Ghiat Ruth, ‘Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film’, Critical Inquiry 23, no. 1 (1996): 131.

37 Denning Andrew, ‘Infrastructural Propaganda: The Visual Culture of Colonial Roads and the Domestication of Nature in Italian East Africa’, Environmental History 24, (2019): 352–69.

38 Brunetta Gian Piero, Il cinema italiano di regime (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2009), 128. A similar point is raised by Marabello Carmelo, ‘Macchinemondi. Afriche lontane, antropologie futuriste e altre allocronie nel cinema di Corrado D’Errico’, in Cento anni di idee futuriste nel cinema, ed. Augusto Sainati (Pisa: ETS, 2012), 117–30.

39 Proglio Gabriele, ‘The Empire as a Mark of Modernity: Representations of Colonial Power in a Famous Regime Documentary’, Modern Italy 21, no. 3 (2016): 289–303; Amodeo Immacolata, ‘In the Empire’s Eyes: Africa in Italian Colonial Cinema between Imperial Fantasies and Blind Spots’, in Empires and Boundaries: Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings, ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann (New York: Routledge, 2009), 166–78. A noteworthy exception is the work of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and in particular “Envisioning Modernity,” cit., 130–5.

40 Deplano, Valeria. ‘From the Colonies to the Empire: Africa and the National Fascist Project’, in Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism, ed. Giulia Albanese (New York and London: Routledge, 2022), 33–55; De Grand Alexander, ‘Mussolini's Follies: Fascism in Its Imperial and Racist Phase, 1935-1940’, Contemporary European History 13, no. 2 (2004): 127–47.

41 Ben-Ghiat Ruth, Fascist Modernities, cit. 132–3.

42 Hagener Malte, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 33. On Futurism’s transnationalism, see Kramer Andreas, ‘Geographies of Futurism: Mapping the First Avant-Garde’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics, and Performance, ed. John London (Bristol: Intellect, 2017), 49–78; Day Gail, ‘The Futurists: Transcontinental Avant-Gardism’, in The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, ed. Paul Wood(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 204–25.; Perloff Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

43 Turvey Malcolm, The Filming of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 144.

44 Stein Erica, ‘Telling One Another’s Stories: The City Symphony and Cine-Genre Narrative’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 20, no. 1 (2022): 25–36, 27. See also Stein Erica, ‘Abstract Space, Microcosmic Narrative, and the Disavowal of Modernity in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’, Journal of Film and Video 65, no. 4 (2013): 3–16.

45 Larkin Brian, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42, (2013): 327–43.

46 Edwards Paul N, ‘Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems’, in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 185–226, 221.

47 Appel Hannah, Nikhil Anand and Akhil Gupta, ‘Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure’, in The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 1–38.

48 Ben-Ghiat Ruth, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, cit., 65.

49 Caprotti Federico, ‘Information Management and Fascist Identity: Newsreels in Fascist Italy’, Media History 11, no. 3 (2005): 177–91.

50 Mancosu Gianmarco, ‘Watching Films in Italian East Africa (1936-41): Fascist Ambitions, Contradictions, and Anxieties’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 261–90.

51 Balla Giacomo and Fortunato Depero, ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe [1915]’, In Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (Yale: Yale University Press, 2009), 209–12; Humphreys Richard, Futurism (London: Tate, 1999), 38–49.

52 Groys Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, translated by Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Huyssen Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); Bürger Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also Hewitt Peter, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Antliff Mark. Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

53 Adamson Walter, ‘Fascinating Futurism: The Historiographical Politics of an Historical Avant-Garde’, Modern Italy 13, no. 1 (2008): 82.

54 “Il cinema per l’Impero,” cit.

55 Nichols Bill, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde’, Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (2001): 580–610, 609, 590. See also Druick Zoë and Deane Williams, ed. The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary's International Movement (London: BFI, 2014).

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Giuseppe Fidotta

Giuseppe Fidotta is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is currently working on a manuscript on the articulations of value, imaginary, memory, and community in Sicily’s antimafia media culture. His key research areas include media anthropology, film history, and cultural theory and his work has appeared in publications such as Screen, NECSUS: The European Journal of Media Studies, The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Culture Machine, The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, and World Cinema and the Essay Film.