Colonial rhetoric in cinema for didactic use from a transnational view. The Italian epic film Cabiria (1914) at the Indian Industrial School of Carlisle

ABSTRACT

The first silent epic Italian film, Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone with the screenplay co-written by the director and the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was used as an educational tool at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1915. The film’s plot unfolds during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). The film’s narrative is pro-empire propaganda for Italy’s recent occupation of Libya (1911–1912). The visual narrative is rich in colonial rhetoric. It shows the viewers the friendship between the enslaved man Maciste, interpreted by a white man wearing blackface, and the Roman soldier and colonizer Fulvio Axilla. This essay analyses the film’s construction of racialized bodies and locates it within the larger context of cultural assimilation through visual technologies applied at the Carlisle school. This analysis focuses on the intermedial imagination of a progressive whitening process in moving pictures, photographs, and lantern slides used at the school.

KEYWORDS:

• Carlisle Indian Industrial School
• colonial cinema
• Cabiria
• whitening ideology
• cultural assimilation

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Leonora Masini

Leonora Masini is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in slavery and Justice at the Simmons Center at Brown University. Her research expertise lies in at the intersection of media, race and ethnicity studies, and modern European colonial history. Her current book project examines the language and imagination of pro-colonial propagandistic educational films by the British and Italian colonial governments (1910-1945). She has published articles on the cinematic rhetoric of colonial propaganda and the use of films in colonial educational schools.