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.

In August 1936, three months after the end of the Second Italo-Ethiopian war and the proclamation of the Italian Empire, the fourth edition of the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia ended with a predictable outcome. The highest prizes, the Mussolini Cups for best national and best international film, were awarded to Augusto Genina’s The White Squadron (Lo squadrone bianco, 1936) and Luis Trenker’s The Emperor of California (Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, 1936), with Joseph Goebbels and the top echelons of the Italian film administration in attendance. Technical awards were carefully distributed among all participating countries except India and Egypt, while the government awards ensured that almost no Italian film producer would have left Venice empty-handed. The main winners, big-budget productions shot respectively in Tripolitania and California, showcased a level of artistry and an overt colonial rhetoric that forebode the ambitions of their respective industries. If “the ideal for the Italian fascist cinema was articulated […] in the awards bestowed at the Venice biennale,” as Steven Ricci maintained, the 1936 edition constitutes an ideal standpoint from which to observe the multifarious transformation of fascist film culture in the wake of the Ethiopian war.¹

First of all, that edition marked a turning point in fascist culture, since for the first time the Ministry of Press and Propaganda exercised control over the festival selection. The transformation of an otherwise glamorous event into an arena for the promotion of Italy’s geopolitical and industrial interests reflected a major shift in cultural diplomacy.² The invasion of Ethiopia and the subsequent economic sanctions imposed by the League of the Nations had damaged Italy’s standing to the extent that Venice remained one of the few international platforms left to the regime, which exploited it to display its new identity as an imperial power.³ Less than a year after the outbreak of the conflict, the aggressively jingoistic campaigns orchestrated by the fascist regime had come to permeate the Italian public sphere with such virulence that the festival could not but disavow its own cosmopolitanism.⁴ In contrast with the previous editions, the Ministry’s selection favored the hitherto neglected genre of the war film, accounting for almost all national feature-length films in competition. Largely supported by the state and the army, the films featured strong nationalist themes and an open endorsement of fascist ideals of heroism, masculinity, and sacrifice at odds with the recommendation of the Directorate General of Cinematography to evacuate politics from Italian screens.⁵ According to film histories of the postwar period, this handful of films, along with few more from the following two editions of the festival, were the only fascist films ever made; the rest of the production outcome of the interwar years being either dismissed as escapist and as such apolitical or valued inasmuch as it contributed to brewing the seeds of Neorealism.⁶ They were, for the great majority, empire films partaking in the film industry’s effort to prepare, sustain, and celebrate the new course of history brought about by the conquest of Ethiopia: their dismissal as empty propaganda undergirded the broader postwar repudiation of the massive popular support that the regime enjoyed, especially in relation to and partly as a consequence of what it was then referred to as the “imperial adventure.”

In this article, I examine one of the films shown at the 1936 edition and awarded with the Ministry of Press and Propaganda Cup, Corrado D’Errico’s documentary The Path of Our Heroes (Il cammino degli eroi, 1936).⁷ Taking the Venice film festival as my point of departure allows me to situate the film in the context of Europe’s interwar film culture, resisting dominant interpretations of fascist colonial documentary (and more generally fascist documentary) as a strictly national and nationalist business disconnected from transnational cinematic networks, influences, and exchanges. The Mostra was a contact zone where filmmakers had the chance to expand their personal networks, explore cultural affinities, and discover different filmmaking traditions and forms, including non-fiction and experimental cinema.⁸ Being organized around national submissions, the festival was also a geopolitical capsule designed to shape the international profile of the film-producing countries, while projecting outward a multifaceted and yet institutional image of national cinema.⁹ Furthermore, starting from the Mostra is also a way to detach this and many other imperial documentaries from their producer, state-owned Istituto Luce, whose monopoly over both newsreel and documentary production has misled many to read this body of films through the framework of cine-journalism, overemphasizing their informational and rhetorical elements to the detriment of narrative, style, and ideology.

The essay first introduces the production history of The Path of Our Heroes by focusing on the integration of (documentary) cinema into the Ethiopian war effort and fascist imperial culture more broadly. Then, through a close reading of the film and the artistic itinerary of D’Errico, it argues for a reconsideration of fascist documentary in light of the influence of both the European cinematic avant-garde and the Italian way to modernism. I propose a reading of the film as an empire symphony, identifying in the reworking of the city symphony genre and of the legacy of futurism a conscious attempt to render visible the empire as an organic totality. Finally, the essay attends to the infrastructure underpinning the development of fascism’s imperial project and the inclusion of cinema within it with the intent of answering, albeit from an admittedly limited standpoint, Priya Jaikumar’s invitation to “expose how cinematic and real spaces carry each other’s imprints.”¹⁰ For the empire largely belonged to the realm of myths and revanchist fantasies, documentary cinema was entrusted with giving visual substance to a space that had no referent in the reality of most Italians. Documentary cinema, in other words, was not simply supposed to represent the empire, but had to contribute to its symbolic manufacture. Investigating this set of operations, in a time of renewed interest in global fascism’s use of visual culture, responds to the urgent need to draw attention to the legacies of Italian colonialism (and colonial media).¹¹

The praxis of political documentary

A month before the outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian war, the Istituto Luce’s East Africa Unit was established almost surreptitiously. Created on the initiative of Mussolini himself, allegedly for documenting life in the colonies, the Unit constituted the largest investment in the decade-long history of the agency and a constant source of apprehensions for its management. On 3 October 1935, Luce operators were along the two-hundred thousand soldiers who crossed the Eritrea-Ethiopian border without prior declaration of war, making evident the actual function of the Unit. From that moment on, it centralized the production of photographs and films from the war front and coordinated the work of a dozen cameramen embedded to the different military divisions to capture the unfolding of the conflict from multiple perspectives.¹² The story of the Unit mirrors in numerous aspects the overarching trajectory of documentary filmmaking in Fascist Italy—a mostly centralized initiative under the careful oversight of the Istituto Luce, influenced by political opportunism and expedience, and executed by a diverse assembly of filmmakers, technicians, and technocrats hailing from varied backgrounds. Similarly to the Istituto to which it belonged, the Unit was managed by a board officially appointed by Mussolini, which included representatives from various government departments such as the Ministries of Press and Propaganda, Colonies, and War, as well as the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Fascist Militia, and the Istituto Luce itself. This composition aimed to guarantee that all parties engaged in wartime activities would have equal access to the Unit’s services, while also discouraging individual initiatives that could result in unequal distribution of resources and expertise. The results of the Unit’s efforts were most prominently showcased in the Luce newsreels (cinegiornali), regularly issued every other day and mandated to be shown before each feature film in every Italian cinema. Less regularly, and with patchier distribution patterns encompassing the non-theatrical circuit as well, the Istituto also released feature-length documentary films. The Unit was directly responsible for a few dozen of those, which spanned from war reportages to industrial films, and while they hold significant value as historical documentation, their significance for the history of documentary cinema at large is yet to be fully appreciated.

The Unit stood at the center of a complex, though at times strongly criticized, propaganda organization able to record and disseminate images of the conflict within the shortest timespan so as to satisfy the appetites of a metropolitan audience enthused by the war and boost the already unprecedented support to the regime. Footage accompanied by written materials (sketches and topographical descriptions, rough chronicles of the events, editing instructions) were shipped biweekly from Asmara (in Italian Eritrea) to Rome, where a team of editors and writers would assemble newsreels and sporadically documentaries of various length. Both the Roman team and the Unit suffered from occasional tensions, mostly across generational lines, that pitted the old guard of film personnel who emerged during the golden age of Italian silent cinema against the new generation brought up by the Cineguf (the university film society network) and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the national film school).¹³ The cinematic documentation of the war retained the traces of those tensions in the unresolved dialectic between, in the language of the time, “formative and informative elements,” that is to say, interactive and expository modes of representation.¹⁴ The mundane images of barren landscapes, marching troops, and encampments testified the objective difficulties experienced by the Unit filmmakers in capturing the contour of a conflict fought mostly through guerrilla warfare tactics. The old guard seemed content to let the boisterous, glorifying voice-over commentary in highbrow Italian deliver the dose of pathos inevitably missing from the images, while the younger filmmakers strived to render the epic dimension of the conflict through formal means. In October 1935, only three weeks after the outbreak of the war, the president of the Istituto Luce sent Corrado D’Errico to Asmara to direct the East Africa Unit, replacing founder of Istituto Luce and Mussolini’s counselor on film policy Luciano De Feo. The handover between the two figures, albeit officially motivated by health reasons, seemed to address the needs of the new guard as much as the discontent about the quality of both documentaries and newsreels rife among ministers and high-ranking civil servants.¹⁵

Still in his early thirties at the time of his appointment, D’Errico was one of the hidden protagonists of 1930s Italian cinema, a figure of functionary-filmmaker embodying without apparent contradiction various aspects of fascist film culture. Before joining the Istituto Luce, D’Errico led a double life of sorts. As a man of the avant-garde, he raised to relative fame within the late Futurist circles at the end of the 1920s with daring experimental theater plays and two well-praised city symphonies, Stramilano (1929) and Rhythms of the Station (Ritmi di stazione, 1933).¹⁶ As a man of the regime, he worked as a journalist for hardcore fascist newspapers and developed connections with high-profile party officials, which eventually landed him a job at the State Secretary (later Ministry) for Press and Propaganda and, for a short period, at Mussolni’s press office.¹⁷ As a man of the cinema, he collaborated with Mario Camerini for Kif Tebbi (1928), an Orientalist drama set in Libya and a harbinger of empire films, and Rotaie (Rails, 1929), a film credited, along with Alessandro Blasetti’s Sole (Sun, 1929), for ushering in a new era of Italian cinema following the near extinction of the industry in the 1920s.¹⁸ From his return from Ethiopia in 1936 to his premature death in 1941 at the age of 39, cinema turned into his only occupation, as he directed eleven feature-length films across a wide variety of genres (swashbuckler, chamber play, adventure, comedy, proto-neorealist drama) and penned several screenplays and a few influential articles on cinema. Yet, his work has barely received any scholarly consideration.¹⁹ This lack of recognition was in part due to D’Errico elusive personality, which, when considered in combination with his closeness to the regime, would not have failed to arise suspicion in the heavily surveilled environment of the film industry.²⁰ However, it also reflects the utter irreconcilability between D’Errico’s militant modernism and the dominant historiographical paradigms centered on the interplay of propaganda, spectacle, and entertainment through which fascist film culture has been interpreted.²¹

At the Istituto Luce, where he worked from 1933 to 1936, D’Errico oversaw the development of new forms of infotainment, propaganda events, and interventions aimed at optimizing Luce’s modes of production.²² Acting as a transmission belt between the Istituto and the State Secretary in the phase of intensified centralization of official propaganda prompted by the war and inspired by Nazi Germany’s Gleichschaltung, D’Errico introduced a series of formal innovations in Luce documentary filmmaking encapsulating “the domestication of modernism and modernity by the fascist regime.”²³ These will constitute the bulk of my reading of The Path of Our Heroes, a film that D’Errico assembled by using footage shot by the East Africa Unit operators over the length of the war, but before moving to the analysis of the film I would like to dwell on the filmmaker’s own conceptualization of documentary.

In a 1936 magazine article titled “Stile Luce” and written shortly after his return from Asmara, D’Errico provided a short but poignant reflection on fascist documentary.²⁴ The article’s main concern is the distinction between newsreels and documentary, which, though apparently innocuous, implies a veiled criticism of Luce’s centralization of professional nonfiction and its resistance to specialism. According to the author, the newsreel, “a fast-paced documentation of topical and social political issues,” presented peculiar characters making it utterly incompatible with the latter, “whose artistic and spiritual function resulted far broader and worthier.”²⁵ In hindsight, however, the interest of the article resides in its identification of documentary specificity in the “rhythmic and musical approach [with which the filmmaker] declines his standpoint on reality […] outside of the contingency of events.” In the same period when documentary cinema was conceptualized in relation to actuality and expertise, D’Errico’s emphasis on form could be easily mistaken for an anti-realist stance consistent with the relegation of topical and social political issues to the newsreels.²⁶ That was not the case. On the contrary, he maintained, “it is with documentary that cinema takes on the function of the historian and bears its tremendous responsibility, especially in the epoch when the lyrical values of life are brought to the highest expression.”²⁷ The article then goes on to describe the ways in which the documentary “grafted [itself] into the life of the nation” through a whirlwind of images related to industrial technologies that culminate with the proclamation of the empire.²⁸

It is worth noting that what at first sight seems to be a report on the two lines of products of the Istituto Luce can be legitimately considered as the manifesto through which D’Errico, informally in charge of revamping institutional propaganda, laid out his theory of political documentary.²⁹ Countering Luce’s practice of not crediting the professionals involved in the making of newsreels and documentaries, D’Errico stressed the importance of creative expression and authorship, calling for documentary filmmakers to provide an individual point of view.³⁰ Nonetheless, expression must be subjugated to the imperative of documenting the massive transformation associated with fascist modernity, for filmmakers are fully integrated into the machine of the state and must accordingly elevate the national interest above any other concern.³¹ Beneath layers of heavy rhetoric, the article is a solicitation (in the form of an uncompromising praise) for the Istituto Luce’s management to live up to the higher requirements of militancy and commitment established after the outbreak of the war, concomitant to the regimentation process underwent by virtually every sector of the cultural industries.³² A few weeks after the publication of “Stile Luce,” the Venice premiere of The Path of Our Heroes demonstrated the applicability of D’Errico’s theory of political documentary to the new imperial climate.

Rendering the empire visible

The Path of Our Heroes is a compilation film made of footage shot by the Istituto Luce cameramen before and during D’Errico’s tenure at the helm of the East Africa Unit. It is divided into twelve sections, each dealing with a specific aspect of the war effort: industrial production, maritime transports, colonial ports, road networks, the postal system, sanitary assistance, airborne provisions, etcetera. In the only surviving copy of the film, French and German intertitles translate the solemn voiceover commentary introducing each section, a clear sign of the international orientation of the project and a likely relic of its Venice premiere.³³ Yet, exceptionally for Luce’s documentary standards, the commentary does not play over the images, but limits its presence to the intertitles. It is instead the quasi-Stravinskian score by Giovanni Fusco, who will later become a stable collaborator of Michelangelo Antonioni, that connotes the images, perfectly suiting D’Errico’s belief in documentary as a musical structure endowed with both artistic and spiritual values. Accordingly, rhythmic montage, with editing being in all probability carried out or at least supervised by the director himself (another major deviation from Luce’s standards), contributes to the overall dynamism of the film, often emphasized through visual and musical analogies as well.

The film’s opening sequence illustrates its formal structure. The sequence is set inside the shop floor of an unspecified factory. It opens with a medium shot of a still flywheel: as soon as the music begins, the engine starts to move. Workers unload meat from a truck. A row of hanging carcasses cut across the frame, while butchers slice meat up in smaller portions. A shot from a different angle follows every other shot. A long shot of another factory with a series of smoking cauldrons. Several frantic close-ups of industrial engines whirling, spinning, pumping, thrusting, splitting, and prodding follow. Caught from unusual camera angles, the conveyor moves objects that only at a later moment appear to be canned food. At the end of the sequence, the superimposition of pistons and the belt further increase the sense of bewilderment skillfully created through montage techniques. What the opening sequence of the film purportedly shows is the manufacturing of canned food, documenting the whole process from slaughtering to dispatching. The following sequence of the first section does the same for military boots and indeed most sections illustrate specific war-related operations that the audience might not be familiar with, to the extent that one could even postulate an instructional component, though obfuscated by formal experimentation. This does not equal to say that D’Errico strives toward what Salome Aguilera Skvrinsky has recently called “processual representation,” that is, the cinematic reconstruction of a process in sequential order.³⁴ Even though the sequence does track the production process from beginning to end through the typical representational syntax of the process genre and, in doing so, produces a degree of absorption in the spectator, it is the sheer interaction between bodies, objects, and technologies, rather than distinct processes or products, that capture the filmmaker’s attention.

The rest of the film pursues a similar strategy at the formal level, though seldom as effectively as the first section. At the thematic level, however, consistency is more marked. Oddly for a production advertised as “the greatest achievement of war cinema,” The Path of Our Heroes dedicates to the war only one section, an anticlimactic series of skirmishes between a fully equipped modern army and what the commentary defines “hordes of savages and rebels” barely caught on camera, in conformity with virtually every Luce documentary set in Ethiopia where “the enemy is more evoked than actually seen.”³⁵ The choice of relegating the actual fighting to a minor episode makes The Path of Our Heroes a very peculiar war documentary, but it could hardly be said to hinder its force, even for propaganda purposes. At the center of the film are instead the less visible elements that constitute the logistical apparatus making possible the war enterprise. Pushed off-screen, war maneuvers are replaced by apparently less spectacular operations. Machines stand in for soldiers, logistics dethrones strategy and tactics, the efficiency of the state apparatus obscures military prowess, and the very heroes of the title turn out to be not the fighters but “the faceless laborers who have learned to subjugate their individual desires to suit the needs of the collectivity.”³⁶

The film, in this respect, circumvents the lack of pathos intrinsic to a dramatically asymmetrical and poorly filmable war. It does so by shifting focus from the conflict to the apparatus certifying Italy’s imperial status so effectively that the incipient “civilization” of Ethiopia is often presented as an accomplished fact even during the war.³⁷ For example, the middle sections on ports, railroads, and roads render this ambiguity through the depiction of the workers-soldiers’ frenetic activity to build or reinforce Eastern African infrastructure networks, while not only omitting completely any reference to the ongoing conflict, but also privileging “civilian” technologies not immediately associable to the war (e.g. trams, animals, and tractors). As Gian Piero Brunetta observed, The Path of Our Heroes’ suppression of warfare responds to the diplomatic need of presenting the conquest of Ethiopia as “a great peacemaking operation, a product of the perfectly efficient civilizational machine of which armed forces are nothing but the last link of the chain.”³⁸ Like virtually all critics who have written on the film, Brunetta seems to espouse the idea that this element, along with the over-the-top commentary and its underpinning racist ideology, condemn the film to being considered as nothing more than an empty propaganda exercise.³⁹ A component as crucial as egregious, the propagandistic nature of the film has deterred historians from engaging critically with the imperial documentary tradition, leading instead to a summary rejection of anything ascribable to that dark chapter of the history of Italian cinema as unworthy of serious consideration.

Cinema and the infrastructure of the empire

The importance of The Path of Our Heroes is to be found in the development of the Italian modernist documentary as much as in the promotion of the so-called “imperial consciousness” of the Italian people around which most educational and propaganda activities of the time congealed.⁴⁰ Ruth Ben-Ghiat traced the film’s modernist aesthetics to the influence of European avant-gardes, namely Soviet Constructivism (prominent in the meta-cinematic section I will discuss later on) and German New Objectivity (for its “productivist and rationalizing imperatives,” via the lesson of Walter Ruttmann, whose 1933 Italian film Acciaio [Steel] featured a few factory sequences resembling the one discussed above).⁴¹ The two references, albeit appropriate, obscure what I would argue is the twofold strategy of the film: its reworking of the city symphony film, the only transnational form developed within the cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, and, at the same time, its revision of the legacy of futurism, the only national and nationalist art movement developed within Italy. By means of a synthesis of the two, which throughout the previous decade had become a sort of Esperanto for the film and art avant-gardes, D’Errico transposed in the imperial context a series of theoretical and aesthetic concerns innervating the very conception of modernity in the 1930s.⁴²

The city symphony model upholds on the level of structure the same tension toward organic consistency characterizing the form of The Path of Our Heroes: visual and rhythmic analogies express a tension toward the ideal of totality underpinning the imperial project. In a similar fashion to Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929), in which the building of the new Communist society is rendered “by linking otherwise separate human beings and activities [and showing] that their actions have a purpose, a meaning, that they are part of a teleological whole,” The Path of Our Heroes seeks to “render” the empire as a visual, spatial, and spiritual unity.⁴³ City symphonies, Erica Stein maintains, foreground “the regulation of urban existence […] disclosing the causality behind new arrangements of space and time;” as such, the comparison with a film largely set in non-urban, non-modern, unsettled areas would hardly be regarded as relevant.⁴⁴ Yet, I propose to identify the focus of the city symphony not in the metropolis itself but in the infrastructure regulating the flows of capital, human, and machines, including the cinematic apparatus. It is from this perspective, then, that The Path of Our Heroes offers an original take on the genre. Following Brian Larkin‘s understanding of infrastructure as “the architecture of circulation,” the film could be described as an empire symphony at the core of which lies an awareness of the infrastructure as the connective tissue and circulatory system of the empire.⁴⁵ Infrastructures, writes Paul Edwards, “constitute artificial environments, walling off modern lives from nature and constructing the latter as commodity, resource, and object of romantic utopianism.”⁴⁶ The analogies between this definition of infrastructure and the imperial project are self-evident—subjecting people, institutions, time and space to a system; isolating technology, society, and nature; transforming nature into a resource.⁴⁷ By acknowledging how infrastructures—their creation as much as their representation—become a prerequisite of the empire, it is then possible to understand better the integration of style and content in The Path of Our Heroes in shaping a cinematic geography of the empire.

The tenth section of the film deals with documentary cinema, a “service” described as being able at the same time “to keep the world informed and to enliven the spirit of the troops and the indigenous population.” Beyond the obvious self-promotional component, this rare audiovisual record of the activities of the Istituto Luce’s East Africa Film Unit introduces the audience to different aspects of film production and exhibition in Ethiopia. The section is composed of two subsections of two sequences, each introduced by a close-up of a typewriter generating a work order destined to distinct film unit groups. In the first case, the camera recedes to show the paper being handed to an operator, who then leaves the Luce Asmara headquarters on a jeep with a small troupe. Operator and former Cineguf member Mario Damicelli is shown shooting aerial views on a plane flying over an Amba. Then, legendary operator Mario Craveri and his camera (endowed with a massive telephoto lens) are framed by two machine-guns, making even more explicit the “weaponization of the cinematic apparatus” already hinted at in the previous sequence.⁴⁸ The second subsection, instead, documents the much publicized autocinema, a truck equipped for screening films in virtually any area this cumbersome motor vehicle could reach. The unconventional open-air cinema setting was already a staple of Istituto Luce’s promotion of cinema, essential for both educational and propaganda purposes among rural communities otherwise impermeable to fascist modernity.⁴⁹ In the colonized territories of the Horn of Africa, even after the conquest of Ethiopia, autocinema constituted the primary experience of cinema for most of the Italian and indigenous populations.⁵⁰ Notwithstanding, the section recognizes the extraordinary, rather than everyday, power of cinema for the indigenous population, here enthralled by Luce newsreel no. 910 showcasing the mass rallies of May 9, 1936 held in Rome to celebrate the proclamation of the empire. The camera dwells on the reaction of a cheering local dignitary as if to suggest analogically the enthusiastic approval enjoyed by the occupiers.

If the inclusion of cinema into the infrastructure of the empire could be connected to the incorporation of futurism, it is not much because of the proto-post-human avant-garde’s fetishization of machines and war, to which The Path of Our Heroes seems likewise invested in. Futurism, instead, is a point of reference in relation to its broader project, emphatically called “the futurist reconstruction of the universe.”⁵¹ From very different perspectives, art theorists and historians such as Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, and Boris Groys have demonstrated that the historical avant-gardes have always engaged not only in transforming the institutions of arts, but most crucially in redefining the interrelationships between arts and society.⁵² Every avant-garde is also a political project, more or less revolutionary, but always destabilizing: every avant-garde embraces an ideal of totality. As a political project, Futurism—and especially 1920s late futurism—is structurally embedded in the fascist regime: historians refer to it as “a spiritualization project that in many ways converged with fascism’s, […] a return to order re-imposing structure on the world, and even re-establishing traditional values.”⁵³

The Path of Our Heroes is a product of late futurism not much for its technological imagination, but for the imagined radical transformation of society through the creation of an infrastructure bearing the promise of human emancipation. The empire evoked by the film is the by-product of the infrastructure, the point of conjunction of all the human and technological efforts that have made it possible. “No one can deny that the birth of an empire might itself be a fact of such emotional force that it is able to become artistic material,” affirmed an anonymous critic on the special issue of film magazine Lo Schermo commemorating the proclamation of the empire.⁵⁴ In assembling a self-enclosed, rational, and extremely functional universe, The Path of Our Heroes conceptualizes the empire as totality and cinema as the privileged instrument to represent, and to a certain extent even to manufacture, the empire. In doing so, it perfectly encapsulates what Bill Nichols considers to be the combination of modernist expression and realist persuasion that characterized documentary cinema before the Griersonian redefinition of documentary as “a sobering ritual of civic participation” separated the two components, condemning the former to near irrelevance. The Path of Our Heroes and, to a more limited extent, the whole imperial documentary tradition in Italy restore the modernist aspiration to “disabuse […] viewers of any commonsense reality […] and construct a new order of understanding.”⁵⁵ In a matter of years, the modernist impulse of interwar documentary, like the empire itself, disappeared from critical view, as if it had never been there in the first place.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

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).