Fascism in Italian cinema since 1945 ; The politics and aesthetics of memory
Lichtner, GiacomoThis argument is supported by the identification of four stages in Italian cinema’s representation of Fascism: Resistance (comprised of the postwar neorealism images of Fascism and the 1950s satires of the regime by director Luigi Zampa), Reconstruction (as Lichtner labels the re-visitation of the 1922-1945 period in the films produced during Italy’s Economic Miracle), Revolution (the engaged films of the 1970s) and Revisionism. In the latter section Lichtner groups a number of recent films produced either for television or for the silver screen during the age of Berlusconi’s governments which attempted to mitigate Fascism’s negative connotations. Lichtner should be credited for being the first one to discuss these films in an academic context and for doing so without having the political climate that informed their production be the only factor in his assessment – in fact he defines the revisionism carried out in these films as “politicised confusion” rather than propaganda.