The Imperial Moment in Fascist Cinema

This essay looks at how Italian feature and non-fiction cinema on imperial themes engaged with themes of temporality as it asserted Fascism's right to occupy Ethiopia (1936) and, during World War II, Greece as well. For the Fascists, cinema was a means of displaying the colonies as theatres of Italian modernity, rebuking rhetorics of Italian «backwardness». As I argue, the movies made between 1936 and 1943 reflect the belief of many film professionals and Fascist officials that the scale of the Ethiopian invasion, and the stories it generated, could not be adequately communicated by traditional means of representation; only the movie camera could adequately capture the dense and mobile Fascist present. I analyse Roberto Rossellini's 1942 aviation drama, Un pilota ritorna / A Pilot Returns, as the apex of this form of temporal and cinematographic thinking, but also as a film that presaged the undoing of Fascism's empire and its cult of Italian modernity.