La Luce per l’impero. I cinegiornali sull’Africa Orientale Italiana 1935-1942

In my PhD dissertation I try to answer to the question on how the Fascist regime in Italy represented its empire through the “Istituto Luce” newsreels, between the 1935 and 1942. Given the lack of a comprehensive work on the above mentioned subject, I’ve investigated on how cinematographic representations could shape or redefine the process of identity building during the “Ventennio”. In order to achieve a broad theoretical frame, in the first chapter I’ve analysed the roots of the Italian fascist’s culture. The discourse as conceived by Michel Foucault is a key concept to investigate about the relationship between power, knowledge and culture. I’ve used two theoretical evolutions of the Foucault’s discourse, namely the visual discourse and the Orientalist theory. In so doing I’ll be able to apply the concept in order to study the visual products about colonialism. Then I’ve investigated about the history of Italian colonialism, focusing on both the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the reasons of the delay that characterized the early studies on the topic. In the chapter two I’ve specified a methodological frame to understand the relationship between Fascism and Italian masses through the newest mass media such as cinema and radio broadcast; as a result I underline several concept of modernity which found place within the cultural space of Fascism. The reconstruction of the “manufacture of consent” allows me a first examination about the role of the “Istituto Luce” within the Fascist regime. New archival records give me the possibility to a meticulous reconstruction of the activity of the Istituto Luce during the Ethiopia’s war. Chapter three is about the “Reparto fotocinematografico Africa Orientale dell’Istituto Luce” (RAO), which factually made imperial newsreels. Related to the activity of the RAO, other two original aspects have been analysed: the activity of the “Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda Africa Orientale” which had to coordinate the whole info-propagandistic activity between Africa and Italy; then I’ve focused my attention on the diffusion of the cinema in the “Africa Orientale Italiana” as a tool to reinforce racial borders between black and white people. In the last chapter I’ve analysed 200 newsreels in order to investigate about the gap between reality and cinematographic representations. Visual analysis is placed in the historical and theoretical frame above mentioned: in this way I’m able to reconstruct the discourse on identity and otherness that shaped these cinematographic representations.