Italian cinema of the fascist Ventennio (1922–43) used music and, more generally, the acoustic component in an anything but naive way: on the contrary, it focused on the most subliminal component of the filmic text so as to convey constellations of meaning that were useful to the regime’s cultural politics.
The musical component proves to be a strategic ideological tool especially in films with declared propaganda content. Fascist ideology translates into a pervasive musical polarization. On the one hand, music enhances fascism’s propagandistic myths, such as Latinity, Risorgimento, family, peasant land, war, etc. On the other, music is put in the service of anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, as well as anti-Ethiopian iconography, connoting spaces and environments, criminalizing the regime’s enemies (Africans, Marxists, Jews, etc.) through dissonances, cacophonic clusters, as well as the deformation of ethnic and jazz music.
The musical component of fascist cinema contributed toward structuring the regime’s rhetoric for all intents and purposes. Analysing the musical construction of spaces and places in the regime’s cinema can help reconstruct a fundamental chapter, so far neglected, of fascism’s cultural encyclopaedia.
Film Music as Propaganda: The Musical Construction of Space in Fascist Cinema was the title of an interdisciplinary panel conducted by Francesco Finocchiaro together with colleagues Leo Izzo and Elena Mosconi at the international conference Mapping Spaces, Sounding Places. Geographies of Sounds in Audiovisual Media, at the University of Pavia-Cremona (19-22 March 2019).
