Diana Garvin reviews Cinema is the Strongest Weapon

Lorenzo Fabbri. Cinema is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 320 pp.

Review by Diana Garvin

20 February 2025

Lorenzo Fabbri’s Cinema is the Strongest Weapon is dynamite, from its first whisper of warning to the bang at the end. This study of race-making and resistance in Fascist Italy combines cinema historiography with film analysis to demonstrate how this art form impacts people and their shared institutions. In this relationship, Fabbri perceives the crux of cinema’s power to shape “racialized identity politics and biopolitical warfare” (p. 27). Fascism is not a twenty-year psychosis that infected otherwise sane people. Rather, it was “a phenomenon that has deep roots in Italian sociopolitical theory” (p. 28). Fabbri’s work shines here, where he accords all that is unspoken sufficient space to breathe. He asks us to consider the deeply uncomfortable: What if there is a “'fascism in all of us' . . . weaponized so easily for the worst”? (p. 31)

This question is not merely academic. For Fabbri, it is a family matter. In his exquisitely rendered preface, Fabbri tells the story of his grandfather, Corrado. Corrado was drafted into the Italian military, fighting on the Fascist side in Greece and Africa. Then, he turned away from Benito Mussolini’s puppet government in Salò to battle the remnants of the Fascist state. Captured by Nazis and interned at the Dachau concentration camp, Corrado managed to survive. He went on to meet someone and fall in love. I will not spoil the ending. But here, and throughout this book, Fabbri weaves a masterful interplay of suspense and payoff.

In his introduction, Fabbri excavates the prefascist roots of the weaponization of cinema, a means to make and manage race. In Chapter 1, “The Government of the Ungovernable,” Fabbri examines two early film novels, Gualtiero Fabbri’s Al Cinematografo (At the Movies, 1907) and Luigi Pirandello’s Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio Operatore (Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1915). His analyses demonstrate that liberal Italy already handled film like a gun, discharging dark desires that could damage the country’s racial health. Fabbri then devotes a substantial portion of the book (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) to filmic representations of labor as national rebirth, in contexts both rural (Alessandro Blasetti’s Terra Madre [Motherland, 1931]) and urban (I Grandi Magazzini [Department Store, 1939]). Turning from the madrepatria to the ocean beyond, Chapter 5, “The White Italian Mediterranean,” investigates how Fascism fashioned Italy contrapuntally. The Mediterranean’s menaces, no longer skulking in the deep, attack—transforming Italian citizens into soldier-heroes. Chapter 6 poses the question of how laughter functions as resistance. Refreshingly, Fabbri answers by taking Vittorio De Sica’s romantic comedies seriously, investigating them as political vehicles. In Chapter 7, “Queer Antifascism,” Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) illustrates the call to adopt outward-looking thinking to escape the suffering of mainland Italy in the latter years of World War II. In the conclusion, we emerge blinking into the sunlight and rubble of liberated Italy. Here, Fabbri, makes the case for his project. By studying these films, “we might catch some glimpse of what Fascism was . . . but also what anti-Fascism–and ‘we’–could be” (p. 248).