![]() ![]() Again, what is Cousins up to? It is difficult to take the film seriously from this point onward.īy the time Cousins concludes his film with images of Russian president Vladimir Putin intended to convey the idea that he is one of Mussolini’s spiritual heirs and of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol after devastation in the ongoing war (but no images of the US-organized destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.), his outlook is no longer much of a mystery. Later in his film, Cousins attempts to link Lenin, along with Hitler and Mussolini, to the anti-working class, reactionary French author Gustave Le Bon and his work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. It is a cinematic lie from beginning to end, aimed at chloroforming critical thought and whipping up enthusiasm for the fascist demagogues and butchers. Riefenstahl’s work is a piece of pro-Nazi propaganda, filmed at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and commissioned by Hitler. It is consistently listed as one of the greatest films ever made (including by Charlie Chaplin and Billy Wilder), and its essential content is historically accurate, although Eisenstein dramatized the various episodes. However, The March on Rome strikes a sour note very early on when it has the misguidedness (and elementary lack of knowledge) to suggest that Paradisi’s A Noi!, as Cousins similarly has asserted in a written comment, “was early in the history of propaganda cinema-before Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.”Įisenstein’s film enthrallingly and movingly portrays a critical episode in the 1905 Revolution when sailors aboard the Imperial Russian Navy’s Potemkin mutinied against rotten food, brutal treatment and tsarist tyranny as a whole. The director usefully points out the tricks performed by Paradisi to make the pro-fascist crowds at the time much larger than they were, to help build the legend of an Italy unified behind Mussolini’s forces. ![]() The march, explains Cousins in his narration, had to be “golden, Virgilian … anointed, elevated, rigorous.” The new documentary points out that it was probably shot on October 30-31, because it poured on the previous days and rain-soaked, muddy figures were not considered “heroic” enough. A Noi!, for example, claims that one of its scenes of fascist marchers occurred on October 28-29. Cousins takes interesting pains to point out the distortions and deceptions in Paradisi’s work. The association of Trump (and later, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Meloni, Modi, Orbán, Germany’s AfD, etc.) with Mussolini and fascism is appropriate and necessary, but since this is accompanied by serious errors or omissions of critical facts, the value of the connection is largely lost, or its genuine significance obscured.Ĭousins makes much of Umberto Paradisi’s A Noi! ( To Us!, 1922), an official National Fascist Party propaganda film, which purports to document Mussolini’s March on Rome. Mussolini (second from left) inspects Blackshirts before the March on RomeĬousins opens his film with the February 2016 incident in which Donald Trump retweeted a phrase widely associated with the Italian dictator, “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” and subsequently defended his action. ![]()
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