Europe on screen, 1932-1943 Projecting a new European Fascist continent in the newsreels of the Luce Institute

This thesis is the first investigation of the Luce Institute’s (LUCE) newsreels, which were filmed throughout Europe during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. The project focuses on analysing all LUCE’s productions in four European countries in specific periods of time (Greece 1939–1940; Spain 1932–1943; Albania 1939–1943; Germany 1933–1942). All of these nations were at the core of Fascist foreign policy in Europe, and were central to LUCE’s strategic plans. Dozens of newsreels were filmed and subsequently distributed in Italian cinemas; they showed the rampant Fascist interventionism in 1930s Europe, and the diplomatic relationships of the Duce’s regime with Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco.
The newsreels conveyed to the audience the idea that the Italian Fascist regime was building a network of allies to foster the expansion of Fascism in Europe, in order to defeat the European liberal democracies. The thesis shows that the newsreels were a genre that mixed the realism of news and documentary film with fabricated elements typical of political advertisements and commercials. If on the one hand these productions were partially inspired by the Cine-Pravda of Dziga Vertov, on the other, they widely anticipated techniques that characterized the Nazi newsreels.
Through thousands of these non-fiction films, the Duce’s regime portrayed Europe as a continent that was about to be conquered by Fascism and was becoming a utopian and illusory projection of Mussolini’s Italy.