Luigi Zampa: Fascism and italianità

Abstract

It would have been understandable if the image of Fascism and Fascists offered by war-themed neo-realist films, in both its Marxist and its non- Marxist, humanist incarnation, had been an overwhelming one that left no space for alternative visions. Nevertheless, neorealist Fascism was not an all-encompassing orthodoxy and there was indeed room for alternative reconstructions of those years; different gazes turned to aspects of Fascist Italy that neorealist authors had preferred to gloss over and apportioned significant attention to elements they had neglected. Luigi Zampa’s impressively fertile body of work (38 titles between 1933 and 1979) provides an intriguing example of such an alternative. Between 1947 and 1962, Zampa realised no less than five films explicitly concerned with Italy under Mussolini’s regime. Already in the willingness to deal with the 1930s and even the 1920s, a distinguishable fracture emerges between Zampa’s works and those of other neorealists who, as the previous chapter has discussed, mostly privileged post-1943 Resistance narratives. Even so, some of Zampa’s works certainly belong temporally, aesthetically and politically to neorealism: in particular his first postwar film, Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace) of 1947, fits perfectly both stylistically and thematically in the admittedly broad neorealist church.