FeaturedFilmReview

The March on Rome – 2nd Italian Doc Season

Reviewer: Jane Darcy

Writer: Mark Cousins, Tommaso Renzoni, Tony Saccucci

Director: Mark Cousins

Mark Cousins’ documentary The March on Rome is more than a straightforward retelling of the ascent and fall of Benito Mussolini. Cousins’ aim is polemical, arguing for a reconsideration of key moments in the rise of Fascism. His focus is Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922. This March, he argues, continues to exert its insidious influence today on extreme right-wing regimes world-wide.

Central to the power of this single event, Cousins argues, is the power of film-making itself. He dissects Umberto Paradisi’s propagandist film, A Noi! (1922), revealing the many ways in which Paradisi deliberately framed scenes and edited footage to glorify Mussolini and suggest his Fascist Party had huge popular support.

Like Adam Curtis, Cousins uses a collage of archive footage and contemporary shots of modern Rome. But where Curtis aims for a dazzling aesthetic of spectacle and speed, Cousins presents a meditation that is at times almost poetic, his narrative delivered quietly and thoughtfully. The film’s structure is clear: it’s divided into five stages or acts, each introduced by a short excerpt of restrained baroque music – a world apart from Curtis’s propulsive sound tracks. Cousins doesn’t demand we react: he allows the horrors of the compelling story to speak for themselves.

The deceptions of A Noi! are fascinating. Paradisi suggests the March happened in glorious sunshine. The truth was Black Shirts trudged through heavy rain. Paradisi therefore reshot scenes a couple of days later when the weather obliged, but disguises the dates on screen. He hides the fact that at supposedly triumphant rally in Naples where Mussolini calls inaugurates the March, only half the expected number turn up. Cousins doesn’t need here to refer to Trump’s inauguration crowds, but the parallel is clear: we have already been shown Trump’s touchy reaction when he’s told a supposedly inspirational quotation he is using is in fact from Mussolini.

More significantly, Mussolini himself was not actually on the March on 22 October, but lying low in Milan, ready for a quick getaway if the insurrection failed. Paradisi’s editing, however, implies he is there, leading from the front. The footage of the Black Shirts reaching Rome’s iconic Altare della Patria is another deception. Paradisi makes it appear as if Mussolini was there. But in fact he was at the Savoy making deals with Italy’s most powerful freemasons. The role of Grandmaster Raoul Palermi has not been exposed, Cousins argues. It was he who stopped King Victor Emmanuel III signing the Prime Minister’s declaration of a state of siege, therefore allowing the Black Shirts to march in. By 30 October, Mussolini had been made Italy’s Prime Minister.

The whole March on Italy, Cousins argues, was therefore a façade.

He then takes us briskly through the atrocities of Mussolini’s dictatorship – the repression, the political assassinations, the aggressive programme of colonization, ending in his arrest, his years as a puppet leader under Hitler and his death at the hands of partisans.

But fascism doesn’t fall with the fall of Mussolini. Cousins sketches out his direct influence – and in particular the influence of the March on Rome – on Hitler and later on Franco. And the story doesn’t end there. The March continues to inspire right-wing leaders around the world – from Viktor Orban and Jair Bolsonaro to Narendra Modi, Marie Le Pen and now Giorgia Meloni.

The March on Rome offers a compelling argument, all the more powerful by being quietly stated.

The March on Rome is screening at the 2nd Italian Doc Season from 27-28 January.

The Reviews Hub Score

Mussolini compellingly re-examined

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