Fascism and Italian Cinema David Forgacs [published in The Italian Cinema Book, edited by Peter Bondanella, London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, Chapter 5, pp. 42-49] Italy had a fascist government for just over twenty years, from October 1922, when Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts seized power, to July 1943, when a majority of his own cabinet ousted him in order to pull the country out of a world war in which it had suffered disastrous reversals. In October 1943 a rump fascist regime known as the Republic of Salò, again headed by Mussolini, was set up with the backing of Nazi Germany in the north of Italy, then occupied by German forces. It claimed to be the legitimate government, but it was opposed by the anti-fascist Resistance and by the advance of British and American troops from the south. Fascism’s final demise came in April 1945 when Mussolini was captured and shot by Communist partisans and Italy was liberated. What relations existed between fascism and the cinema over this period? There is no clear consensus about this among film scholars and historians. Some argue that the cinema was strongly shaped by fascism, while others maintain that its influence was more limited. The former generally point to the propaganda newsreels, bans of some foreign films and revisions by censors of treatments and scripts for Italian films. They also argue that there was a distinct fascist ideological influence on many feature films, not just those with an overt political content. The latter point to the limits of state control of private film production, the Italian film industry’s commercial orientation, including its attempts to emulate Hollywood, and the numerical prevalence of entertainment films. They also point out that from 1922 to 1939, in other words for most of the period of fascist government, many more American films were being screened in Italy than Italian ones. In 1938, for example, American films accounted for 74% of box office gross in Italy. So, until 1939 the cinema in Italy could, from the audience’s point of view, be said to have been more American than Italian. Hard-line fascists repeatedly complained about the seemingly irrepressible ‘esterofilia’ (love of foreign things) of the Italian public and of certain film critics.