Prolific documentarian Mark Cousins delivers perhaps his most focused work yet with The March on Rome, an at times frame-by-frame analysis of an early Italian Fascist propaganda film used to demonstrate the roots of fascism and their insidious growth over the past century up to the present day. With the stated intention of drawing parallels between then and now, the director successfully juggles a wealth of archival footage to show how Benito Mussolini’s infamous 1922 March on Rome was never a fait accompli, its unexpected success a spur for far right takeovers worldwide whose pattern book remains disturbingly unchanged. Inserted staged monologues with Alba Rohrwacher are wholly unnecessary and Cousins would have done well to put more emphasis on the continued presence – no, legitimization – in Italy of fascist extremists, but overall The March on Rome is a thought-provoking, exceedingly well-made work whose international aims will serve it well for worldwide sales.
“Bombastic” and “fascism” tend to go together, so perhaps it wasn’t a mistake to open with Donald Trump aggressively defending his use of a Mussolini quote, though drowning the Orange Man’s pathetic justification with Adrianne Pieczonka’s performance of Puccini’s “Un bel dì” is a little too much, too soon. Presumably Cousins felt he needed to grab his audience instantly before shifting to footage from silent-era director Elvira Notari, using her Naples setting to dive into the origins of the Blackshirts and their march north to Rome. The documentary briefly sets the scene, presenting an Italy victorious after World War I but tense with social unrest, using Alba Rohrwacher’s fictional character speaking directly to camera as a means of introducing Umberto Paradisi’s 44-minute so-called documentary of the March, A noi! (roughly translatable as “To Us!”), released just days after the events took place.
Cousins in voiceover proceeds to deconstruct the film, which he discusses as a precursor to later works like Battleship Potemkin and Triumph of the Will – it’s a tricky comparison, making it seem as if A noi! was one of the first propaganda films when in truth cinema was being used for these purposes starting with the Spanish-American War. He’s on firmer ground immediately thereafter when he examines Paradisi’s film more closely, comparing the timeline with actual events and showing how the director cleverly used tight framing and other tricks to make it seem like the March on Rome was a massive, spontaneous uprising (hello again Donald Trump) with a glorious, inevitable conclusion. The truth, as he cogently develops, is that Mussolini was uncertain of the outcome, and it was thanks to a powerful conservative Masonic lodge pressuring King Vittorio Emanuele III to go against his prime minister that the Blackshirts’ ragtag sortie became a successful putsch.
Cousins then goes on to connect the dots with fascist movements that followed, showing how Franco, Salazar and others in the immediate aftermath were galvanized by Mussolini’s success, and how all of them in turn were inspired by far-right theorist like Gustave Le Bon (including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurists’ advocation of annihilation is trickier without context). The documentary’s middle part is more focused on how Fascism used the theatre of mass events to animate and control the population, drawing inspiration from the theatricality of the Catholic Church and then ramping it up by a million degrees. It’s on shakier ground when it seems to imply that fascist countries were worse colonial powers than other nations – Belgium, anyone? – but Italian brutality in Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia, predicated on a division of peoples between “civilized” and “uncivilized,” was unquestionably horrific.
With just ten minutes of running time to go, Cousins then shifts to Rome today, showing immigrant shops and restaurants, though even a superficial visitor to the Eternal City can see that integration barely exists, and the dark presence of violent far-right extremists like the Casa Pound periodically returns to Rome’s walls and billboards in the form of manifestos and announcements. That part isn’t properly underlined here, which is a missed opportunity, and while he shows supporters of the football club Lazio arriving at the Olympic Stadium, one of the few places in the city still displaying its Fascist decorations, he neglects to mention that being a Lazio fan implies a pro-Fascist outlook.
Thankfully not everything is dark, and Cousins’ cinephilia shines through when he uses a montage of dance sequences from an Elvira Notari film as well as Il conformista, Un giorno particolare and even Salò to show how even in the darkest moments we can privilege our humanity to resist destructive forces. 1922 wasn’t all bad, as he rightly claims: it’s the period that also produced masterpieces like Dreyer’s Die Gezeichneten, Gance’s La Roue, Chaplin’s Pay Day and Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. But we allowed what was good and compassionate then to get hijacked, just as we always do. The March on Rome closes with shots of the destruction of Mariupol by Russian forces and leaders including Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro and Narendra Modi, who’ve all risen to prominence by taking lessons from Mussolini’s playbook of intolerance and fear. And then there’s Giorgia Meloni, the woman likely to be Italy’s next prime minister with a 25% lead in the polls. Though she’s recently tried to distance herself from her party’s Fascist antecedents, she continues to seek support among the extreme right, signaling troubling times for a nation that still hasn’t recovered from the March on Rome, one hundred years ago.
Director: Mark Cousins
Written by: Mark Cousins, Tony Saccucci
Cast: Alba Rohrwacher
Producers: Carlo Degli Esposti, Nicola Serra
Co-producer: Andrea Romeo
Executive producer: Antonio Badalamenti
Cinematography: Mark Cousins, Timoty Aliprandi
Costume designer: Alessia Condò
Editing: Timo Langer
Sound: Stefano Di Fiore
Production companies: Palomar, in collaboration with Il Saggiatore, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli autori)
In English, Italian
97 minutes
