Of Song and Sponsorship

Amateur Filmmaking Experiments with 16mm Color Film Base on the Frontlines of the Italian Fascist Project

Abstract

This article unearths the material, experimental, and aesthetic factors that shaped the anodyne-seeming amateur film Il Friuli, made in the eponymous eastern border region of Italy over six crucial years leading up to WWII. It argues that the film bears traces of two competing necessities, that of the film stock’s provenance and that of its materiality. On the one hand, the film reveals the “business” of taking an amateur image under centralized political and corporate sponsorship by the Italian Fascist government with equipment from the Nazi-sympathetic film stock company Agfa. On the other, it bears the marks of the local and material stakes that shaped it—the aesthetic codification of landscape and folk, and the experimentation of the new 16mm Agfacolor film stock. Drawing upon paratextual propaganda materials including newspapers, and consumer and industry magazines, it argues that, while the film ostensibly celebrates a twinned victory of cinematic and industrial progress in the service of nationalism and war, moments of material experimentation and encounters with lyrical logics reveal the contradictions at the heart of the fascist narrative.