Image courtesy of The Match Factory
To mark the 100th anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922, the new documentary from prolific filmmaker Mark Cousins takes its cue from Umberto Paradisi’s 1923 film A Noi made under the aegis of the Fascist Party and which charts the period leading up to Mussolini’s eventual takeover of the Italian government.
Weaving striking archival footage with new performance material featuring actress Alba Rohrwacher and interlinked with associated feature film material, The March on Rome (Marcia su Roma) provides the perfect platform for Cousins to ruminate on the dark times of Mussolini’s rule and how fascism still lurks in the shadows. Premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival it stands out thanks to judicious use of the powerful stock footage and photos provided by the Luce Archives.
Co-written by Cousins and Tony Saccucci (and with Cousins narrating), the film is produced by Palomar DOC and is set to be released in Italy on October 20 – the actual 100th anniversary of the fateful event.
The astute use of film material – largely Italian – is very much a Cousins’ trademark, but while the material is impressive the subject matter means that here we have a much more sombre Cousins charting the rise of fascism. The film opens with stunning archival footage of Italy in the 1920s, with music from Madame Butterfly playing on the soundtrack. He begins the story in Naples using extracts from Italy’s first female filmmaker Elvira Notari and her 1922 film E Piccerella which showed footage of Black Shirts with the caption “Special trains for the ‘wonderful fascist forces.’”
This offers a taste of what is to come. The film that is core to the theme is Umberto Paradisi’s 1923 film A Noi which focussed on the 1922 fascist rally in Naples and the subsequent march towards the Italian capital. It was, according to Cousins, “aimed as a portrait of the key developments of fascism but distorted the truth…a disturbing truth.” He stresses how it was a film made three years before Eisenstein’s “propulsive” Battleship Potemkin and 13 years before Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will.
Cousins describes A Noi as a “grubby 44 minutes of cinema,” detailing how its edits helped reinforce Mussolini’s position and influence – “Mussolini was not on the March in case it failed. When it went his way he headed to Rome – he was back inserted into the action,” he narrates – and says the film helped pave the way for fascism. At this point (30minutes into the film) we get our first glimpse of archival footage of Adolf Hitler.
Cousins’ documentary film details the intricacies of Mussolini’s regime – from the influence of the freemasons and claims by MP Giacomo Matteotti that a US company bribed Mussolini in order to gain access to North Africa, through to Mussolini’s admiration for Gustave Le Bon’s book ‘The Psychology of the Masses’ – while also often dipping back into cinema, dwelling on Ettore Scola’s 1977 A Special Day (starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni) about gender and fascism, set on a day when Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome in May 1938.
The film also features Alba Rohrwacher in the role of Anna, a working-class woman embodying the feeling of ordinary Italians at the time, initially an enthusiastic supporter of the regime, then a disillusioned and fierce critic.
As Cousins chronicles the development of fascism the story tracks the older Mussolini, adding that “World War II put a stop to the March.” On July 25 1943, 21 years after the March on Rome, Mussolini resigned, and was arrested and imprisoned (before his liberation by German paratroopers, eventual recapture and execution in April 1945). But Cousins adds: “The end of Italian fascism was not the end of fascism – it was a spreader event.”
In his festival statement Cousins adds: “Far right politics appear in many places. I grew up in Northern Ireland in the ‘70s, which was our own anni di piombo, the ‘leaden years’ of political and sectarian unrest. It was a time of a low temperature war – the Troubles – but it was also a time when the UK government operated underground with far right paramilitaries to suppress the civil rights movement.”
“The dangerous right were, therefore, a part of my life,” he adds. “In the early 1990s I co-directed a film in which we tried to expose the far right in France, Scotland, Austria and Germany – Another Journey by Train. So this is a topic I have been interested in for most of my career, and the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome seemed like a good occasion to return to it.”
Italy, 2022, 97mins
Dir: Mark Cousins
Production: Palomar DOC
International sales: The Match Factory
Producers: Carlo Degli Esposti and Nicola Serra at Palomar; Antonio Badalamenti and Andrea Romeo at Palomar DOC
Scr: Mark Cousins, Tony Saccucci
Cinematography: Mark Cousins, Timoty Aliprandi
Editor: Timo Langer
With: Alba Rohrwacher
