The warm sand of the desert: Italian colonial cinema and the image of Islam

Manduchi Patrizia

First

2017-01-01

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Abstract

The essay focuses on the Italian cinematography set in colonial Libya in the period between the '20s and the '40s. Through the reconstruction of the stereotypes related to Islamic culture and religion that the movie screens made popular in Italy (and all over the world) at the time of the colonial enterprises of Fascism, we want to highlight how the powerful machine of Fascist propaganda had disseminated, not only by documentary films but overall by the fiction cinema, a distorted image of the culture and the religion in an Arabic country. In the first part of the essay it will be rebuilt the events that led to the identification of the cinema as a weapon for the colonial propaganda and the creation of the film industry in Fascist Italy, with a specific political purpose, with great expenditure of means and great artistic commitment. The focus will be on the deconstruction of all those elements of the film speech, built around the idea of a cultural subordination (the Arab and Muslim) that meets and clashes with the Italian superiority, according to the methodology mostly used by cultural studies.