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The invisible war on nature: the Abyssinian war (1935–1936) in newsreels and documentaries in Fascist Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Federico Caprotti
Federico Caprotti*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, King's College, London, UK
*
∗Email: federico.caprotti@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

This contribution to the special issue focuses on newsreels and documentaries that were produced concerning the Second Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–1936), commonly known as the Abyssinian War. It aims to contextualise LUCE's filmic production on the war, so as to create a framework in which the institute can be understood not only as being part of a wider politics of propaganda in Fascist Italy, but as an example of a modern socio-technical organisation that enabled the discursive construction of East African nature as ‘Other’ and therefore helped to justify colonial war as a process of sanitised creative destruction aimed at replacing a previous, negative ‘first nature’ with a positive, Fascist and Italian ‘second nature’. The article draws on archival documents from Mussolini's government cabinet, and on LUCE documentaries and newsreels; these sources are used to create a background against which LUCE's concern with the Second Italo–Ethiopian War can be understood.

Keywords

FascismEthiopiaAbyssinianewsreelsfilm
Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 19 , Issue 3: Fascism and nature , August 2014 , pp. 305 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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