Time.news – “The images of the march on Rome are the first fake news created ad hoc by a party, if by fake news we mean a narrative that is only functional to another type of need: political power, in its achievement or maintenance”.
Tony Saccucci, director, screenwriter, professor (he teaches history and philosophy at the Mamiani classical high school in Rome), author of ‘March on Rome’, the film directed by Irish director Mark Cousins who opened this edition of the Festival in the lagoon raising an uproar due to an image of Giorgia Meloni inserted at the end of the film, together with that of Le Pen, Orban and Bolsonaro.
Saccucci has also written with Cousins the screenplay for ‘Marcia su Roma’ which will go to theaters a few days before October 28th.one hundred years after the Duce’s rise to power, and cold-minded he said he was struck by the brawl in the press that broke out in Venice over that passage (perhaps under elections, it was to be expected) instead of on the evidence, “certainly little valued even by historians “, of that ‘cinematographic’ enterprise,”a gigantic mise-en-scène, designed by skilled directors, a film that changed the history of the world”.
Who was the real director of the march, of the march of 28 October 1922?
“Some contemporaries defined the march on Rome as a comic opera, a clumsy kermesse”, the director from Vallinfreda, a village in the mountains on the outskirts of Rome, replies to Time.news. “However, what still resists in the collective imagination, even a hundred years after the real events, is their representation. We must be careful not to confuse facts with the representation of the facts themselves, because what goes down in history, what is handed down in the memory of a people is that representation that itself becomes historical truth. The ‘march on Rome’ question is emblematic in this sense. What has come down to us is the echo of its mythology. A myth created while events unfolded ”.
Live images, but not spontaneous, do we understand well? Did the Duce and the hierarchs recite a script, were they actors and extras on a set?
“The only existing moving images of the march on Rome are those of Umberto Paradisi’s film entitled ‘A Noi! From the festival of Naples to the triumph of Rome ‘. Those images are precisely the first fake news created ad hoc by a party, if by fake news we mean a narrative that is only functional to another type of need: political power, in its achievement or maintenance “.
Tony Saccucci (right) at the Venice Film Festival with Mark Cousins
Saccucci, director of two films on that period both awarded with two silver ribbons – ‘Il boxer del Duce’, on the story of Leone Jacovacci, and ‘La prima donna’, which tells the tragedy of Emma Carelli, director of the Teatro Costanzi of Rome from 1912 to 1926 – he is convinced that behind the march and its staging there were several directors, inside the fascist party, but also outside, freemasonry, for example. Certainly not a new thesis. “True, but I found the evidence.”
Explain better, what evidence?
“Renzo De Felice in his timeless work on fascism recognizes without hesitation a role to Freemasonry for the success of the march. However, he leaves open the question of how much this role was “important”. Raoul Vittorio Palermi’s freemasonry played an important role in the days immediately preceding the march but he was obviously not the only director. Let’s say that the march was directed by several hands. We have Umberto Paradisi as a true director. Until 13 October 1922 Paradisi was president of FACI (the producer of the film Gloria. Apotheosis of the Unknown Soldier of 1921 on the displacement of the Unknown Soldier, the greatest blockbuster of the 1920s): I discovered that his deputy was Amleto Palermi, his own son by Raoul Palermi “.
Excuse me, but this is not seen in the film.
“In a couple of weeks I will present my PhD entitled ‘The film of the march’ at Sapienza. For four years I have studied the representation of the march on Rome, that is the film A Noi !, in its technical and productive genesis. Precisely through the unveiling of that representation I tried to reconstruct the real facts, to give a name to the protagonists. I disassembled and reassembled the 64,945 frames that make up the 436 scenes of A Noi! “
And what did you discover that we didn’t already know?
“I think I managed to unmask the propaganda construction of that event, also with the help of artificial intelligence. More than a century after the birth of cinema, historiography is ready to welcome the eye of the camera into the ranks of witnesses. Perhaps, to paraphrase Marc Bloch, the time has come when the ogre of the fairy tale begins to smell human flesh between the frames of the films ”.
Images shot and artfully edited to create a propaganda event that would shift consensus. Today, all politicians do it every day with social media.
“Il Duce with the film on the march was the first. The march on Rome was the first fiction of Italian politics. The regime used cinema and images to create fake news which then came true. In a few days at Sapienza I will tell who were the directors and ‘social media managers’ of that event ”.
Is Mussolini still so present in Italian society?
“No. I don’t think that after a century Mussolini is still present. Generations change. What is undoubtedly present is a sort of genetic memory of that spirit of the Italian people that had brought Mussolini to power. In this sense, we could hyperbolically say that Mussolini was present even before he was born. The British continue to need the thaumaturgy of the Crown which in our eyes would seem an anachronism ”.
Are you saying that Italians have fascism in their blood, sorry?
“I’m saying that every people has its own anthropology, its own historical DNA that is built and modified through slow crystallizations. This is the reason why an external eye was essential on a film as important as ‘March on Rome’: that of Mark Cousins ”.
What does Cousins’ film add to the narration of the rise of the Duce that we did not already know?
“Bertolt Brecht, in ‘Life of Galileo’, writes that“ to understand the movement of a sphere you have to ask yourself from the outside ”: this is what we did with the masterful direction of Mark. A foreigner can better see if and to what extent we have metabolized the experience of the twenty-year period ”.