Blasetti's Italian Fascist propaganda epic "1860" screening at the Harvard Film ARchive tonight at 9:30pm.
Nazi, Soviet even Chinese Communist film propaganda all get revived locally, but Mussolini and his blackshirts get bupkiss. This is in part due to creative shortcomings in the Italian film industry at the time (they had no Reifenstahl no Eisenstein)and the lateness by which the Fascist regime came to the making of "positive propaganda".
So tonight's show is unique, however let the record show that Channel Zero has already screened such Italian propaganda films as "Scipio Africanus" (once billed as Mussolini's answer to "Triumph of the Will") and Rossellini's "The Man from the Cross" (1942).
But then, we are never envious when some larger institution picks up one of our ideas, the Harvard Film Archive and the like are in a position to exploit more fully what are in the end worthwhile but extremely obscure films.
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