Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon : University of Minnesota Press : 9781517910846 : 1517910846 : 12 Dec 2023 : A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini's regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance   Looking at Italy's national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film's mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism.    Exploiting realism's aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini's biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism's susceptib