In “The March on Rome,” which premieres in the Venice Days sidebar at Wednesday’s Venice Film Festival, Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker Mark Cousins traces the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and its aftermath in Europe in the 1930s. It also draws a dotted line from those events to the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in January 2021.
The documentary, illustrated with archive footage and featured cinematic analysis of The Cousins, begins with Donald Trump’s defense of his decision to retweet a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than to live 100 years as a sheep.” Later in the film, Cousins inserts footage of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, hoping to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
The issue of quoting Mussolini made a strong impression on Cousins at the time. “I remember seeing this thing on TV and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s not actually denouncing Mussolini,'” he says. “Their cousins were also shocked by a line in Trump’s inauguration speech: ‘This American massacre stops here and it stops now.’ Wow, massacre. The Obama era was a lot of things, but it wasn’t a massacre.”
He adds, “The thing about the outbreak is its direction of travel. It goes further, unless it’s stopped, and using the word ‘massacre’ was a huge leap to the right, so I think this was an important moment.”
Mark Cousins
In the ’90s, Cousins had made a movie, Another Train Journey, for Channel 4, about neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, and he’d gone underground to research it. “I wasn’t familiar with this area, and when producer Andrea Romeo called me [to make this film]I jumped at the chance.”
The project was brought to Romeo by researcher Tony Sacucci, whose work then formed the basis for the Cousins scenario. Romeo is credited as co-producer of the film, which was produced by Carlo degli Esposit and Nicola Serra for Palomar. The Match Factory deals with global sales.
At the center of the “March on Rome” is Umberto Paradisi’s film “A Noi!” , which purports to show how the march of the fascists in the Italian capital in 1922 was a precursor to Mussolini’s rise to power. However, Cousins shows how the film presents a distorted version of events.
But he started with another movie, Elvira Notari’s “E Bexerella,” which shows street scenes from real life in 1920s Naples. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a movie about how movies can lie, so start with a movie that doesn’t lie,’” he says. “I wanted to show that the wonderful, imaginative human work was done in 1922, as well as very reductive material like ‘A Noi!’”
Other films that Cousins used to support his thesis on how cinema can convey truth or tell lies include Augusto Tretti’s satire “Il potere” and Ettore Scola’s drama “A Special Day” starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
To some extent, the cinema itself is on trial in the “March of Rome”. “Those of us who love cinema, like you and me, like to think that movies are a force for good in the world. But if you’re really honest, and you look at the evidence, you can’t really say over the past 120 years that cinema has necessarily been a force for good, Cousins says. Cinema has been great at certain things of desire, pleasure, and escape, but it has also been a reactionary force in many ways. It was used for propaganda and for the purpose of murder, I believe. So “Noi!” for example “.
He makes other criticisms of films, referring to his series Film Story: Epic, in which he argues that “Hollywood was like a test tube, celebrating youth and beauty, and that’s it.” “I want to celebrate cinema, but we have to be honest, I’ve done horrible things, I’ve committed crimes,” he adds.
He has no problem with cinema taking up political themes, although he has a problem when “cinema is under imagination. When it’s traditional and kinda boring.” He adds, “Even if you look at the role that cinema played in fascism, every film is bad, there is Bertolucci’s ‘Il Conformista’, you know, or ‘1900.’” Cinema is just part of the way we dramatize our lives and try to tell us: Look what we’ve just lived or what we’re going to live through, and all that’s great and without that we’d be deprived, though there are dirty movies, and there are very right-wing movies, I’d rather have those movies on no thing “.
Much of the film looks at the backstory of Mussolini’s rise to power, which includes the role the Freemasons played in his rise. It also takes a look at the thinkers Il Duce based his ideas on, from the Italian poet Gabriel D’Annunzio and the Futurists, to Sigmund Freud and Gustave Le Bon, and in particular his book The Psychology of Crowds. Mussolini saw himself as an artist working with the public and, like some other artists, considered himself superior to the common man. Cousins says fascism’s simplistic view of the world is “like a horror movie.” “She knows what scares you.”
The film also contains sequences in which the actor Alba Rohrwacher plays a character called Anna. “I knew I needed some introduction. It’s like you’re painting a painting: Sometimes you need an introduction to be aware of the background,” he says.
The Cousins’ next feature-length documentary, A Surprising Glimpse into Deeper Things, will focus on Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham. Produced by Adam Doughty and Mary Bell.
Barns-Graham was a leading member of the St Ives School of Artists, and contributed to the development of British abstract art in the twentieth century.
Cousins says: “After making a film about fascism, devastation, and the poverty of imagination, the new movie is about a great painter named Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who was diverse in nerves. One day in 1949, she climbed a glacier in Switzerland, changed her life, and painted for 50 years “.
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