The March on Rome review – Mark Cousins dissects Mussolini and the grisly founding myth of fascism | Venice film festival 2022

Mark Cousins’s dynamic and entirely arresting documentary essay, with his distinctive collage of photos, clips and narrative voiceover, returns us to the grisly founding myth of European fascism for its 100th birthday: Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922: his ragged march of blackshirts from Naples to the capital.

On their arrival, and in the face of the marchers’ supposed fascist might, Italy’s abysmal King Victor Emmanuel III simply outdid Chamberlain in timidity, overruled his prime minister Luigi Facta and installed Mussolini instead, so that no actual coup d’état was required. It is on loss-of-nerve moments like that that history turns, and Cousins rightly juxtaposes it with America’s Capitol riots, which did not result in the neo-squadristi concession that Donald Trump was hoping to force.

Cousins also discusses the part played by the fledgling artform of cinema in promoting Mussolini’s supposed glamour and prestige, and in bringing its own delirious futurist excitement into alignment with fascism. Particularly, Cousins expertly deconstructs A Noi! or Us! by Umberto Paradisi, the propaganda film that created the mythology of the march and exaggerated its size and popular acclaim. In particular, the film erased the fact that Mussolini was not heroically in the vanguard, but hung back in Milan for some time, ready to flee the country if the march failed – and took a train to Rome when it appeared to be successful. Mussolini appears in the film at first as a single portrait study looming out of the darkness as in a horror film (like a plumper Nosferatu in fact). The film finally shows us the brutal archive footage of Mussolini’s dead body (and that of his mistress) when he was eventually deposed and turned on by the people. Cousins doesn’t make the comparison, but I thought of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu.

The March on Rome discourses widely and arguably even waywardly in the personal, subjective style that Cousins has made his own. Using contemporary footage, he shrewdly talks about Italy’s hardly noticed heritage of fascist architecture, how these forms and signs have been reabsorbed into postwar life mostly without being destroyed and cinema buildings have been part of this renewal and repurposing. However, Cousins doesn’t mention the Venice film festival, a key invention of the Mussolini government – the Palazzo Del Casinò on the Lido is surely one of the most obviously fascist-era buildings in Europe.

Pure cinephilia is not the main purpose as it has been with Cousins’s other works, although in the film’s final segments he talks about the other film-makers of the 1920s, Dreyer and Chaplin, people whose genius showed that cinema is vital when it has nothing to do with coercion of propaganda, when it is fluid, malleable, sensitive, human – and funny. The film’s other notable invention is the periodic appearance of an imagined working-class woman chorically addressing the camera: at first seduced by fascism and then disenchanted, played by Alba Rohrwacher. It is she who is to return again and again to a Mussolini slogan, that order and greatness would be restored to Italy by the fascists “with love if possible, by force if necessary”. The sheer fatuity and dishonesty of that slogan is certainly exposed here. The eloquence of this film is invigorating – and educational.

Mark Cousins’s dynamic and entirely arresting documentary essay, with his distinctive collage of photos, clips and narrative voiceover, returns us to the grisly founding myth of European fascism for its 100th birthday: Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922: his ragged march of blackshirts from Naples to the capital.

On their arrival, and in the face of the marchers’ supposed fascist might, Italy’s abysmal King Victor Emmanuel III simply outdid Chamberlain in timidity, overruled his prime minister Luigi Facta and installed Mussolini instead, so that no actual coup d’état was required. It is on loss-of-nerve moments like that that history turns, and Cousins rightly juxtaposes it with America’s Capitol riots, which did not result in the neo-squadristi concession that Donald Trump was hoping to force.

Cousins also discusses the part played by the fledgling artform of cinema in promoting Mussolini’s supposed glamour and prestige, and in bringing its own delirious futurist excitement into alignment with fascism. Particularly, Cousins expertly deconstructs A Noi! or Us! by Umberto Paradisi, the propaganda film that created the mythology of the march and exaggerated its size and popular acclaim. In particular, the film erased the fact that Mussolini was not heroically in the vanguard, but hung back in Milan for some time, ready to flee the country if the march failed – and took a train to Rome when it appeared to be successful. Mussolini appears in the film at first as a single portrait study looming out of the darkness as in a horror film (like a plumper Nosferatu in fact). The film finally shows us the brutal archive footage of Mussolini’s dead body (and that of his mistress) when he was eventually deposed and turned on by the people. Cousins doesn’t make the comparison, but I thought of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu.

The March on Rome discourses widely and arguably even waywardly in the personal, subjective style that Cousins has made his own. Using contemporary footage, he shrewdly talks about Italy’s hardly noticed heritage of fascist architecture, how these forms and signs have been reabsorbed into postwar life mostly without being destroyed and cinema buildings have been part of this renewal and repurposing. However, Cousins doesn’t mention the Venice film festival, a key invention of the Mussolini government – the Palazzo Del Casinò on the Lido is surely one of the most obviously fascist-era buildings in Europe.

Pure cinephilia is not the main purpose as it has been with Cousins’s other works, although in the film’s final segments he talks about the other film-makers of the 1920s, Dreyer and Chaplin, people whose genius showed that cinema is vital when it has nothing to do with coercion of propaganda, when it is fluid, malleable, sensitive, human – and funny. The film’s other notable invention is the periodic appearance of an imagined working-class woman chorically addressing the camera: at first seduced by fascism and then disenchanted, played by Alba Rohrwacher. It is she who is to return again and again to a Mussolini slogan, that order and greatness would be restored to Italy by the fascists “with love if possible, by force if necessary”. The sheer fatuity and dishonesty of that slogan is certainly exposed here. The eloquence of this film is invigorating – and educational.