Venice Review: Mark Cousins’ ‘The March On Rome’
deadline.comRight at the beginning of The March On Rome, a special screening in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, Mark Cousins draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that cinema is most powerful weapon of all.
It isn’t clear — to me, anyway — whether that joyful proclamation dates back to 1922, when Benito Mussolini led a Fascist march from Naples to Rome, or to some other eruption of historical optimism.
Cinema isn’t as powerful as all that — if it were, Fascism would have been clobbered to a pulp by Chaplin, Lubitsch and all the other filmmakers who lampooned its vainglorious leaders.
But images do matter. They certainly mattered to Italian Fascism.Mussolini was hellbent on taking over Italy “with love if possible, by force if necessary,” a neat phrase much repeated in Cousins’ film essay.
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