| Sumario: | This article examines the foregrounding of Catholic iconography in three 1943 Fascist war films:Quelli della montagna(Aldo Vergano),Il treno crociato(Carlo Campogalliani), andI trecento della settima(Mario Baffico). By portraying armed conflict not in terms of victory and defeat, but as momentary struggle on the path to salvation, this particular kind of cinema moved away from national bombast, or at least tempered it, and rewrote deprivation as abnegation, defeat as providence, and death as martyrdom. In this context, the fallen soldier becomes aEucharistic Body: a ritualistic offering of the transubstantiated body of a sacrificial lamb to the congregation (the audience and the nation), who by taking part in this cinematic communion acknowledges his immolation and accepts military defeat as the will of a higher power.
|
|---|