Camicia Nera: Watching Propaganda from the Inside

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you’re the type of person who digs through archives just to see how regimes tried to sell themselves to the public. If you’re looking for a Friday night popcorn flick, steer clear—you’ll probably hate it. It’s heavy, it’s stiff, and it’s about as subtle as a brick to the face.

There’s this weird, jarring shift in the film where the trenches of WWI suddenly give way to these pastoral, sun-drenched shots of Italian farms. It’s trying so hard to convince you that the trauma of the war was just a necessary price for the 'order' that follows. It feels gross watching it today. You can almost see the gears turning in Giovacchino Forzano’s script, trying to force this narrative that everything is finally 'fixed'.

Oddly specific observations:

• The transition from the dirt and misery of the front lines to the tidy, smiling peasants is so abrupt it gave me whiplash.
• The music swells every time a symbol of the state appears, which happens about every four minutes.
• I spent way too much time looking at the extras in the background. Half of them look like they were told to stand there and look grateful, and they’re clearly just waiting for lunch.
• The lighting in the agricultural scenes is strangely artificial, like they were trying to make the dirt look holy.

It’s not as polished or 'fun' in a dark way as Das deutsche Mutterherz, which also had its own heavy-handed agenda. This one just feels like it’s lecturing you, non-stop. There’s no room for the audience to breathe. The characters aren't people; they're just mouthpieces for the state.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Camicia nera (1933) through its definitive frames.

Watching Annibale Betrone march around, you realize he’s not acting so much as performing a duty. Everything is so rigid. It’s like watching a wax museum exhibit that someone tried to animate with a megaphone.

There’s this one sequence where they show 'modernized' farming equipment, and the camera lingers on it like it’s a religious relic. It’s almost funny how much they cared about tractors and irrigation in a movie that’s supposed to be about the human spirit. Maybe they thought showing a nice plow would make people forget the war. It didn't work.

I couldn't help but compare the pacing to something like Klovnen, which, despite being a completely different beast, at least understood that you need a human pulse to keep a story moving. Here, the pulse is replaced by a drumbeat of nationalistic slogans. It’s dry. Really, really dry. 📽️