Mark Cousins – Marcia su Roma AKA The March on Rome (2022)
Through little-seen archive and his characteristically cinematic analysis, Mark Cousins narrates the ascent of fascism in Italy and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. Both essay film and historical document, Cousins contextualises history through the now, holding a mirror to a political landscape of a creeping far right and manipulated media.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
In one way, this film is a gift to make. It’s about an important historic event that was filmed. And at the centre of that event is a charismatic man who, again, was widely filmed. So there’s plenty of great archive footage of the March on Rome and Benito Mussolini. But it is tainted footage. It was shot by the fascist information machine to sell fascism. So our film must detain it. In many of my films I full back the curtain on cinema to show the audience the fascinating ways in which it makes emotion and excitement. I will do the same here. People will see footage of key events of the 20th century, and hear how it was manipulated. Relevant revelations in our modern era of fake news and new aggressors. Our film will deepen and widen its appeal by putting at its centre a young Italian woman, Anna. Through her eyes we see and hear what the rise of fascism felt like – its appeal, excitement and eventual abjection. They young woman is played by the great actor Alba Rohrwacher with defiance at first, and then coming realisation. We will shoot innovatively, on a virtual set in Cinecittà. To make the film more cinematic still, I have filmed 580 “tableaux” shots of Rome in its many guised – monumental, religious, troubled, architectural. And in addition to these I will use telling clips from the history of Italian cinema, movies by Ettore Scola, Augusto Tretti, Elvira Notari, Bernardo Bertolucci and others. These films further flesh out the film’s portrait of fascism in Italy, its turmoils and escapes. Together these sequences will show us Rome in visually bold ways and will add layers to our story.
It’s quite a remarkable story of a theft of power in the Eternal City, an event which snowballed into a sequence of tragedies in Europe and further afield. A story whose toxic masculinity and manipulation of imagery have many resonances today. We watch in fascination and some dread. To give the story more scale and power, I am structuring it in five acts, like an opera. The story has the emotions of a great opera, and the expressivity. And so, we hope, has our film.
Marcia su Roma.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 37 min
Size: 4.12 GiB
Video
Codec: h264
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 5 723 kb/s
BPP: 0.110
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AAC LC @ 317 kb/s
https://nitro.download/view/AC257F0C35A4303/Marcia_su_Roma.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/AEDEAB8154FE9F2/Marcia_su_Roma.FULLREVISED.eng.srt
https://nitro.download/view/6F702645BF9E916/Marcia_su_Roma.pt-BR.srt
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Spanish, Portuguese
