Film Music as Propaganda (2020)

Round table at the University of Vienna and silent film screening with piano accompaniment at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Vienna

On January 14, 2020, an international round table took place as part of the "Campus aktuell" series at the University of Vienna, which focused on the connection between film music from the silent film era and fascist propaganda. The academic discussion of the topic was rounded off on the same evening with a screening of the silent film Addio, giovinezza! (1918) at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Vienna, accompanied on the piano by the pianist and composer Daniele Furlati.

The aim of the event was to illustrate that the use of music and sound in fascist cinema was anything but naive. For example, the extent to which certain components of the cinematic text were subliminally used to convey constellations of meaning to the audience that were conducive to the regime's cultural policy was discussed. It has been shown that the acoustic-musical component in particular could be used as a strategic ideological instrument in films with more or less explicit propaganda content. The socio-cultural components of fascist ideology are characterized by a strong musical polarization. On the one hand, the music emphasized established topoi of fascist rhetoric such as the Risorgimento, the family as the nucleus of society, "Latinitas" or peasant life; on the other hand, the music served anti-communist, anti-Jewish and anti-Ethiopian iconography in order to discriminate against opponents of the regime through dissonances and cacophonous clusters. The sound served not least to underline the socio-economic changes of modernity, for example the Americanization of life in large conurbations or the supposed amorality of urban cultures. The analysis of the cinematographic "soundtrack" under fascism and the ideological constructions associated with it makes it possible to reconstruct a fundamental, hitherto neglected chapter of cultural policy under the fascist regime.

Further information: Poster of the event

Participants: Francesco Finocchiaro, Leonardo Quaresima, Daniele Furlati, Daniel Winkler, Carolin Krahn

Project Leader: Francesco Finocchiaro (also head of the FWF research project Film music as a problem in German-language journalism (1907-1930)Carolin Krahn and Daniel Winkler (co-organization of the round table)