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In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.
This is the first volume in the new
Cinema Cultures in Contact series, coedited by Giorgio Bertellini, Richard Abel, and Matthew Solomon.
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at:
openmonographs.org.
Giorgio Bertellini is Professor of Film and Media History at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of the award-winning volumes Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque and Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader.
"This is a remarkable and timely study. Only someone with Bertellini’s cross-disciplinary expertise and meticulous, dogged research skills could pull together these cases and weave them together in a compelling account of the 'cinema effect' on American politics. This is a model of interdisciplinary, transnational scholarship."—Barbara Spackman, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
"This book is fantastic, an eminently readable milestone in the study of celebrity. Bertellini sets a new standard for archival and analytical approaches to movie stardom in the 1920s while also illuminating the political stakes of celebrity that resonate with twenty-first-century culture."—Gaylyn Studlar, author of This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age
"An astute and thought-provoking study that brings together film studies and the transatlantic history of Italian Fascism in an original way."—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of Italian and History, New York University
"Bertellini’s brilliant book shows clearly how celebrity and promotional culture became integral to new practices of mass governance in the early twentieth century. It is a crucial history, essential also to any genealogy of the mediatized present and the rise of modes of authoritarian and neofascist governance."—Lee Grieveson, author of Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System
352 pp.6 x 9Illus: 46 b/w illus.
9780520301368$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jan 2019