‘More fascists in black shirts appeared in the cinema of the early 1960s than in all the cinema of the ventennio,’ writes Gian Piero Brunetta, in his monumental Storia del cinema italiano (p. 134). Brunetta's comment aptly introduces the scope and interests of Dominic H. Gavin's Fascism and Resistance in Italian Cinema: History, Memory and Identity after 1968. Gavin's study analyses how postwar Italian cinema actively challenged the memory of Fascism and liberation in Italy, as it took shape in the early postwar period. The book concentrates on the cycle of cinematic production of the 1970s which questioned the institutional memory of antifascism, anticipating key historiographical concerns of the following decades. The author argues that in many of those movies ‘it is the antifascism (rather than the fascism) of the previous generation that is most immediately called to account’ (p. ix).

Gavin details how 1970s films transcended early postwar Italian cinema, which had contributed to the establishment of a shared memory of the Fascist ventennio and the monumentalisation of the Italian Resistance. In particular, post-1968 films debunked clichés such as the conception of Italian fascism as ‘a bombastic theatre’. The author argues that this stereotype ‘served as a means of evading history, much as in the immediate postwar years the temptations to deride the defunct regime offered an alternative to a national examination of conscience’ (p. xiv).

The book is divided into five chapters. The first, ‘From commemoration to contestation (1945–1970)’ offers a broad historical overview and introduces the main subject of the book, which is elaborated in the following four chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of the 1970s cinematic representation of Fascism and the Resistance. The second chapter is titled ‘Myth of Resistance’ and explores how films questioned institutionalised memory. The two following chapters approach two different takes on a recurring trope of 1970s intellectual debate: the treatment of Fascism in allegorical terms, from escapism in the chapter ‘Interrogation of the Past or Flight from the Present?’ to Fascism's popular allure in ‘Fascinating Fascism’. The book ends with ‘Fascism as a Comedy,’ a chapter that scrutinises how the comic genre reflected on the national past.

Fascism and Resistance in Italian Cinema crosses the disciplinary boundaries between historical research, memory and film studies. Gavin's book masters a large scholarship that in the last decades used cinema and visual representations to enrich an analysis of twentieth-century Italy, focusing on questions such as mass culture, industrialisation and hegemony, in addition to collective desire and social anxieties. Always attentive to historical accuracy, Gavin describes in his book how auteurist Italian cinema was in close dialogue with current politics and ideological debate. In his study, detailed film analyses are never isolated from contextual knowledge; his close readings indicate how the formal aspects of films and directors’ choices (even when discarded) extensively confronted coeval narratives of national history and memory. In the same vein, Gavin details how well-known masterpieces, as well as lesser known attempts at a visual critique of the political status quo, are not merely examples of the 1970s zeitgeist. The author refrains from reductionism, avoiding the presentation of post-1968 Italian movies simply as indexes of historical trauma, amnesia, or repressed memory.

Approached in their singularity, these films illuminate the contradictions of postwar Italy's self-perception as well as the – at times spectacular – reversals in representation of the past. Gavin assesses Italian culture's capacity, in the long post-’68 period, to shake up the founding myth of the other great threshold of the Italian novecento: the post-Fascist transition to a democratic state. His cinematic analyses illustrate how the 1970s, widely perceived as a time of crisis, contested the ideological ‘truths’ born out of the defeat of the Fascist regime. As the author claims in his introduction, ‘many films on the fascist era need to be viewed in connection to antifascist politics and the challenges faced by Resistance memory’ (p. ix). The main consequence of this approach is a reappraisal of antifascist politics of memory, as it was institutionalised and monumentalised in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War (and depicted in iconic films such as Rossellini's Rome Open City).

Gavin charts how Italian cinema contested the consoling and rhetorical visions of the recent past promoted by party politics after 1945. It is in the 1970s, however, that films such as Valentino Orsini's Corbari or Francesco Maselli's Il sospetto openly challenged the PCI orthodoxy, along the lines of the broader contestation that characterised the decade. According to Gavin, Bernardo Bertolucci's La strategia del ragno, for instance, ‘illustrates the widespread sense of dissatisfaction on the Italian left with the Communist Party's Gramscian politics of cultural hegemony, easily perceived by the 1970s as a form of accommodation with power’ (p. 39). The author shows how Bertolucci's film, like Rossellini's earlier Il generale Della Rovere and especially Federico Fellini's Amarcord, elaborate a compelling critique of shared memory as intertwined with the collective myths of the period, anticipating pivotal questions such as the Fascist regime's control of everyday life and the creation of a popular consensus around the figure of the Duce. In this vein, Gavin examines how Ettore Scola's Una giornata particolare features Italian icons such as Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in roles that debunk gender clichés. Like other films of the period (including Pasolini's Salò and Wertmüller's Giovannino Sette Bellezze), Scola's film uses Fascism for a nuanced investigation on the nature of violence and human acquiescence to power. Still, these movies successfully steer clear of the ‘fascinating fascism’ enacted in films of the same period such as Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte and Luchino Visconti's La caduta degli dei.

The book's last chapter approaches the thorny question of whether it is possible to represent Italian Fascism in a comedic fashion. The risk is indeed to redeem Mussolini's regime and cleanse it of its most despicable aspects. Gavin examines films such as Fellini's Roma and Amarcord in which the director's ‘recollections of the 1930s contain an uneasy mixture of nostalgia and repulsion’ (p. 63). Far from a superficial assessment of nostalgia as an impossible repetition of the past, Amarcord ‘suggests that Fascist, “official” culture is not a world away from popular culture, but rather appears to be in some form of continuity with it’ (p. 155).

Italian cinema represents a space in which popular memory and political myths are negotiated; in the 1970s it displayed a real obsession with the Fascist ventennio. Gavin's book accurately investigates this obsession that still permeates Italian society today. Centred on auteurs and their creations, however, the book does not enquire into how prominent Italian actors, such as Gian Maria Volonté or Marcello Mastroianni, decided to play characters whose political agendas were decidedly problematic for 1970s party politics. An analysis of their agency as public figures, together with an extensive exploration of their films’ popular reception, would have further enriched the variegated panorama that Gavin has competently articulated.