Listen! Listen! Mussolini in the hole

Abstract

My paper will focus on some issues related to photographic image and its language, starting with the analysis of a photographic work created in 1937 by Bruno Munari for Almanacco letterario Bompiani of that year. The title of the insert is Udite, Udite!, it is a sixteenth note created by mounting quotations from Mussolini's speeches, photographs of the regime, and the portrait of the Duce inserted at the top of each page perforated as a “telescope", a graphic expedient that makes him 'physically' present. The description and commentary on Munari's work will be linked to issues, such as: the visual, cultural and psychological strategies of fascism, all focused on the image and 'corporeality' of Mussolini, also through photography; the 'resistance' action of Munari's photography and graphics given the author's awareness of the subtle power of visual communication, the ability of photography to strengthen opinions and positions and, as already experienced by Dadaism, “to turn poisons into an antidote"; the exploitation of the photographic medium, by propaganda and satire, in the exaltation of the physical, direct and multiple dimension to which the medium gives access. In the years of fascism, photography was, together with cinema, the regime's main communication tool, aimed mainly at enhancing the figure of Mussolini, his body, his resolute face. Munari, who since the Thirties has distinguished himself in graphics and advertising for his modern style, in Udite, Udite! shows a full awareness of the strategies of fascism, subjecting them to a skilful make-up operation. Using the same language of the regime, Munari bends it to a different meaning through the grammar of modernist collage and the enhancement of the conceptual component of the photographic image. He carries out an operation of ideological cosmetics, telling a different story, soliciting, without further verbal declarations, the critical sense of those who look and read.