Building the Public Image of the Unknown Soldier. The Italian Case in the Postwar European Context: Memory and Cinema

Abstract

This articles outlines the emergence and transformation of one of the most popular Italian myths arising from the First World War: the image of the unknown soldier. It examines how films and their motifs and characters from the early 1920s until the early 1930s evoked and revived historical events seen as extremely valuable by a society that had lived through them. Outlined first is how the popular image of the First World War Italian warrior (i.e. the “Milite Ignoto” or “Unknown Soldier”) was constructed. Second, the article chronicles how this image became a subject for film, and how that choice affected the themes of Italian cinematographic production, notably non-fictional, in the period spanning from the First World War’s end until the ascent of Fascism and its aftermath. The role of full-length Gloria. Apoteosi del soldato ingot (Glory. Apotheosis of the Unknown Soldier), Federazione Cinematografica Italiana / Unione Fototecnici Cinematografici, 1921) was a prominent one for it showed how the image of the unknown soldier began to acquire the dimension of a myth. Some fragments of its footage for example—where the tomb of the Milite Ignoto (at the Altare della Patria at Vittoriano) was filmed—served in the making of the film Gloria (Glory) by Roberto Omegna in 1934 which was later distributed by the Fascists’ Educational Film Union-LUCE. The article thus details how Italians’ postwar image of the unknown soldier changed due to the Fascists’ manipulation of memory.