Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
“On an April evening in 1934, on the left bank of the River Arno in Florence before twenty thousand spectators, the mass spectacle 18BL was presented, involving two thousand amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry and cavalry brigade, fifty trucks (18BL was the model number of the first truck to be mass-produced by Fiat), four field and machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations, and six photoelectric units. However titanic its scale, 18BL’s ambitions were even greater: to institute a revolutionary fascist theater of the future, a modern theater of and for the masses that would end, once and for all, the crisis of the bourgeois theater. This is the complete story of 18BL, a direct response to an April 1933 speech by Mussolini, who called for the creation of a distinctively fascist ‘theater for twenty thousand spectators.’”
Publisher: Stanford University
Paperback: 234 pages
Illustrated