Disemboweled vision: Fascism, Rome and cinema

The BSR Podcast

A lecture by John David Rhodes (BSR; Cambridge). Many of the spaces and thoroughfares that we take for granted in the centre of Rome are the results of brutal practices that reshaped the city only several decades ago. While every power that has ruled Rome sought–with varying degrees of intensity and success–to fashion the city in its own image, Fascism’s sventramento (disembowelling) of several of Rome’s neighbourhoods left a spatial and visual legacy that is troubling and difficult to pin down. This talk will range across documentary filmmaking, photography, painting, official planning discourses, and other materials in order to describe a sense of how Rome’s disembowelling is a critical element that must be considered in order to grasp the social and aesthetic specificity of modern Rome and Roman modernism.