Staging fascism

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 18 BL was presented, involving two thousand amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry and cavalry brigade, fifty trucks (18 BL 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, 18 BL'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 18 BL, a direct response to an April 1933 speech by Mussolini, who called for the creation of a distinctively fascist "theater for twenty thousand spectators." The book describes how the spectacle arose...

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