The burden of winning. American cinematographic policy in Italy in the years of the allied military administration (1943–1945)

The years of the Allied military administration in Italy seem to be a crucial turning point in both its own postwar history and that of Europe as a whole. In the final years of the Second World War, we can find the precise economic, political and ideological foundations that characterised Cold War Europe and the confrontation between the two blocs, including from a cultural point of view. This chapter relies on Italian and American archives, going beyond the usual key concept of American imperialism and enriched with recent research on the origins of the Cold War in an Italian context. It aims to piece together how the Italian film industry was one of the points of ‘interest’ in American foreign policy between 1943 and 1945. With Hollywood productions returning to Italian soil, Washington tried to establish a stable industrial stronghold that could carry out an ideological struggle to both free Italians from their fascist past and disseminate political and cultural models of a capitalist nature. In this way, a precise economic project was put in place, whose political and cultural repercussions supported the emergence of a grand design of Rooseveltian style, adapted to the new postwar challenges and the emerging dualism between global superpowers.