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During the period 1922-37, both the British and Italians launched institutes for educational cinematography and collaborated in the creation of the League of Nations' International Educational Cinematographic Institute. Their leading newspapers dedicated entire sections to the advertising of educational campaigns through cinema. Comparing official documents and the print apparatus about the establishment and the activities of two institutes for educational cinema in Europe gives us a perception of how similarly and differently the British and Italians used their educational films to convey imperial sentiments and rhetoric into civilian life during fifteen years of colonial rule.

The first silent epic Italian film, Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone with the screenplay co-written by the director and the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was used as an educational tool at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1915. The film's plot unfolds during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). The film's narrative is pro-empire propaganda for Italy's recent occupation of Libya (1911–1912). The visual narrative is rich in colonial rhetoric. It shows the viewers the friendship between the enslaved man Maciste, interpreted by a white man wearing blackface, and the Roman soldier and colonizer Fulvio Axilla. This essay analyses the film's construction of racialized bodies and locates it within the larger context of cultural assimilation through visual technologies applied at the Carlisle school. This analysis focuses on the intermedial imagination of a progressive whitening process in moving pictures, photographs, and lantern slides used at the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By comparing two missionary films, the British Livingstone (1925) and the Italian Abuna Messias (1939), this study identifies a striking similarity and some differences between the British and the Italian colonial agendas. These two visual narratives are distant in time and belong to two different imperial histories and imaginations; however, one scene in the earlier British film is reproduced almost identically in the later Italian one. This study argues that the shared content underlines not only the Italian fascist government's political aim to explain colonialism and warfare with the justification of fighting human trafficking, but also the intent to create an image of anti-slavery struggle on the British model. This work sheds new light on how Abuna Messias furthered the role of the Catholic Church and the missionary agenda in Italian fascist colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]