Fascism on Film Podcast

In the season 1 finale episode of Fascism on Film, we turn to Paul Verhoeven’s "Starship Troopers," a gory, flamboyant, and darkly hilarious satire that asks viewers to confront their own appetite for militarism, propaganda, and authoritarian spectacle. Released in 1997 and adapted (loosely and subversively) from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, the film uses the grammar of classic war movies to tell the story of a society where se...

"To Be or Not to Be" was made during the war, not after—a rare example of a Hollywood film that mocked Hitler and the Nazis while the outcome of the war was still uncertain. The U.S. had just entered WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), and the mood of the nation was tense and somber.

At the time, making jokes about Hitler and concentration camps was controversial. Many critics (including the New York Times’ B...

Italian filmmaking master, Federico Fellini, takes a nostalgic look at his early life as a teenager in fascist Italy with his final masterpiece, 1973's "Amarcord." While this film is not heavy on the violent and repressive aspects of fascism, it does offer an intricate portrait of a town mostly at ease with its repressive government. Filled with many classic Fellini moments and characters, this time Fellini uses his canvas to portr...

This episode explores the haunting beauty and quiet devastation of "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s semi-autobiographical novel. Set in Ferrara, Italy, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the film focuses on an aristocratic Jewish family who, shielded behind the walls of their estate, remain willfully detached from the mounting threat of Italian fascism. As racial laws erode ...

This episode explores the rise of homegrown authoritarianism as depicted in two groundbreaking Warner Bros. films from the late 1930s. "Black Legion" dramatizes the radicalization of an American factory worker into a shadowy paramilitary group that targets immigrants, Jews, and labor organizers—mirroring the real Black Legion active in Depression-era Detroit. "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," the first explicitly anti-Nazi feature from ...

This episode examines how early American cinema didn’t reflect ideology—it actively shaped American political imagination through opposing forms of propaganda. In "The Birth of a Nation," white supremacist violence is transfigured into sacred national myth, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors. 

"The Birth of a Nation" is still one of the most shocking and abhorrent works of cinema, and yet, we believe historians are reluc...

This episode explores Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"(1935) as both a landmark in cinematic innovation and a chilling demonstration of fascist aesthetics in their purest form. Directed by Riefenstahl, the film is less a historical document than a sacred text of Nazi ideology—one that transforms politics into religion, mass into myth, and submission into beauty.

We examine how fascism uses spectacle to overwhelm critical t...

This episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast centers on István Szabó’s "Mephisto" (1981), a haunting study of artistic compromise under fascism. Loosely based on the life of actor Gustaf Gründgens, the film follows Hendrik Höfgen, a talented but insecure stage actor in Nazi Germany, who ascends to national fame after aligning himself with the regime. Höfgen does not believe in fascist ideology—he considers himself apolitical, a man ...

This episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast examines "The Mortal Storm" (Dir. Frank Borzage, 1940) one of the earliest Hollywood films to confront Nazism directly. Released before the U.S. entered World War II, the film portrays the ideological unraveling of a tight-knit German family under Hitler’s rise. It is a story of creeping authoritarianism, social fracture, and moral choice—one that dramatizes fascism not as an external inv...

On this episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast, we focus on the 1972 film, "Cabaret," James and Teal introduce the guiding ideas behind Fascism on Film: that cinema is not simply a record of political events but one of the primary arenas where fascism is imagined, stylized, reproduced, and resisted. For the series, we will explore how fascism expresses itself through regimes and ideologies, images, gestures, narratives, tones, and ...

On this premier episode of Fascism on Film, hosts James Kent and Teal Minton introduce the guiding ideas behind the show, and set the stage for what's to come. 

For this series, James and Teal will explore how fascism expresses itself through regimes and ideologies, images, gestures, narratives, tones, and aesthetic forms that live on in the cultural unconscious. The episode makes the case for why this particular way of understandi...