The Mass Panorama

The sea has a voice, which is very changeable and almost always audible. It is a voice which sounds like a thousand voices, and much has been attributed to it: patience, pain, and anger. But what is most impressive about it is its persistence. The sea never sleeps; by day and by night it makes itself heard, throughout the years and decades and centuries. In its impetus and its rage it brings to mind the one entity which shares these attributes in the same degree: that is, the crowd.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power ¹

The Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d'Italia was the lavish mass distribution monthly to which subscribers of Italian Fascism's official daily could turn for commentary on current events, literature, science, culture and fashion, much like Americans could turn to Life magazine, Russians could turn to Soviet Life, and the Chinese to China Reconstructs. Starting sometime in the mid-1920s, the Rivista underwent a graphic makeover. Among the innovations introduced was the regular inclusion of large scale foldouts: panoramic photographs, typically two to six times wider than the standard page size. Foldouts in and of themselves were not uncommon in period magazines and, as with contemporary foldouts of Playboy bunnies or Penthouse pets, they were understood as special features, graphic highlights detachable for purposes of exhibition in the home and in the workplace. What first drew my attention to the Rivista's foldouts, however, was the object of desire draped across the picture plane: teeming, seemingly infinite crowds rallying around a visible or invisible leader, sometimes abstracted into an indistinct ocean of dots, sometimes swarming with particulars; crowds wedged into architectural settings representative of the great historical cities of the Italian peninsula, crammed together to the point of driving out all voids. The political rally as source of vicarious photo- and/or pornographic thrill. Such was the graphic principle that would inform the next fifteen years of the Rivista Illustrata's practice; years during which wave after wave of innovative artists and graphic designers laid out its pages: Bruno Munari, Mario Sironi, Fortunato Depero, Giò Ponti, Xanti Schawinsky. The graphic environment shifted with each successive wave. But not the foldouts. Mass rally after mass rally after mass rally unfolded in every number, right up to the collapse of the Fascist regime and the review's demise.

The obvious reason for this persistence was the foldout's propaganda value. The Rivista was much more than an Italian Life magazine. It was a semi-official party organ. It set out to promote the image of Fascism as a revolutionary movement and of Fascist Italy as a perpetually mobilized nation. Yet the notion of propaganda raises more questions than it answers. It tells one next to nothing about the nature and the variety of the images placed in circulation or about the contours of the socio-political imaginary which they hoped to tap into and to shape. Nor does it address the larger question of where and how these mass photographic panoramas fit into the broader stream of crowd images that arises in European culture in the wake of the French Revolution, a topic that has been addressed, though in a far from definitive manner, by culture critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and art historians such as Wolfgang Kemp. ² Last but not least, the invocation of a propagandistic function does not help one to understand how and why mass panoramas became intertwined with the art of photomontage and, with slight though significant variations, circulated not only in inter-war Italy, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, but also in the postwar period from the Chinese Cultural Revolution up through the North Korea of Kim il Sung II.

So the topic of this essay is that literal specter of the Enlightenment known as the revolutionary crowd, hovering between reason and hallucination, between the emancipatory dreams of 1789 and the terror of 1793, and the mass public's inscription...