Fascism on Film Podcast

In the Season 2 finale of "Fascism on Film," James and Teal break down the 2024 film, "I'm Still Here." Walter Salles' look at Brazil under military dictatorship in the 1970s is a chilling reminder that what was once another nation's past, strikes an eerily similar note to what we've allowed ourselves to occur in the present. "I'm Still Here" tells the true story of one Brazilian family that seemingly has it all until one day, authoritarianism catches up with them. Enjoy this episode, and James and Teal will return in 2026 with an all new season. 

 1977's "A Special Day" is a heartfelt romance of Hitler and Mussolini’s infamous cementing of their two nations culminated in a 24-hour Roman holiday. No, but it is set on the same day as that day-long event. However, in the Roman suburbs, we get a different meeting of two mismatched strangers, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren bring a story of humanity and heartbreak set amidst the backdrop of a political ideology that doesn’t allow homosexuality. "A Special Day" is a masterwork of cinema, and a dive into a world under fascism's rule.

In this episode, James and Teal tackle Ari Aster’s "Eddington," a dark, surprising film set in the earliest days of COVID—when fear, isolation, and conspiracy thinking were reshaping the country in real time. They discuss Joaquin Phoenix’s unraveling sheriff, the town’s descent into misinformation, and the chaotic final act that blurs the line between protest and false-flag operation. It’s one of Aster’s most unsettling films, and a direct reflection on the world we’re living in now.

Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" is both a thrilling action film, and a mirror-holding look at current American society. Baked into its absurdist right vs. leftist fantasy are truths about how each side views the other. Anderson doesn't let anyone off the hook, as he finds the humor in taking each side to a comical extreme.  Make no mistake, through the humor of "One Battle After Another," it's clear who the villains are, and who pulls the strings. As we see our country move closer and closer to one ruled by a small number of wealthy white elites, some of the craziness that unfolds in this movie doesn't feel quite so far-fetched.  Although filmed prior to the current administration, Anderson clearly knew where the country was headed, and he becomes one of the first filmmakers to tackle our current political situation head-on.  This week we examine the first of two modern U.S. filmmaker takes on America today. We'll break down the other in our next episode.

Released just months after Hitler came to power, "Hans Westmar" stands as one of the earliest cinematic expressions of Nazi ideology. Ostensibly a biopic of Horst Wessel—the Sturmabteilung (SA) activist turned martyr whose death became a rallying cry for the Nazi movement—the film dramatizes the transformation of a young man from aimless nationalist to disciplined Nazi believer. But more than a tale of political awakening, "Hans Westmar" is a ritualized myth of sacrifice: a cinematic hymn to obedience, struggle, and death in the service of the Volk. This episode dissects the film’s calculated use of martyrdom, racialized othering, and aestheticized violence to forge the ideal fascist subject. What does it mean to “die for Germany”? Who is seen as the enemy within? And how does the myth of redemptive bloodshed sustain fascist ideology on screen?

Between 1933 and 1945, more than 1,000 feature films were produced under the Nazi regime—most of them not overtly propagandistic, but melodramas, musicals, comedies, and historical epics. Hitler’s Hollywood, a 2017 documentary by German critic Rüdiger Suchsland, explores this vast and often overlooked cinematic universe. Narrated by Udo Kier in haunted tones, the film argues that Nazi cinema was not just an arm of propaganda but a total fantasy system—an attempt to reprogram reality through spectacle, myth, and longing. This episode goes beyond the documentary to ask: How does a fascist regime use film not just to control, but to enchant? How do escapist romances and sentimental dramas reinforce authoritarian ideals? And what happens when a culture begins to dream fascist dreams?

Romance as Resistance: ‘Casablanca’ In this episode of Fascism on Film, we look at Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), one of Hollywood’s most enduring films and one of its quietest acts of persuasion. Beneath the romance and intrigue, Casablanca tells a story of political awakening—about a man, a city, and a country choosing between indifference and action against fascism. We discuss how Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, with his famous line that he “sticks his neck out for nobody,” becomes a stand-in for prewar America. The film’s emotional arc mirrors the nation’s own shift—from cynicism and self-interest to moral conviction. By the time Rick helps Victor Laszlo escape and sacrifices his own happiness, his personal redemption becomes a metaphor for America joining the fight for democracy. The film’s characters form a map of the moral landscape of World War II: Rick as the disillusioned American, Ilsa as a divided Europe, Laszlo as the conscience of the resistance, Renault as the opportunist, and Strasser as the face of authoritarian power. Casablanca’s brilliance lies in how emotion becomes politics—a love story turned into a lesson in courage. Behind the camera, many of the film’s cast and crew were refugees from fascism—Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Lebeau, and Curtiz himself. Their real experiences give the movie its emotional truth; the fear and displacement onscreen were lived, not imagined. We also explore the film’s mythmaking and legacy. From the Cross of Lorraine hidden in a smuggler’s ring to the swelling of “La Marseillaise” over “Die Wacht am Rhein,” Casablanca builds its resistance through symbols, songs, and small acts of defiance rather than overt politics. 80 years later, Casablanca still holds up a mirror to moments of moral hesitation and reminds us that neutrality is a choice, that romance can be resistance, and that even one person’s decision has meaning in a broken world.

This week, we take aim at Nazis as pop-culture film villains and the tropes associated with them in a discussion on Quentin Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds," in which the auteur shakes up World War II history with his revisionist caper war film. He makes an audience hungry for Nazi revenge, questioning how far one must go along in the journey to experience catharsis in foiling the Nazis. And in the ultimate act of revenge, Tarantino gives the masses something they always wanted to see, and Hitler gets his comeuppance. This film, shaped by a director with a history of fascist propaganda movies and WW2 films at his disposal, creates a Nazi-revenge, blood-soaked, brain-splattered pop culture sensation in a culture where sex gets you an NC-17 rating, and violence gets you Oscar nominations.

François Truffaut’s "The Last Metro" is a deceptively quiet film about survival, resistance, and performance under Nazi occupation. Set in a Parisian theater during the German occupation of France, the story revolves around a company that tries to continue producing art while hiding the theater’s Jewish director in the basement. Beneath its surface—a war-era romance and backstage drama—is a nuanced meditation on repression, complicity, and cultural resistance. The title refers not just to the curfew imposed by the occupying forces (forcing audiences and actors alike to catch “the last metro” home) but also to a kind of societal and moral deadline. Everyone must choose whether to act, to pretend, or to disappear. "The Last Metro" is often read as a metaphor for how artists and intellectuals maneuvered under occupation, and how repression forces performance in every sphere of life. For Truffaut, born in 1932 and whose family had complex wartime allegiances, the film is also a personal reckoning with French memory—how heroism, compromise, and fear intermingle beneath the surface of everyday life.

"The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" is Fritz Lang's 1933 German detective thriller that arrived on the heels of Hilter coming to power, making it the regime's first official 'banned' movie.  The film is a fascinating look at how an evil ideology spreads beyond one man when that man make it his mission to make evil the rule of law.  "Mabuse" is a semi-sequel to Lang's masterpiece, "M," and it packs a punch visually and through its innovative use of audio.  Our discussion hits on its fascist interpretations, some of the misunderstandings about the movie, and the film's place in time when it was created under one set of rules, and ready for release under another.

In this episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast, we look at Mr. Klein (1976), Joseph Losey’s haunting story of identity, complicity, and erasure in Nazi-occupied France. Alain Delon plays Robert Klein, a Paris art dealer who lives comfortably off the desperation of others, buying paintings and possessions from Jewish families needing to flee persecution. He’s charming, detached, and perfectly suited to the opportunism of wartime Paris until the day a Jewish newspaper arrives in his mail, addressed to “Mr. Klein.” Trying to prove he is not that Mr. Klein, he enters a maze of bureaucracy that slowly consumes him. What begins as a misunderstanding becomes an obsession and, finally, a collapse of identity. Losey’s film moves between realism and dream. Mirrored rooms double Klein’s reflection, a grotesque cabaret mocking Jewish caricatures, and the quiet efficiency of the French police preparing for the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv roundup. Beneath the surface elegance lies what we call the “machinery of murder” a portrait of fascism carried out through paperwork, compliance, and silence. We discuss how Mr. Klein reveals fascism not as spectacle but as routine, and how easily a society can lose its moral center when categorizing people for persecution becomes routine bureaucracy. Watching it today, the parallels are chilling. Join us as we unpack Mr. Klein, a story that asks what happens when the system decides who you are and how easily anyone can disappear inside it.

We open our second season of "Fascism on Film" with Jean Renoir’s wartime drama "This Land is Mine." This  film boldly dramatizes the internal resistance to fascism—not on the battlefield, but in the classroom, the courtroom, and the soul.  Released in 1943 while the war was still raging, "This Land is Mine" explores what it means to live under occupation, and what it takes to speak the truth in a world governed by fear. Set in a fictional European town under Nazi rule, the film centers on a timid schoolteacher, Albert Lory (played by Charles Laughton), who undergoes a moral awakening from passive compliance to active resistance. Through this journey, Renoir offers a commentary on education, conscience, and the price of dissent. This episode looks at the film’s idealistic framing of national character and moral clarity, while also situating it within the political context of wartime Hollywood and Renoir’s own exile from Vichy France.

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 service guarantees citizenship, where democracy has failed, and where a perpetual war machine feeds on loyalty, violence, and spectacle. Propaganda as entertainment: Verhoeven replaces the opening title cards common in war films with a “Federal Network” commercial—state‑run media commanding the audience: “Would you like to know more?” Recruitment videos, live battlefield feeds, and grotesque lab footage turn war into a televised brand, complete with slogans: “We have the ships. We have the weapons. We need soldiers!” Militarism as a civic religion: In this world, only those who serve in the military earn the right to vote. A high‑school teacher (Michael Ironside) lectures students that “violence has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor,” a mantra repeated until it becomes gospel. Fascist aesthetics played straight—then satirized: Nazi‑inspired uniforms, brutalist eagles, banners, chants, and blood sacrifices permeate the mise‑en‑scène. Verhoeven draws directly from Triumph of the Will while exaggerating those tropes to absurdity. The construction of the enemy: The Arachnids are depicted as both pathetic and existentially threatening—a core contradiction of fascist propaganda. They are not just an enemy; they are a species to be eradicated. The audience is invited to cheer at genocide, then left uneasy with that reaction. The illusion of choice: Echoing Edward Bernays’ Propaganda (1928), the film shows how a regime offers superficial choices while shaping thought at every level. The viewer’s cursor clicks “Would you like to know more?” but every path leads back to the same militaristic narrative. The humor and horror of complicity: Verhoeven’s satire is deliberately unsubtle—Rico, Carmen, and Carl are glamorous poster-children for the regime, even as they march deeper into moral compromise. When a captured “brain bug” is tortured and soldiers cheer, we are forced to ask: Who are we rooting for? While this is the end of our first season, it is by no means the last. We plan to be back in mid-to-late October with a whole new season of movies that examine fascism. 

"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’ Bosley Crowther) objected to the tone, accusing Lubitsch of bad taste. But others defended the film as a brilliant weapon against totalitarianism. As time passed, the film’s reputation grew enormously. It’s now considered a masterpiece of wartime satire and is frequently cited as one of Ernst Lubitsch’s greatest achievements—and one of the finest examples of antifascist comedy ever made. As the first season of Fascism on Film reaches its penultimate episode, James and Teal look at the ways in which comedy and farce is used to critique the dangers of fascism, and its absurdities. 

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 portray Italian citizens trapped in a fool's paradise, unable to see the horrors that will befall the country in a few short years.

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 their rights and community life, their retreat into games, nostalgia, and gentility becomes an allegory for bourgeois denial and complicity. De Sica renders fascism not through spectacle, but through absence, silence, and subtle exclusion—making this a vital film for understanding how fascism consolidates power not just through violence, but through social norms, legal frameworks, and cultural passivity.

This week, James and Teal take listeners back to where Fascism officially started, Italy, with Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film, "The Conformist." The movie is a cautionary tale on the human desire to fit in, and how fascism bends its will on a people, and its architecture. This movie is a dazzling array of set design and color cinematography that amazes, shocks, seduces, and leaves the audience spellbound.

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 a major Hollywood studio, presents a procedural exposé of a German-American espionage ring based on real FBI case files. Rather than framing fascism as an imported ideology, both films root it in domestic conditions: economic precarity, masculine humiliation, and the failure of democratic institutions to confront violent nativism. This episode examines how these films use the language of noir, crime, and realism to dramatize the emotional mechanics of American fascism. They offer a stark warning: that fascism in the U.S. won’t arrive with spectacle—it will arrive as self-pity, secrecy, and patriotism.

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 reluctant to fully dismiss this film, one we see lacking in any merit or societal value. We don't recommend you see this film, but we encourage you to listen to our thoughts on it, and how we arrive at the conclusion that this movie, intentional or otherwise, serves as a template for European fascism that would soon threaten an entire world.

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 thought, offering audiences not arguments but ritualized emotion. Through architecture, lighting, choreography, and montage, "Triumph of the Will" doesn't persuade—it anoints. Riefenstahl’s camera doesn’t show Hitler taking power. It shows that he already reigns, divinely ordained by unity and desire. It's not a pleasant filmgoing film experience, but we felt it necessary to discuss it.