Fascism on Film Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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 of the theater. But through a series of seemingly small decisions, he trades principle for opportunity until he becomes a mouthpiece for totalitarianism.

The episode explores how fascism recruits artists and intellectuals, not only to serve its ideology but to sanctify it with prestige and style. We examine the roles of ambition, vanity, self-deception, and silence in the making of complicity. The question is not just why people betray others—but why they betray themselves.

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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 invader, but as a virus that colonizes relationships, institutions, and inner lives.

This episode explores how fascism thrives by exploiting the cracks in civil society—co-opting education, splitting families, demanding obedience, and redefining loyalty. Through Borzage’s sentimental but politically charged direction, "The Mortal Storm" becomes a cinematic forecast of what happens when fear and ideology eclipse community and love.

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 aesthetic forms that live on in the cultural unconscious.

This episode explores the collapse of democratic culture in the Weimar Republic through the lens of Bob Fosse’s "Cabaret"(1972). Set in Berlin during the early 1930s, the film depicts the slow-motion unraveling of liberal society, where decadence and denial mask the encroachment of fascist power. 

Rather than portraying Nazis as an external threat, "Cabaret" shows them as emerging from the very heart of a fractured society—at once ignored, tolerated, and eventually embraced.

The episode investigates how art, performance, sexuality, and political evasion interweave with rising authoritarianism. "Cabaret" becomes a parable for the death of democracy by distraction: it asks whether culture can resist collapse—or whether it dances on as the world burns.

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 understanding fascism is vital, human, and uses empathy to transcend political abstraction. It doesn't merely tell us that fascism is evil; it lets us feel it.

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.

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 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.

"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.