Fascism on Film Podcast
What do movies teach us about fascism? From propagandistic myths of power to stories of suffering and belonging, cinema has long chronicled the many faces of fascism. Films don’t just reflect history or envision the future; they help shape it, revealing how authoritarian movements seduce, normalize, and endure, and at what cost to our humanity. Fascism on Film Podcast explores these connections one episode at a time. Each season (10–15 episodes) tackles a different facet of fascism on screen. Season 1 looks at pre‑war fascism, examining both notorious propaganda and lesser‑known works of resistance. Hosted by writers and lifelong cinephiles James Kent and Teal Minton, the show blends sharp analysis with decades of shared filmgoing experience to uncover how art, ideology, and history intertwine. Music courtesy www.classicals.de.
Episodes
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 Directed by Riefenstahl, the film is less a historical document than a sacred text of Nazi ideology—one that transforms politics into religion, mass into myth, and submission into beauty.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...
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