Abstract
From the beginning of the 1940s, Italian cinema critics have called the commercial films produced under the fascist regime "white telephones". This specific term indicates the white and brilliant visual texture many popular films shared in those days. This visual texture originated in the Hollywood cinema, which dominated the world market including Italian one. Italian cinema industries tried to assimilate a Hollywood-like production to overcome the long-lasting crisis from the 1920s. As a result, Italian screens were covered with white shining lights. This paper aims to reveal the significance of the "white" vision in the Italian cotemporary culture, focusing on the properties of cinema, namely the expressive medium of light and the most powerful economic system of the last century. From this point of view, we can discover another aspect of the first talky colonial film, Lo squadrone bianco, which is renowned for a fascist propaganda.
