MARK COUSINS’S useful and provocative essay documentary The March on Rome begins with an examination of the “clunky” but influential propaganda film A Noi (To Us) made by Umberto Paradisi in 1922 to glorify the Italian Fascist coup d’etat, and ends with a shocking newsreel of an Italian partisan crushing the executed dictator’s face to pulp with his boot.

Around these events swirl an enormous historical context which Cousins barely touches: the Biennio Rosso (“two red years”) of 1919-20 — when Italian workers led a massive strike wave and occupied factories and shipyards, but which, in the absence of revolutionary leadership, was stalled by reformist unions, leaving a vacuum for fascism to fill; the 23-year legacy of Fascist rule: the suppression of democratic rights, the campaign of terror to crush the organised labour movement, the murderous colonial wars in the Balkans and North Africa, the participation in the Holocaust as an ally of Hitler and the role of communist partisans in the overthrow of the regime.

Cousins made the film because he was approached by Italian producers and he “couldn’t say no. It played to a number of my interests: the ‘spectacle’ of fascism, and the fact that I could use cinema to talk about how the visual culture of fascism worked then and maybe now.”

His approach to history is not driven by an objective analysis of class politics but by an emotional narrative: “I had my own internal needs,” he explains. “Within 10 minutes I could see the overall structure.”

Beginning with Donald Trump quoting Mussolini and refusing to disown the words despite their provenance — “It’s better to live one day like a lion” — the film sets out to draw parallels between events 100 years ago and now, ending with a “rogues’ gallery” of contemporary leaders of the far right, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Meloni, Modi, Orban, Germany’s AfD and so on.

When he started the film “Meloni wasn’t as powerful as she is now,” he says. “I heard a speech she made to Vox in Spain where she said No to LGBT rights and Yes to the universality of the cross, that Europe is a Christian continent. That, to me, is a fascist idea, so I inserted her. Given the evidence of her speech I did that as a ‘J’accuse’ to her.”

In terms of Trump: “I was very suspicious of calling Trump a fascist until his inaugural speech where he used the phrase ‘this American chaos’. America is fucked up, but not chaotic and for him to call it that... Fascism is very good at saying it’s a mess out there, they promise to bring order to chaos, though the opposite is the truth.

"I’m very aware that young people today, Generation Z, have grown up seeing the Donald Trump phenomenon happen, and I’m very interested in making something for them which can help join the dots. Historical fascism has strong echoes of Trump; The Washington Post and New York Times, and people like Winston Churchill and Sigmund Freud sucked up to Mussolini. And let’s not forget the artists... Let’s not forget cinema’s culpability.”

Substituting for the missing historical and class context is Cousins’s deployment of an odd convention, an actress, Alba Rohrwacher, who plays an “everywoman” fellow traveller of Italian fascism, at first enthusiastic, and then disillusioned. Why tell history in this summary way and from this bourgeois perspective?

“I needed a foreground,” he says. “The film could just be archive footage. The character needed to be non-elite, to be a mother and to be a believer.”

Who is she based on?

“Nobody. My own background is working class and the women in my family are very Catholic, very religious and all conservative in some way. None are educated. So, I know a lot of women who have been on the receiving end of coercive, right-wing ideas. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Alba’s character...”

Does she reflect Cousins’s own fatal fascination with fascism?

“No!” he says. “What I’m interested in, and this is very personal for me because I was brought up in a family that was very Catholic, without books, without enlightenment. I’m fascinated by leaders and movements that create a church-like atmosphere of devotion, worship, hypnosis...

“But as a film-maker you don’t get to choose what you make. There is a difference between your beliefs and where your creative abilities lie. My films are implicitly but not explicitly political. I’m interested in contemplation, not confrontation. I was bought up in a zone of conflict — the Troubles — and I am afraid of conflict. I was extremely badly bullied at school and I’m interested in recovery. The aggressors and bullies don’t win. They are defeated.”

By disengaging from the fact that post-World War I Italy was torn apart by class struggle, and that fascism was a ruling-class conspiracy to destroy socialism, Cousins allows himself to view it as a proactive movement. “It is worth considering the ‘authorship’ quality of fascism,” he says, “the 1922-ism of it, which isn’t about a reaction to Bolshevism, but the Modernist movement. It doesn’t need a threat. It tells its own story.”

This is the means by which he draws parallels with Trump: “Trump — this volcanic narcissism — is the centre of its own universe. He isn’t reacting to mass strikes. He is a pure capitalist, creating a mythology of himself and the elites that he instinctively understands. And Trump is much less well educated than Mussolini...”

What has the reaction to the film been like?

“The Italian press went for us,” he says, “but the film did well in cinemas and teachers in the north of Italy began using it in classrooms. That didn’t go down well with the current Italian government. One of Meloni’s party, the Fratelli D’Italia, asked a question in parliament, but others objected that politicians shouldn’t be telling teachers what to show kids. And after that the bookings increased!”

This is motivating. “It’s the educational aspect I’m keen on,’ he says, “but one of the disappointments is that here in the UK it has not been bought for distribution. That may be because it is perceived as an Italian story, or that we don’t have a problem with the far-right in the UK. But it’s not too late. Things are not getting better!”

The March On Rome will screen at London's Bertha DocHouse as part of the Italian Doc Season on January 28. For more information see: dochouse.org