“Raiding Africa”: Motor Raid Films and Italian Economic Imperialism after the End of Colonial Empire

This essay explores a series of sponsored Italian nonfiction films representing trans-African car crossings, made after the dismantling of Italy’s colonial empire following World War II. I focus on two significant examples of what are commonly referred to as “motor raid films”—that is, film works shot during the Tripoli-Mogadishu and the Algiers-Cape Town crossings, produced by the main national nonfiction film companies, and sponsored by the major automotive firms between 1950 and 1952. Their production histories are traced using the film materials preserved by the Istituto Luce’s Archive and Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa, with reference to the corporate sources in Fiat’s and Alfa’s documentation centers. I investigate how cinema navigated the end of fascist territorial imperialism to become useful to the continuation of economic imperialism in the postwar free-market economy. Taking a cue from the scholarship on useful cinema and adopting an “infrastructural disposition,” I read these films as material and discursive manifestations of broader configurations of power and extraction. Their “usefulness” is then rethought in reference to what has been called the “automobility system” or “regime,” retracing how their production processes intersected the car companies’ extractive interests toward African lands. I argue that, while contributing to expand their markets, the motor raid films supported the car manufacturers’ arguments in favor of the extraction of labor in former Italian colonies and of raw materials in parts of the continent still dominated by other European powers. Ultimately, the films advocated an audiovisual and discursive “reframing” of Africa by representing it as a place of transit and of resource extraction, a mere testing ground for Western industries.