Cinema is a field of symbolic power in which the discourses prevailing in today’s society are constructed. In this Journal edited by the University of Palermo, the authors propose to analyze the representations of authoritarianism and totalitarianism based on the analysis of a corpus of filmic images of cinematographic and fictional newsreels, which deal with the intersection of cinema / history in relation to its context of production. The films are considered as cultural products that take elements of the symbolic universe
that surrounds them, constituting themselves as constructors and reproducers of social imaginaries.
The various articles presented in this book are established as a laboratory for the reflection of social scientists, who in the task of investigating the future of socio-historical processes today have this inestimable resource that was provided by science and the modern technology. There are multiple perspectives of analysis offered from the perspective of the authors: the cinema as a historical document; the film version of the past; the film as a didactic resource; signifier system, and place of memory and social imaginary, all of them developed and applied to the different films that make up this publication.