Alongside the war dramatically mixed with mud and blood, from 1914 to '18 a parallel war was fought, no less decisive, made up of words and above all of images.
The Collection, patrimony of the Civic Museums of Udine, represents much of what was produced during the years of the conflict on all fronts and in all languages. The official publications appear there, propaganda tools of the various Governments and Commands; but also and above all what in the trenches, with the use of the mimeograph (at the time it was called a velocigraph), produced - directly - those who lived and suffered that conflict on the front line.
On the Italian front (similarly to what happened for all the parties involved in the conflict) behind these apparently spontaneous instruments, moved the powerful "Servizio Propaganda" (called "Servizio P"), wanted by the General Staff after the defeat at Caporetto . In fact, starting from January 1918, it was decided that each Army, and descending each Corps down to the single Battalion, was flanked by an "Office P", with the task of dealing with the morale of the troops, ensuring them assistance, refreshment and recreation in the free time, and instilling confidence and, if possible, good humour.
Trench magazines are the clearest fruit of this titanic propaganda effort. At the end of the war, in Italy alone, there were almost a hundred, and in the last months of the conflict alone, the number of paper materials exchanged at the front, dropped on enemy lines or disseminated within the country reached the hyperbolic figure of 62 millions of items including magazines, postcards, posters, bulletins.
A real paper offensive carried out to the sound of proclamations, messages repeated with a pounding rhythm, incitements, imperious requests or persuasive witticisms... anything that can restore confidence in one's own strength and faith in victory. To be conveyed are simple, immediate concepts, in compliance with the directives of the General Staff, which prescribe "flat and accessible expressions, which without opinion convince of the topics covered". In fact, for the P Service the troops and the people are almost children with a simple and good-natured soul, which must be conquered with recourse to imagination, imagination, games and sometimes a few goliardic winks. Even rebuses, charades, sweepstakes are in fact bent to the purpose. With these new tools, a new call to arms is being implemented, which involves all the social and cultural components of the country behind the lines of the Piave, young socialist and Catholic intellectuals, called to serve in the ranks of the P Service and destined, only a few year later, to go through very different destinies. On the pages of trench magazines writers, journalists, columnists and more or less famous "pencils" (many illustrators enlisted as officers or non-commissioned officers) like Umberto Bunelleschi, Antonio Rubino, Aldo Mazza, Filiberto Scarpelli, Eugenio Colmo (known as Goliath), Bruno Angoletta, Mario Sironi, Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carrà, the young "corporal" Giorgio de Chirico, Enrico Sacchetti, Mario Buzzi, who in the following years will become protagonists in the world of illustration for books or magazines, posters or art and painting.
A new medium also breaks into the storytelling and creation of the imaginary: cinema, documented in the exhibition by examples of American animation. Just a few years after Windsor McCay's famous pioneering experiments, the American troops, who have made power and technological innovation their calling card on the European battlefields, are in fact engaging in animated satirical cartoons. It is the beginning of the era of cartoons, which will then have a large part in the Second World War, and which now has ridiculous and clumsy soldiers of the Central Powers as protagonists.
The decision to combine this historical analysis with a section dedicated to the memory of the Great War through the eye and sensitivity of contemporary illustrators is original and engaging. Almost a parallel path that involves the visitor starting from the Hall of Parliament, at the beginning of the exhibition. Here among the frescoes that recall the Battle of Lepanto, the images of "1916: the First Day of the Battle of the Somme" by Joe Sacco scroll, projected in large format on the ancient walls, in a game of references and cross-references between the wars of the past and the shocking modernity of the First World War. The use of video projections, touch screens and repertoires of digitized reference materials actually accompanies the entire visit itinerary, which winds through a number of thematic sections: the first one, "We and They", compares precisely through two screens and projections, accompanied by sound effects, the construction of the imagination of the enemy, from time to time grotesque, ridiculous, monstrous. One room - and it will be like entering the "command center" of the P Service - is dedicated to the official directives of the General Staff, recovered by drawing directly on the original sources of the Army. A specific space is dedicated to Austrian newspapers which falsified Italian newspapers for reasons of counter-propaganda, compared with the originals. Two rooms are reserved, one for the presentation of a large number of body magazines, and the other for an important selection of works by illustrators of greater quality and graphic and artistic interest. This is followed by a monochromatic space that houses magazines from other countries and alignments, in different languages and – in a suggestive setting that incorporates the lilac color of the original sheets – a room dedicated to mimeographs and rare spontaneous sheets, often issued in single copies, sometimes of the activity of soldiers interned in prison camps. In this section it will be possible to notice how common language can become when the same life conditions occur: in fact, although these sheets are the work of French, German or Italian soldiers, they seem to have been drawn by the same hand. The exhibition closes with the original plates of contemporaries, storytellers through images who have illustrated and continue to illustrate fragments of the Great War. Gipi, Manuele Fior, Jacques Tardi – writer and cartoonist, of the French school, the Australian Joe Sacco and the illustrator known throughout the world and now considered a historical master, Hugo Pratt, of which, in addition to ink, a significant and unpublished selection of the precious original hand-painted cels made in 1977 for the "Supergulp" broadcast of Rai Due.
Ph: Hugo Pratt, the Corto Maltese and the Red Baron, 1977, original cel.
