In the first episode of “Fascism on Film,” co-hosts Teal Minton and James Kent begin a conversation about one of the most unique and destructive political phenomena of the last century: fascism.

Rather than starting with a textbook definition or a single historical case study, we watched these films and asked the question: What does fascism look like? What is the visceral experience of it? And how do we learn to recognize it when we see it?

Our curiosity evolved into a years-long conversation, and now into this podcast. Reflecting on our own backgrounds as writers, teachers, and cinephiles, we unpack how cinema has served as both a mirror and a mechanism for fascist power through propaganda, resistance, and postwar reckoning. From early Nazi newsreels to American Hollywood dramas, from banned films to accidental warnings, we explore how film renders the abstract idea of fascism into visible, emotional, and often contradictory forms.

This episode outlines the conceptual framework of the series. Drawing on Roger Griffin’s theory of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism—a mythic rebirth through crisis—and Robert Paxton’s model of fascism as a staged political behavior rather than a fixed ideology, we begin charting a cinematic and historical map: propaganda films, prewar American responses, postwar moral reckonings, and modern echoes in today’s media ecology.

Along the way, we explore the complicity of early Hollywood, the challenges of defining fascism in contemporary America, the role of race and white nationalism in fascist systems, and the eerie familiarity of its tropes in the age of social media.

Our first episode doesn’t offer answers so much as it opens doors. It invites listeners into a conversation about cinema, history, and the frightening elasticity of authoritarian aesthetics. By examining what fascism looks like on-screen, our podcast aims to help us better recognize it off-screen as well.