Blessed Cinema: State and Catholic Censorship in Postwar Italy

Abstract

Film censorship in Italy was as rigorous throughout the 1950s as it had been under Mussolini’s regime. The postwar period represented, however, a decisive moment: Italy experienced one of the highest box-office intakes in Europe and a new film law, introduced by Giulio Andreotti in 1949, transformed censorship practice into a preventative form of control under the ideological and legislative pressure of the Catholic establishment. This crucial turning point would set a standard practice—slightly modified in 1962 and again in 2007, but substantially the same—in which state censorship would be echoed by that of Catholic Church, whose main aim was to “promote a moralizing cinema.”KeywordsPostwar PeriodCultural PolicyArtistic QualityParish CinemaFascist RegimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.