Entrepreneurs and the State in the Italian Film Industry, 1919–1935

Chapter 9 examines the dominance of American cinema during the interwar years. It also looks at the policies of the Fascist regime with regard to the strengthening of the Italian film industry in response to the American dominance in the sector. The chapter’s four sections address, first, the channels through which millions of Italians came to watch American films and the presence of American ‘runaway’ productions in Italy; secondly, the regime’s attitudes and policies towards American cinema (here the role played by Mussolini and his eldest son, Vittorio, are of particular importance, together with the views of the Italian tzar of Italian cinema, Luigi Freddi); thirdly, the ways in which the Italian film industry responded to both the practices and style of Hollywood cinema during the interwar years (this section is articulated in different subsections, one of them devoted to the creation of the Cinecittà studios); fourthly, the filmic representations of migration to the Americas during the interwar years.

Except for comedy, Italian popular cinema in the postwar era was mainly characterized by ephemeral genres and subgenres that would follow the model of a successful national or foreign movie and then exploit it to the point of complete saturation. A good example is the spaghetti Western, which became extremely popular in the wake of Sergio Leone’s 1964 success Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), only to disappear within about a decade. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is the fact that, unlike the Hollywood studio system, the Italian film industry was utterly disorganized, comprising countless short-lived, small production companies with no interest in building up fashionable filmic formulas for long-term use. Thus among successful genres such as the film operistico (opera film), the peplum (sword and sandal), and the giallo (thriller), comedy appears to be the only exception. As old as Italian cinema itself, comedy not only survived every crisis in the movie industry but also became increasingly important, and it is now the only popular form of Italian film (all the other genres disappeared or moved to television). This can be explained by the Italians’ well-known passion for comedy. Long before the birth of film, comedy had a long-standing tradition in Italian theater, going back at least as far as the renowned commedia dell’arte in the sixteenth century, characterized by farce, irreverent parody, mockery, and biting satire.

This article addresses the apparent reluctance to engage with feminist film theory and gender studies in the mainstream of Italian film studies, particularly those originating within Italy. The roots of this neglect lie in a patriarchal critical tradition and a tendency for Italian feminism to function outside academia. The article contends that this situation has led to an impoverished understanding of Italian film history and potentially negative consequences for the Italian film industry. Emphasizing a need for sensitivity to the differences between Italian and Anglophone feminist approaches, the article considers the ways in which more attention to feminism and its theoretical debates could lead to a very different picture, indeed a second take on the Italian film industry, as illustrated with the example of 1950s melodrama and spectatorship theory. Finally, the article maps some other ways in which scholars, particularly Anglophone, might approach this second take, and why they should.

Taking into account the EU policies aimed to strengthen the industrial-financial condition of its audiovisual system, the Italian broadcasters’ economy and the historical development of its relationship with the national film industry, our study will tackle the Italian free-to-air television policies in national feature films broadcasting. The study analyzes the trends of Italian feature films programming in the national free-to-air television market during the last 10 years, referring to the following issues: a) volume and origin of feature films; b) broadcaster (public and commercial); c) time slots. The results show how Italy has been experiencing a much more dramatic downturn in fiction programming in respect to the other European countries and it discloses that the increase in national TV fiction programming is accompanied by a contraction of domestic feature films slots (despite the good state of health the Italian film industry has been experiencing during the past decade) and an increase of the American ones.

From a historiographical point of view, the Italian diva Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) as an actress-manager offers an original case study in relation to her only film performance in Cenere ( Ashes, 1916). This is a film adapted from the eponymous novel by Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926). In the 1910s, when Duse decided to work in the Italian film industry, she was a celebrity and her name was a guarantee of success for the Ambrosio Company in Turin. The film producers wanted to use her celebrity in order to ensure success at the box office. As an actress-manager with a long and acclaimed international career in the theatre, Duse knew this mechanism very well, but her position was contrary to their expectations. In fact, she aimed to present herself as an anti-diva, with her wrinkle-furrowed face and white hair, proposing a fascinating artistic creation based on the ‘mother roles’ that she had created for the theatre. This paper explores new elements concerning the position of Duse as an actress-manager for the Italian film industry in the 1910s. It is focused on her strategy of reiterating her stage success in playing a mother. On film, she did not want to be an instrument used for commercial purposes, and she did not want to create a common popular diva film. With Cenere, Duse's capability as an actress-manager can be seen in her creation of this non-conventional, poetic role for the silent film industry in wartime Italy.

The yearbooks and almanacs printed between the beginning of the Second World War and the end of the Fifties collect rare and hardly accessible data on the Italian film industry and the professionals involved in it. As such, they are both sources, whose use can be extremely profitable in production studies, and objects of investigation that might reveal the rhetoric and the discursive strategies through which different social actors have promoted an image of that production system as a fully-fledged and rationally organized industry. The article describes these yearbooks and interprets such discourses, in order to better understand the tensions that characterize this phase of important changes for the Italian film production.

This paper examines the evolution and effects of the tax credits systems introduced in the Italian film industry. We have studied the economic and juridical roots of State subsidies, enabling the readers to understand their legitimacy and providing them with the main international best practices. An empirical analysis is performed, assessing whether recent measures introduced in Italy have influenced the domestic theatrical distribution of a sample of 399 Italian films released in the last 4 years. Tax incentives are found to have a positive relation to the number of prints distributed. However, direct contributions do not have a statistical influence on theatrical distribution, supporting the recent wave of reforms aimed at shifting the mix of resources from direct to indirect public support.

The chapter provides an overview of the history of the post-war Italian film industry from crisis to crisis, that is to say from the ground zero of 1945 (when the whole Italian film business had to be politically and economically reorganised, together with the rest of the war-torn country) to the ground zero of 1985 (the year in which, for the first time in almost three decades, Italian film production fell below the rate of 100 films made per year, as the culmination of a crisis that started in the mid-1970s). The chapter opens with an in-depth production history of I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), followed by an account of the 1958-1964 boom in the production of pepla, the historical-mythological adventures of the sword-and-sandal kind. Both cases (an isolated commercial failure the former; a short-lived box-office goldmine, or filone, the latter) are emblematic of the functioning of the Italian film industry between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s – a state-subsidised system mostly based on a constellation of medium, small and minuscule business ventures piggy-backing on popular genres/trends in the local and/or global film market.

The Italian film industry and the local banks are progressively shortening the distance between them. The traditional financing options available to producers, presales and coproductions, are now partnering with more sophisticated tools, which have already proven their efficacy in other markets. A new impulse towards these new tools is given by the newly introduced tax incentives, although the local industry still has to grow both in terms of dimension of players and diversified product.

Francesca Archibugi is one of the major women in the Italian film industry whose work represents a significant contribution to contemporary cinematic art and who has obtained unanimous international recognition. This article examines Archibugi's filmography from an aesthetic perspective, while analysing her narratives and realistic cinematography in relation to the Italian familyscape where tradition and modernity coexist in a dialectic relationship. Archibugi sets her narratives in a milieu of national events and cultural transformations, weaving together private spheres and public events. In her most recent film Flying Lessons (2007) the director proves to be also perceptive to national and diasporic identities, post-national contexts and trans-cultural contacts. Characterised by aesthetic minimalism and realistic narratives, her authorial work goes beyond the intimate, the personal, the private and transcends the local and the national, as it assembles these elements in a montage of human micro-history and recomposes them as the tiles of an Italian social and inter-cultural mosaic.

In conclusion to our 2013 book, Reframing Italy, in which we considered new trends in Italian women’s filmmaking, we broach the topic of the marginalisation and stereotyping of women in a highly patriarchal film industry and the problems involved in articulating an aesthetics that speaks directly to female audiences. While our book highlights the exceptional, often invisible, production by Italian women filmmakers, for most women filmmakers in Italy their opportunities in the film industry are still limited and their films appear against all odds. In our contribution to this volume, we expand on our previous work and focus more directly on the ongoing struggle for gender equality in the Italian film industry. A recent 2017 report by DEA (Donne e audiovisivo) confirmed our own findings that Italian women directors find themselves less likely to attract funding or to gain the confidence of producers. In fact, the study shows that only 12% of public financing for films goes to women, 21% of the films produced by the state agency RAI are directed by women, and only 9.2% of the films directed by women reach mainstream movie houses.

Music Publishers and Synchronized Scores: Mascagni, Ricordi, and <i>Rapsodia satanica</i>

Flourishing in Italy between the late 1950s and the 1970s, commedia all’ italiana was a satirical genre that the Italian film industry has lately sought to revive with the production of comedic films explicitly addressing the genre’s classic titles: in 2009 Enrico Oldoini directed I mostri, oggi, an “update” of Dino Risi’s classic 1963 comedy I mostri, while Neri Parenti released in 2011 a comedy entitled Amici Miei—Come tutto ebbe inizio, advertised as a prequel of Mario Monicelli’s 1975 classic Amici Miei. With reference to Rick Altman’s essay A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre (1984), Boitani offers a definition of commedia all’ italiana based on a structural criterion, to demonstrate that these recent endeavours cannot be considered a second wave of commedia all’ italiana, as much as an attempt to market conventional Hollywood-style comedies through the use of a recognisable franchise.

This article presents an examination of material from archives, much of it little known and little researched, on the Italian film industry. The importance of archive sources in pinpointing the processes that bring a film to the screen continues to inform film research. The main documentation explored is that of the Film Finances Archive, only recently made available to researchers. This is considered in tandem with data from the Italian State Archive, and a range of other critical and narrative sources. Of these, particularly significant is the correspondence and autobiography of Prince Alessandro Tasca, a little-known figure, who was the Film Finances representative in Italy. Italian filmmaking from 1950 to 1960 is the main focus because it is given extensive coverage in the Film Finances Archive, when the company was involved in a number of Anglo-Italian co-productions. The field of Anglo-Italian co-productions has been described as an ‘undiscovered world’. It is thus contended that, through exploration of this newly available archive material and other relevant sources, the study offers a fresh perspective on the context of postwar Italian filmmaking.

This article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores the multilayered, shifting dimension of their precarious and gendered labour. Engaging with key questions raised by historians of Italian Fascism and by feminist research in film and media history, the article delineates intersectional barriers to film employment faced by women in the years of the dictatorship and points to their historical legacy.