From Bust to Boom: Women and Representations of Prosperity in Italian Cinema of the Late 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

Outside Italy, Italian cinema of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War is generally associated with neorealism but, while neorealist cinema focused on social politics, it is in the sphere of popular cinema that the negotiation of a new national consensus is visible. The idea of negotiation was central to the work of feminist film scholars from the 1980s who sought to bring feminist theory into alignment with the lived experience of female audiences. Rather than seeing the female audience as passive consumers of dominant social values, Christine Gledhill explored how melodrama (despised as “feminized sentimentalism”) used both the melodramatic and realist modes to ground the struggles between social values in a recognizable world.1 Jackie Stacey’s ethnographic study of how female British audiences engaged with cinema stars in British and American cinema of the Second World War and the 1950s identified extremely complex negotiations, insufficiently explained by psychoanalytic film theory. She stresses the importance of historical context and the lived experience of her female correspondents for whom the hunger, disruptions, and deprivation of the wartime and postwar periods, and the influence of American culture colored their relationships with worlds on screen.2 Women in her survey mention the intensity of the experience of bonding with their on-screen heroines, and memories of their skill and financial investment in copying favorite stars.3