The Lure of Hollywood

During its early years, entrepreneurs in the Italian film industry maintained a complicated relation with the state. The arrangements between the joint-stock company Società Anonima Stefano Pittaluga and the Italian government in the interwar period were typical. Initially, Italian banks financed productions, despite the difficulties entailed in assessing a film's potential profitability. Following the rise of Benito Mussolini, the state invested in the industry, viewing it as a means of building nationalism and shaping the country's culture. While the deal was disastrous for the quality of the films, it nevertheless enabled filmmakers to gain technical experience and acquire production facilities that they were later able to put to better use.

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

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.

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>

This chapter shifts from the public to the private sphere and considers the importance of the rise of the amateur holiday film within the context of class, collection and nature appreciation during the interwar period. Amateur films are a rich and often untapped source of historical evidence. They can reveal the degree to which individuals had internalised the tourist industry’s primary claims about the importance of regional travel in relation to cultural identity. The chapter considers two amateur filmmakers: David C. Bowser and Frances H. Montgomery. While the surviving films from both collections provide evidence of the impact the larger scenic and travelogue industry had on the construction of leisure activities and the importance of documenting one’s spatial patterns and identity, the films also present competing aesthetic and thematic narratives, especially in relation to the concepts of home and away.

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.

Global brands are brands that expose a coherent identity across diverse cultural and geographical contexts. While the number and importance of global brands have increased with the most recent, neoliberal wave of globalization, the phenomenon is not new in itself. Brands were already an important element to the “first” wave of globalization of 1870–1913. Building on superior productive capacity and new advertising and marketing skills that had developed in a growing domestic consumer market, British brands like Pear's Soap were successful in colonial markets as well as in continental Europe and the United States. In the interwar years, the development of an American consumer society relied on new capacities for “Fordist” mass production: a consolidating cultural industry centered on radio, cinema, and the press, and new management and marketing practices along with market research and consumer psychology. In particular, there was a consolidation of American advertising practices; advertising underwent a “scientific turn” and began to rely more on systematic theories and models and less on intuition and artistic whim. These tendencies gave a growing strength to American brands like Lux Soap or Lucky Strike cigarettes. Aided by Hollywood cinema – where actors were often featured as “live” advertisements for branded consumer goods – and by the global expansion of American advertising agencies like J. Walter Thompson, these brands began to make inroads into European and, to some extent, Asian markets by the 1920s. For example, until the proclamation of “autarchy” in 1935, American brands had a discrete presence in fascist Italy and Coca‐Cola was consumed in Nazi Germany. They were sold against the backdrop of a globalizing American media culture, centered on cinema and jazz music, where commodities like cigarettes and bubble gum could achieve new, transnational meanings as part of an alluringly modern American way of life. During the postwar years, the global diffusion of American brands and of the American consumer culture of which they were part would be a key component of the processes of “Americanization,” whereby the United States built up a cultural “soft‐power” in the so‐called “free world” that remained in a position of relatively uncontested hegemony at least until the onset of the Vietnam War.

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.

Women wearing pants poses provocative questions: When did it start? Who invented this fashion? How scandalous was it? Were women really arrested? Prior to the 1920s it was a rarity to see women in the Western world wearing pants, but as the silk pajama trouser suit moved from the boudoir to the beach in the early 1920s it cemented the image of the trousered woman. Worn by Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, painted by Raoul Dufy and immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, pajamas came to symbolise much more than sleepwear: this book explores how much the pajama phenomenon was not only critical to the careers of designers such as Chanel, Patou, Poiret, and Schiaparelli, but how the versatile garment was also bound to the independence of women and influenced culture more broadly. Through meticulous research and never-before-seen images, the authors position pajama fashion in the context of the Golden Age of Travel, the rise of Hollywood, and the changing political climate of the early 20th century, to reveal how the rising trend in sleepwear influenced the image of the trousered woman now associated with The American Look. In the period between the two world wars, pajamas transformed the fashion landscape. Emerging from ladies’ boudoirs in the late 1910s as a new outdoor mode, “beach pajamas” were among the first trousered women’s attire for public wear in the West. The popularity of pajamas at seaside resorts opened the door for other trousered apparel for women—from satin and lace ensembles to workwear-inspired denim jumpsuits— to be marketed under the “pajama” umbrella, ultimately familiarizing the public with the image of women in pants. By the late 1930s beach pajamas had been immortalized by the likes of Raul Dufy and F. Scott Fitzgerald and graced the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New Yorker. With examples from the interwar period’s most influential designers, including Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Madeleine Vionnet, as well as previously unpublished images from period photographs, private holdings, and museum collections, this is the first book to trace beach pajamas from their earliest appearances as anti-fashion garments at the close of the 1910s, to fanciful, feminine iterations of the 1920s and 1930s, to their evolution into the height of sportswear. From Sleepwear to Sportswear frames beach pajamas as liminal garments that straddle the lines between masculine and feminine, East and West, public and private, and sportswear and lingerie. Using context from the golden age of travel, the Hollywood film industry, the Great Depression, and a growing modernist zeitgeist, D’Agati and Schiff present new research to establish beach pajamas as an important foundation of American sportswear.

This article examines the impact of structural changes in the postwar film industry on the activities and effectiveness of the foreign distribution subsidiaries of American firms. As these subsidiaries saw their regular supply of films from their in-house Hollywood studios decline, they sought out alternative sources of product content, often from local markets. Unable to rely on the traditional “ownership” advantages bestowed on them by their parent firms, these subsidiaries increasingly needed to integrate into local networks and forge closer relationships with local producers and exhibitors. Our focus is on Italy, one of the most important film markets for US companies in the 1960s. We collect data on the box office revenues and screen time allocated to every film released into the first-run cinema market and compare the effectiveness of American versus Italian distributors in maximizing the exposure of their most popular films. We explore the attempts by US firms to form partnerships with Italian distributors and producers. Finally, we examine available archival records to reveal the detailed activities of US distribution offices in Italy and their attempts to integrate into local business networks. We conclude that while US subsidiaries did not fully succeed in becoming “insiders” within the Italian film industry in this period, they did actively work toward such an objective.

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.

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.

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.