The Narrative Pattern of Italian Film Comedy

Italian national cinema developed quickly between the last decade of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I (particularly in Turin and also in Rome), and it won a sizeable share of film audiences around the world for, in particular, its epic films set in classical settings. The outbreak of the war virtually destroyed the industry, but with the coming of sound and the advent of the Fascist government, support for the industry grew before World War II broke out, with the building of the film studio complex at Cinecittà (“Cinema City”), the establishment of Luce (the government agency charged with producing documentaries and newsreels), and the opening of an important national film school in Rome, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Unlike its counterparts in totalitarian Russia or Germany, the Italian industry was not completely dominated by government propaganda, and in fact some of the major Fascist figures in the industry wanted to imitate the entertainment of Hollywood rather than support a completely ideological cinema. Major directors emerged during this period, such as Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, and Vittorio De Sica (all of whom continued to work after the end of the war), and the cinema during the Fascist period trained a great many people involved in basic film production who were to play a vital role in the dramatic rebirth of Italian cinema after 1945. With the end of the war, Italian neorealism burst on the international scene. Such figures as Roberto Rossellini, De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Giuseppe De Santis won international acclaim for their “realistic” portrayal of contemporary Italian social and economic problems. During the 1950s, many young directors (Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Pietro Germi among them) sought to move beyond the kind of programmatic social realism Marxist critics in Italy and France championed, and in the 1960s a second generation of even younger figures (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Francesco Rosi) looked both backward to their Italian neorealist heritage and abroad to French cinema for inspiration. During the same time, but less beloved by film scholars and critics, Italian cinema began to produce an enormous number of highly profitable works that might be described as genre films or, to use the Hollywood term, B films. First, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the peplum or “sword and sandal” epic film starring foreign bodybuilders became immensely popular and was quickly exported. This genre was followed closely by the spaghetti western, an incredibly successful genre that produced almost five hundred films in a very short time and revolutionized the face of a classic Hollywood genre almost overnight. Subsequently, in the 1970s and 1980s, the thriller (known as a giallo in Italy) and the spaghetti horror film (with its zombie and cannibal variants) were also extremely popular. Perhaps the most popular genre of all, one that continued to thrive during the entire postwar period, was the so-called commedia all’italiana or “comedy, Italian style,” a form of comic film indebted not only to the traditional commedia dell’arte but also to a collection of brilliant actors and scriptwriter-directors who combined humor with a biting and often cynical vision of Italian culture, providing a type of social criticism that Italy’s politicians often avoided. The period between 1945 and around 1975 thus witnessed an Italian cinema that managed to combine popular entertainment in a variety of film genres with art films, box office power with critical acclaim at film festivals and among auteur-oriented critics and film historians. Nevertheless, directors and technicians of genius continued to work, and in the last decade some new faces have added luster and box office appeal to the national cinema’s treatment of new themes (racial and gender identity in a multiethnic and multicultural Italy, terrorism, crime, and the Mafia), themes that have evolved in Italian cinema’s reflection of everyday reality in the peninsula. Italian film scholarship has evolved dramatically in the recent past, moving from a focus on postwar neorealism and the art film toward a broader definition of film history that encompasses an interest in multicultural themes, more film theory imported from abroad (especially from the United Kingdom and the United States), and more interest in two periods (the silent era and the Fascist period) that have long been neglected in comparison with postwar Italy.

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.

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.

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.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 John Stafford, The £.S.d. of Film Making in Rome Studios, Kinematograph Weekly, 20 June 1946, 14. I am indebted to Dr. Paola Merli for her painstaking and insightful comments on this paper’s arguments and understanding of Italian history, culture and cinema. 2 Herbert Harris, Gentleman From Verona, Picturegoer, 10 April 1948, 10. 3 Andrew Grey, Gracie—48 years young, Picturegoer, 5 January 1946, 8. 4 ‘Britalian’ is a word sometimes used to identify the Italian community in the UK. 5 By 1952, Italian film exports were worth more than £1.75 million, probably only slightly lower than those of Britain. Official statistics for British film exports were not published until 1956, when they stood at £4 million. Ironically, the rapid growth of the Italian industry might not have been possible without the infrastructure of technical training and state support put in place over the previous two decades by Mussolini’s regime to save the ailing film industry. This foundation was built upon by the governments of reconstruction, which put the volume of Italian production on a par with that of Britain by promoting co-production and distribution deals and instituting a production fund of £3 million. Italy Increases Subsidy for Producers, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 August 1952, 9. For an overview of the Italian film industry in this period see, for example: Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema (London, 1996), 83–93; Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge, 2000), 15–20; Matthew Hibberd, The Media in Italy (Maidenhead, 2008), 51–56. 6 J. Arthur Rank Speaks …, and Let British Films be Ambassadors to the World, Kinematograph Weekly, 11 January 1945, 35 and 163. 7 Letter from Joan T. Zappa, Picturegoer, 16 August 1947, 14. 8 Letter from Brian Roger Haigh to Picturegoer 8 November 1947, 14. 9 Distribution and Exhibition of Cinematograph Films: Report of the Committee of Enquiry Appointed by the President of the Board of Trade, HMSO, Comnd 7837, November 1949, para 51. 10 Recalled in To-day’s Cinema 20 November 1945, 4. 11 Some civilian cinemas, including all of the ones in Naples, were out-of-bounds to Allied troops ‘for health reasons’. Captain Andrew Grey, ‘Going to the pictures in Italy’, Picturegoer 31 March 1945, 8–9. However, almost all cinemas south of Rome had been derequisitioned by June 1945. War Office 204/3305. Public Records Office (hereafter PRO). 12 The British film industry was equally slow to supply publicity material to the thriving Italian fan magazines, which were unhampered by paper shortages. Grey op cit. 13 The cheeky Lancastrian’s dialogue was dubbed in falsetto Italian, but his comic songs were left in their original form, perhaps deemed beyond effective translation. Ibid. 14 The Cinema, 15 May 1946, 31. The nomination by the British authorities in Italy of Smith as the sole representative of all film companies caused an outcry from Rank’s competitors in May 1945. Representatives of private companies had not been allowed to visit Italy up to this point, but American companies were already evading this prohibition by securing attachments to the Office of War Information. Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 371/49949. PRO. 15 Internal Bank of England memo to Mr. Somervell, 23 October 1946. Board of Trade (hereafter BT) 11/3201. PRO. 16 Treasury memo from E. Rowe-Dutton to Sir Wilfred Eady, 31 October 1946. BT 11/3201. PRO. 17 See correspondence in FO 371/60671. PRO. 18 Talks began on 21 March 1945 and produced a set of draft proposals on 30 May 1945. Captain Vernon Jarrett (rather than ‘one of Mr. Rank’s men’) was appointed as the British’s Film Officer with a seat on the Italian Film Board. FO 371/49949. PRO. 19 Verrnon Jarratt, The Italian Cinema (London, 1951), 62. 20 David Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era: cultural industries, politics and the public (Manchester, 1990), Chapter 5. 21 Kinematograph Weekly, 12 December 1945, 20. 22 Robert Raymond, Invaders Welcome!, Film Illustrated Monthly, 3(2) (1948), 18–19; Peter Noble, Film Illustrated Monthly, 2(11) (1947). 23 Tony Rose, Continental Invasion, Picturegoer, 14 February 1948, 7. 24 Lionel Collier, Continental Hits, Picturegoer 10 September 1949, 21. However, the exhibition of almost all Italian films in Britain was restricted to a small number of specialist cinemas. By September 1956, Italy had produced more than 1,500 films during the previous decade, but only Bread, Love and Jealousy (1954) had achieved a circuit release in Britain. Italians Demand British Circuit Deal—or Else, Kinematograph Weekly, 6 September 1956, 3. 25 In truth, there were a number of British silent films that utilised Italian locations, and a few examples in the 1930s of Anglo-Italian production co-operation. Carmine Gallone, an experienced Italian director who had also worked in France and Germany during the contraction of his home industry, directed scenes shot at the Venice Carnival for the musical For Love of You (UK, 1933). Unsurprisingly, these were emphasised in the publicity: ‘Every gondola available in Venice was commandeered and several hundreds of gondoliers and lovely girls took part. The title song “For Love of You” is sung here with beautiful effect by Foresta as the gondolas containing young lovers slip past, making the scene one of rich splendour and romance.’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 2 November 1933, 53.) Gallone’s 1935 Bellini bio-pic Casta Diva was made by Gaumont British in partnership with Allenza Cinematografica Italiana The English languish version The Divine Spark employed the scripting talents of Emlyn Williams and an entirely different cast, with the exception of Marta Eggerth. Mario Zampi’s First World War drama 13 Men and a Gun (1938) was made for Two Cities Films by a British cast in Italy in bilingual versions, but the English version failed to meet the qualifying conditions for a British quota film. The decision to film in Italy was probably shrewd at a time when the doors to the Italian market were rapidly closing to foreign-made films. Two Cities would go on to be one of the most successful production outfits in 1940s British cinema, but not before Zampi and his business partner Fillipo del Giudice had spent some of the war years interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. 26 The Cinema 23 November 1945, 16. 27 The Cinema 14 August 1945, 6. MGM had begun negotiations for the rights to Quo Vardis just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, and it eventually became Hollywood’s most expensive film when £2.5 million was spent on its production, principally at Cinecittà, in 1950. 28 Kinematograph Weekly, 15 August 1946, 24. 29 Stefano Pittaluga had produced the first Italian sound film in 1930. The picture was directed by Gennaro Righelli, who would also direct L’Armata Azzura. 30 The Blue Squadron pressbook, Warner Bros First National, 1934. 31 Warners appealed, but to no avail. Kinematograph Weekly, 2 August 1934, 3. 32 The Cinema 28 November 1945, 6. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Kinematograph Weekly, 7 February 1946, 22. 36 Gentilomo had directed Rome Symphony (1939), one of the World Windows series of Technicolor shorts photographed by Jack Cardiff. His other credits included the well-received Carnival in Venice (1940) and, most recently, the neo-realist influenced O Sole Mio (1945). 37 William Freshman, Roman holiday, Film Industry, December 1946, 2–3. 38 Jarratt, op cit. 39 Kinematograph Weekly, 14 March 1946, 13. 40 Kinematograph Weekly, 21 March 1946, 25. 41 Kinematograph Weekly, 2 May 1946, 24. 42 Stafford, op cit. 43 To-day’s Cinema, 4 March 1947, 22. 44 Film Report 1455, 7 March 1947. 45 Picturegoer, 5 July 1947, 13. 46 Elisabetta Girelli, Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British cinema (Bristol, 2009), 19–27. See also Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain: realities and images (Leicester, 1988). 47 A Man About the House pressbook, British Lion, 1947. 48 Ibid. See also Michael Denison, Overtures and Beginners (London, 1973), 209. 49 The Cinema, 8 January 1947, 30. 50 Picture Show, 29 November 1947, 11; Film Illustrated Monthly, 2(10) (1947), 23. 51 Andrew Gray [sic, Grey?], The British Film World Needs a Place in the (Empire) Sun, Film Industry, October 1946, 8–9. On ‘bandits’, see Film Industry, November 1946, 18. It would be another 10 years before the ACT and the three Italian technicians’ unions came to an agreement on location filming in both countries. Kinematograph Weekly, 27 September 1956, 3. 52 Douglass Montgomery, My Adventures in Italy, Picturegoer, 24 May 1947, 11. 53 The Cinema, 10 December 1947, 22. 54 Call of the Blood is the story of a British bourgeois couple (the husband is of Mediterranean origin) who honeymoon in Sicily where the people are closer to nature. The contemporary advertising for Hitchens novel colourfully evokes its discourse of erotic essentialism: ‘A story thrilling with the exultant joy of physical life […] In the man’s veins runs a stream of hot Southern blood, which unawakened until this time, now echoes a quick response to the romantic and mysterious environment and to the beauty of an alluring young peasant girl’ (New York, 1906). 55 Film Industry, March 1948, 18. 56 To-Day’s Cinema, 13 February 1948, 14. 57 One Night With You pressbook, Rank, 1948. 58 Patricia Roc International Fan Club Magazine, 1(8) (October 1947), 2. Two months earlier, announcing that she had been given the part, she had been rather more enthusiastic: ‘So it’s the true blue Italian skies for me, friends! … Pauline, my personal maid, is very thrilled about it all.’ Patricia Roc International Fan Club Magazine, 1(6) (August 1947), 6. 59 Kinematograph Weekly, 21 August 1947, 13. 60 Film Illustrated Monthly, 3(6) (1948), 23. 61 Sunday Express, 25 April 1948. 62 Can Price make Byron box-office?, Film Illustrated Monthly, l3(3) (1947), 6–7. 63 Dennis Price, Bringing a character to life, Picturegoer, 28 February 1948, 10. 64 Sydney Box and Vivian Cox, The Bad Lord Byron (London, 1949), 92. 65 The Cinema, 22 October 1947, 19. 66 Film Illustrated Monthly, 4(5) (1949), 13. 67 The film had the working title OK, Agostina at this point. 68 To-Day’s Cinema, 22 April 1949, 3, 20. 69 Dora Dobson, Experiment that Became a Triumph!, The Cinema Studio, 8 December 1948, 15. Ischia became the home of the English composer William Walton in 1949, and was later the base for location work on the Anglo-American swashbuckler, The Crimson Pirate (1952), although the action was supposed to be set in the Caribbean. Studio work followed at Teddington and Elstree. The film was a major box-office hit, but the production was dogged by script re-writing and other delays caused by transportation problems, near-death accidents and the confusions arising from using three crews: British, American and Italian, under the direction of Robert Siodmak and Vernon Sewell. As a consequence, Warner Bros’s frozen assets were well nigh evaporated. See Colin Hanmer, Ischia is an island, not a sneeze, Picturegoer, 14 February 1953, 10–11. 70 Yvonne Mitchell, Actress, London, 1957, 71–77. 71 To-Day’s Cinema, 11 October 1949, 11; Kinematograph Weekly, 13 October 1949, 24. In Film Monthly Review (December 1949, 42), Austin Welland, frustrated by the film’s ‘trite’ dialogue, condemned the picture as ‘a futile attempt to “cash in” on the current craze for films with an Italian setting’. 72 A Legend, an opera and a triangle, The Cinema Studio, 9 June 1948, 7. ‘No film made against the background of either the Dolomites or of Venice could be wholly dislikeable’, commented the Manchester Guardian, 5 February 1949. 73 Michael Denison’s account of the filming in his Overtures and Beginners (221–223) includes comments on the privations of living on the £5 per week allowed by British foreign currency restrictions, and a description of floating down the Venetian Grand Canal by moonlight with Tito Gobbi singing the melancholy songs of the gondolieri. 74 Not surprisingly, Brief Encounter was a favourite of Rota’s. On his positive experience of composing for a British film, see Nothing Like it in Italy, The Cinema Studio, 6 October 1948, 9–10. See also George Minton. Where The Glass Mountain got its title, The Cinema Studio, 10 November 1948, 17–18. 75 The Times, 4 February 1949. The Cinema Studio’s review judged The Glass Mountain ‘a shrewd compromise between the high and low-brow’ and correctly predicted that it would have ‘considerable box-office success’. 20 January 1949, 21. 76 Quoted in Dennison Thornton, Portrait of George Minter, The Cinema Studio 8 December 1948, 15. 77 Kinematograph Weekly, 2 September 1948, 21. 78 Angelo Unit Start in Italy, The Cinema Studio, 1 September 1948, 9–10. 79 The Cinema Studio, 10 November 1948, 13. 80 Majorie Rhodes, My Dream Holiday, Film Illustrated Monthly, 3(12) (December 1948), 5. 81 Private Angelo pressbook, Associated British-Pathe, 1949. 82 In his autobiography, Dear Me, Harmondsworth, 1978, 211, Peter Ustinov clarified his own thoughts on this controversial aspect of Italianism:The Italians have always seemed to me to be almost over-endowed with courage expressed in the form of personal panache, or recklessness. They are nonpareil in the production of Condottieri, poisoners, boxers, racing-drivers, stuntmen, popes angelic and diabolical, gangsters, and unflinching martyrs. Place all these disparate elements in a trench, however, and cover them with the drab uniform and a coat of mud, give them a officer or two that they don’t necessarily respect, and of course their splendid qualities of individual radiance are tarnished. They prefer not to die under anonymous, or worse, under stupid circumstances. These aspects of Italian character would be revisited in the more well-known Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières’ 1994 book filmed by Working Title in 2001. 83 Douglas Bodkin, Bidding Goodbye to Trequanda, The Cinema Studio, 3 November 1948, 15. On the production of Private Angelo, see also, The Quadruplicated Duty of Ustinov, The Cinema Studio, 15 December 1948, 9–11. 84 Picturegoer, 6 August 1949, 14. 85 The Cinema Studio, 29 September 1948, 10. 86 Quoted in a digest of reviews of Private Angelo in The Cinema Studio, 13 July 1949, 15. 87 Peter Noble, Film Illustrated Monthly, 4(8) (1949), 17. 88 Private Angelo pressbook, Associated British-Pathe, 1949. The film’s publicity materials also included showcards to promote Italian wines endorsed by Maria Denis. 89 Ustinov estimated a saving of £40,000 on Private Angelo by keeping studio work to a minimum. The Cinema Studio, 6 October 1948, 10. He saved another £23,000 by finishing location shooting two weeks ahead of schedule. The Cinema Studio, 24 November 1948, 16. See also Operation Angelo, Kinematograph Weekly, 28 October 1948, 31. 90 See the Mole-Richardson supplement, Kinematograph Weekly, 29 October 1953. 91 The Cinema Studio, 6 October 1948, 10. 92 Kinematograph Weekly, 11 August 1949, 3. As well as half a dozen quota films shot in Italy, the previous year had seen four filmed in Austria, two in Germany, and three in France. 93 The Cinema Studio, 25 January 1950, 3. 94 BT 64 95/4934, PRO. Quoted in Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: the film industry and the British government 1927–84, London, 1985, 182. 95 Italian immigration numbers increased from 350 in 1947 to 6500 in 1949. Terri Colpi, The Italian Factor: the Italian community in Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1991), 134. Their lives in Bedford were depicted in the Viking Film Unit’s documentary England May be Home (1950). 96 The Cinema Studio, 13 October 1948, 15. See also: Calvert on location, Picturegoer, 26 February 1949, 7. 97 Acting in the SUN, Peter Noble’s Picture Parade, 1949, 113–16. 98 The Times, 18 April 1949; Evening Standard, 14 April 1949. 99 The Cinema 13 April 1949, 15; Daily Worker, 16 April 1949. 100 Picture Show, 10 September 1949, 10. 101 Acting in the SUN, op cit. 102 Michael Korda, Charmed Lives, London, 1979, 242–246. 103 Interviewed by the author 22 July 2008. A union representative was flown in to make sure the crewing arrangements were being observed. 104 The Cinema Studio, 20 July 1949, 18. See also Kinematograph Weekly, 26 May 1949, x). Documents relating to the picture’s successful registration as a British film survive as PRO file BT 64/2497. Newbrook recalled that he was paid in cash with ‘bagfuls of lire’. 105 See, for example, the location report in The Cinema Studio, 10 August 1949, 16. 106 22,000 people went to see it in one week at the Sheffield Gaumont alone. Kinematograph Weekly, 15 February 1951, 16. 107 The budgets for these films were around £135,000 each, considerably less than those given to Rank’s prestige pictures. Kinematograph Weekly, 3 February 1949, 24. 108 They Only Had a Touch of the Sun!, The Cinema Studio, 11 January 1950, 11–15. 109 Desmond Dickinson, BECTU Interview. 110 Kinematograph Weekly, 9 August 1951, 14, had more reservations than most: ‘The volatile Italians pep things up a bit, but fail to atone for the fundamental error of presenting bedroom farce in the open air.’ For an assessment of the film’s box-office performance see Kinematograph Weekly, 18 June 1953, 8. 111 Kinematograph Weekly, 21 July 1949, 29. 112 To-Day’s Cinema, 17 February 1950, 6. 113 Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow (London, 2000), 27. 114 See Government Backing More Than 50% of Present Filming, The Cinema Studio, 12 October 1949, 3, 12; Studios Dark But Money for the Continent, Kinematograph Weekly, 13 October 1949, 3. The NFFC backed Her Favourite Husband, Children of Chance, State Secret, My Daughter Joy, Shadow of the Eagle and Interrupted Honeymoon. 115 Italian and British Film Producers Associations were in regular talks on saving dollars by extending the mutual exchange of pictures, although, while foreign pictures were regularly and successfully dubbed into Italian, the same skills and facilities were scarce in Britain. Italian Producers in Two-Way Distribution Talks with BFPA, Kinematograph Weekly, 27 July 1950, 9. 116 Five Countries Make One Film, The Cinema Studio, 11 August 1948, 3, 6. 117 Operation X pressbook, Columbia Pictures, 1950. 118 For example, Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times, 18 June 1950. 119 The Cinema Studio, 5 October 1949, 3. Salkow had the help of Jacopo Comin for the Italian version. 120 Spectacular and picturesque … Magnificently photographed, was the verdict of Picture Show, 55(1437–1440) (1950), 12. 121 Daily Telegraph, 28 August 1950. 122 Better Over Here …, Kinematograph Weekly, 2 March 1950, 28. 123 Unity Park, On Filming in the Dolomites, The Cinema Studio, 26 October 1949, 7–10. 124 Picture Show, 26 November 1949, 11. 125 Jock Macgregor, Location Italy, Picturegoer, 8 October 1949, 10. See also: Elizabeth Forrest, The Secrets of State Secret, Picturegoer, 9 September 1950, 12–14. 126 Quoted in a digest of reviews in The Cinema Studio 26 April 1950, 18–19. ‘Really splendid entertainment […] one of the films one is proud to claim as British’, said Picture Show, 9 September 1950, 12. Kinematograph Weekly, 15 December 1949, 29. Picturegoer, 19 November 1949, 3. The between and story in these films became a of in correspondence see 6 May 1950, 3. Tony Rose, You For This From The Cinema Studio, May 1950, 21. had the for Man (1947), another film with a of Picturegoer, 28 January 1950, Kinematograph Weekly, 15 February 1951, it as ‘A production, rich in Kinematograph Weekly, 27 December 1951, 12. Kinematograph Weekly, 18 June 1953, 8. Kinematograph Weekly, 9 August 1951, 19. Kinematograph Weekly, 18 June 1953, 8. My Venetian Picturegoer, 17 May 1952, 9. Letter from Picturegoer, 3 January 1953, 3. in Italy, Rome 1951, This was not necessarily to the of British the film the they have been to the of their up an of of it is to the in the is a film. But it is the of Rome and Venice that the Some of are my of and the The are a Picturegoer, 18 September 27. Kinematograph Weekly, 17 February 1949, 31. in Italy, Letter from Dora The Cinema Studio, 8 March 1950, 6. On the making of the film see Picture 8 August 1953, is in Picturegoer, 18 September Picturegoer, 25 September 20. On the making of and see she Picturegoer, 26 September 1953, 8–9. Kinematograph Weekly, 28 January 22. See also Margaret in for 16 January 16. The Cinema Studio, 17 August 1949, 5. could not help the in Italian to the of 28 August 1952, 9. Quoted in and The Cinema Studio, 22 February 1950, 7–10. Kinematograph Weekly, 14 August 1952, 24. British production was The Times, 11 July 1949. On Private Angelo see, Michael Filming and its The Cinema Studio, 22 December 1948, The Cinema Studio, 4 January 1950, 5. with its American and Italian was seen as an rather than a British

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.

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

In much that is written about Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns” – that genre of Italian cinema characterized by hyper-violence or cartoon-like formal properties or both – most critics invoke an Italian cultural rubric for deciding the films’ ultimate meaning. From the earliest critical readings of the “spaghetti western” that focused on Leone’s films as derived, cut-out copies of the mythic American westerns of Ford, Hawks, and Anthony Mann to the more recent attempts to locate Leone’s cinema within a more encompassing framework of native Italian visual tropes, Italian culture remains the final arbiter of acceptable interpretations. In the following essay, I take issue with that view by arguing for another perspective on Leone’s cinema, especially with regard to his first two westerns, Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. I do so by associating the conflict and violent acquisition of power depicted in the films with a semantic chain that needs to be thought through a notion of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean functions as a kind of unconscious in Leone’s cinema, one that operates both visually and diegetically. The visual impact is made most clear in the barren mise-en-scene of these films, shot in southern Spain, which offers a dramatic counterpoint to the monumentality of the American Western. Diegetically, the Mediterranean figures in the ultimate denouement of these films: the destruction of towns and the lives that inhabit them. This destruction is linked to the centrality of technology in Leone’s oeuvre, which, when inserted into a depoliticized setting such as the Mediterranean, leads to a radical discounting of life. Thus the Mediterranean appears in my reading of Leone not simply as hybridity or as “common inheritance” of all mankind as some would have it, but rather as fundamentally destabilizing for all political order.

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.

Since the silent days of cinema, Westerns have been one of the most popular genres, not just in the United States but around the world. International filmmakers have been so taken by westerns that many directors have produced versions of their own, despite lacking access to the American West. Nowhere has the Western been more embraced outside of the United States than Italy. In the 1960s, as Hollywood heroes like John Wayne and Randolph Scott were aging, Italian filmmakers were revitalizing the western, securing younger American actors for their productions and also making stars of homegrown talent. Movies directed and produced by Italians have been branded “spaghetti westerns”—a genre that boasts several hundred films. In Spaghetti Westerns: A Viewer’s Guide, Aliza S. Wong identifies the most significant westerns all’italiana produced as well as the individuals who significantly contributed to the genre. The author profiles such American actors as Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef; composers including Ennio Morricone and Carlo Rustichelli; and, of course, directors like Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Leone. The most memorable movies of the genre are also examined, including Compañeros, Django; A Fistful of Dollars; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and They Call Me Trinity. In addition to citing pivotal films and filmmakers, this volume also highlights other relevant aspects of the genre, including popular shooting locations, subgenres like the Zapata western, and the films and filmmakers who were inspired by the spaghetti western, including Quentin Tarantino, Richard Rodriguez, and Takashi Miike. An introduction to a unique homage of American cinema, Spaghetti Westerns: A Viewer’s Guide allows fans and scholars alike to learn more about a genre that continues to fascinate audiences.

Starting in the late 1950s, exploitation filmmakers operating in Italy sometimes used pseudonyms, allonyms or prestanomi. This article examines the multiplicity of motivations behind this practice, and attempts to untangle some of the implications of the use of pseudonyms in Italian exploitation cinema, especially as it relates to the complex dynamics of gender and nationality in the film production sector. It compares the case of the alias O. Hellman, which appears in a small number of exploitation films in the 1970s, with similar ones from that period, including ones in which the ambiguity of authorial attribution involves husband and wife teams – an ambiguity fascinatingly compounded by the protectionist measures of Italian film policy and the contradictory evidence of primary and secondary sources. Finally, the article reflects on the implications of this practice on data-based gender research in the Italian film industry.

This essay focuses on a discourse of contestation about the present which has emerged in Italian cinema since the end of the 1980s. This discourse is narrated in cinematic images of past films inserted in fictional stories. Through cinema self- reflectivity, the past is depicted as more authentic and signifies the loss of innocence of the Italian society of the 1990s, buried under scandals of political corruption and deconstruction of its traditional party system. Films such as Cinema Paradiso, Splendor, The Icicle Thief and La vera storia di Antonio H., but also many other films produced in recent years, emphasise a common heritage in a period of individual and collective internal and external chaos. A common term of reference in these films is the relationship between cinema and television. This relationship is portrayed in these films in a problematic way, as the pervasive presence of television in Italian everyday life is held as responsible for the crisis in the cinema industry. With its omnipresent images, re-runs, programme clones, anthologies and stock programmes, television seems to have taken over the function as archive of the country's historical memory. The pivotal work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory is used here as a tool of analysis of the role of memory as an instrument of reconfiguration of the past for specific groups of the Italian audience. The argument that stems from this analysis is that the films produced in Italy in the last decade that focus on history and memory reconstruct identity in the group of the baby-boomer generation, ensuring thus continuity with the past.