Why Italian Film Studies Needs A Second Take on Gender

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 contributes to an understudied topic in Italian film studies: representations of older people in contemporary comedies. After contextualising Italian cinema’s enduring tendency to employ laughter to cope with tragedy, I cast a spotlight on three of the few Italian film comedies that address the topics of old age and ageing in sustained, purposeful, and original ways. Beginning with an analysis of Fantozzi va in pensione (Neri Parenti, 1988) as a kind of precursor to more recent features, I examine the interconnected themes of work, retirement, intergenerational conflict, and death. Close readings of Metti la nonna in freezer (Giancarlo Fontana and Giuseppe Stasi, 2018) and Buoni a nulla (Gianni Di Gregorio, 2014) follow. These comedies recycle tropes addressed in Fantozzi va in pensione. Yet, when interpreted in the context of contemporary Italy, the latter two films are also innovative in their grotesque depiction of older persons as ‘human capital’.

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.

(2008). Italian Film Studies: A Two-Pronged Approach. Italian Studies: Vol. 63, Thinking Italian Film, pp. 274-277.

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 2014 annual AAIS Conference, organized by the American Association for Italian Studies, took place over three days from 26–28 May 2014 at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, for the first time in a location situated outside North America or Italy. Partially because of this geographical collocation, the conference drew an exceptional number of participants: over seven hundred members convened from more than twenty-four countries, which makes this conference, according to AAIS president Carol Lazzaro-Weis, the ‘largest . . . in the history of the organization’. In this report, I will briefly present and discuss the panels and papers on cinema and television presented in Zurich; I will highlight the general trends that emerged in the three-day conference and explore specific topics that seem to be of particular interest in the field of Italian screen studies. The Zurich conference saw, at least quantitatively, a positive influx of different approaches anddisciplines, suchasphotography, politics, gender (inpart due to thework of theQueer caucus), postcolonial issues,Marxism,andcritical theory, tonamebuta few. This surely reflects the on-going evolution ofAnglo-American-Australian Italian Studies, but it is possibly also due to the presence of scholars who work in European universities who were able to attend the conference en masse. The keynote speaker, Rosi Braidotti, exemplifies this trend: an Italian-Australian scholar who has lived in different countries and is now based in the Netherlands, Braidotti works mainly on social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory, and ethnicity studies, from a standpoint of continentalphilosophy.Her lecture, ‘PosthumanistParadoxes’,was followedbya long and warm round of applause, together with a standing ovation. In general, it could be said that the evaluation of the situation of Italian screen studies that emerge from Zurich is mixed: on the one hand, many of these panels had a great turnout, and a number of members came to the conference to discuss these topics. As a result, a stable but ever-evolving community of scholars from different countries has its recurrent appointment at theAAIS conferences andmuchacademic research is generated from these encounters. But, on the other hand, it is fair to say that cinema and television (let alone Internet, videogames, etc.) are still far from being fully considered a matter of serious academic research and inquiry in the large community of Italian studies. The interaction of Italian history and politicswith cinema andmediawas surely one of the main trends discussed at the conference. We can single out a few of panels and

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.

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 discusses the current state of Italian film studies, placing it within a critical context in which Italian cinema is thought to be perennially ‘in crisis’. It addresses the discipline's obsessive interest in neorealism and in auteur cinema, and looks at the history of debate on the contested critical status of Italian popular and genre production, using as a case study the inchiesta in 1955–56 in the Communist newspaper L'Unità on ‘cinema e popolo’. It argues that Italian film studies needs to develop a more sophisticated theoretical and historical approach to the study of both neorealism and popular cinema, in order to account for neglected films such as Vittorio De Sica's collaboration with David O. Selznick, Stazione Termini (1953).

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

‘Made in Italy’ is a term associated with style, elegance and quality goods (Fortunati and Danese, 2005). The nationally-specific dimension of Italian fashion emerged in the 1950s as the industry sought to break away from its over-dependency on Parisian style and to establish itself as an important force on the international stage. While numerous texts exist on Italian fashion and style, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to assessing the place of costume in Italian cinema.1 This disparity in Italian film studies appears at odds, for example, with the now established body of work existing on fashion, style and costume in Hollywood movies including Stella Bruzzi’s Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997), David Desser and Garth Jowett’s edited volume Hollywood Goes Shopping (2000), Sarah Street’s Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Cinema (2001) and Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film (2010), to name but some. These and other texts have clearly illustrated the significance of costume to the film text in terms of mise-en-scene, assessing character and plot development, identifying genre, denoting the class, gender and sexuality of the wearer, and its extra-textual meanings to audiences (Stacey, 1994).

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This article addresses the representation of masculinity in Italian film melodrama of the 1950s. The introduction outlines the reasons for which Italian film studies has tended to focus above all on female characters in this popular genre. The subsequent argument is structured in four parts. In the first, I offer a typology of the various masculinities employed within these films. In the second, I examine the relationship between the dominant models of masculinity in the melodrama and socio-political changes in gender dynamics that took place in Italy during the 1940s and 1950s. In relation to two examples (Traviata ’53, L'angelo bianco), in the third part I analyse the ways in which melodrama, in its representation of a masculinity in crisis that is opposed to fascist virility, engages with emasculation. The conclusive fourth section offers a brief reflection on the relationship between male desire and the melodramatic trope of the suffering heroine.