In October 2023, C’è ancora domani, the first feature film directed by Paola Cortellesi, was released in Italy. After being in theaters for almost a year, it totaled 44 million euros in takings, surpassing foreign titles such as Barbie and -Oppenheimer. The economic success and the cross-cutting consensus received from spectators and critics inevitably make C’è ancora domani a case worthy of attention. In this framework, the article adopts the perspective of media industry studies to understand which factors linked to the film’s production and distribution may be able to explain, in a substantial or accessory manner, its success. Secondly, C’è ancora domani is used to track down and discuss critical issues in the Italian film industry. Using Cinetel data and statements released by various stakeholders, the study shows how the film was differently promoted in two consequent phases (firstly hiding its committed nature, and then exploiting word of mouth), thus aggregating two different audiences over time. From this perspective, C’è ancora domani demonstrates how, in order to valorized films, it is always important to develop ad hoc strategies, and that the prototypal nature of films also concerns the promotional patterns.

Abstract 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.

ABSTRACT This study aims to examine the accounting tools adopted in the filmmaking companies of Franco Cristaldi, specifically the mechanisms adopted in a selection of films in the period in which they achieved artistic success at a national and international level. Cristaldi’s biography, the events of his film production companies, the use of accounting in the production of films such as ‘The Name of the Rose’, ‘Cinema Paradiso’ amongst others are extensively illustrated. A comparative analysis with the practices of the Hollywood major studios during the 1940s, as described by the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, reveals both a reliance on accounting tools to balance creativity with profitability and distinctive features that shed light on Cristaldi’s entrepreneurial approach within the context of the Italian film industry. The research contributes to accounting history studies by presenting a case of accounting in film production. Specifically, the research demonstrates the role played by accounting tools in the quest for profitability in a context where it should be combined and harmonised with art creativity.

Abstract 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.

In Adua (2015), Igiaba Scego illuminates the legacy of Italian colonialism by chronicling the intergenerational trauma passed from Zoppe, a Somali translator working for Italians during the fascist ventennio, to his daughter Adua, an actress exploited by the Italian film industry. This study analyzes Scego’s use of perspective to represent fundamentally different experiences of time in Adua, emphasizing Scego’s unique contribution to a postcolonial aesthetics that combats colonial temporality as defined by Johannes Fabian. In Time and the Other, Fabian asserts that time has not yet been decolonized, and thus has not been deconstructed as an ideological instrument of power. Scego unflinchingly documents the effects of colonial chronopolitics through her third-person narration of Zoppe’s perspective, which deteriorates into a series of invectives that portray his complete arrest in time. Adua endures similar traumas, but she embraces narration as a means of refashioning her voice and restoring community. In depicting Adua’s story as a triumph over colonial temporality, Scego champions first-person narration as a tool for the construction of a postcolonial chronopolitics that decolonizes time in order to work towards a more ethical geopolitical order.

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

We received so many positive reviews of the 2022 Music and Moving Image Conference panel on silent or mute film music that we decided to publish Gillian B. Anderson's, Yukiko Yuden's, and Christy Thomas Adams's papers as is.Most 35 mm films produced in the first three decades of the twentieth century had no soundtrack printed on the moving picture media itself (hence the industry label “silent” to contrast with films with a soundtrack printed with the images). However, their projection or screenings were accompanied by live or recorded sound effects and music, making their presentation a performing art (anything but silent, but still not generally with any talking).1 It was, in fact, this absence of speech that led to the appellation “talkies” to early recorded-sound pictures.Together these three articles present an international picture of early film music practices. Anderson focuses on the synchronized relationship between accompaniments and pictures that connected the pathos formulae in the moving pictures with those in the music, establishing the foundation upon which all subsequent moving picture accompaniments were based. She documents the use of live synchronized accompaniments in large and small cities in the United States among the top directors, deluxe cinemas, and even regular solo keyboard accompanists.Yoden shows how the classification of “East Asian” (the pathos formulae for it) related to the actual characteristics of some East Asian music used in Japanese cinemas. She used “humdrum tools, a set of resources for computational music analysis, to analyze multiple pieces from a macro perspective.” Adams focuses on the amount of new information about Mascagni's score for Rapsodia Satanica that she discovered in music publisher Ricordi's archive. She documents how many copies were printed, how much they cost, how much Mascagni was paid, the process of score preparation, and the relationship between Ricordi and Cines, the producer and the Italian film industry in general.

&lt;The Street of Sun&gt;(1952) and &lt;The Evil Night&gt;(1952) have been regarded as representative realism films produced during the Korean War. Just as Italian Neorealism came about World War II, Korean realism films in the 1950s also appeared with the Korean War. &lt;The Street of Sun&gt;(1952) and &lt;The Evil Night&gt;(1952) depicted the everyday scenery of Korean society, And critics at the time called these films a work of (Neo)realism. In terms of narrative, &lt;The Street of Sun&gt; is similar to the realism films produced in Japanese colonial era, &lt;Tuition&gt;(1940) and &lt;Angeles on the Streets&gt;(1941). Since the filming of &lt;The Evil Night&gt; was conducted even before the outbreak of the Korean War, there were parts that did not fit the reality of the time. However, as director Shin Sang-ok recalls, &lt;The Evil Night&gt; borrowed Neorealistic styles and depicted various lower-class people. Therefore, most of the reviews evaluated &lt;The Evil Night&gt; as an exemplary (Neo)realism work. Critics took note of that the Italian film industry gained worldwide fame despite the difficult situation caused by the war. So they hoped that young Korean directors would create new trends such as Neorealism.

In 1993, a few months before his death, the veteran film director Federico Fellini was invited to the University of Bologna to receive an honorary doctorate. Bologna, the oldest modern university in the world, wished to bestow on Fellini its institutional recognition of his half a century in the Italian film industry. Not unflattered, Fellini declined, and wrote to the rector of the university that he felt ‘like Pinocchio being decorated by the headmaster and carabinieri for cavorting in Pleasure Island’.

Using the example of the Italian film industry of the 1960s and 1970s and, in particular, popular erotic thriller cycles, the article focuses on different types of time periods closely associated with film production: the shooting stage and the phase of apprenticeship for newcomers. These labour temporalities were fraught with hierarchical tensions and power imbalances. Directors appropriated the length of film shooting as a means of occupational distinction. Under the pretext of apprenticeship, experienced mentors took advantage of moneyless trainees who lacked a personal network of supportive film practitioners. Apprentices weathered through this period in anticipation of fairly compensated freelance work.

ABSTRACT The paper sketches out the emerging relevance of acting coaches and casting directors, shedding light on a profound change within the Italian film industry. Around the mid-2000s, a new generation of directors (Di Costanzo, Rohrwacher) developed a style which implies that acting is not merely an individual matter. This process encouraged emerging casting directors and acting coaches, who increasingly became acknowledged professional figures. At the same time, the birth of high-budget TV productions increasingly required new actors, creating unprecedented opportunities for performers.

We study nascent project-based enterprises (PBEs) through the lens of upper echelons and institutional theory. We analyse the interplay between the different role-congruent reputations of their project entrepreneurs and the institutional endorsement of their project idea, theorizing how these affect PBEs’ ability to attract private investments. In the context of the Italian film industry, we find that the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role is crucial for attracting investors, while the artistic reputation of the project entrepreneur in the creative director role is crucial for attaining institutional endorsement of the project idea. Finally, we find that the effect of the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role on attracting investments is mediated by the institutional endorsement. We contribute to the literature on PBEs by demonstrating how specific combinations of project entrepreneurs’ roles and (role-congruent) reputations can directly and indirectly attract investments.

The release of Conan the Barbarian (1982) played a crucial role in the emergence of the sword and sorcery film, a subgenre of fantasy cinema featuring muscular heroes in violent conflict with wizards and other supernatural creatures. Italian genre filmmakers attempted to capitalize on the international popularity of sword and sorcery by quickly producing a number of low-budget films, which emulated the stylistic and narrative features of Conan. Over a period of six years, between 1982 and 1987, the Italian film industry produced almost two dozen sword and sorcery films, which achieved mixed results at the box office. Although recently an increasing number of international film scholars have focused on the critical examination of Italian genre cinema, to date, little attention has been devoted to the study of Italian sword and sorcery. By examining the aesthetic features of four Italian sword and sorcery films (Gunan il guerriero [1982], Ator l’invincibile [1982], Hercules [1983] and The Barbarians [1987]), as well as their modes of production and distribution, this article proposes the first comprehensive critical examination of this filone.

Barely has the afterglow subsided from the celebration of 70 years since the first appearance of neorealism in the wreckage of the postwar Italian film industry,1 than the heralds of its 75th anniversary appear.2 This recurrent urge to commemorate neorealism suggests that the movement acts to remind scholars that film once had a heroic phase, as an art form with a previously unparalleled public importance. Yet sceptics might be forgiven for considering the movement little more than a glorious failure, with ‘neorealism’ a barely coherent term for a group of films that can be counted on the fingers of both hands, and that fulfilled few of their makers’ hopes for a transformation of Italian society by a humanistic film culture. Francesco Pitassio offers an enthusiastic series of reflections on Italian cinema’s transformative moment, in what is perhaps the most ambitious single-author appraisal of the phenomenon in its entirety since Stefania Parigi’s Italian-language Neorealismo. Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra (a book that takes a similarly open definition of neorealism as Pitassio’s, its title translating as Neorealism: The New Postwar Cinema).3 As with Parigi, Pitassio has to confront a problem met by any scholar when dealing with one of the historic monuments of their field – finding something new to say about it. The task becomes more difficult still when one considers how successive waves of scholarship have eroded this monument’s distinctive features. As his introduction reminds us, one can no longer define neorealism in opposition to fascist-era cinema now that scholarship has established the intricate connections between the two. Meanwhile, to maintain that the distinguishing element of neorealism is the simple revelation of truth, as its admirers once did, nowadays simply sounds naive. And good luck with trying to argue for any consistency among figures as diverse as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti or Giuseppe De Santis, none of whom was happy about the label ‘neorealist’ anyway.

Set during the height of the Congolese Civil War (1960-1965), Congo vivo (Giuseppe Bennati, 1962), narrates the affair between an Italian journalist, Roberto (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Annette (Jean Seberg), the wife of a Belgian diplomat. The film was co-written by William Demby (1922-2013), a novelist, journalist, translator, and screenwriter, who like many African American soldiers who arrived in Italy during World War II as part of the U.S. Allied Forces, remained in the country for the better part of forty years. Written during Demby's period of intermittent expatriatism between the United States and Italy, and in the same period as his signature novel, The Catacombs (1965), I argue Congo vivo, a hybrid film with elements of documentary, ethnography, and narrative fiction, is situated within a transnational and transmedia framework and offers another perspective on Italian Third Worldism. I also argue that Congo vivo anticipates the filone films set within former colonial territories that index not only the decline of the Italian film industry and the rise of television, but also an emergent postcolonial condition.

This article explores the role of Alessandro Blasetti in arguing for, and promoting, the development of the Italian film industry before and after the Second World War. Though a prominent film director for more than thirty years, Blasetti was never considered an auteur: he had no distinct authorial style and not did he specialise in any particular genre. Unlike some postwar directors, he never positioned himself in opposition to producers but, on the contrary, worked closely with many of them, winning a reputation for reliability and professionalism. A supporter of Fascism until the later 1930s, he encouraged state involvement in the industry and was the first to use the Cinecittà studios, inaugurated in 1937, to their full potential. After the war, he mediated between opposing political forces to defend the interests of the Italian cinema as an industry and a ‘collective art’. He was responsible for creating several stars, including Gino Cervi and Sophia Loren. Drawing on the Blasetti archive, the article considers the range of the director’s activities, political links and his way of conceiving his role, immersed in rather than against the industry.

The relationship between film promotion and the wider economy has scarcely been studied in Italy. This article explores the influence of American exploitation techniques in the peninsula in the years following World War Two and the responses of the Italian film industry. It is shown that, though many advocated imitating American practices in the fields of advertising and promotion, over time the industry learned not only to appropriate successful techniques but to adapt them in ways that were better suited to products that were often presented as being more ‘cultural’ than ‘commercial’. Attention is paid to the way film directors were drawn into campaigns to underline the cultural value of their works. By the same token, Italian stars were not cast as cheerleaders for the developing consumer economy in the way that American stars had been. Yet linkages between film making and advertising were nevertheless forged through practices of product placement that exploited the loophole of ‘verisimilitude’. Hollywood runaway productions like Roman Holiday set the tone for the insertion of Vespa scooters, automobiles and other goods in feature films. The article evaluates the interplay of the cultural and the commercial in Italy’s postwar economic revival and the role of cinema in its development as a mass consumer society.

The article is devoted to the study of the development of Italian cinema in the period of fascism. The author draws attention to the Italian film industry in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The article describes the process of monopolization of Italian film studios and its influence on the cinema of the fascist period. «Quo Vadis», «Cabiria» are considered in comparison with fascist films «Nerone», «Scipione l’africano». The author studies how the ancient heritage was used in films of the early twentieth century and in fascist films. This comparison illustrates how antique plots were used in the propaganda of politics and how films about antiquity performed the ideological function of legitimizing fascism in Italy during the fascism’s period.

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.

ABSTRACTThis essay analyses documents collected at the Harry Ransom Center that pertain to Italian producer Salvo d’Angelo, in particular his correspondence with David O. Selznick in 1950–51 regarding a proposed French–Italian–American co-production of Stazione Termini. The goal of this essay is to contribute, on one hand, to current scholarship on the history of the Italian film industry. At the same time, the case of Salvo d’Angelo’s failed agreement with Selznick constitutes a lens through which to examine the issue of film ‘authorship’ at a crucial juncture in the history of Italian cinema, in the context of growing entrepreneurship in the industry and the rise of Italian (male) directors on the international scene.