Objectif 83/2. Cine-Ups Apart

 

POPULAR ITALIAN CINEMA

An international conference

Supported by the AHRC, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Society for Italian Studies and the King’s Roberts Fund

27-28-29 May 2009

King’s College, University of London

 

Keynote Speakers: Richard Dyer (King's College, London), Barry Forshaw (Film Critic), Rosalind Galt (Sussex), Giacomo Manzoli (University of Bologna), Elena Mosconi (Cattolica, Milan), Kim Newman (Novelist and Film Critic), Christopher Wagstaff (Reading), with a closing summary by Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College, London)

Organisers: Louis Bayman (King’s College, London) and Sergio Rigoletto (University of Reading)

 

* * *

 

Fabio Benincasa

Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci: The dialectic between genre and authorship in 1970s Italian horror

 

Between 1960 and 1980, Italian film industry develops, next to an internationally acclaimed art cinema, a widely popular commercial cinema, based on a formalized genre system. The gap existing between those different types of productions, films based on a radical dislike for narration and films focused on popular entertainment, has been never filled up, generating two conflicting aesthetical options. Notwithstanding this conflict, there were many directors trying to deal with the issue of authorship in mainstream cinema, binding radical experimentalism to genre and narration. A typical example in Italian film history is horror genre. Horror directors were usually well aware of the psychological and dreamy potential of images. Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci represent prominent examples for understanding the contradictory dialectic between genre and authorship in Italian film. Bava, mainly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and Classic Hollywood in general, masks his visual experiments behind a flawless genre packaging: he respects most of genre topoi, leaving plots relatively compact. Fulci, a generation younger than Bava, tries to apply to horror genre an extreme form of deconstruction, inspired to practices used by Nouvelle Vague directors for their films. Fulci’s horror films are virtually plotless, underlining the importance of images over representation. Bava and Fulci’s works demonstrate how authorship and experimentalism deeply penetrated into Italian popular cinema, without completely subverting the use of plot and narration or the recognizable elements of genre. On the other hand, the evolution of authorial consciousness from Bava to Fulci highlights the growth of expressive autonomy typical of contemporary popular film in which the Nouvelle Vague innovations are fully absorbed into shared codes of representation.

 

 

 

John Berra

Graphic Match: Skilful Adaptation and Social Satire in Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik

 

The comic book is a worldwide cultural phenomenon, one that has been adapted, with varying degrees of success, into television and feature films. Unlike such American comic book heroes as Superman and Spiderman, whose bright costumes and selfless heroism are synonymous with the supposed virtues of the American ideal, the Italian comic book character Diabolik is a more morally flexible individual. Partnered with the beautiful Eva Kant, who would become his lover throughout the run of the fumetti, the master thief is known only by his surname, has an extensive knowledge of chemistry and computers, and has no qualms about stealing from both criminals and the state. Later editions of the comic would somewhat soften the character, re-moulding him into a ‘Robin Hood’ figure, but Diabolik is arguably the most amoral comic book character to be adapted for the big screen in that, although his courage and physical prowess rival that of his American counterparts, his energies are completely devoted to criminal activity.

 

This paper will examine the faithful nature of Mario Bava’s interpretation of the original Italian comic, and the director’s cinematic grasp of comic book language, as evidenced by his use of camera work and décor, the extremely wide lenses that provide a sense of distorted depth, and the expressionistic performances that he elicits from his cast. The evolution from fumetti to feature film will also be considered, with reference to the Italian censorship system of the period which, although allowing a film about an amoral comic book character to be made, would not permit Diabolik to be victorious at the end, as will the position that Danger Diabolik occupies within the ‘lounge’ cycle of the Sixties cinema. It will be argued that Danger Diabolik was an attempt by Bava to integrate a politically subversive European sensibility into a genre that was associated with the strict moral coding of the Hollywood studios. Diabolik plunders from his government, pushing the state towards bankruptcy and makes social-political statements by using dynamite to destroy official buildings, mirroring the political turmoil in Italy at that time, positioning this masked anti-hero as an extreme symptom of the consumer age in that he is a man without ties who will stop at nothing to obtain what he wants.

 

Dr. John Berra is an Associate Lecturer in Film Studies with Sheffield Hallam University, and the author of Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production (Intellect, 2008), and the editor of the forthcoming Directory of American Independent Cinema (Intellect, 2010) and the Directory of Japanese Cinema (Intellect, 2010). He is also a regular contributor to Electric Sheep and Film International.

 

 

 

Réka Buckley, University of Portsmouth

From the Sala Bianca to the Italian Screen: Made in Italy goes to the movies with Lucia Bosé’

 

‘Made in Italy’ is a by-word for style, elegance and quality goods. 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. This gap in Italian film studies appears at odds with the now established body of work existing on fashion, style and costume in Hollywood movies including Desser and Jowett’s edited book Hollywood goes Shopping (Minnesota Press, 2000), Sarah Berry’s Screen Style: Fashion and femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minnesota Press, 2000), and Stella Bruzzi’s important work Undressing Cinema: clothing and identity in the movies (Routledge, 1997). These and other texts have clearly illustrated the significance of costume to the film text in terms of discussing the mise-en-scene, assessing character and plot development, identifying genre, denoting class, gender and sexuality of the wearer, and its extra-textual meanings to audiences as discussed by Jackie Stacey in Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (Routledge, 1994).

 

This paper will discuss the importance of fashion and costume to Italian cinema in a particular period: the 1950s. In 1951, Florentine merchant Giovan Battista Giorgini made the first steps towards establishing an international identity for Italian fashion, when he organised a fashion show of exclusively Italian designs for a select group of foreign buyers and journalists. By the following year when Giorgini organised a spectacular exhibition of Italian designs at the illustrious Sala Bianca, in the Pitti Palace in Florence, ‘Made in Italy’ was well on its way to becoming an international phenomenon. Attention will be paid to key fashion stylists, such as Schuberth and the Fontana sisters who were drawn into the world of Italian cinema and to Italy’s most celebrated costume designer, Piero Tosi. Finally, the theme of fashion and costume will be explored through a case study of the star Lucia Bose’s films from Ferdinando Sarmi’s exquisite costumes in Cronaca di un amore (Antonioni, 1950), to the inclusion of fashion ateliers as film settings and fashion modelling as a central theme in Le ragazze di piazza di Spagna (Emmer, 1952) to the importance of fashion in the character development of Clara in La signora senza camelie (Antonioni, 1953); and a brief assessment of the implications of Bosé’s fashions on her star persona will be considered.

 

 

 

Alessandro Buffa

New York Calls, Naples Responds: Black and Neapolitan Action Movies in the 1970s

 

Historian Robin Kelley has argued that “the expanding literature on the underclass provides less an understanding of the complexity of people’s lives and cultures than a bad blaxploitation film.” [1][1] Drawing on Kelley’s insight I would like to consider blaxploitation films and Neapolitan cine-sceneggiata of the 1970s as responses to the discourse of the social sciences and as examples of global cinema.

 

Anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the early 1960s famously defined the culture of poverty as a “subculture…passed down from generation to generation along family lines.”2 This concept not only shaped later research on the urban crisis of American cities, but also had a tremendous impact on the study of poverty in Naples. Although these approaches were challenged by radical urban anthropologists in both the U.S. and Italy, the so called black ghetto and the Neapolitan vicoli (alleys) continued to be perceived by social scientists and media practitioners as isolated, homogeneous,  and authentic territories.

 

In this respect, blaxploitation and sceneggiata have been often considered as two genres that depict the “authentic” culture of the black ghetto and Neapolitan vicoli of the 1970s. In this paper I would like to propose a different reading of these two popular genres of action movies, considering how they reflect the fluid, international, and hybrid dimension of the inner-city in New York and Naples. The city in these films, like the cities depicted in comic books, noir and gangster movies, acquires a labyrinthine and fluid dimension; it is populated by figures who resemble the characters of kung-fu films which in the 1970s were extremely popular in black ghettos in New York and vicoli in Naples.  Blaxploitation movies appropriate the language of mainstream media in order to reflect on the exclusion and exploitation of African diasporic population around the world. The filmic sceneggiata narrates the urban life of Naples from the point of view of the underclass and poor artisanal classes. These movies both take place and are actually shot on location in Naples and New York, opening up a further critical dimension and connection between these cities in a moment of structural urban crisis. 

 

 [1] Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 16.

[2] Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” in On Understanding Poverty, ed. Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 187.

 

Alessandro Buffa is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Stony Brook University. His dissertation examines the image of Naples and New York in film between the 1960s and 1980s in relation to the social science research on the “urban crisis” of these cities.

 

 

 

Frank Burke

The Politics of the Peplum From Fabiola (1948) to Hercules and the Captive Women (1961)

The Italian "peplum" was a noteworthy mini genre or "filone" of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ushered in by Hercules (Pietro Francisci, 1958), it consisted (in the main) of tales based loosely on Greco-Roman mythology, starred body-builders (usually American) such as Steve Reeves, and spawned approximately 200 movies over a seven-year period. Featuring cartoon-like characters and situations in live action cinema; ridiculous monsters and kitschy sci-fi effects; and musclemen wielding boulders of papier mâché, the peplum appears to be little more than escapist, spectacular, bad taste. However, read with care, it can be seen to be performing meaningful cultural work within the world that it seems to be fleeing. By expanding the filone’s chronological parameters to include three pre-pepla sword-and-sandal films--Fabiola (Alessandro Blasetti. 1948), Spartaco (Riccardo Freda, 1952), and Ulysses (Mario Camerini, 1954)--as well addressing three "bona fide" pepla--Hercules, The Colossus of Rhodes (Sergio Leone, 1961), and Hercules and the Captive Women (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961)--I would like to chart the interrelationship of the Italian postwar sword-and-sandal film with significant changes within the Italian historical situation. As the films move from stories of compromised or failed revolution (Fabiola, Sins of Rome) to tales of (monarchical) restoration (Ulysses, Hercules), they reflect the increasing conservatism of the postwar period: the disappearance of Resistance aspirations and the onset of 1950s conformity. However, they take another interesting turn, becoming not only self-parodies but also trenchant critiques of all political formations, including democracy (Colossus, Captive Women)--pointing to the growing politicization of Italian film and society throughout the 1960s. Simultaneously, the six films increasingly contest American-driven values associated with late capitalism, consumer culture, and nascent postmodernity. By Ulysses, the effects of Americanization materialize; by The Colossus of Rhodes so does resistance to those effects. My paper will seek to illustrate that, in ranging from the serious (Fabiola, Sins of Rome, Ulysses) to the silly (Hercules) and culminating in the seriously silly (Colossus and Captive Women) these movies serve as useful instruments of sociopolitical critique.

 

Frank Burke teaches in the Film and Media Department of Queen’s University (Canada). His courses generally embrace film in relation to postmodernity, ideological criticism, cultural studies, poststructural theory, and gender, with a strong emphasis on Italian culture. His research has focused on Italian, American, and Italian-American cinema, specializing in the work of Federico Fellini. He has published three books on Fellini’s in English and contributed to two Italian volumes on the director. He provided the audio commentary, along with Peter Brunette (Reynolds Chair of Art, Wake Forest University), for the Criterion 2006 DVD release of Fellini’s Amarcord. He has completed a detailed analysis of Fellini’s television commercials, which he hopes to include in an updated version of his 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern. He has contracted with Edinburgh University Press to produce a study on the Italian “sword-and-sandal” film or “peplum” of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

 

 

 

Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto

Blaxploitation Italian Style

 

In this study I address a comparison between the 1970s "blaxploitation" films produced in the United States and those released in Italy. The main distinction is that such a film genre in Europe did not aim to target an urban black audience as it did in the U.S. In the specific case of Italy, I am particularly interested in the 1970s travel movies portraying the journeys of Black Emanuelle and those films whose main character is Eritrean top-model Zeudi Araya. I wonder why such films recalled and "exploited" the image of the colonial Black Venus, a figure deep-rooted in Italian imagery since the nineteenth century. Why was the exotic and erotic sexuality of such a character depicted as dangerous, cannibalistic? Indeed, to what degree can the term "cannibalism," as Fatimah Toning Rony uses it in her book The Third Eye (1996), be applied in these films to both the anthropophagic practice associated with primitive people portrayed in the plot as well as to the scopophilic fascination of Italian male viewers for the Black female body?

 

 

 

Carol Chiodo

Comedy Film Production in Italy, 1938-1943: Source Texts from Stage to Screen

 

This paper examines the body of Italian film comedy produced between 1938 and 1943 as an aggregate, highlighting the importance of adaptations of theatrical source texts. The methodology, while appearing to privilege numbers over narrative, has several advantages: 1) it provides a generic panorama of the feature film industry as a whole during a time of both tyranny and transition and 2) it brings into focus the industry's reliance on theatrical source texts.  This statistical and generic study should then set the groundwork for further explorations of  the comic film genre between the prewar Italian film comedy and the late Fascist period and its legacy for neorealism and beyond.

 

Biography

Carol Chiodo is in her third year of the Ph.D. program in Italian Language and Literature at Yale University. Her research interests include  Dante and medieval cosmology, and 20th century popular Italian theatre, particularly lo spettacolo di varieta' and its vestiges in neorealism and postwar Italian filmmaking. She isthe founder of the Dante Working Group at the Whitney Humanities Center and a member of the coordinating committee for the film festival Italian Cinema: New Directors, New Directions at Yale University.

 

 

 

Emanuele D’Onofrio

Contemporary Historical Films and the New Italian Epic: a Renovated Impegno?

 

The Italian writer We Ming I’s recent essay ‘New Italian Epic’ has risen a lively debate in the panorama of Italian literature. Henceforth, writers and scholars have engaged with the essay’s hypothesis of a number of traits common to most of the contemporary production of Italian novels,  sufficient to define a new ‘epic’ tendency. Some of these characteristics, to mention only a few, are the inconsistency of the (singular or collective) narrating voices, the ‘hidden’ subversion of the language and the rediscovery of a ‘popular’ approach.

 

Drawing on these ideas, the film critic Mauro Gervasini has suggested that works such as Il divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008) and Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008) pave the way for the formulation of  a NIE theory also with regard to Italian cinema (2008). For Gervasini, this idea would be demonstrated by the use of techniques such as the obliquity of the camera gaze and the choral, or dessicated, narrating point of view. Already contested by director Guido Chiesa (2008) and others, in this paper I am going to discuss this suggestion with specific regard to the recent production of historical films. For this reason, I will focus on works of different nature and revisiting different pasts, among which N – Io e Napoleone (Paolo Virzì, 2006), Sangue Pazzo (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2008) and Buongiorno, Notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003). In particular, I will argue that the concept of 'allegory' as formulated by Walter Benjamin (1928) – namely, an unpredictable triangulation between three different times, the time represented (the present of the characters), the time of  production (the present of the author) and the time of reception (the present of the audience) – reveals productive connections between cultural texts and the world also when used in film analysis. If ‘this happens in Italy, not surprisingly, country of thousand emergencies, scarcely interested in the future, beyond the edge of indisputable (and indisputed) catastrophes’ (Wu Ming 1, 2008), I will ask whether this formulation of a filmic NIE is the sign of a renovated cinema of impegno.

 

 

 

Robbie Edmonstone

Beyond “Brutality” – the Italian Filone and the Violence of the Attraction

 

“Brutality” has long been held up by critics to be one of the defining features of the Italian filoni; a body of popular genre film cycles (peplum mythological epics, horror films, giallo thrillers, poliziotteschi crime dramas, westerns and others) released during a frenzied period of film production between the late 1950s and mid 1980s. A disproportionate emphasis on scenes of often extreme violence and spectacle can be traced across all of the cycles, resulting in a habitual “weakening” of narrative and disruption of the filmic continuities fundamental to mainstream cinema. This emphasis and the uneasy pleasures that it provides have led to a distinct ghettoisation of the filoni within English-language film criticism, with historical accounts of Italian cinema ignoring the films completely, dismissing them as “trash” or portraying them

as parasitic counterfeits of “authentic” Hollywood genre films. Furthermore, such accounts typically fail to address the question of what it is that makes these films so violent, limiting their descriptions to blanket terms such as “brutal”, “exploitative” and “sadistic”, in the process reaffirming the idea that the filoni are simply not worthy of further study. As a result, the suggestion that the films could provide pleasures which are distinctly different from those established by mainstream cinema remains largely unaddressed.

 

This paper seeks to address this critical schism by illustrating the usefulness of examining the filone as a mode of cinema whose fundamental pleasures are non-narrative, and are thus far more effectively investigated by using theoretical models derived from the study of early spectacle cinema. By engaging with Gunning’s (1986) continuing work on cinematic “attractions” and using textual analysis of representative films, I shall investigate the central attractions that the filone offers its spectator, illustrating in the process the idea that this body of films, so frequently castigated for their “excessive” violence, in fact relentlessly challenge the concept of what “film violence” really is: not only as a diegetic event but also as an act often perpetrated on the continuities of narrative, spatio-temporal continuity and even on the filone viewer.

 

 

 

Austin Fisher

Out West, Down South: Gazing at America in Reverse Shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? (1966)

 

Amongst Italy’s political Left, the ostensibly aspirational lure of Americana in the post-war years was frequently inflected with ambivalence and misgivings over the socio-cultural impact of an increased transatlantic flow. Such disquiet is widely identified in films by Italy’s acclaimed auteurs (La dolce vita and Rocco e i suoi fratelli being two notable examples). Where discontent with the Economic Miracle and the onset of US-led modernity is concerned, however, the milieu of filone cinema is frequently overlooked. This paper will demonstrate that, with its burgeoning appropriation of the Western genre in the 1960s, this superficially imitative category of filmmaking in fact offered a paradigm for cognitive resistance to the hegemonic codes of US popular culture.

 

Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? (1966) will form the locus of this argument. Arising from the radical pen of Franco Solinas, this film’s militant polemic is, on a narrative plane, transparent. Through an examination of its meticulously choreographed cinematography, however, the paper will interpret Quien sabe?’s didactic manipulation of camerawork, mise en scène and point-of-view as equally central components in this agenda. A bravura riposte to modes of representation dominant in Hollywood’s Cold War appropriations of revolutionary Mexico, Quien sabe? will be read as a direct counterpoint to Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954). It takes possession of what Richard Slotkin calls Hollywood’s “counterinsurgency Westerns” on behalf of those “Southern” peoples hitherto marginalised by the genre’s normative framings. By turning the film camera around, Damiani registers an altogether less-than-awe-struck gaze at bourgeois culture, from the perspective of those discontented with US hegemony, both in Italy and abroad.

 

That Italy’s post-war “Americanisation” was less a process of linear subordination than one of appropriation, re-inscription and semantic negotiation is tangible through Damiani’s lens. By reworking the heavily-coded signifiers of the Western genre, Quien sabe? reflects processes of creative participation in the meanings of transatlantic artefacts which characterised much of the nation’s cultural discourse in this era. Far from acquiescing to the received signifiers of mass culture, the film’s status as “popular” cinema rests upon its aspect as a forum for resistance, and a voice for sub-cultural communities.

 

 

 

 

Mark Goodall

Dolce e Selvaggio: the Italian mondo documentary film

 

“The history of the cinema cannot be written in terms of intellectual works alone…The great popular currents are of prime importance in the evolution of the art”1

 

One of the most popular genres in Italian film history also happens to be one of the most neglected. The ‘mondo’ documentary film, invented by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi with the release of their 1963 film Mondo Cane, was a Technicolor compilation of strange rituals from around the world- ‘primitive rites and civilized wrongs’ as one mondo film advertised itself. The film was a sensation, hated by Anglo-Saxon critics but loved by audiences who found the garish mix of exotic globetrotting, freakish human behaviour and repulsive rituals deeply fascinating. Mondo Cane was created by a small team led by news-reporter-turned-cine-journalist Jacopetti who teamed up with Prosperi, news photographer Antonio Climati and composer Riz Ortolani (his score for the film was nominated for an Oscar). ‘Mondo’ films- and many followed in the wake of Mondo Cane- became notorious for their fakery, nudity and extreme violent content (particularly towards animals). The fusing of the burlesque with the ethnographic has proved influential to this day. While highbrow critics such as Pauline Kael derided the film (she once described Jacopetti and Prosperi as “perhaps the most devious filmmakers ever to have lived”) the mondo film succeeded at the box office.2

 

While mondo became a global phenomenon, it is important to record the genre’s origins in 1950s/1960s Italian culture and society. Mondo, one of the few ‘original’ Italian genres, emerged at a particular time in Italian history and must be understood in its proper context. The role of the film in ending the Italian state and church monopoly over newsreels, for example, is largely forgotten while it can be argued that the mondo aesthetic augured the style of much of Berlusconi’s media. Another aspect of the appeal of the films for audiences was that they personified what Francesco Adinolfi calls ‘Italy’s Exotic Adventures’.3 This paper, placing the mondo film within its rightful Italian context, continues the work of rescuing these controversial films from the dustbin of film history.

 

1 Pierre Leprohon. The Italian Cinema (Secker and Warburg, 1972)

2 In Christopher Wagstaff’s essay ‘A Forkful of Westerns’ (Dyer and Vincendeau, 1992), for example, mondo films are evident in a list of popular genre films screening at a terza visione cinema.

3 Mondo Exotica: sounds, visions, obsessions of the cocktail generation (Duke, 2000)

 

Mark Goodall is a lecturer in media communications in the Bradford Media School at the University of Bradford. He is the author of Sweet and Savage: the world through the shockumentary film lens (2006) and is co-editor of Crash Cinema: representation in film (2007)

 

 

 

Danielle Hipkins

"Potrebbe generare un figlio": Contemporary Italian Cinema in the Light of Postfeminism

 

The term ‘postfeminism’ is one increasingly used in the context of film and media studies to interrogate the position of feminism in contemporary popular media culture (Tasker and Negra, 2007). What relevance does the term have in the Italian context, and more specifically in the context of contemporary Italian cinema? In order to explore this question I will focus in particular upon recent debates about female fertility and the ways in which popular cinema draws upon those to position women in a relationship with reproduction that disavows the key achievements of second wave feminism. This paper will examine the consistency with which the topics of conception, abortion and childbirth figure as melodramatic tropes within a wide range of different genres, from comedy to politically oriented drama, reflecting a flattening of female characterization that could be defined as postfeminist in its return to an essentialism made all the more potent by its reconfiguration as empowering.

 

 

Edward Lamberti

Point of View in Three Comedies directed by Pietro Germi

 

After a series of skilfully made melodramas and thrillers, writer-director (and sometime actor) Pietro Germi turned to comedies, beginning with Divorzio all'Italiana in 1961 and continuing with the likes of Sedotta e abbandonata and Signore e Signori. Why have these films, so popular at the time, been relatively neglected in critical discourse in recent years? Is it that, while Germi's work from this era is often discussed in terms of its satirising of Italian laws and customs, the experience of watching the films is diluted given that so many of the targets of their satire have now been hit and won over? The films may still offer the pleasures of emphatic direction, tight plotting, precise framing and assertive acting, but without the social context in which they were made, what meaning do they carry today?

 

I should like to help focus attention on Germi by considering the issue of point of view in the three films mentioned above. Germi and his collaborators dissipate point of view in these films, sharing it between characters, unreliable narrators, an omniscient camera, and even the emotive (and often tongue-in-cheek) music, so as to introduce layers of ambiguity and moderation to the stories. Roving camerawork, POV shots, fantasy sequences, voice-over and other elements combine to create kaleidoscopic portraits of the communities, conveying the complexities and cross-purposes of society and mining them for comic gold.

 

I will discuss some of the writings on the films by the likes of Mario Sesti, Alessandro Tedeschi Turco and Millicent Marcus and offer my own analysis of Germi's style that will tie details of specific moments to a consideration of the overall works. Through this I will argue that the films can be enjoyed, and praised, not only for the sophistication of their narrative structures (which, over forty years later, still feel fresh and modern) but also for the way in which their deployment of multiple points of view offers a humane and level-headed depiction of character and situation.

 

Edward Lamberti is an MA candidate at King's College London.

 

 

 

Michael Lawrence

““La più bella bambina di Roma”: Child Performance and the Popular in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951)”

 

This paper will address Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), in order to consider the importance of the child, and particularly the performance of the child, for understanding Italian cinema of the post-war period, and particularly the relationship between neo-realist and more populist cinema. Inspired by Visconti’s own experiences casting children for his films, Bellissima presents both a satire of commercial film production (filmed at the Cinecittà studios and featuring the popular director Alessandro Blasetti playing himself) and a serious examination of the aesthetic and ethical issues surrounding the use of children in popular film (whether from Italy or Hollywood: the spectre of Shirley Temple in particular haunts Visconti’s film). Bellissima proved the most popular film Visconti had yet made. The performance of Tina Apicella (as Maria) in Visconti’s film, and her character’s disastrous performance during her screen test for Today, Tomorrow, Never (the film-within-the-film) demonstrate how the child’s performance, understood either in terms of its immediacy and authenticity, or its melodrama and sentimentality, functioned in popular (and neo-realist) cinema of the time. While the film’s self-reflexive examination of action and stardom has been explored (by, for example, Francesco Casetti), it is Anna Magnani’s performance (as Maria’s mother) that is traditionally discussed. This paper will argue that in Bellissima the child’s performance encourages a serious consideration of the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by the spectacle of (and the labour of) the ‘popular’ child performer.

 

 

 

Irene Lottini

«Il delirio del lungo metraggio»

Cinema as Mass Phenomenon in Early Twentieth Century Italian Culture

 

«Le ragazze […] avevano il delirio del lungo metraggio, […] seguivano nei cento e più cinematografi di Roma ogni nuova produzione, […] sapevano a memoria tutti gli abiti di Lyda Borelli nel Velivolo della fatalità o nello Spasimo che redime»1. Using these words the 1918 short story Lungometraggio by Pio Vanzi describes the passion that young ladies showed for the new cultural phenomenon called cinema.

 

In the early Twentieth century Italian society cinema immediately stood out as popular cultural entertainment. Very soon, Italian literature testified the relevant social and cultural impact of cinema, telling stories and adventures inspired by this new world. Besides the well known Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operature by Luigi Pirandello, many short tales – publications often classifiable among the various products of consumer literature – delineate characters and atmospheres of the new film industry or feelings and attitudes of the new cinematic public. The representation of figures of producers only interested in money, of actors indulging in rivalries, of whimsical stars entangled in complicated love affair accompanies the description of the extreme emotions and exclusive passions that a film screening can give to young spectators in the dark of a movie theatre.

In the meanwhile, the contemporary filmic production offered more than one example of auto-reflexive representation of popularity. Telling the (mis)adventures of successful theatre actresses, diva-films such as Ma l’amor mio non muore (1913), Retaggio d’odio (1914) or Sangue blu (1915) propose significant meta-textual references. In these films the scenes celebrating the actresses’ performances on stage and their audiences’ ovations become a mise en abîme of the new cinematic stardom.

 

Relevant moments of auto-reflexivity distinguished, then, the successful comic production. Popular masks such as Cretinetti or Tontolini-Polidor often settled the destabilizing actions characterizing their comic roles in the new world of which they were part. Here, as in the diva-films or in the tales dedicated to the film industry, the mise en abîme of cinematic creative and spectatorial experiences testifies and reaffirms the nature of cinema as popular mass phenomenon.

1 Vanzi, Pio. “Lungo metraggio.” La Vita Cinematografica (December 1918), 153.

 

 

 

Giacomo Manzoli

Aldo Fabrizi after Rossellini: a popular icon of the Christian Democracy’s post-war propaganda

 

Everybody knows Aldo Fabrizi for his role as “Don Morosini” in the Italian neorealist masterpiece, Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945). However, Fabrizi’s career is mainly due to a series of characters - often directed by himself - that he played in films of the popular cinema of the Fifties. In this period, the Roman actor gave life to a sort of cheering regional mask which was primarily conveyed by the saga of an archetypical Italian family (the Passaguai family), which steadily gained him top positions at the box office.

 

For the most part, the lecture will focus on one of his films made in 1949, which anticipated and in some ways laid the foundations for the crystallization of the “Fabrizi character”, titled Welcome Reverend! (Benvenuto reverendo!, 1949), shot by the same actor.

 

This film reveals some extremely interesting aspects. Firstly, it retrieves, in a farcical way, the very character that brought Fabrizi international fame. Secondly, it diffuses in a metaphoric, if sometimes even too didactic perspective, a problematic but compliant interpretation of the government policies, carried out by the Christian Democratic party. And finally, it shows the ways through which it is possible to find a still unstable link, expressed by the audience of that period towards the popular cinema, between the instances of neorealism and the claim of a “bottom up” representation.

 

Therefore, the lecture will focus on the three processes visible in the film, as it attempts to define the coordinates on which arose the relationship between politics, popular culture and cinema throughout the decade that preceded and determined the so-called “economic miracle”.

 

 

 

Alex Marlow-Mann

Towards a Re-Interpretation of Enzo G. Castellari’s Il grande racket and the Italian Crime Film

 

One of the dominant genres at the Italian box-office in the 1970s was the Italian crime film, or poliziesco, which numbers over 100 films produced between 1972 and 1979. Contemporary critics were dismissive of the genre, considering it a vehicle for right-wing ideology and disparagingly labelling it the poliziottesco. Although there have been a couple of slightly more attentive and sympathetic analyses of the genre since then, the principal interpretative paradigm remains a ‘reflectionist’ one, which sees these films as a mirror of the turbulent society of the times and depicts a fundamentally reactionary mode of cinema. Now that its precursor, the once denigrated Spaghetti Western, has been recognised as a more complex and interesting genre than it was originally considered, the time has come to take a closer look at the Italian crime film. As a case study, this paper will focus on Enzo G. Castellari’s Il grande racket/ The Big Racket (1976), a vigilante movie that can be considered exemplary of the genre as a whole. Drawing on ideas from cognitive theory and moral philosophy in order to examine the genre’s appeal to the audience’s emotions and their sense of justice, this presentation will challenge conventional interpretations of the genre. What is really at stake in these films, it will be argued, is the creation of an emotional tension deriving from the viewer’s sense of injustice. The films’ invocation of contemporary social and political issues should be seen as functional to this aim rather than as the films’ motivating discourse. Analysed from this perspective, Il grande racket appears not as a straightforward vehicle for reactionary ideology, but rather as what Robin Wood calls an ‘incoherent text’, which refuses to provide either ideological or emotional closure to the complex tensions it sets up. Such a re-interpretation helps us to account for the Italian crime film’s extraordinary popularity and suggests a way of providing a more complex and nuanced interpretation of the films themselves.

 

 

 

Elena Mosconi

When the Children Cry: Popular Tastes and National Education in Early Italian Cinema

 

Negli anni che precedono la prima guerra mondiale abbiamo una significativa produzione di stampo pedagogico, che fa leva sulle corde del film strappalacrime, con bambini morti, oppure orfani, o ancora poverissimi, oppure capaci di sacrifici eroici. Gli esempi spaziano da La madre e la morte (Ambrosio, 1911) a Il piccolo garibaldino (Cines, 1909); da Il piccolo cerinaio (Genina, 1914) a Gli spazzacamini della Val D'Aosta (Paradisi, 1914). Questa produzione serve sia per avvalorare la presenza delle famiglie anche popolari (in particolare donne e bambini) al cinema, ma pure per educarle ai traumi della vita (si pensi alla grande mortalità), oltre che per creare dei modelli di eroismo nazionale in un periodo delicato per l'Italia (ispirati all'etica del sacrificio). Mi piacerebbe approfondire la derivazione di questi modelli derivano dalla pedagogia religiosa, dai racconti popolari e dal feuilletton.

 

Erika Nadir

The Functions of Music in Germi/Rustichelli’s Divorzio all’italiana

 

Even before there was voice sound in cinema there was music accompaniment.  Music has served as part of the film experience since the Lumière Brothers and has changed only in the different and complex ways in which it complements the celluloid.  Especially in the Italian comedies of the 1950s and 1960s, music plays an unusually complex and significant role, not just in creating ambience and accompaniment, but also commenting on the action itself and contributing to the comic elements of the films.  Plus, in using music already established in another arena, a popular song or liturgical music for instance, another layer of meaning or conversely, a deliberate juxtaposition may be intended by the composer and director.

 

Music already established in its own genre provides its own world and in so doing, an audiovisual counterpoint to a film.  In subtly invoking the unmistakable themes of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata in Divorzio all’italiana, Germi and the composer, Rustichelli expand the inquadratura of the film invoking a popular and evocative theme of another work of art, loaded with meaning. Subtly, the aural textuality invoked by a concurrent art form (using the opera juxtaposed in the film), creates the metaphorical space that Michel Chion calls “en creux.”   The tension that arises from juxtaposing two existing art forms creates visual and aural metaphors. The greater the tension in this dialectic, the greater the relief, and therefore, the humor.

 

Erika Nadir, in her second year of UCLA’s Department of Italian Phd program, graduated with a BA in Italian Studies, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude. As part of her program at UCLA, Ms. Nadir teaches Italian language and is the Teaching Assistant for Medieval Italian Literature: Dante to Machiavelli.  In her previous life as a professional opera singer, Ms. Nadir premiered three operas of the composer, Antonio Carlos Gomez, a Brazilian contemporary of Giuseppe Verdi.  She was featured in the first American staged performance of Verdi’s opera Alzira.  Among her current research topics is a focus on Italian opera in the Italian film comedies of the 20^th century.

 

 

 

Daniel O’Brien

Hercules versus Hercules: Variation and Continuation in Two Generations of Heroic Masculinity.

 

This paper compares and contrasts two cinematic depictions of Hercules, in terms of their production contexts and representations of masculinity. The 1958 Hercules (Le fatiche di Ercole, Pietro Francisci) is credited with launching the peplum, one of the most important genres in the history of Italian popular cinema. The 1983 Hercules (Luigi Cozzi) belongs to the science fiction-fantasy cycle launched by the American-produced Star Wars (1977). I consider the extent to which it is legitimate to characterise the 1983 film as a ‘neo-peplum’, deriving its themes, ideology and iconography from the earlier version.

 

Produced 25 years apart, in different cultural, economic and industrial contexts, the Hercules films have significant qualities in common. Italian-made, with a mostly local crew and cast, both films feature an American bodybuilding champion in the title role, respectively Steve Reeves and Lou Ferrigno. It is notable that the 1983 Hercules is not a remake of the earlier film. While the 1983 version has clear allusions to its predecessor and the peplum genre, it also draws on post-Star Wars conceptions of cinematic fantasy.

 

The 1958 Hercules arguably established the ground rules for the mythological action film, foregrounding the muscular male body as an instrument of self-reliance, liberation and moral authority. This representation of masculinity is altered substantially in the 1983 version, which stresses Hercules’ dependence on and vulnerability to divine intervention. Ferrigno’s Hercules is placed in parental and adoptive relationships which are ruptured through violence, underlining further a sense of helplessness and impotence. This emphasis on family trauma is a recurrent feature of the post Star Wars fantasy cycle. In the case of the 1983 Hercules, it perhaps also reflects the political instability within Italy at the time, epitomised by the assassination of former prime minister Aldo Moro and its legacy of conspiracy theories. Even a super human such as Hercules can only triumph through the intercession of a higher power and advanced technology. This paper asks whether the 1983 Hercules ultimately endorsed, challenged or negated its predecessor’s construction of heroic masculinity.

 

 

 

Alan O'Leary

"Cinepanettone con nonna e papá": Rituals of Cinema-going and the Challenge to Scholarship

 

The Italian film industry has often been pronounced moribund but has always survived by providing critically despised films, usually comedies, for a popular audience. In recent years it has produced a series of films released annually around Christmas colloquially referred to as 'cinepanettoni'. These films have been successful enough to have become part of the annual festive rituals for a large proportion of the population, and have spawned offshoots as popular actors are employed to produce copycat films; indeed, the industry is now attempting to generate an equivalent series of films for the summer season.

 

Despite the undeniable success of these films, and the cult status of many which has generated a complex network of fan cultures, they remain largely unstudied, and have suffered a critical disdain from those representing authoritative film criticism and scholarship. In short, they are at once despised and ignored by 'official' culture, or indeed seen as symptomatic or even partly causal of a putative (and Pasolinian) ‘cambiamento antropologico’ that has led to the election of successive right-wing governments.

 

Picchi and Uva's Destra e sinistra nel cinema italiano (2006) is one of the very few studies to notice these films and to attempt to treat them seriously; broad-brush dismissal remains the characteristic critical attitude and approach, and as such is self-evidently inadequate to the analysis of a complex phenomenon. This paper will ask what approaches would best be used to describe and analyse these films. I will suggest that a complex methodology treating several contrasting aspects of the texts and their consumption needs to be developed: they should be analysed from an industrial perspective, situating their importance in the unstable Italian film industry; techniques of film and textual analysis should be employed to describe the character, variety and development (since the first such film in 1983) of their formal attributes and content; aspects of an anthropological approach should be used to grasp how these films are viewed, used, and circulated during their brief cinema releases and then subsequently through standard distribution and channels like the internet.

 

 

Catherine O'Rawe

Reading Riccardo: Riccardo Scamarcio and Questions of the Female Public

 

This paper will examine the star persona of Riccardo Scamarcio, in his trajectory from teen star to serious actor in middlebrow dramas. Questions of his critical and fan reception have been dominated by the ‘problem’ of the female audience, which either has to be ‘elevated’ in order that they can appreciate his serious dramas, or shaken off completely. The paper will attempt to situate this problem of the reception of male stars both synchronically and diachronically, using approaches familiar in post-feminist film and media studies.

 

 

 

Fulvio Orsitto

Cannibalism Italian Style

 

This presentation focuses on the recurring presence of anthropophagy in many Italian films produced after 1968. Trying to investigate the growing presence of death in Italian films during the “years of lead”, this study begins analyzing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (released in 1969, but anticipating the disturbing mood that will dominate the following decade) and – after a brief overview on the Italian cannibalistic sub-genre – focuses on Cannibal Holocaust, directed by Ruggero Deodato in 1980. The intention of the present research is to demonstrate how the constant presence of death “in” the Italian film industry could be interpreted as a sign of the much feared death “of” the same Italian film industry. Even though some scholar attributes the crisis that affected Italian films during the 1970’s to the death of many Neorealist directors (Visconti, De Sica and Rossellini), and to tragic loss of intellectuals like Pasolini (Liehm 1984), the genuine responsible was the increasing presence of television in the life of Italians. In fact, after 1976 Italy witnessed a rapid and unsupervised broadcasting deregulation (Sorlin 2001), which attracted herds of spectators to the small screen at the expenses of the film industry. As a consequence, in just a few seasons what was one of the largest film markets in the West, was reduced by over two-thirds (Miccichè 1984). In the span of few years, television almost destroyed cinema by offering it up in every conceivable form on a thousand channels, in a deluge. Films were mutilated, dissected, massacred (Cipriani 1984). In other words: cannybalized, literally “eaten” by television. In the meanwhile, city streets became almost deserted. Citizens preferred to stay home fearing terrorism, and devoting themselves to the consumption of immaterial necessities through the television and other objects of family mediation instead (Cianfarani 1984). The parallel expansion of televisual offerings and fears of terrorism changed the cinema experience from a collective social experience, to a domestic experience (Wood 2005). The desperate reaction of the Italian film industry was to push the limits of what was conceivably possible screening. In an extreme attempt to differentiate cinematic and televisual experience and – following the same rationale behind Pasolini’s infamous Salò – in order to create a product that television could not possibly digest; many directors presented their audiences with excessive images. To exorcize the fact they were being cannibalized by television, many Italian films openly displayed anthropophagy, creating a significant short circuit between causes and consequences, and desperately trying to attract spectators before the even deeper crisis that will characterize the 1980’s.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Cianfarani, Carmine. “Society, Market and Industry” in Italian Cinema of the Eighties. Roma: 1984, 13:15.

Cipriani, Ivano. “The Programming of Film on Television” in Italian Cinema of the Eighties. Roma: 1984, 77:79.

Liehm, Mira. Passion and Defiance. Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. Berkeley: U. of California Press: 1984.

Miccichè, Lino. “Introduction” in Italian Cinema of the Eighties. Roma: 1984, 9:11.

Sorlin, Pierre. Italian National Cinema. 1896-1996. Bristol: Routledge, 2001.

Wood, Mary P. Italian Cinema. New York: Berg, 2005.

 

Professor Orsitto is the Director of the Italian and Italian American program. Born in Turin, Italy, he holds a Laurea/BA in Italian literature (1998) and a Laurea/BA in film and media studies (2001) from the University of Turin. In 2000 he moved to the United States to teach at Connecticut College. In 2003 he earned a Master of Arts in Italian at the University of Connecticut, and in 2004 he received a Master in Film Studies from the University of Turin. In 2008 he received his Ph.D. in Italian from the University of Connecticut. He has conducted research and published on Italian cinema and literature, and he is currently working on Italian American cinema and post-national Italian cinema. His teaching expertise encompasses the whole range of Italian Language, Literature, Culture and Cinema. Before coming to the United States, he lived in Nice (on the French Riviera) and traveled quite extensively, spending time in Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon, and basically everywhere in Europe. When he is not traveling, watching a film, or driving his convertible, he is probably cooking some Italian dish.

 

 

 

Maria Francesca Piredda

Cinema and Popular Preaching: Italian Missionary Film and Fiamme

 

In the sphere of Italian catholic cinema studies, is still to be made a focusing on Italian missionary cinematographic production. This phenomenon is clearly linked to the use of images in the traditional preaching form of the Church, since its origins and till the XXth century in different ways because of social contest, ecclesiastical and colonial politics, as well as fruition’s circumstances. Generally speaking, missionaries use cinema to give information about themselves, to get economic aid, to educate and to show their life experience, speaking to a mixed audience – young and adult, Christians and not Christians, “civilized” and “savage” people – of which they attempt to satisfy expectations and modes of learning.

 

The Italian missionary cinematographic production, which has begun around the Twenties and continues up to now, is located between documentary and fiction and reveals some constants: the opposition Christian faith/paganism (that in the fiction is represented by missionary-wizard struggle), the unknown and invincible nature (in accordance with exoticism discourse), the necessity of missionary’s presence in foreign countries (showed in a propagandistic way), the attention (often with prejudice) for local habits.

 

This paper will be focused on a fiction film produced by Saveriani of Parma in 1929: Fiamme. The work shows on the one hand an amateur quality (Saveriani took it during their summer holidays in Appennini Mountains and they weren’t professional, so the movie reveals a lot of imperfections) and on the other hand Fiamme converts Hollywood models into a popular and catholic version. Adventure and heroism are the most important ingredients of a good product that “teaches by entertaining”, associated with iconographic and narrative models typical of Christian hagiography, in order to reach a popular audience and to support religious propaganda. The outcome of this mix is a “religious western”, where the opposition between traditional values and innovation becomes the couples archaic – civilization, paganism – Christianity, the last one represented by a missionary who protects a little community of American Indians.

 

Maria Francesca Piredda graduated in History of Cinema (2003) at the Università del Sacro Cuore of Milano with a thesis on the representation of the Italian colonial experience in the Italian cinema (1905-1945). She finished the PhD program in Cinema Study at the Università di Bologna with a thesis on missionary cinema experience in the last century (2008). Currently, she is a research fellow at the Università of Bologna. She has teaching experiences in Cinema History classes (Università del Sacro Cuore of Milano and Università of Bologna) and she is interested in spectacular and cinematographic practices in the Italian contest and in their impact on audience and the critics.

 

 

Paolo Russo

Genres, Sexuality and Popular Culture: the Boycott of Giuseppe De Santis’ Dangerous “Post-modern Neorealism”

 

After the worldwide success achieved with the “Trilogia della terra” and a few other titles in the early 1950s, Giuseppe De Santis complained about a true political boycott that literally stopped his career.

 

This paper draws upon research I conducted on the conspicuous materials held in the Fondo De Santis in Cinecittà: subjects, treatments, screenplays, letters, production papers, and other documents. Never studied before in its entirety, such a wide corpus bears witness of the incredibly high number of unfinished projects by the filmmaker from Fondi and sheds light on how De Santis could have fully developed the poetic potential of his artistic project: the constant use of genres (musical, melodrama and western in particular), the influence of folklore and popular culture and literature, sexuality and the star system.

 

This paper will reflect on De Santis’s Pettotondo (a big budget feature film project, 1957-59) as a case study: through the comparison of the various screenplay drafts and documentation about the pre-production process, I will show how De Santis’s goal was to address the “questione meridionale”, the revolts of the peasants and, above all, the condition of women in Italy; but he tried to do so by appealing and challenging the viewer to engage with these “hot” social and cultural issues through an “ideological eroticization of Claudia Cardinale’s body”. A strategy that clearly emerges throughout the development stages of the project, and that calls for the necessity to reframe De Santis’s work beyond the Neorealist label, according to his peculiar awareness of the medium and of the role of spectatorship.

 

 

 

Pauline Small

Approaching Pink Neorealism

 

Pink neorealism is popular cinema of the comedy genre. This body of work requires reconsideration and critical reappraisal: there are a number of decidedly erroneous lines of approach in general currency. Fundamentally the error lies in accessing this form of cinema through either the spectrum of another distinctive body of work or another route of critical appraisal. Conclusions are then drawn that derive not directly from the films themselves but from a comparative or relative assessment, where the basis of the comparison or relative assessment is neither questioned nor explicitly validated. I would argue that the following received approaches do not stand up to scrutiny:

1)     Pink neorealism is a pale imitation of neorealism that compromises the vigour and impegno of the earlier material

2)     Pink neorealism is a weak, less incisive form of comedy that spawns a superior        

subsequent body of work, the commedia all’italiana

 

3)     Pink neorealism is filmmaking that offers examples of early star vehicles in the careers of a number of prominent postwar Italian actors 

 

4)     The majority of pink neorealist films are escapist rural comedies: the genre evolves later into urban comedies, that eventually develops into the commedia all’italiana (see example 2)

 

I propose a re-evaluation of this body of work on a quite specific basis. Thomas Schatz (1985: 13) argues that ‘critical analysis of any genre film must be based firmly on an understanding of both the genre and the production system in which any individual genre film is generated’. In this paper I will sketch out elements of the particular production system underpinning the films of pink neorealism: the aim is to challenge the above points, in the belief that a more accurate account of contemporary production practices will lead to a more informed analysis of this body of filmmaking. 

 

 

 

Daniela Treveri-Gennari

Regionalism and Italian Cultural Diversity: Landscape and dialect in Mediterranean cinema.

Throughout the 20^th Century, Europe was one of the principal markets for Hollywood films. In Italy, the restricted distribution of American films started in 1938 and ended at the conclusion of WWII. Italy then became one of the largest foreign markets for the American film industry, with 80% of Italian cinemas screening American films. Five times as many films were imported than were exported from Italy to the U.S. For the American production companies seeking to optimize the return on their investments, weakening the competition was the best way to make profits. This obviously created a degree of financial distress for the Italian film industry. In this paper I wish first to dispel the myth that the flooding of Hollywood films into post-war Italy inhibited the flourishing of the national film industry. I shall go on to show that certain types of regional comedies were successfully produced in response to the American cinematic invasion of Italy, and examine the way in which they were perceived by national spectators. The films which attracted the widest number of audiences at the box office and on which I shall focus are: Dino Risi's Pane, amore, e… (1955), Vittorio De Sica's L'oro di Napoli (1954), Mario Camerini's Vacanze a Ischia (1957), and Mario Mattoli's Un turco napoletano (1953). All these films share a certain geographical specificity. This particular type of regional cinema, with its own identity, stardom and locations, exerted its power in post-war Italy over the more detached cinema from abroad.

 

 

Federica Villa

Language Issues in the Works of Giorgio Bassani and Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 1950s

 

By analysing a number of issues explored in the works of Giorgio Bassani and Pier Paolo Pasolini, this paper aims to show that in the early 1950s both authors engaged in attempting to fashion a popular cinema and a standard national language. Moving from a reaction against cinematic and literary/linguistic neorealism, both Bassani’s and Paolini’s work repeatedly advocates a true and proper intermediate writing lab, where to try out new script-writing solutions and where to work towards the creation of a simple prose style.

 

As a result, this paper will be divided into two main stages:

a. A brief excursus of passages from the writings of Bassani and Pasolini in order to focus on a number of key issues concerning “national and popular writing” and explore the existence of a proposal for stylistic strategies placing themselves somewhere between cinema and literature.

b. An analysis of some sequences from La donna del fiume (Mario Soldati, 1954), a film which, besides seeing both Bassani and Pasolini -  the latter at his first experience in this field – engaged in the script-writing, is definitely an exemplary instance of popular re-writing of some neorealist stylemes.

Finally, the proposal will focus on how the Italian cinema of the 1950s should be seen as a huge treasure-trove of solutions leading to the creation of a truly popular profile for our cinema and this specifically because of the many instances of cooperation between writers and film-makers.

 

 

 

Mary P Wood

What is ‘popular cinema’?

 

I have argued elsewhere (2005:111) that ‘Italian auteur cinema is not so much a distinct entity in itself as the intellectual and/or better funded end of national genre production’.  In this paper I will use Bourdieu’s notions of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ (1993) to explore how a particular popular genre marks itself off as having a distinctive identity within the field.  As a case study I will use the horror genre because it raises many interesting questions – how do genre film directors construct their persona and lay claim to a habitus within the field?; what value is given to the different creative roles?; how was the commercial value of a film ‘package’ (producer, director, genre, actors, cinematographer) evaluated, and what decisions have to be made in a contemporary situation of ‘flexible accumulation’ (the exploitation of cultural texts in as many forms and formats as possible) (Harvey 1990:147)?; what is the nature of the secondary text of interviews and articles which supports the genre and how has it changed?; how has the constituency, the audience evolved?; how do horror films negotiate cult status?

 

My paper will use interviews with directors, producers and other creative roles, and will interpret the discourses which attempt to differentiate the field and assign value within it. Riccardo Freda who boasted in the 1950s that he’d never bankrupted a producer, making a virtue of ‘poor cinema’ in re-using expensive sets from other films and changing the lighting to avoid having to move the camera for reverse shots, is performing an equivalent role to more recent directors who are at pains to distance themselves from any suggestion of respectability or cultural value. 

 

Interviews are mediated texts whose content has been filtered through the social and cultural formation of the individual and the power relationships underpinning areas of the film industry. Interviews with those involved in the Italian film industry can reveal the nonconscious narrativizing of professional roles, internal competition, professional identity and personal motivation, the ‘trade stories’ told in order to align oneself with particular practices, and how these have changed to take account of the global media economy.

 

 

References

 

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)

Mary P Wood, Italian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2005)

 

Mary Wood is Professor of European Cinema at Birkbeck, University of London, where she teaches film.  She is the author of Italian Cinema (Berg, 2005) and Contemporary European Cinema (Hodder Arnold, 2007).  She has published widely on Italian cinema, and her most recent research has concentrated on aspects of Italian film noir.  Her current publications include 'Intervista-interview-insight' (The Italianist special film issue, 2009); 'Italian film studies: a two-pronged approach' (Italian Studies, Thinking Italian Film issue, Autumn 2008); 'Lipstick and chocolate: Le conseguenze dell'amore' in Dana Renga (ed): Mafia Movies (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming, 2010); 'Navigating the Labyrinth: cinematic representations of right-wing terrorism' in R Glynn, A O'Leary & G C Lombardi (eds): Terrorism Italian-Style (IGRS, 2009); 'The dark side of the Mediterranean: Italian noir' in A Spicer (ed): European Film Noir (MUP, 2007), and 'Enrico Mattei: Making the case for conspiracy' in S Gundle & L Rinaldi (eds): Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy (Palgrave, 2007).