Search Results

This chapter revisits Italy and turns to Dante on screen. It considers the role of early Italian cinema, giving particular attention to the cultural and political contexts of the 1911 Milano-Films Inferno — a project that took shape during a decade which also saw significant developments in Italian nationalism before the country's entry into the First World War.

This chapter examines the historical connections between the rise of the documentary in the 1920s–30s; its reception in Italy, and its effects on both critical discourse and filmmaking practices; and the formation of neorealism. It first looks at the ideological and political implications of the post-facto narrative of the genesis of neorealism as a way of re-creating a nationalist historiography of cinema. The chapter then determines the alternative genealogies of neorealism by reconstructing the historical connections between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking in Italy in the 1930s; the emergence of Italian documentary filmmaking and the Istituto LUCE; and the larger international history of prewar documentary cinema and its impact on the stylistic changes in fiction films of that period.

This chapter examines the ways in which Italian cinema was promoted to American audiences. The advertising rhetoric of postwar Italian cinema was anchored by two seemingly contradictory poles: One emphasized critical merit and aesthetic qualities, the other relied on verbal suggestions and visual intimations of more sordid cinematic content. Each ad depended on the newspaper or magazine in which it was published as much as on the specific character of the theater at which the films were screened.

This chapter explores the relationship between the conceptual framework of the early Soviet avant-garde (of which cinema formed a vital part) and that of neorealism, bringing out the moments of concrete mediation in the dialectical relationship between avant-garde and realism in cinematic history. It presents a broad outline of the dissemination of early Soviet film theory in 1930s–40s Italy (a period encompassing the rise and fall of fascism) and shows how this dissemination helped initiate the formulation of the neorealist discourse. The chapter points to the presence of Italian neorealism in the Soviet cinema of the postwar and post-Stalin period, suggesting aesthetic interdependence between the Cinema of the Thaw in the Soviet Union and Italian neorealism.

This chapter explores how neorealism viewed race in Italy’s past and present. The rise of Italian neorealism is linked to the self-serving mythology of the Italian as victim rather than perpetrator of World War II. Italian neorealism mostly forgot more than just Italian anti-Semitism: the neorealist mythopoesis also erases the Italian colonialist past, which a new generation of historians are currently unearthing in all its bloody details.

For a long time, television was blamed for weakening the Italian cinema and reducing it to a very limited part in public entertainment. According to an Order in Council of 1947, radio, and later television, broadcasting was a State service entrusted to a public company submitted to parliamentary control. When Radiotelevisione Italiana began its television broadcasting, on 3 January 1954, Italian cinema was in its heyday. Many assumed, at the time, that once they would be offered pictures at home, people would have no reason to go out, so that cinema attendance would soon decline. However, with the passing of time, the evolution of both media was not so straightforward; they were in competition but, at the same time, complemented and influenced each other. Opinions about the impact of television on cinema changed during the second half of the twentieth century. Today, when new means of communication, more flexible and interactive, are appealing to a wide public, they can and must be defended from the point of view that a close collaboration is their only chance to survive.

This chapter identifies the elements of formal, filmic, representational, or linguistic continuity between fascism and the post-World War II period in Italy. It discusses the new interpretation of fascist cinema that began in the middle of the 1970s; the beginnings of De Sica’s neorealism; and the broader cultural climate of the 1930s that reflected the poetics of neorealism.

This chapter examines Dunham’s work on Botta e risposta (1950) and Mambo (1954) to highlight the substantial creative freedom that midcentury European cinema granted to a Black woman choreographer. The Dunham company’s portrayal in these films suggests that her troupe’s fame in postwar Europe was filtered through the same crude ideas about Black cultures that informed Baker’s career. And yet within such a framework, Dunham was afforded authorial control over her dance scenes to an extent not possible in Hollywood and, like Baker, used these scenes to present a culturally complex vision of Black womanhood that countered racist misconceptions. The chapter establishes Dunham as a coauthor of Mambo by showing that her choreography is central to its artistic vision.

This chapter set the stage for an exploration of contemporary French-language European road movies by tracing the interwoven lines of the tradition in its American and European iterations back to the 1960s, the period during which the template for contemporary road cinema crystalized. It argues that the contours of the road movie tradition are not strictly the product of a direct lineage from seminal American films from the late 1960s, such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA), but the result of complex transnational interactions within European cinemas and between European and American cultures. The films covered are Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962, Italy), Le corniaud/The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1965, France/Italy) Les petits matins/Hitch-Hike (Jacqueline Audry, 1962, France), Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1977, West Germany), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki Kaurismäki,1989, Finland/Sweden) and Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994, Germany/Portugal).

This chapter explores the similarities and differences between Iranian neorealism and its Italian progenitor. It shows that Iranian-style neorealism has not been homogenous, exhibiting itself in two different styles under two different political systems, and that it has been neither a fully formed film school nor a movement, but a moment of convergence in the social history of cinema.

This chapter examines Western tropes in Italian cinema's ‘neorealist’ phase. Taking as key case studies In the Name of the Law (In nome della legge, Pietro Germi, 1949) and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Pietro Germi, 1952), it explores the complex ways in which Germi worked references to American genres into his work, thereby debunking approaches presupposing an Italian neorealism separated from ‘popular’ cinema, and demonstrating an oft-overlooked precursor to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying in Germi's two films a representational equivalence between the Italian South and the American West, the chapter charts a lineage of tales of banditry that blended the international and the local.

The pioneering Italian film Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) is widely recognized as a turning point in both film history and the popular reception of the ancient world. Its feature-length adaptation of the Polish novel sought to nationalize the Italian public through the presentation of a common cultural heritage in the Roman past, to raise the commercial prestige of the Italian film industry in global markets, and to increase the artistic status of cinema and legitimate it as a respectable form of entertainment. Its use of nineteenth-century historical fiction also provided a radically new way of experiencing Neronian Rome, related to but distinct from the reconstruction of the Roman past in other high cultural forms. The film achieved substantial success, reaching spectators of all classes throughout Italy and across the world. Yet when it was first released, some critics deplored it as cheap, facile ‘wordless images’—a harbinger of a ‘cinema age’ that would threaten the survival of theatre, the book, and even literacy itself. This chapter draws on recent work in adaptation studies to reconceptualize the relationship between the Italian film and the Polish novel as more complex than image to word. And, through its analysis of the afterlife of Sienkiewicz’s novel on screen, this chapter explores cinema more broadly as a mode of expression that is not inferior to the book but more varied, and in possession of extensive ideological and aesthetic, as well as mass-market, reach.

This chapter explores the conversion of Rome’s Cinecittà film studios into a refugee camp in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It argues that as one recognizes its material and historical vicissitudes, its true magnitude, the duration of its existence, and the broader social and political forces that governed its development, the camp emerges as a hidden, obverse figure of neorealism. Archival documents and images, and the gaps that still plague the history of the camp, join in a description of the overlapping uses and meanings, the physical and figurative implications, of a uniquely warped space, at once actual and phantasmatic, allegorical and cinematic.

This chapter explores the postwar film work of James Agee, Helen Levitt, and Sidney Meyers, which can be seen as a possible response to Italian neorealism outside of mainstream American cinema. Agee, who wrote the first prominent critiques of neorealist films in the United States, was involved in two independent nonfiction film projects, The Quiet One and In the Street, both of which were released in 1948. His participation in these two productions came about through his friendship with the photographer Helen Levitt, and Janice Loeb, a painter of private means who, according to some accounts, financed the making of both works. Loeb produced The Quiet One and brought on Meyers as director.

This chapter discusses the rise of Italian genre cinema and its venerable golden age that was assisted by financial incentives and funding awards. It recounts how Mario Bava's Black Sunday became a stellar success in the United States when released in 1961. It also mentions US companies that spent approximately $35 million dollars a year from 1957 to 1967 in order to finance or buy the distribution rights to Italian films, or to make their own films, with Italian studios as their production base. The chapter talks about Galatea, the production outfit that financially backed Bava's film that branched out to the American market when they sold Hercules to producer Joe Levine and subsequently earned an advance to provide a sequel. It looks at the boost in feature production during the 1950s that was caused by the inviting cultural/economic protection model of Christian Democrat politician, Guilo Andrelotti.