Daniela Treveri Gennari

Post-War Italian Cinema : American Intervention, Vatican Interests

Chapter 1: You Can Be Like Us: American Intervention in Italian Reconstruction Chapter 2: Roman Catholicism, Americanism and Americanisation: Ideology, Politics and Cultural Propaganda Chapter 3: The State, Cinema Legislation and American Interests Chapter 4: Endemic Propaganda: Catholic Production, Exhibition and Criticism Chapter 5: Dispelling the Myth: The Popularity of American and Italian Cinema in Post-War Italy and the Response of the Catholic Church Chapter 6: Gender Roles, the Church and the Allure of Modernity in American and Italian Films Conclusions

‘If You Have Seen it, You Cannot Forget!’: Film Consumption and Memories of Cinema-Going in 1950s Rome

Cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Italy in the 1950s. In particular, Rome not only boasted the highest number of movie theatres in the country, but was also the home of cinema studios, production and distribution companies as well as film industry offices. Building upon a survey of film-goers who lived in Rome between the years 1945 and 1960, this article analyses the experience of film consumption, choice and movie taste in the capital at the time. Moreover, it investigates how the memory of events related to cinema-going was woven into people’s personal narrative. The project not only adds new dimensions to our understanding of audiences in Rome during the 1950s, but also looks into the way people construct their memories of the social experience of cinema-going and reflect upon them after over 60 years.

Did Neorealism start in church? Catholicism, cinema and the case of Mario Soldati's Chi è Dio?

This paper demonstrates that the collaboration between leftist intellectuals and filmmakers and the Catholic Church was vital in the birth and development of Italian Neorealism. Many films simply classified as neorealist and therefore often interpreted as the result of a leftist ideology, were – on the contrary – the product of a partnership between communist scriptwriters or directors and Catholic producers or filmmakers. The point here is not to claim that particular films belong to one category or another but rather to explore the ways in which that fruitful collaboration operated. Mario Soldatis Chi è Dio, the only cine-catechism of the period available for study, will be analysed and investigated as one of the first Neorealist films in order to demonstrate how the origin of the Neorealist cinema in Italy took place within the context of communist–Catholic collaboration.

A Regional Charm: Italian Comedy versus Hollywood

OCTOBER 128, Spring 2009, pp. 51–68.

Introduction: Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context—Not Just a Slower Transition to Modernity

We offer an overview of what motivates the recent interest in rural cinema audiences and exhibition, in the wake of a long association between cinema and the urban. We explore how this has been fostered by the New Cinema History, which moves away from the explanatory primacy of the film text towards an open-ended study of cinema’s flow through places, spaces, cultural, affective, and institutional sites and is also fundamentally connected to the ‘spatial turn’ in film history (Klenotic, Putting Cinema History on the Map: Using GIS to Explore the Spatiality of Cinema. In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, & P. Meers (Eds.), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (pp. 58–84). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Rather than considering rural cinema everywhere as lagging behind the experience of metropolitan modernity in which cinema has been understood to be imbricated, understanding the uneven rural space might challenge our understanding of the globalizing influence of cinema or indeed, of the hegemony of Hollywood. We emphasize how moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of the rural, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world. We also consider the variety of methods that the challenge of studying rural audiences demands, from oral history to programming analysis. We then explore in more depth the rationale for the book’s division into five parts, offering a framework to understand how rural villages and remote towns across the globe experienced ‘hybrid versions of modernity’ (Fuller-Seeley and Potamianos, Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing. In K. Fuller-Seeley (Ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (p. 7). Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).

Oral Memories of Cinema-Going in Rural Italy of the 1950s

As urbanization gathered pace in 1950s Italy, mass waves of internal migration took a growing number of citizens away from rural life towards the cities. Cinema-going of this period has typically been analysed in the context of its burgeoning urban centres, although in 1951 over 40% of the working population in Italy was still agricultural. In this chapter, we are using data drawn from over 1000 questionnaires gathered across Italy to consider how cinema-going might have functioned differently in rural and urban areas. The line between the definition of rural and urban was blurred by the advent of cinema itself, since it presented the ideal pretext for a journey into the nearest town or city, thereby offering an insight into other possible worlds in more ways than one. Rural respondents are accordingly often self-conscious about their ‘rural’ status, particularly in the geographically outlying areas of Italy. These respondents emphasize the importance of cinema as an educational source, both constructing a sense of national identity and revealing possible alternative worlds. We suggest that distinctive models of spectatorship emerged in this context, particularly in relation to stars, to whom rural audiences generally attribute less importance, as models towards which they aspire, rather than with whom they can identify.

Mapping Cinema Memories: Emotional Geographies of Cinema-going in Rome in the1950s

This article, based on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project ‘In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, Genre and National Identity’, explores the power of geovisualization for capturing the affective geographies of cinema audiences. This mapping technique, used in our project to interrogate the Italian exhibition sector as well as to map film distribution, is used to illustrate the affective and emotional dimensions of cartographic practices related to memory. The article first examines the imbrication of memory and space, before moving on to a discussion of our mapping of the memories of one single respondent and the questions this mapping raises about geographical and remembered space, mobility and the relation between mapping and life-cycles.

Catholicism and Neorealism: Zavattini’s Contribution to Universalia-Produced Prima Comunione (Blasetti, 1950)

The collaboration between the Catholic church and left-wing filmmakers, scriptwriters, and producers in postwar Italian cinema is a fascinating yet submerged area of research. This chapter aims to explore the relationship between the Vatican-sponsored production company Universalia and one of the most representative neorealist writers, Cesare Zavattini. I will do that by looking at Zavattini’s working relationship with the Catholic company and then I will take Blasetti’s Prima Comunione (1950)—scripted by Zavattini—as a successful example of what Mino Argentieri (1979, p. 155) defined “that dialogue between atheists and believers.”