David Forgacs

Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880-1980: Cultural Industries, Politics and the Public

This book aims to be both a cultural history of 20-th century Italy and a case study of cultural modernisation. Focusing on the development of the modern cultural industries such as publishing, cinema and broadcasting, it looks at their impact upon a society which remained predominantly agrarian until around 1950. Starting with an overview of Italy since 1990, the book traces the effects of industrialization and commercialization on popular culture and the arts. It then deals with the cultural policies of the Fascists and the post-1945 reconstruction. It ends with a discussion of the impact of television in the 1960s and 1970s and on trends towards multimedia conglomerates and deregulated broadcasting in the 1980s. The author draws on archive and newspaper sources as well as published materials, and questions established assumptions about the relationship between culture and politics, particularly in the Fascist period, and about the forms and meanings of modernization since the Second World War. The book is written in a way that is accessible to the non-specialist reader. It may also be of interest to students of Italian history and culture, cultural and media studies, European history and politics.

Looking for Italy's public sphere

Starting out from Jürgen Habermass definition of the public sphere, and from the criticisms subsequently made of it by various scholars, this article considers whether the concept may be appropriately applied to Italy in the modern era. Is it correct to limit the public sphere to its ‘classic’ liberal form or to understand it in a normative sense rather than a more neutral, descriptive one? Can one, for example, speak of a fascist public sphere? Is the public sphere always fatally undermined by the mass media or can it harness some of the media to its own ends? If there is still a critical public sphere in Italy today, where is it to be found and what forms does it take?

Introduction: disability rights and wrongs in Italy

This is the first issue of Modern Italy to focus on disability. We want to thank the general editors of the journal, Philip Cooke and John Foot, for having welcomed our proposal for it. The origina...

Preparing and Recording Audio Commentaries

I have now recorded full-length commentaries for four ‘classic’ Italian films: Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), and Il conformista (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). Although these credentials hardly make me an expert on the subject, I have learned some lessons about audio commentaries that I think are worth sharing. First lesson: do not risk going into a studio to record a commentary without a script of some kind. It is true that many audio commentaries — usually those done by the film’s director — are unscripted and perhaps even recorded in a single take. Occasionally these are good, but more often they have long sections where the director cannot think of anything interesting to say or just tells background anecdotes. However, this is the person who made the film, so even if they have nothing much to say about it we forgive them for it. Film scholars cannot crave the same indulgence from listeners. I can think of only one case of a really good scholarly commentary on an Italian film that is not closely scripted, and that is Robert Gordon’s on the Arrow Films dual-format edition (2011) of Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948). I, however, have increasingly come to use more and more detailed scripts for my commentaries, timed right down to the second. I may want to draw attention to a shot that is on screen for just one or two seconds and it comes in right at the beginning of a scene. I have to find a way of commenting on it either just before it appears, or while it is on screen, or just after, but I cannot place my remarks too much on either side, otherwise listeners may not understand which shot I am talking about. For me, therefore, repeated rehearsal and exact timing — in other words, a pre-written script — are essential if I want to be sure I cover a certain number of points about a film. The first time I did a commentary I had not anticipated these problems. It was the commentary on Ossessione, which I did together with Lesley Caldwell, whose first time it also was. Lesley and I had several meetings beforehand, going through the film sequence by sequence, deciding what we would say and which of us would say it. It was an enjoyable process and we thought that was all there was to it. But The Italianist, 33. 2, 183–189, June 2013