Louis Bayman

The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama

Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Beyond the pleasure principle: exploring the limits of a pervasive term

This article aims to discuss pleasure as a way of understanding film. I do not seek to judge the correctness, political or otherwise, of certain pleasures, or to offer any overarching theory of pleasure. Instead I investigate what film scholars talk about when we talk about pleasure. Understanding pleasure more as an attitude to film spectatorship rather than an object in and of itself, I consider the importance not solely of the rational pursuit of prima facie pleasures but also of more enigmatic emotional needs relating to intimacy, pain and the confirmation of shared values. Separating cinematic pleasure from any necessary association with positivity, I caution against the potential for pleasure to be instrumentalized as part of a neo-liberal ethic of happiness.

‘The Fair and the Museum: Framing the Popular’

Popular Italian cinema encompasses many delights: the foundational spectacle of the early historical epics and the passionate theatricality of the first screen divas take their place within a gallery of emotional and sensual pleasures. Even the canonical works of Italy’s post-war art cinema grew from the soil of popular genres and were nourished by traditions of theatricality and entertainment. And yet while Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni are icons of the European auteur canon and neorealism is a core unit of academic study, the vast and diverse output that made cinema a key popular form in Italy remains in many ways more unfamiliar. This volume aims to help correct this imbalance of attention by exploring films that may count in one way or another as popular entertainment. It interrogates the very meaning of the popular and hopes to give a sense of its complexity and specificity in Italian cinema.