Paolo Noto

‘Che credeva, che fossi Cenerentola!’: Changes of Clothes, Guest Appearances, and Other Diva Performances in 1950s Cinema

Abstract Italian female stars of the 1950s are often subject to the gaze of male characters as they dress or undress. In this article, I analyse this cliché and others, such as dances, partial stripteases, and guest appearances, as textual topoi, in order to define how visual attractions attained a narrative function consistent with the fragmentary character of that cinema. The frequent visual linking of feminine beauty and consumer goods also helps to re-frame, historiographically, the issue of stardom in the early 1950s, and to identify that period as a complex one in which the female body was no longer visualized as an element able to link the cinematic representation to a supposed state of nature, but not yet displayed as a completely commodified object.

Solo un militare italiano: realismo e modelli di genere nel combat film italiano degli anni Cinquanta

The essay focuses on a cycle of combat films produced in Italy in the 1950s, dedicated to the Second World War and directed by filmmakers such as Duilio Coletti and Francesco De Robertis. The relationships between this genre films and the contemporaneous realist culture, usually overlooked by later historians, are redefined in the light of articles and reviews published in film journals and popular magazines at the time, and according to the interpretation of neorealism recently provided by Karl Schoonover as an aesthetic catalyst of a transnational “politics of pity”. This brings to the analysis of the gender roles represented in these films, with a particular attention to the representation of an imperiled yet heroic masculinity.