Stephen Gundle

Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy

Italian society after World War II was profoundly affected by the culture of glamour that encouraged mass consumption. This culture drew heavily on images and desires created by the American film industry, and it would not have arisen in the absence of American glamour. Over time, however, Italian glamour acquired some important indigenous features, which were economically beneficial for Italy in boosting exports and tourism. Through most of the Cold War, the perceived glamour of Rome captured in the film La Dolce Vita made the city a cosmopolitan crossroads for the rich and famous. Nevertheless, in contrast to the United States, which was the avatar of glamour, Italy did not develop domestic glamour in the full sense of the term.

The 'civic religion' of the Resistance in post-war Italy

The problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key...

The death (and re‐birth) of the hero: Charisma and manufactured charisma in modern Italy

Summary In the twentieth century Italy has witnessed an unusual variety of charismatic political figures. Given the tradition of the Risorgimento and in particular the influence of Garibaldi, several of these donned the mantle of heroism. However, in modern conditions this heroism was largely a matter of showmanship. With the rise of mass communications, political leaders were compelled to reinvent the nature and forms of their appeal to the people and also to engage with the languages of popular entertainment. It is argued that cinema heralded a profound change in the nature of charisma and that television subsequently undermined it by rendering political leaders familiar and reducing the distance necessary for stage management.

Stars and Stardom in the Study of Italian Cinema

Before the 1980s, studying stars and stardom was not commonplace even within film studies, let alone Italian studies. The only discipline that had any record at all of seeking to grasp the mechanics of contemporary celebrity was sociology, which gave rise to a number of interesting works in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This fact reflected the organization of academic disciplines at that time. Modern languages, like English studies, were concerned mainly with literature. Film, in so far as it was treated at all in Italian studies curricula, was considered largely in terms of the works of recognized canonical directors. As a discipline with a very recent history in Britain (the first university department was established at Warwick in 1978), film studies was concerned to establish its high cultural credentials and did this by stressing sophisticated textual analysis of the masterpieces of world cinema. Questions concerning the film industry or cinema and society were largely neglected. [...]

Playing the dictator: re-enactments of Mussolini in film and television

This article explores the portrayal of Mussolini in film and television drama. It considers the contexts in which films and mini-series were made from the 1970s and the problems faced in bringing the Duce to the screen, mostly in dramas that stressed the final phase of his rule. Despite efforts to ensure authenticity in the reconstruction of locations, events and people, there was a notable emphasis on the private and personal dimensions of the dictators life, a sphere in which screenplays had to indulge in invention in keeping with the practices of all ‘biopics’. The resulting ‘screen Mussolini’ is more human and potentially more sympathetic than the Mussolini of historiography. In a situation in which the legacies of Fascism and anti-fascism are still debated, this media construction has been controversial. The article assesses, using textual analysis, the meanings of the different representational solutions deployed in the films and considers some of the issues involved in playing Mussolini.

Assassinations and murder in modern Italy

This book explores some well- known and some lesser-known assassinations and murders and analyzes them in their historical, political and cultural contexts.

Adriano Celentano and the origins of rock and roll in Italy

Abstract This article examines the way in which American rock and roll was translated into Italian culture. It argues that Italian versions of rock and roll were not just ‘watered down’ or ‘domesticated’ versions of the original. Rather, Italian rock emerged from a context that was different in musical, ethnic, political, linguistic and religious terms. By focussing on Adriano Celentano (the most prominent ‘Italian Elvis’ of the 1950s), it is shown that Italian rock singers evolved from mere imitation to cultural forms that were more related to the Italian environment. Musically, this meant a relationship with the domestic melodic tradition, jazz and American rock and roll rather than the blues. The rebellious attitude of early singers was a function of the hostility demonstrated towards them by political and religious authorities. Once this attitude was replaced by one of co-optation, opposition was replaced by modernizing integration. A figure like Celentano managed to be simultaneously defiant and conservative, pagan and religious, conformist and non-conformist. The resulting contradictions were concealed beneath a personal magnetism partly based on an established ‘cool’ style that appealed to the new categories thrown up by social and economic changes. Celentanos fame was confined to Italy not because he merely imitated American rock but because he developed an original synthesis that was specifically adapted to Italian tastes.

Visions of Prosperity: Consumerism and Popular Culture in Italy from the 1920s to the 1950s

It is widely recognized that important changes took place in the economy and in society in Italy in the 1950s. The post war republican constitution was broadly accepted. The country’s alignment with the West was settled, and the most pressing problems arising from the impact of war on infrastructures resolved, Italy began the conversion to consumerism that would finally consolidate its institutions and provide a common texture of aspirations and lifestyles to the country as a whole. Italy would continue in some respects to be an abnormal democracy (without alternation of parties in government) and a variety of political and social crises in the 1960s and 1970s would test the capabilities of the country’s leaders to the utmost. However, it is broadly accepted that the main steps towards stabilization on the basis of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism occurred in the 1950s. In that decade, television broadcasts started. Mass production began to get underway, domestic electrical appliances came within the reach of the middle classes and within the purview of poorer sectors of the population, and cities, especially in the North, experienced an unprecedented influx of people from the countryside and the South. The great collective passions that had sustained the Resistance and the clashes of the late 1940s began to give way to individual and familial strategies for material betterment.

How Berlusconi will be remembered: notoriety, collective memory and the mediatisation of posterity

This article explores the ways in which Silvio Berlusconi might figure in collective memory. It approaches this from a number of angles. First, consideration is given to the way political figures of the past have resonated culturally and the role of institutions including the mass media in this. Second, Berlusconis own efforts to situate himself in relation to a shared past are explored, with reference to the place of three nostalgic appeals that figured with varying intensity at different points in his career. Third, Berlusconian aesthetics are investigated to explore the relative roles of kitsch and glamour. It is shown that kitsch gained the upper hand and that this also manifested itself in the monarchical aspects that his personality cult took on. Finally, Berlusconi is considered as a possible subject for a biopic and a discussion is offered of the way his life and career might be presented in different variants of this genre. Overall, it is suggested that expectations that he will be damned by his...

Alida Valli in Hollywood: From Star of Fascist Cinema to ‘Selznick Siren’

In Journeys of Desire, a landmark multi-authored volume on the experiences of European actors in Hollywood, the Italian Alida Valli appears as something of an anomaly. The actress, who played opposite Gregory Peck in Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case and Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, seems not to belong entirely or easily to any of the categories elaborated by the volume’s editors, Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau, or their authors. She was neither an émigrée for political or economic reasons nor eager to undertake a more personal career progression that promised fame and success on a global scale. Unlike many European women, she was not cast consistently as the exotic temptress that was the conventional Hollywood stereotype, nor did she entirely embrace the more novel alternative of naturalistic candour that was associated with Ingrid Bergman. Furthermore, she did not generally, in her screen roles, play the generic foreigner, a common role in the pre-war years, or conform to the more precise national identification that marked many of the European actors who worked in Hollywood in the 1950s. In principle, her potential for success was great since she arrived in the United States, unusually for the post-war years, without any of her films having had a proper American release, and thus without the baggage that a little later would obstruct the integration of Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren and others. Yet, like many European imports she never became a major American star, despite good English, an aloof, cool beauty that had traditionally gone over well with middle class and adult audiences, and significant Hollywood-style ‘re-packaging’. Valli’s professional itinerary was in some respects quite typical: she established her stardom in the domestic cinema before catching the eye of a Hollywood producer (David O. Selznick), who placed her under contract and subjected her to an extensive