Caterina a modo suo (Super bestseller) (Italian Edition)

The multi-screen theater complexes, which show mostly American blockbusters, threaten the very existence of such intimate venues. The Western, predicated on the notion of the West as both a direction and a destination, has captivated writers and filmmakers as an expression of imperialist and pastoral yearnings. And the Western was inextricably linked to the quest for expansion in the United States and the policy of manifest destiny, with its narratives of justice and revenge. In the s, Italian directors such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci manipulated the classical version of the Western genre that showcased the pursuit of civilization as the driving force behind American frontier life, pushing societal mores onward into uncharted lands.

Filmed mostly in Spain as well as in various locations in central and southern Italy, the Italian version of the Western sought to critique American expansionism in the far West, and even farther West in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War in the s.

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Both Harmonica and Manuel are mostly, if not totally, silent. The Western genre, like American fast food, has influenced culture all over the world. In Focaccia Blues we are meant to ponder the possible permutations of heroes and villains in this duel between artisanal bread and mass-produced fare. The selection of a Spanish name recalls an earlier linguistic misnomer given to Italian immigrants in the United States. When 8 Manuel heads east from the United States to Italy, reversing the traditional path which immigrants took a century ago, he dislikes what he finds.

The bad guy leaves town empty handed, rejecting both the bread and the woman. And well he should know since the actor Nero inhabited that very same role almost fifty years earlier. In an interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times, Tarantino acknowledged the importance of spaghetti westerns on his oeuvre, including his most recent film: McGrath , 9 How do we define Focaccia Blues, with its combination of documentary and fiction?

As Elsaesser indicates, cinematic slowness, however represented, may be interpreted as an act of organized resistance in the same way that the Slow Food movement reacts against the velocity of food production and all its attendant problems. He asserts that slow cinema: Focaccia Blues differs from the mockumentary, which contains fictional content in a documentary form, and from the docudrama, which contains documentary content in a fictional form.

According to Lipkin et al. Indeed, Focaccia Blues consciously vacillates between authenticity documentary material and hyperbole fictional love story. Yet perhaps the most appropriate designation for Focaccia Blues is docufiction, a term coined by Rhodes and Springer , 5 , in that this film synthesizes fact and fiction through the dramatic tale that illustrates, in albeit exaggerated fashion, an actual event.

The distinct regionalism that informs this docufiction must be considered as well. As Ravazzoli , points out, the strengthening of regional film production occurs at the expense of a unified national Italian cinema. Such disparate, regionally accented production has positive as well as negative results. While this relatively new phenomenon undermines the commonality of meaning and image in the national cinema, 10 it allows local constituencies to create new meanings, images, and representations according to Ravazzoli. Whereas some critics may contend that the insular nature of regional production, which has increased 11 exponentially in recent years as Ravazzoli documents, may result in a provincial perspective, this hybrid film appears to challenge viewers with its creative vacillation between documentary and fiction.

It also affirms the power of small films such as Focaccia Blues, which was produced on a relatively slim budget approximately , Euros and had limited distribution it has yet to be shown in commercial theaters in the United States. Focaccia Blues illustrates how tradition, combined with novel ideas, prevails. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their careful reading and insightful comments. In the case of the pane di Altamura, the yeast, grain, sea salt and water must come from the region and certain types of wheat — Apulo, Archangelo, Duilio and Simeto — must be used.

Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe. Italian Cinema, American Film, ed. State University of New York Press, Spaces, Contexts, Experiences, ed. Troubadour Italian Studies, She notes that whereas Milan, Turin, Rome, and Naples were historically centers of the Italian film industry, the first decade or so of the twenty- first century has evidenced a marked increase in regional production since the advent of regional film commissions in Puglia, along with Sicily, are the regions that have shown the most growth.

New Approaches to Film and Place, ed. A Marriage Made at the documenta? Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. Accessed November 10, Accessed December 17, Defining Terms, Proposing Canons. Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. Between Europe and the Mediterranean Islands.

Media, Representations, Identities, ed. If only I could say that out loud. Actually there is no fate worse than being gay and Italian. Filmed in English by a Francophone director, the film was presented at a range of international film festivals and, in view of its auteur cinema and low-budget-character, an international success. The quote identifies the central criteria of identity, namely national origin and sexual orientation that are brought together in this queer, culture- clash comedy.

Our contribution will analyze the film in the context of Italo-Canadian cinema, transatlantic queer cinema and trans-national comedy. I dream of your kiss and drawn in your eyes. As in this song, the Italian characters of the movie are nostalgic about the rural Italy of their youth, so that Italy congeals with a nostalgic place of memory. In this sense, the opening sequence shows a visual correspondence through a theatrical staging of the Italian-American imaginary: The viewers see vividly gesticulating people, embracing lovers, an immense church presented at an unusual, oblique, very close angle, and then a grocery store called Dante.

We are then led by the small and rotund, ordinarily dressed parents Gino Paul Sorvino and Maria Barberini Ginette Reno , who emigrated in their youth from rural Southern Italy to Canada, during the front credits, all the way to their Italian-speaking allotment garden, where the neighbors, planting and reaping their vegetables, watch and greet them. Although the beginning of the film fixes the action clearly in the microcosmic everyday life of Montreal through the images, the mostly mute performance of the Barberini, accenting their theatrical facial expressions and body movements, already makes it clear that Little Italy is a place where Italy is more of a gesture.

It works as the hegemonical justification that becomes apparent in the cultural pattern of mammismo: Even if the protagonists are from rural Southern Italy, they identify themselves in the New World just as Italians. For the parents, the Canadian outside world remains the epitome of foreignness, presenting the cause for many an educational prohibition in the upbringing of their son and daughter.

This rigidity is evoked visually via the reduced spatial staging of the Barberini house, especially the over- decorated and kitsch dining room located in a stage-like niche of the ground floor. And it is also addressed as Gaudreault, time and time again, refers back to arrested flashes of consciousness in which the actors look straight into the camera, in the direction of the audience, thus interrupting the diegesis.

The head of the family Gino, a Forza Italia supporter, looks into the camera and clearly elaborates on how much he is longing for a space devoid of differences, Canada being a blank page, while we see behind him his wife ironing the laundry. Reducing the cinematic space to a stage-like environment, Gaudreault shows that, for them, Montreal is an indeterminate place: Then to make the matter even worse, there is two Canada. The real one Ontario, and the fake one Quebec. The so far unsuccessful screenplay writer Angelo Luc Kirby , the central character of the film, lives in a relationship with the policeman Nino Paventi Peter Miller , a physically impressive school-friend whom he met again after long years by chance.

He finally moved in with him, but that was a long time before he could tell his family about his true sexual identity. But this outing, initiated by the increasingly passionate gay Angelo, leads to a separation with Nino leaving Angelo behind for the benefit of the francophone and blond Pina Lunetti Sophie Lorain , the woman with whom he will found a family. She had to marry and ended up committing suicide in frustration. But she had wanted to become a movie star and loved to dance and teach Angelo the Mambo Following his self-evaluation, he has always been like her, an outsider within the Italian milieu St.

Pius X High School. Frustrated by the life in Little Italy and his law studies, which he pursued for some time in order to satisfy his parents, he works in the call-center of an airline and wants to move to the omosessuale village of Montreal and to become an Anglophone screenplay writer. Accentuating the corporal dimension through its melody, the song thus symbolizes a hybrid identity in a transcultural and sexual sense, caricaturing the petty-bourgeois conventions which are far removed from the changing world of the metropolis around them.

Gaudreault chose not only a well-established milieu as a starting point but also creates a film which refers to the 2 Franco- Canadian success genre per se, comedy, by using the already successful Anglophone play by Steve Gallucio, bearing the same title as his movie, as the basis for the latter. Gallucio wrote the screenplay for the movie together with the director by making some changes, e. Furthermore, Gaudreault uses a strong and prominent musical dramaturgy. Initially planning to engage Italophone actors, Gaudreault consequently employs mostly non-Italophone actors from an Anglophone background, as in the case of Angelo, played by the young Kirby from the National Theatre School of Canada, whose repertoire includes Shakespeare and mostly modern and Canadian works Daniel Brooks, Michael Mackenzie Judith Thompson.

NewFest in May and June of , respectively. It was promoted afterwards at a lot of other international film festivals and nominated for a range of Canadian awards e. On a commercial level, the film proved to be a success, especially in Canada and the U. Due to this, Gaudreault and Gallucio adopted their concept of Italo-Candian comedy.

This is all the more remarkable since Canadian cinema can look back on a rather long history of migration movies showing not only Francophone productions, but also many other language and film traditions. The Italo-Canadian cinema continues to hold a special status insofar as it has its own movie scene and movie festivals like the annual Toronto Italian Film Festival or the Italian- 6 Contemporary Film Festival taking place in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto and Vaughan. Especially Anglo-Canadian film makers with an Italian background, like Carlo Liconti, Vincenzo Natali, Jerry Ciccoritti and Derek Diorio are quite successful, but — apart from Liconti with films such as Vita da cane , La Famiglia Buonanotte and Cuori in campo , TV — the instances they pick out their family background as the topic are few and far between Diorio: The Kiss of Debt, ; Ciccoritti: Lives of the Saints, , TV.

The cinema and TV Quebecois has a strong proponent in filmmaker and actor Ricardo Trogi, who presented both TV mini-series Smash, and movies , of different format, which in part take up Italian issues and time and time again present Italophone actors. But Quebec, moreover, possesses a distinct Italian-speaking TV culture.

The TV program Teledomenica, 8 dating as far back as on the air until , was a popular Italophone TV program, followed by others. That means that this choice of genre modulates the ending of Mambo Italiano in a typical manner. The conflict of the plot, sparked by the generation differences through different gender concepts, is harmonized in the end: The melodramatic climax, where Angelo, after being left by his boyfriend Nino, distances himself from his parents by means of a powerful and violent discourse against the petty-bourgeois life in Little Italy, is finally followed by a happy ending.

This occasion not only incorporates all the pride of Lina, as an Italian mother, but it is also the only event which can cause a change in the fixed artificial world of Little Italy, where Lina and Maria are mourning the death of her husband and sister, respectively, at the cemetery as if they had died recently, not decades ago. The topos of the hetero-normative holy family is thus parodied further in the following sequences, but the image is never subverted.

The reconciliation scene of the Barberini family While the Sicilian-born Maria is shocked about this abuse of this holy place, their 12 father joins the children and what follows turns into a declamatorily emotional reconciliation.

In this line, the tone of resolution and harmony dominate the further sequences of the film: In the end, when Angelo gets together with his new boyfriend, the gay-hotline activist Peter Tim Post , the film restages the scene from the very beginning, when Maria and Gino walk with their shopping bags through the allotment garden of Little Italy. As usual, all the neighbors are watching them But while the ending accentuates difference by image and music, the conflictual potentials of the plot are realigned for the benefit of the generic aesthetic of comedy.

The scenes of her with ever-changing therapists run through the film — the climax has her mimicking a therapy session with her brother in order to help him after the split up with Nino, both drinking from a bottle of red wine. They become not only a running gag, but they are, as the call- center and gay hotline-scenes with Angelo, also a structuring aspect of the film. Again, this element is a doubly effective parody: As her brother is unsuccessful in doing so in his character, Anna is clearly the most exaggerated character of Mambo Italiano, additionally representing the typical urban neurotic, originally created by Woody Allen and afterwards mainstreamed by various TV soaps Sex and the City, —, or Desperate Housewives, — She is characterized as a heterosexual woman, whose ideal man would be someone like Nino: She is shaped by the constant panic of engaging in emotional and corporal contact with other people, their psychotherapists, but also with her surroundings, illustrated in the scene where she discovers her brother with Nino naked in his bed, thus discovering his homosexuality and only calming down after taking some valium pills and running out of the house immediately thereafter At the same time, Anna is also a highly artificial figure: In this film, the diva-like neurotic female main characters Pepa Carmen Maura or Leo Marisa Paredes are assisted by Marisa and Rosa, played by Rossy de Palma respectively, two minor characters with a flashy eye and nose.

The main characters are both beautiful, but they have been left by their lovers and for a great part of the films lead rather unhappy lives, abusively taking sleeping pills and drinking excessively. A striking case in point is the scene in which both mothers give a dinner party in the Barberini house in order to find a wife for their sons. The living room, with its differently structured and flowery-patterned wallpaper and sofas held in green-brown-beige hues and the generally over-stuffed furnishing, sets the frame for the unification of all characters in one room.

The space appears like a theatrical stage where the guests sit in one row, all excited and tense, only getting up when they speak. Rounded doorframes allow a glimpse into adjacent rooms that seem like back stages and show similarly ornamental wallpaper and sofa covers, which do not fit together. The names Nino, Gino, Lina, Pina , which only differ in one or two letters, add to the comic confusion. The meeting of the Barberini and Paventi families is the climax of the film. It reveals the betrayal of Nino by the words of Pina, the only character who speaks some phrases in French, and shows Nino at the same time as a mammone, who hesitates to tell Angelo the truth and fulfills the expectations of his mother in the end.

The presentation and statements of what is fictitious as well as the non-communication of the real family conditions are also staged in this climatic scene by means of a baroque aesthetics of exaggeration, a strongly artificial ambience in the form of a hybrid aesthetic. Theatricality and Television Besides the appealing sound-track, there is another element keeping the parodistic episodes of the life of the Barberinis together.

In other words, Gaudreault clearly uses inter-medial procedures by referring to highly artificial and theatrical settings. In a scene shot before the house of the Barberini, Maria is crying melodramatically without stopping and Gino advises his son to go away without looking back, before he makes the same operatic gesture as his wife. The scene is underlined by the popular Neapolitan folk song O sole mio, the audio track describing a perfect sunny day with fresh air after a storm, contrasting its melody 14 and lyrics with the melodramatic gestures of the stage-like scene.

As a viewer, one would expect a scandal — at the very latest when the priest asks whether anyone has any objections to the marriage, and we see Angelo waiting in his car, then getting out of it.

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But instead, it is in fact the late-comer Rosetta Pierette Robitaille , a neighbor, who receives a nearly opera-like appearance that interrupts the marriage ceremony: It soon becomes apparent that Angelo has not dressed up for the marriage but rather for a visit to the gay hotline where he picks up Peter for a spontaneous rendezvous. In this regard, his relation to his already named Aunt Yolanda, who was full of joie de vivre, serves as the oldest point of identification.

Decades ago, she wanted to leave the rigid family model behind to become a movie star. They create and cite, for example the fashion of retro-style, which has become popular in the American media industry of the s and s in order to satisfy specific market niches. The composition of the film with its episodic structure, popular music dramaturgy and artificial settings, contrasting image aesthetic, hard cuts and warm colors are reminiscent of the TV of the s and 80s but also of American soaps and sitcoms see Bignell ; Creeber At the macro-structure, Gaudreault stages his family melodrama in the style of a well-made contemporary US-American soap and parodies it at the same time, on the level of aesthetic as well as film plot: Just like in Bad Men ff.

The boy spends his afternoons in front of the TV set and writes down the dialogs 6: The show focuses on love and power intrigues in the South of the U. Gaudreault not only parodies the simplicity of the dialogues from a soap sequel, he also creates a complex intermedial aesthetic: Nino and Pina are sitcom-like beautiful, but flat characters, mainly worried about a charming physical and stylish appearance.

Whereas Nino is characterized as a mainstream, compatibly ideal son, policeman and future husband hiding his identity of a bisexual , especially Pina is clearly staged in scenes, which are reminiscent of urban American sitcoms, for example when she is preparing herself for the wedding and sitting at the dressing table in a rose bra and a white bathrobe.

Her fingers are entwined in her bouffant and blond curls, while we see beside and behind her four friends with teased hairs and identical dresses whose color is that of the wall-paper. The camera catches her from the perspective of the mirror, in which Pina is looking, and turns around the scenery. More than that, TV is the domain that stimulates his career wish, while at the same time placing his difference on a new level: In contrast to all other characters, Angelo is more and more identified with the queer scene, pushing Nino towards his outing, which he finally conducts by himself after a few visits to the omosessuale village.

Furthermore, it adds a new milieu and development of the action to the film: Angelo goes to the gay-hotline to get in touch with other people in crisis. Due to his nervous personality, he fails as a hotline volunteer, but he ends up falling in love with his supervisor Peter. With him, the technophile, artistic loner manages to finally overcome his melancholia and to get on TV, after all, as a successful author by writing a comedy about what he knows best: Conclusion For the Barberini family, the meeting turns out to be a horror scenario: After the announced break up with his boyfriend, Angelo heavily insults his parents and their petty-bourgeois attitude in the form of an inappropriate and long tirade, breaking with his usual behavior as well as the aesthetic of the film.

He accuses Maria and Gino of leading a ghetto existence in Little Italy, where they reproduce their limited South-Italian existence What is told here in a stage-like monologue scene could be the basis for a melodrama, and Angelo himself is well aware of this, for at the end of his tirade he stages himself as a polemic commentator of this scene, right after he is slapped in the face by his sister as a rebuttal of his misdemeanor against his parents: The end to the quintessential Italian melodrama.

I hope you all enjoy your lives in your respective cocoons. In doing so, he characterizes his own identity once again in contrast to his family and the Little Italy, linked in his vision to the prototypical and artificial melodramatic Italian taste. Unlike his Aunt Yolanda, he is able to fulfill his childhood dream to become a screenwriter for TV.

But his soap looks much more like boulevard theatre than a modern quality TV series. Even though he is characterized by his behavior and facial expressions during the major part of the film as a failing figure, Angelo can find his luck in the end. The production started with a similar budget as Mambo Italiano, but became a big box office hit. Elvis italiano , Steve Sanguedolce: Sweet Blood , Adriano Valentini: Il piano or Riccardo Trogi: Il tango della neve 8 The archive is later cleared as a documentary by Tana Ricordati di noi, For more on the story of queering sexuality in Canada see Waugh Like posing opera singers, they come forth out of the confessional, but the church is empty.

Thanks a lot you for giving me back my famiglia. At least Angelo could have had the decency of finding himself a nice Italian boy! High to Low Avg. Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Festa di famiglia Italian Edition Nov 03, Available for immediate download. Lezione di tango Oct 09, Palazzo Sogliano Italian Edition Sep 17, Only 3 left in stock - order soon. Only 6 left in stock - order soon. Vaniglia e cioccolato Italian Edition Oct 17, Only 8 left in stock - order soon. Vicolo della Duchesca I miti. Usually ships within 1 to 3 months.

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Available for download now. This linguistic policy aimed to democratize Italian speech and create a Fascist culture that would not accept the feudal feminine forms of address. Between and and after , Italian regional dialects were featured and even encour- aged in films. The ItaUan practice of dubbing foreign films, rather than distributing them with subtitles began in shortly after the introduction of sound technology to film. Italian intellectuals such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese cultivated an image of America as a source of anti-Fascist culture.

There was a demographic cam- paign of tax benefits for large families. Mussolini's Duce personality cult mimicked cultural commonplaces from ancient Rome. In order to instill a sense of national identity and prestige in Italian popular culture, children and teenagers were enlisted in youth groups such as the Balilla, the figli e figlie della lupa sons and daughters of the she wolf , Avanguardisti for teenage males , and Giovani Italiane young Italian girls. Such groups are depicted ironically in films such as FeUini's Amarcord Spectator sports had been immensely important in the ideology of Mussolini's regime.

With a boxing heavyweight world champion, Primo Camera in , and two World Cup soccer victories in and , Mussolini trumpeted the return of the ancient virtue of the Italian people and commissioned stadiums and public sports culture. The equation of athletics with nationalism made its way to films including depictions of fascist university games in Mario Bonnard's lo sua padre , — a film adaptation of an Alba De Cespedes novel. There was also interest in the record setting and technological culture. Minister Italo Balbo made a record setting flight by piloting a squadron to Chicago in Tazio Nuvolari had a remarkable career as a race car driver in the increasingly popular formula 1 and Mille Miglia automobile rally races around the Italian peninsula.

Bicycle rac- ing was also immensely popular, rivaling soccer in popularity, with the exploits of champions such as Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali firing popular imagination in races such as the Giro d'ltalia Tour of Italy. Sporting events were transmitted by the Italian state radio instituting a popular element in national culture. Italy's first Nobel Prize for literature after nationalist poet Giosue Carudcci was won by Sardinian novelist Grazia Deledda in Yet, a literary figure who continued to yield huge influence during the Fascist period remained Gabriele D'Annunzio D'Annunzio was strongly opposed to a bour- geois state, preferring the old aristocracy of birth and means, the only class that, in his view, had any cultural validity and understood his poetic need to defend his visions of beauty and genius.

D'Annunzio had also been able to identify himself with patriotism and militarism, a mantle he had appropriated after the death of poet Giosue Carducci. Equally important for his controversial views of the world and of man in this particularly critical time of Italian life is Luigi Pirandello , a true innovator in world theatrical history. Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for literature in His strong philosophical pessimism, by which human unhappiness is not so much a consequence of the social system, but of human nature, brought him to accept Fascism and dictatorship as the least possible evil in order to control the evil of human nature.

Pirandello saw man as unable to break out of his tragic soli- tude or to communicate with others or even with himself. The only way of escape is either madness or a painful form of resignation. Pirandello's theatrical works like Six Characters in Search of an Author used traditional schemes, charac- ters, and situations, but within such schemes, the action always transgresses and criticizes the traditional system of thought and behavior.

Another important writer was the Trieste-born author Italo Svevo who dabbled in psychoanalysis and took English lessons from a young James Joyce, then living in the Adriatic port city of Trieste. Svevo's masterpiece The Confessions ofZeno underlines the frailty of the individual. For many of these authors the Fascist period was a period of reflection and preparation for intellectual production after WWII. Other artists, like still Ufe painter Giorgio Morandi , who also enjoyed increased recognition after WWII, kept to their craft choosing subject matter which could not provoke the regime.

During the Fascist period, it remained possible for authors to write and publish even if they were not open supporters of the regime, as long as their works did not contain explicit political attacks. In fact censorship on literary works was not as severe as on the press, for example, for the regime actively discouraged not only publication of articles critical of the govern- ment but even crime beat reporting, which could besmirch the propaganda of the new "Fascist era.

The outbreak of WWI in interrupted this vital period of Italian filmmaking and initiated a critical period of stasis so that in the s Italy lost much of its prewar interna- tional market share. American film studios began to arrive in Italy to make their films on loca- tion and to take advantage of Italian expertise and craftsmanship.

MGM filmed the first version of Ben Hur in the Cines studios in Rome and other Hollywood film studios also opened production and distribution offices in Italy. Unlike Russian dictator Joseph Stalin or German dictator Adolf Hitler who had moved to support filmmaking, Mussolini was initially interested in newsreels for the propagation of his personality cult.

It was also the year of the lowest production 14 features since the early days of the cinema. The themes and style of the contemporary Italian national cinema truly begin in this period and the regime's attitudes toward the cinema changed accordingly. By the mid- s, Mussolini was identified with a placard proclaiming that the cinema was V arma piii forte the strongest weapon , although it has not been established that Mussolini ever actu- ally made the statement.

Mussolini's son Vittorio took an active interest in pro- ducing and screenwriting as well as editing the journal Cinema. The regime also added the Centra Sperimentale di Cinematografia CSC film school in Rome in order to further develop the national film industry. Joining him in lecturing were Umberto Barbaro , Alessandro Blasetti , and Francesco Pasinetti In the same year, Cinecitta Cinemacity , one of the world's largest film studios, was inaugurated by Mussolini in Rome for the development of a national film industry to bring the culture of Rome to the world.

The Italian professional cinema of the late s became a training ground for postwar Italian film directors. In only 32 films were produced in Italy and Hollywood studios enjoyed nearly three-fourths of the Italian market, compared with only 13 per- cent for Italian productions. With trade barriers against Hollywood films, by , the number of Italian films produced increased to 1 17 with Italian production accounting for over 50 percent of the domestic market. But the regime's demands did not equal those of the Nazi government on the German film industry or Soviet demands on Russian filmmakers.

On the whole, the regime encouraged Italian directors to make films that depicted Italian life in a positive light. However intellectuals including Luigi Chiarini, Umberto Barbaro, and Francesco Pasinetti were able to continue their discussions of film theory in journals like Bianco e nero. Film directors who did not wish to blatantly praise the regime could make films that were politically "neutral" or that had elements that indirectiy appealed to the regime's political agenda such as Pietro Micca , a film directed by Aldo Vergano and written by Sergio Amidei about the Piedmontese defense against a French invasion in the early s in which a humble miner blows himself up in order to deliver Turin.

Alessandro Blasetti One avenue by which directors could avoid explicitly criticizing Fascism was the historical or pseudo-historical spectacular film, a genre with a long tradition in Italy, going back to Cabiria and The Last Days of Pompeii. Probably the best rep- resentatives of the s historical dramas trumpeting the heroic and nationalis- tic values dear to Fascist culture ministers are the early films of Alessandro Blasetti. Like many Italian directors Blasetti started his career as a critic and jour- nalist.

Blasetti was influenced by the reaction against the Idealist philosophy of Benedetto Croce, which criticized technical elements in artistic expression. Once Blasetti became a director, he borrowed from the for- malists, particularly in terms of camera angles and shots that depicted a strong relationship between characters and their natural surroundings. Sole was hailed as a rebirth for Italian cinema. The film focused on seemingly nonprofessional actors and popular themes, techniques that would become trademarks of the famed neorealist period in the s.

Blasetti's career during the Fascist period is remarkable for its depth and variety. After his silent debut with Sole, Blasetti made Nerone a collection of the work of comedian Ettore Petrolini , which included the Bravo, grazie! Well done, thank you! Blasetti also excelled in costume dramas like the Renaissance era drama Ettore Fieraniosca depicting the dis- fida di Barletta the skirmish between Italian and French knights at Barletta , based on a novel by Massimo D'Azeglio. In filmmakers were invited by the Fascist regime to commemorate the decennale, the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's accession to power with the March on Rome.

Blasetti's contribution to the commemorative celebration of the regime is a film that offers some stylistic similarities to the neorealist films of the postwar period for the use of nonprofessional actors, on location shooting, and a focus on lower-class characters see figure 2. In the counter- parts of Manzoni's Renzo and Lucia are the Sicilian couple Carmelo and Gesuzza, who postpone their wedding when the German speaking mercenary troops of the Bourbon regime invade their Sicilian village.

Padre Costanzo from plays a role similar to Manzoni's heroic priest Fra' Cristoforo by providing moral leader- ship and a plan for the young man to escape. The Betrothed, Renzo the inexperienced country lad enters Milan, a city where the laws and customs he is accustomed to no longer apply. In Carmelo makes a similar voyage into northern Italy, first to Civitavecchia and later to Genoa.

Rather than the bread riots of Manzoni's novel, Carmelo is confused by the myriad voices of Italy's different political factions. He meets a pro-republican Mazzinan, a papist Giobertian, a Tuscan who favors regional autonomy, ecstatically singing Piedmontese troops, and republicans who argue about the primacy of Italian patriots such as CamiUo Cavour or Massimo D'Azeglio. Each of these members of Garibaldi's contingent in the film represents a faction of the future Italy: Catholics, republicans, monarchists, and above all the different regions of Italy identified by accent and mannerism.

Garibaldi as men of providence whose charisma could unify the diverse forces behind a common cause. The film focuses on a small town split between Fascist and anti-Fascist factions culminating in the death of Mario, a twelve-year-old boy at the hands of anti-Fascists, an event which Blasetti presents as a part of the build up to the Fascist March on Rome in Like the commonplace of the defense of children provides the ration- ale for action, although depictions of the near civil war level of violence of the period in Blasetti's film is limited to a few scenes of street fighting and forced- feeding of cod liver oil.

Propaganda ministers, such as Alessandro Pavolini, did not openly object to the creation of a parallel between the Fascist March on Rome and Garibaldi's impresa dei mille in P However Old Guard was initially received coolly by Fascist officials during a period as the regime was more inter- ested in depicting Fascism's imperial aspirations than its revolutionary origins.

In fact the film was released because Mussolini apparently enjoyed the film immensely. The fact that Old guard received a lukewarm government reception is indicative of some of the changes and contradictions undergone by Fascism and the party since the rad- ical revolutionary period of portrayed in the film. The case of Old Guard gives an idea of the line to be treaded by directors dur- ing the Fascist years, even by those making pro-Fascist films such as Blasetti.

Direct portrayals of Fascism were actually somewhat rare in 1 s Italian cinema. In Forzano's film an amnesiac blacksmith is brought back to his senses when reminded of catch-phrases from the March on Rome. In this film, an Italian communist deserter in WWI changes his politics and sacrifices himself for the Fascist cause just before the March on Rome. The small number of dramas directly portraying Fascism indicates that filmmakers and producers prudently preferred to dress political themes in histor- ical garb.

Indirect portrayals of the regime blurred the manner in which the Fascists attained power and helped to avoid the threat of censorship. Although many directors worked in the genre, the director most identified with this type of film is Mario Camerini However it was in the romantic and sentimental comedies that Camerini made his mark.

His first films as director. Jolly is the tragic story of a clown's love affair with a plot much like Fellini's La strada In Camerini wrote a brief article that recommended using inexperi- enced actors because of their tendency to follow direction more closely than professional actors. Camerini also reveals an admiration for the style of Soviet formalists specifically mentioning Vsevolod Pudovkin's Film Technique.

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Thus Camerini had direct contact with the Hollywood style and cultural conventions centered on the sentimental treat- ment of a good deed rewarded with a happy ending. The husband assumes the identity of the governor and the natural imbalance caused by the governor's abuse of power is overturned for a happy ending. Mussolini wanted to prohibit the release of the film, but after the intervention of culture minister Alessandro Pavolini and severe cuts, the film was released in a minute version.

De Sica developed the Camerini romantic comedy model with his career-long collaborator, screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, another figure of pivotal importance in postwar Italian cinema, whose career began with Camerini. The benign depictions of social tensions resolved in the Hollywood tradition of the happy ending in light comedies like It Signor Max and Doctor Beware could be seen as indication of the anni del con- senso period. In Doctor Beware, three love interests vie for the attention of an irre- sponsible pediatrician played by De Sica.

Anna Magnani plays Loretta, a fast talking and fast living show girl. Adriana Benetti, who would also star in Blasetti's Four Steps in the Clouds is a poor orphan girl who eventually wins the doctor's heart and Irasem Dilian is the spoiled daughter of a rich mattress manufacturer. The film has undertones of real social commentary. There is a dire depiction of Teresa working under the lustful eye of a butcher to the vapid frivolity of the rich girl aptly named Lilli Passalacqua Lilly PasstheWater , or the manner in which Teresa is spied upon by one of her fellow orphans, or the reliance as a universal cure all by the pediatricians at the orphanage on cod liver oil, a supplement with political overtones from its use to publicly humiliate Mussolini's opponents dur- ing Fascism's revolutionary period.

Films like Doctor Beware were important for the later development of the commedia alVitaliana comedy Italian style of the s and '60s which would rekindle the technical ability shown by De Sica to pro- vide quick and efficient characterizations that supplied often devastatingly ironic social commentary in a comic setting. Precursors of Neorealism Some films of the s had a production style and thematic content that presaged many pre-neorealist themes of the s, especially those deriving from the natu- ralistic or verismo currents in Italian literature.

One of the most important inno- vations of the journals Bianco e Nero and Cinema was that they both called for a more realistic film style in articles theoretical enough to avoid censorship. In short, the Cinema group wanted to rejuvenate Italian cin- ema by modeling it after Verga's prose. In , Leo Longanesi, a fervent Fascist journalist who reportedly coined the expression "Mussolini is always right," wrote about the ideal film style of taking the camera into the streets to observe reality, a statement similar to those expressed by Cesare Zavattini, the later theoretician of the neorealist style of the s.

By the early s, the idea of neorealism as a style of cinema was gaining a strong foothold. Umberto Barbaro published an article entitled "Neorealismo" in the review Film in Such films did not accept distinctions between documentary and fictional film narratives. Visconti was born into the Milanese aris- tocracy in The Visconti name stands alongside other great ruling families in Italian history such as Delia Scala and the Medici. Luchino enthusiastically devel- oped his cultural and artistic interest in theater and opera.

Before long, Visconti was attracted to film and traveled to France to assist Jean Renoir on Toni , a film about an Italian immigrant in France whose unhappy marriage and involve- ment in a violent and tragic love triangle has been seen as a precursor of the Italian neorealist style for its spare photographic imagery, multilinguistic cast, and grip- ping storyline about the passions of humble people.

Obsession is a stark vision of life in the Po Valley region of northern Italy with close attention to environmental details and an unflattering treatment of daily life in Italy contrary to the regime's social self-image, which removed the film from circulation. The film evidences the early contrast between melodrama and the fatalism that woidd become a part of the Italian art cinema decades later.

These films faced potential censorship due to plots based on themes per- ceived as an affront to the regime's image of the family based upon female sub- servience and male virility extending from the Duce to the masses. Yet such rebellious or antisocietal roles for females were not unusual in the Fascist-era cin- ema. In both these films the heroines come from a foreign national and political culture, Russian Bolshevism, and their role was to present the evils of the alternate totalitarian political system.

One of actress Clara Calamai's films before Visconti's Obsession was Boccaccio directed by Marcello Albani in which Calamai assumes male dress in order to impersonate her uncle, the fourteenth century writer Giovanni Boccaccio, because she is jealous of the female conquests of her cousin, Berto. This early reference to Boccaccio gives an indication of the continuing importance of female roles in the Italian cinema, a tradition from the days of the diva-like Francesco Bertini, which would continue after the war.

In Hollywood musicals of the s, the kicking rockette choruses mimicked the lever actions of factory machine and fused female sexual energy with the machine imagery. Besides chorus lines in this Fordist con- text, the standard for a s female physical display in the cinema was Claudette Colbert's hitchhiking stocking readjustment scene in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night 1 , mimicked in the Italian cinema by Assia Noris in Camerini's I'll Give a Million Overall the s and early s were an incredibly vibrant period for the Italian cinema, which like French cinema imder Nazi Vichy rule, enjoyed increased production due to autarkic policies that kept Hollywood films out of theaters.

The strength of Italian production in comedies, biopics, and even historical epics evidence continuity in the Italian cinema and the development of a cadre of professionals who would take the lessons learned during the s and early s into the postwar period. Of course production decreased due to the interruption of the war, whose end in meant the beginning of the next step in the realist movement: Mussolini saw the Rome-Berlin Axis as a chance for Italy to achieve Great Power status, a desire only partially satisfied by Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia in and his exuberant rhetoric claiming that the Empire had finally returned to the "seven hUls of Rome" after 20 centuries of history.

But Hitler's early string of successes in Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and France convinced MussoHni to enter this war on what he mistakenly judged to be the winning side in part to order to avoid the limited territorial concessions of the pace mutilata mutilated peace as defined by D'Annunzio peace treaty following WWI.

The tide of the war began to turn against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan by the fall of with Allied victories on the North African front and the Russian counteroffensive. On July 10, , Allied armies landed in Sicily reportedly aided by informants connected to imprisoned Sicilian mafia bosses from New York. Ciano was always a bit at odds with the Utopian, anti-bourgeois attitudes, or memories, of his maximalist father-in-law. The tension between the aristocratic status quo and Fascist iconoclasts was never fully resolved.

The anti- aristocratic attitudes resurfaced in the last days of Fascism when Ciano, who had apparently voiced criticism of the alliance with Germany, was executed for his dis- loyalty after his vote in the Fascist Grand Council allowing inquiry into Mussolini's actions following the Allied invasion of southern Italy in On the pretext of a meeting, Italian king Victor Emmanuel III reportedly had Mussolini arrested and taken to prison reportedly in an ambulance! Victor Emmanuel then appointed WWI hero and conqueror of Abyssinia, General Badoglio , as head of an interim government before fleeing to Puglia, a region in southeastern Italy not under German or Anglo-American miHtary con- trol.

Between July 25, , and September 8, , the Italian peninsula reeled in political instability. General Badoglio secretly negotiated an armistice with Anglo- American forces. When news of negotiations for an armistice between the Italian monarchy and the Allies was radio broadcast by Badoglio on September 8, neither Anglo-American forces nor the Italian Army which had received ambiguous instructions from the king's generals were able to prevent German forces from gaining military control over much of the peninsula.

On September 12, Mussolini was rescued by German paratroopers from the prison-fortress at Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi region. Thus from until , Italy was effectively divided in half. The Anglo-Americans controlled much of the south. Following instructions from Moscow, Togliatti had announced the svolta di Salerno the Salerno about face , which instructed Communist Party members and sympathizers to cooperate with monarchists and other anti-Fascist forces.

Partisan resistance groups under the general heading of the Committee of National Liberation CLN enHsted the participation of former Italian soldiers, interested in avoiding the Republic of Salo draft. The success of the underground Resistance added significantly to the prestige of the Italian Communist Party, which had provided important members of the Resistance leadership.

In March of , the CLN mobilized general strikes in the north calling for an end to the war. Catholic forces joined in the Resistance as the Vatican began to position itself for a postwar world to defer embarrassment regarding the perceived inaction of Pope Pius XII against Nazi-Fascist policies. By the end of the war there were popular uprisings in Milan, Domodossola, Turin, and Genoa. Allied liberators not only had to expel the Nazi German troops, but also disarm the victorious Resistance iighters and control their own often undisciplined multinational forces.

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By April , the war entered its final stages in Europe. Mussolini tried to escape incognito into Switzerland but was captured, killed near Dongo, and brought back to Milan and hung by his feet with his faith- ful mistress Clara Petacci and others at Piazzale Loreto, the site of an earlier Fascist atrocity. The existence of a near state of civil war during between monarchists in southeastern Italy, partisan groups fighting Fascist sympathizer draftees of the Republic of Salo which included important postwar figures such as dramatist Dario Fo and German regular troops proved that there had been an indigenous reaction against Fascism.

The myth of the Resistance allowed Italians to attenuate the level of war guilt felt in Germany, for example, for the industrial scale of the atrocities committed against Jews and other ethnic groups in the Holocaust. These include infighting between Red Communist and White Catholic factions in the Resistance itself, which resulted in atrocities including the incidents depicted in Renzo Martinelli's film Porzus Another often overlooked aspect of the period was the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousand of Italians from the coast of Istria in contemporary Slovenia and Croatia.

After the fall of Mussolini's Fascist regime and its shortlived heir the Republic of Salo, there followed a period of civil strife, political reprisals and summary executions with numbers of victims approaching the controversial figure of 20, In May of , King Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in favor of his son Humbert, a move insufficient to quell the memory of the Savoy monarchy's policies during Fascist accession and rule. The process of establishing a post-Fascist order was not entirely smooth and gave rise to the term camaleontismo turncoatism to describe the opportunism of ex- Fascists to identify with the new political order.

There was also a certain cynicism in the electorate exemplified by the short-term rise of the Fronte del Uomo Qualunque The Whatever Man Front led by writer Guglielmo Giannini The Cultural and Literary Roots of Neorealism Although the term neorealism was coined in the early s, the postwar moment of neorealism has deep roots in Italian culture. Manzoni was in turn influenced by eighteenth and nineteenth- cen- tury currents in realism such as the work of the English novelists Daniel Defoe or Henry Fielding , who like later French authors, such as Stendhal , portrayed middle, and lower-class characters in stories that reflected the social and economic conditions of their time.

Sicilian author Giovanni Verga developed verismo, from vera true , similar to natu- ralism but without naturalism's scientific language. Verga emphasized the strong primitive impulses and passions of Sicilian peasants in their natural environment in a linguistic style that pretends that the author is absent and reality is portrayed objectively. Many Italian authors in the s read American literature as a form of protest against the Fascist dictatorship.

The Italians admired the spare, nonrhetorical style of the American authors and their frank treatment of all subject matter, regardless of how common, grim, or violent. Partly influenced by these American writers, Italian writers such as Pavese and Vittorini refused to follow government direc- tives asking for propaganda writings that would convey a rosy or exalted view of life under Fascism. The neorealist school of literature is not as well defined as its counterpart in film but among its writers figure the abovementioned Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini, Alessandro Varaldo author of one of the first Italian detective novels II settebello , Vasco Pratolini, Renata Vigano, Ignazio Silone, Italo Calvino, and Carlo Levi.

Neorealist prose developed as the succes- sor of verismo and was characterized by a low-key opposition to Fascism, a con- cern for the problems of industrial workers and peasants and lower class as opposed to aristocratic heroes. Neorealism rejected the rhetorical flourished of authors such as D'Annunzio and described the settings and events of day-to-day life in frank terms, often reproducing the popular speech of the protagonists. Several of the neorealist literary works achieved international fame. Silone wrote two anti-Fascist novels that enjoyed great success also in the United States: These novels described the poverty and ignorance that afflicted southern Italy in an objective manner that contrasted with the style of overt anti-Fascist propaganda or self-indulging moralistic rhetoric.

These novels suc- ceed in "letting the facts speak for themselves" in the tradition of verismo. That attitude includes a strong desire to uncover the truth about the widespread suffering in Italy, and to identify with the plight of the victims. Neorealism also criticizes the view of society as a mere collection of indi- viduals who condone indifference to others' suffering.

According to Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter for Vittorio De Sica and a chief theoretician of neoreal- ism, many social problems persist because of a lack of awareness of the plight of others. Neorealism wants to help overcome this barrier by showing how others live, suffer, and hope. The journal Cinema, in October , carried this statement by Italy's nineteenth- century literary scholar Francesco De Sanctis, "It is said that the ugly is not material for art and that art represents the beautiful. De Sanctis's words were echoed later on by the director Alberto Lattuada in what may be called the neorealist man- ifesto: Then let us show our rags to the world.

Then let us contemplate our disasters. So we owe them to the Mafia? Then let us pay all our debts with a fierce love of honesty, and the world will be moved to participate in this great combat with truth. Another statement by Zavattini is revealing: Neorealist directors hoped that, by identify- ing with victims of suffering and injustice, they could instill in their viewers a pos- itive response, a movement toward reform.

That they were able to seek such a response without turning their films into propagandistic documentaries is to the credit of neorealism. A major element of the "newness" of the new "realism", was the reaction to the wartime political situation. Never before had a realist movement in film or litera- ture been so attached to the contemporary political situation as to actually encourage reform. The greatness of neorealism lies in the fact that it managed a detailed portrayal of the contemporary Italian sociopolitical situation.

In this spirit of renewal and experimentation, the practical reality of the Italian cinema in the immediate postwar period was that many stylistic similarities among the WORLD WAR II 45 neorealist films were determined by the lack of funds. Part of the vibrancy of the neorealist films may be explained by the fact that often the directors produced their own films on very limited budgets. Directors used cost saving measures that actually have been recognized as a style of filmmaking with the use of on-location shooting in authentic settings, nonprofessional actors, an emphasis on popular speech, a rejection of elaborate or contrived plots, frequent employment of improvisation, and a reliance on post-synchronous sound, a technique that would actually characterize much of postwar Italian production.

Some of the neorealis- tic techniques were developed out of necessity due to a lack of resources like func- tioning studios or even a steady supply of electricity. For example, Rossellini had to use on-location shooting for Open City because the Cinecitta Studios in Rome were unusable. The making of these films has become a subject in recent Italian cinema such as Carlo Lizzani's Celluloide a dramatization of the making of Open City or Maurizio Ponzi's dramatization of the wartime Italian film industry, A luci spente By and large the "rough" neorealist style was a well-planned reflection of both a serious social consciousness that wanted to tell the truth about an "Italy in rags", an aesthetic ideal that turned "ugliness" into art.

This combination produced films of great power and beauty. The neorealist film movement rushed into Italy on the heels of the departing Nazi troops. The sense of relief coming from the realization that Mussolini, the Fascists, and the Nazis had been defeated was matched only by a conviction that the story of widespread suffering needed to be filmed immediately. Roberto Rossellini and Open City War films from the Fascist period may be divided into several categories.

The third current was the documentary drama featuring the Italian armed forces such as Uomini sul fondo and Alfa Trau directed by Francesco De Robertis, who also released a war dramas started during the war, Uomini e cieli after Roberto Rossellini has been called the "father of neorealism". In fact Rossellini's first features were all Fascist-era war films: Open City has enough thematic and stylistic elements in common with Man of the Cross for Open City to be considered its remake.

Thus by the time Rossellini made Open City in , he was at least on his fifth war film. Rossellini's film rises above political infighting with a theme of universal brotherhood in a film that effectively depicts all views of the wartime struggle. Rossellini left Rome for the Abruzzian countryside and Tagliacozzo, to prepare for this film and be closer to the Allies and perhaps to sort out his personal situation given his track record making Fascist-era war films. In September , German troops occupied Rome and would remain imtil Anglo-American troops liberated the city in June