italy from fascism to neo-realism

Bibliography
Armes, Roy (1985), French Cinema.
Bandy, Mary Lea (ed.) (1983), Rediscovering French Film.
Hayward, Susan (1993), French National Cinema.

and Vincendeau, Ginette (eds.) (1990), French Film, Texts and

Contexts.
Truffaut, Francois (1954), A Certain tendency of French cinema.
Williams, Alan (1992), Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking.

Italy from Fascism to Neo-Realism

morando morandini
cinema in the fascist period
The first sound film made in Italy was La canzone dellamore
(The love song, 1930) by Gennaro Righelli, taken from a
short story by Pirandello entitled, ironically enough, In
silenzio (In silence). Italian cinema in 1930 was in a
parlous state. Of the 1,750 films produced between 1919
and 1930, it would be difficult, even with hindsight, to
pick out one which achieved even minimal international
success. When pushed, cinema historians usually point to
a couple of silent films of 1929, by two of the most important directors of the following decade: Sole (Sun), Alessandro Blasettis first film; and Rotaie (Rails) by Mario
Camerini, which was released in a sound version in 1931.
Mussolinis Fascist movement had come to power in
October 1922 and by 1925 had established a totalitarian
state. In 1926 it intervened for the first time in the field of
cinema, taking over the Istituto Nazionale LUCEacronym
for LUnione Cinematografica Educativa, the National Institute of the Union of Cinematography and Education
formed in 1924. The regime thus created for itself a monopoly of cinematic information: LUCE produced documentaries and also newsreels, and projection of the latter
was made compulsory.
The first Italian sound films were produced at the Itala
and Cines studios in Rome, which had been purchased by
Stefano Pittaluga, following his acquisition in 1926 of the
Turinese company Fert. All the eight films produced in
1930 were the work of CinesPittaluga. Pittaluga was an
energetic and intelligent entrepreneur, surrounded by
peers who were often hasty, incompetent, and amateurish.
But he died suddenly in the spring of 1931, at the age of
44, leaving behind him a powerful circuit of interests: a
production company, acting studios, technical laboratories, a distribution organization, and a vast chain of
outlets all over Italy.
His empire was split into two parts: one for the distribution and exhibition of films, which went into state
ownership, forming the basis of ENIC; the other for production and the running of studios. The latter was put

into the hands of a banker, Ludovico Toeplitz, who in 1932

appointed the writer and essayist Emilio Cecchi as head
of production. In 1935 the Cines studio on Via Vejo in
Rome was gutted by a fire and had to be demolished. Cines
thus collapsed for the second time, although it was later
to be re-formed twice, in 1942 and 1949. With the exception of the official sanctioning of censorship in law in
1923, which was honed and perfected in a series of modifications up to 1929, the Istituto LUCE, and some protectionist measures, the active impact of the Fascist
regime on cinema was late in coming, although it perhaps
indirectly encouraged the centripetal pull of Rome on the
industry. In the first twenty years of silent cinema, the
film industry, or rather the film craft, had been spread
out between Turin, Milan, Rome, and Naples. Whilst the
early history of North American cinema is characterized
by the shift from New York to Los Angeles, from east to
west, in Italy cinema gravitated towards the centre of
political and bureaucratic power.
The first legislative support for the industry came from
Law 918 (18 June 1931), which assigned 10 per cent of boxoffice takings to aid all sectors of the film industry and,
in particular, to reward those with a proven ability to cater
for the tastes of the public. As in other fields, the Fascist
regime and the industry were in full agreement: profit
above all.
On a more cultural note, the eighteenth Venice Biennale exhibition of figurative arts began on 6 August 1932,
and included the worlds first film festival, officially designated as the First International Exhibition of Cinematic
Art. The idea was born in Venice, but already in 1934 its
organization had been taken over by the authorities in
Rome.
In 1933 it became obligatory to show one Italian film for
every three foreign films. The year 1934 saw the creation of
the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia, headed by
Luigi Freddi, which was given the task of overseeing and
co-ordinating production activity. In 1935 the film school
Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia was set up under
the aegis of the Ministry of Popular Culture, with Luigi
353

Ancient Rome as a prescursor of Mussolinis Italy: Carmine Gallones Scipione lAfricano (1937)

Chiarini in control. It moved into its own premises in

January 1940. In April 1937 the Cinecitta
` studios were
opened, having inherited the equipment which had been
salvaged from the Cines fire of 1935.
Despite Mussolinis slogan, paraphrasing Lenin-For us
cinema is the strongest weaponthe real question to ask,
then, is why the Fascist regime took so long to arrive
at these interventionist measures? One can hazard two
complementary responses. On the one hand, active intervention followed the example of Nazi Germany, where
Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda Goebbels had not
hesitated to take control of cinema. On the other hand,
Fascist policy in cinema merely reflected the regimes
ideological inconsistency, its hasty compromises, and
chameleon-like pragmatism ably adapted to any and all
necessities. As in other sectors of cultural life, Fascist
influence was primarily negative, preventive, and repressive. Rather than forcing artists and intellectuals into prescribed political positions, Fascism merely worked to
divert their interest away from present-day reality, which
was to be the exclusive preserve of politicians. Hence, after
354

1930, there were only four films made about the Fascist
revolutionits origins in squads and their march on
Rome of October 1922, which was in actual fact more of
a stroll. These were: Camicia nera (Blackshirt, 1933) by
Gioacchino Forzano; Aurora sul mare (Dawn over the sea,
1935) by Giorgio C. Simonelli; Vecchia guardia (Old Guard,
1935) by Alessandro Blasetti; and Redenzione (Redemption,
1942) by Marcello Albani, adapted from a play by Roberto
Farinacci, the so-called ras di Cremona, a Fascist ultra
and one of Mussolinis henchmen.
Only the third of the four merits attention, because of
Blasettis generous and honest commitment to the ideology of the regime. The same good faith was apparent in
his other works: in Sole (1929) and in Terra madre (Mother
Earth, 1930)rare examples for the period of films set
against a realistic social, rural backdropand in the militaristic rhetoric of Aldebaran (1936) and the nationalist
and Francophobe sentiment of Ettore Fieramosca (1938).
Fascist propaganda is also evident in around thirty
other films (out of 722 produced between 1930 and 1943),
and these may be divided into four categories:

italy from fascism to neo-realism

1. Patriotic and/or military films: from documentary

footage of the First World War to Scarpe al sole (Shoes in
the sun, 1935); from Cavalleria (Cavalry, 1936) to Luciano
Serra pilota (1938) by Goffredo Alessandrini; from films
about aviation to films about the navy, including two war
filmsCommander Francesco De Robertiss semi-documentary Uomini sul fondo (Men in the deep, 1941) and
Roberto Rossellinis La nave bianca (The white ship, 1941).
2. Films about Italys African mission: from Roberto San
Marzanos documentary about Ethiopia, A.O. dal Giuba allo
Scioa, to a series of films in the wake of its conquest:
Squadrone bianco (White squadron, 1936) by Augusto
Genina, Il grande appello (The great appeal, 1936) by
Camerini, Sentinelle di bronzo (Bronze sentries, 1937) by
Romolo Marcellini, Abuna Messias (1939) by Alessandrini.
3. Costume dramas: history rewritten as a parade of precursors of the Duce. The major exemplars are Scipione
lAfricano (Scipio the African, 1937) by Carmine Gallone
and Condottieri (Soldiers of fortune) by Luis Trenker, who
came from near the Austrian border and had previous
experience as an actor in German cinema. Both were
genuine epics, made in the same year with the backing of
ENIC and a total budget of 20 million lire.
4. Anti-Bolshevik and anti-Soviet propaganda films: these
include two films on the Spanish Civil War, both from
1939: Lassedio dellAlcazar (The siege of the Alcazar) by
Genina, made with powerful choral elements, and the less
polished Carmen tra i rossi (Carmen and the Reds) by Edgar
Neville, who went on to direct Sancta Maria (1941). Other
films in this category are Luomo della croce (Man of the
cross, 1943) by Rossellini, Odessa in fiamme (Odessa in
flames, 1942) by Gallone, and Odissea di sangue (Blood
odyssey, 1942) by Righelli. Alessandrinis turgid romantic
diptych Noi vivi / Addio, Kira (We the living / Farewell, Kira,
1942), adapted from novels by Ayn Rand, is a somewhat
different case, since it is Stalinism rather than Communism itself which is attacked.
The official cinema of the twenty-year period of Fascist
rule aspired to be virile, heroic, revolutionary, and celebratory, but it only represented 5 per cent of national
production: superstructure rather than base. The base
was bourgeois, or better petty bourgeois, and Janus-faced,
divided between family and Empire, between sentimentalism and grandiloquence, between dopolavoro
(the after-work workers clubs set up by the regime)
and the military. At the highest level of achievement,
these two faces are reflected by the two most important
directors of the 1930s: Mario Camerini and Alessandro
Blasetti.
Camerinis films appear modest, toned down, marked
by a careful attention to detail, a graceful sense of irony,
and a European mastery of the techniques of expression.
His are shrewd descriptions of the middle and lower

middle classes which reveal the customs and habits of the

time, to the extent that some have maintained that, had
it not been for his collaboration with scriptwriter Cesare
Zavattini, De Sicas post-war work would have been but a
pale imitation of Camerini.
Two of his comediesGli uomini, che mascalzoni . . . (Men,
what scoundrels! . . ., 1932) and Il signor Max (1937), both
starring De Sicastand up to comparison with Lubitsch or
the Renoir of La Re`gle du jeu (1939), as has been argued
recently by Manuel Puig. And at least two of his other
filmsDaro` un milione (Ill give a million, 1935), with
screenplay by Cesare Zavattini, and Una romantica avventura
(A romantic adventure, 1940)are works of international
class. For Gli uomini, che mascalzoni . . ., Camerini took
the camera out of the studio and on to the streets of
Milan, amongst the stands and the people of the commercial fair, thus anticipating a tendency of post-war neorealism. Location scenes of street life are also a feature
of the first film by Raffaello Matarazzo, the little-known
Treno popolare (Peoples train, 1933), which was only rediscovered at the end of the 1970s by a younger generation
of critics.
Blasettis career was less consistently successful and
more eclectic than Camerinis. His best films were 1860
(1934), a moving, crisp, and anti-rhetorical reconstruction
of the early days of Garibaldis Thousand, and Unavventura di Salvator Rosa (An adventure for Salvator Rosa,
1940), a witty and perspicacious portrait of the seventeenth-century poet and painter. He also made films of a
heroic and grandiloquent kind, most apparent in grand
spectacles such as La corona di ferro (The iron crown, 1941)
and, after the war, Fabiola (1949); and he displayed a more
low-key and realistic vein in La tavola dei poveri (The table
of the poor, 1932) and, most successfully, in Quattro passi
tra le nuvole (A stroll up in the clouds, 1942), written by
Zavattini.
Despite the individual talent of figures like Blasetti and
Camerini, the driving force behind Italian cinema
remained the escapist film, or as Luchino Visconti had it
in a 1943 polemic, a cinema of corpses. Its style was much
closer than is commonly acknowledged to Hollywood
products of the same period: it split into distinct genres;
it relied on the cult of stars; and it cultivated, with only
occasional success, the image of the director as a professional and author-figure. In this sector, the most significant player by far was Emilio Cecchis Cines, which
was the only production company to resemble a Hollywood-style studio, but which is also noteworthy for its
attempt to reconcile experimental innovation with the
demands of business, individual creativity with mass production. The principal genres were comedy, melodrama,
and costume-cum-historical drama. The comedies were for
the most part sentimental, and after 1937 increasingly
frivolous and vacuous, based on a rejection of reality in
355

Tot

(18981967)
Antonio de Curtis Gagliardi Griffo Focas Comneno di
Bisanzio, alias Tot, first trod the boards in his native
Naples in 1917, achieved early success in the 1920s, and
became the leader of a review company in 1933. And
many of his film performances derive directly from his
days in the theatre. Between 1937 and 1967, he made
ninety-seven films in all, excluding the eight unfinished
films for television, which were broadcast posthumously
in 1968. Picking out the best is no easy task: in the words
of critic Goffredo Fofi (1977), only an anthology from all
his films of the best sketches and scenes would do him
justice. Indeed, Tot a colori (Tot in colour, 1952) is already such an anthology.
In the rich panorama of Italian cinema, Tot is a
unique phenomenon. In the opinion of script-writer and
critic Ennio Flaiano, he did not exist in real life, nor was
he a type or a character from the commedia dellarte tradition, even if he mastered its techniques and gags: he only
ever played and represented himself. A clown of genius,
who drew on both ancient and modern models, and was
at times obscene and cruel, at others an intensely humane puppet, an eccentric mannequin, a comic
chameleon, an astonishing and inimitable mime, Tots
comedy verges on the metaphysical, according to Flaiano. He does not play characters, but represents imponderables, from the improbable to the grotesque.
His most important influences were undoubtedly
Neapolitan, from the tradition of Pulcinella to his great
predecessor Scarpetta. In due course, he also played his
part in neo-realismin De Sica and Zavattinis Loro di
Napoli (The gold of Naples, 1954), in Eduardo De Filippos Napoli milionaria (Millionaire Naples, 1950), and
in Steno and Monicellis Tot cerca casa (Tot goes househunting, 1949), and Guardie e ladri (Guards and robbers,
1951). Tot e Carolina, made in 1953, was blocked by the
censor and released with cuts only in 1955. He worked
with Rossellini in Dov la libert? (Where is liberty?,
1952), and, shortly before his death, was cast by Pasolini
in two short films and in Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and
Sparrows, 1966). Tot played a great range of characters,
at times of high literary and theatrical originfrom
Pirandello, Campanile, Moravia, Martoglio, Marotta,
Eduardo De Filippo, and even Machiavellibut always
remained essentially himself, showing up the absurdity
of his presence in each of the imaginary worlds he
frequented. At the 1970 conference which marked his
rediscovery and re-evaluation by a new generation, the
director Mario Monicelli confessed that it had been a
mistake to play up the humane side of Tot, and thereby
to clip his creative wings. The true power and genius of
his comedy lay in its dark, inhuman aspect.
Tots brand of comedy did not travel well. A number
of his films were released, dubbed (and losing much of
the verbal humour), in Spain and Latin America, but in

356

The Italian comic Tot in Steno and Monicellis Guardie e

ladri (1951)

the English-speaking world he remains unknown, except

for his occasional appearances in art films and in Monicellis I soliti ignoti (US: Big Deal on Madonna Street). Towards the end of his career, his eyesight began to fail, but
once on the set he continued to perform with unfailing
professionalism, a sombre, dapper figure, precise in his
movements and unpredictable only in the strange intensity he gave to each and every role.
MORANDO MORANDINI
Bibliography
Fofi, Goffredo (1977), Tot: luomo e la maschera.

italy from fascism to neo-realism

favour of anaemic, dissipated characters who live in an

absurd excess of luxury and who talk to each other via
the shining white telephones which gave their name to
the genre. The direction was minimal, and always secondary to the set and its furnishings, and to the taste for
window-shopping.
The era of the white telephones coincided with, and
was a direct effect of, the steady increase in the volume of
production. In 1937, when Mussolini ordered that one
hundred films a year should be the target, only thirty-two
feature-length films were made. The following year, when
the government suddenly passed a law setting limits on
the importing of American films, provoking the pull-out
of the Big FourMGM, Warners, Fox, and Paramount
production leapt to 60 titles, and then to 87 in 1940 and
120 in 1942.
This growth fed the power of the star actors: on top of
the group of early 1930s starsVittorio De Sica, Assia
Noris, Elsa Merlini, Maria Denis, Isa Mirandacame new
names such as Amedeo Nazzari and Alida Valli, Osvaldo
Valenti and Luisa Ferida, Fosco Giachetti, Clara Calamai,
Doris Duranti, and so on.
Around 1940, two new trends in film-making emerged.
The first, represented by film-makers such as Mario
Soldati, Alberto Lattuada, Renato Castellani, and Luigi
Chiarini, returned to the literature of the nineteenth
century or to the art prose of contemporary writing. The
second attempted to create deep links between film and
reality, looking to documentary forms and to the Soviet
cinema as with De Robertiss Uomini sul fondo, or to the
French school as with La peccatrice (The sinner, 1940)
and Fari nella nebbia (Lights in the fog, 1942), by Gianni
Franciolini.
Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, whom recent critics have
tended to set alongside Camerini and Blasetti in importance, belongs to the first trend, but has many affinities
with the second also. He was less cultured than Lattuada
and Soldati, less refined than Castellani, but he was able
to construct stronger narrative lines than others. Gelosia
(Jealousy, 1942), Le sorelle Materassi (The Materassi sisters,
1943), and Il cappello del prete (The priests hat, 1943) are
exemplary adaptations of literary texts. Sissignora (Yes,
Maam, 1941) is a minor but unusual work which combines a sentimental story-line with realist elements and a
certain formalist inspiration.
In the war years, reality inevitably loomed large, and
the screenwriters, directors, technicians, and actors who
were to be the protagonists of the new realist cinema after
1945 were already working. Three films made during the
war revealed the hidden face of an Italy in deep crisis
Quattro passi tra le nuvole, by Blasetti (1942); I bambini ci
guardano (The children are watching us, 1942), by De Sica;
and above all Ossessione (1943) by Visconti. All three were
already works of opposition.

liberation and neo-realism

With Rome Open City (Roma citta
` aperta, 1945), shot by Rossellini between 1944 and 1945 in haphazard conditions
with economic and practical difficulties of all kinds, Italy
returned to the forefront of world cinema. Shortly thereafter, the catch-all term neo-realism became current. It
had already been used in the 1930s with reference to
literature and the figurative arts. According to Luchino
Visconti, the first person to apply it to cinema was the
editor Mario Serandrei in 1943, referring to Ossessione.
Rather than a schoolthe French labelled it lecole italienne de la Liberationor an artistic current, neo-realism
was part of a general turn towards realism in cinema of
the time, providing a new way of looking at and representing the reality of war-torn Italy and of the Resistance. It was distinguished not only by its head-on
confrontation of the collective problems of the moment,
but also by the impulse to suggest a positive solution to
those problems and to marry the causes of individuals
and of society as people wanted it to be.
At the heart of the implicit ideology of neo-realism
lies the positive and generous, if a little generic, desire
for a profound renewal of people and society. Hence
some have suggested that its base values are humanistic,
and that it is therefore inaccurate to talk of a Marxist
or revolutionary hegemony behind the films. After all,
the renewal of people and things is far from socialist
transformation, and fraternity is not the same as class
solidarity. Only a few films provided even a latently
Marxist vision of reality: Il sole sorge ancora (The sun still
rises) by Aldo Vergano, and La terra trema (The earth
shakes) by Visconti, both made in 1948. The former,
produced by the ANPINational Association of Italian
Partisans, used both propaganda and melodrama to
elucidate the class structure of Italy (represented by a
Lombard village) under German occupation. The latter
was Viscontis free adaptation of Giovanni Vergas
famous novel I Malavoglia (1881), which narrates the
struggles of a family of Sicilian fishermen to free itself
from poverty and exploitation.
Most of the directors, screen-writers, and technicians
involved in neo-realism had years of experience behind
them. De Sicas debt to Camerini is evident, as is Rossellinis to the technical expertise of De Robertis. Another
crucial influence was the broadening of cultural horizons
carried out by Umberto Barbaro and Luigi Chiarini at the
Centro Sperimentale and in the journals Bianco e nero
(founded in 1937) and Cinema (1936), whose contributors
included future writers and directors such as Carlo
Lizzani, Giuseppe De Santis, Gianni Puccini, and Antonio
Pietrangeli. Another group centred on the restless cultural
atmosphere of Milan, and included Alberto Lattuada,
Luigi Comencini, and Dino Risi. Also foreign influences
were far from negligible: French realism (above all Jean
357

sound cinema

Renoir), Soviet cinema, and American narrative (Elio Vittorinis 1941 anthology Americana contributed much to
the myth of America current in the unofficial culture of
the last years of Fascism).
The most significant figure, and the most original director, of the neo-realist movement was Roberto Rossellini,
and his greatest films were Paisa
` (1946) and Germany Year
Zero (Germania anno zero, 1947). He was also the first to
distance himself from it to follow a more private, psychological path, more wedded to ethics than to society. Apart
from Rossellinis war trilogy, a list of the major works of
neo-realism would include at least three films by De Sica
Sciuscia
` (Shoeshine, 1946), Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette,
1948), and Umberto D (1952)and two by Visconti (La terra
trema, 1948, and Bellissima, 1951). Rather than setting up a
hierarchy of values, one can point to the various forms
which neo-realism adopted: Giuseppe De Santiss social
polemic with the rhythm of social melodrama in Bitter
Rice (Riso amaro, 1949); Luigi Zampas moralistic polemic
in Vivere in pace (To live in peace, 1946); Renato Castellanis
comic proletarian sketches Sotto il sole di Roma (Beneath
the Roman sun, 1948) and Due soldi di speranza (Two
pennyworth of hope, 1951); Pietro Germis novelesque
naturalism, aping the style of American cinema in In
nome della legge (In the name of the law, 1949) and Il
cammino della speranza (The way of hope, 1950); the
populist fable of De Sica and Zavattinis Miracolo a Milano
(1950); and the literary eclecticism of Alberto Lattuada
in Il bandito (The bandit, 1946) and Senza pieta
` (Without
pity, 1948).
Setting an end point to the development of neo-realist
cinema has become a critical convention, as has the use
of the term itself. For the writer and critic Franco Fortini,
writing in 1953, however, the term is misconceived, and a
better term would be neo-populism, since neo-realism
expressed a vision of reality founded on the primacy of
the popular, with its corollaries of regionalism and
dialect and its components of Christian and revolutionary
socialism, naturalism, positivistic realism and humanitarianism.
As far as an end point is concerned, if the parabola
begins in 1945 with Rome Open City, it can be said to end
with Umberto D in 1952. It very soon went into irreversible
crisis for both external and internal reasons. Amongst the
internal causes was an inadequate cultural hinterland.
Four currents of thought had infiltrated post-war Italian
intellectual life: Marxism, existentialism, sociology, and
psychoanalysis. In neo-realism, there was some hint of the
first and hardly any trace of the other three. Even its
most original theorist, Cesare Zavattini, in proposing the
rejection of character in favour of the true person,
immersion in everyday life, and rejection of fantasy, led
directors to forget history, and to lose the ability to capture
on film the dialectical relations between the various com358

19301960

ponents of reality. The aim to depict everyday life became

an excuse for sketchiness, reality turned picturesque,
fresh immediacy slipped into local colour (usually Roman
or southern), and social commitment was eclipsed by folklore and the powerful but sparse Italian traditions of
dialect theatre. Even in the best films, there is an air of
the short story or fragment rather than the fully formed
novel. In 1953, both the surviving neo-realist films, from
ideas by Zavattini, were episode films: Siamo donne (We
the women) and Amore in citta
` (Love in the city). With Il
tetto (The roof , 1955), by De Sica and Zavattini, we have
entered the Arcadia of the movement.
Meanwhile, with Francesco giullare di Dio (Francis, Gods
jester, 1950) and Europa 51 (1951), Rossellini was setting
out on the road which would lead him to Viaggio in Italia
(Journey to Italy, 1954), whereas Viscontis Senso (1954,
released in Britain as The Wanton Countess) saw him following his vocation for melodrama. Indeed, in retrospect,
it may seem untenable to group together under a single
denomination directors as diverse as Rossellini, Visconti,
De Sica, and others, but it is precisely their marked diversity in the years following neo-realism that proves there
was some strong common cause, a cement which held
them together for a time. And that cement was, in the last
analysis, a product of the political, civic, and existential
upheaval of the war and the passage from dictatorship
to democracy, and its hopes, projects, and illusions of
change.
There were also external causes for the failure of neorealism. In 1948 the electoral victory of the Christian
Democrats provoked the final collapse of the fragile antiFascist front which had been one of the ideological sources
of the movement. The deep division of the country into
two hostile camps was reinforced by the nascent Cold
War hostility between the two superpowers. The 1950s
brought the transformation of Italy from an agrarian
into an industrial nation but also the accentuation of
the economic and social imbalance between north and
south.
The Christian Democrats centrist politics used democratic legitimacy as an alibi rather than as a stimulus to
civic responsibility. On the cultural level, the 1950s were
marked by immobilism, clericalism, and by divisive conflict between two fronts. As a result neo-realist cinema
was perceived as an art and culture of opposition, more
than it ever was in reality, and, as such, it was targeted by
the ruling class. The battle for and against it took on clear
political and ideological features, rather than cultural
and artistic; and in turn, this made it more difficult for
its practitioners to make constructive revisions and
developments in their style. Witness, for example, the
reluctance of the left to take on board Rossellinis later
style, and its distorted overestimation of a number of
progressive directors.

italy from fascism to neo-realism

the easy years

By many criteria, the 1950s were Gli anni facilithe easy
years, as the ironic title of Zampas 1953 film had itfor
Italian cinema. In 1955, the first year of television in Italy,
box-office sales reached a peak of 819 million, never equalled before or since. The 25 films made in 1945 had already
become 62 in 1946, 104 in 1950 and, with a high point of
201 in 1954, and a relative slump to 133 in 1955, reached
167 in 1959. With the avalanche of American films, often
up to four or five years old, which flooded the market at
the end of the war, home products took only a fraction
of box-office takings, but nevertheless, the fraction grew
from 13 per cent in the immediate post-war years to 34
per cent at the end of the 1950s, reaching 36 per cent in
1954 and edging towards a peak of 50 per cent at the end
of the decade.
The era of the sex-pot divasGina Lollobrigida, Silvana
Mangano, Sophia Loren, Silvana Pampaninitook off. The
genre of popular melodrama also scored notable successes
through the work of its most important director, Raffaello
MatarazzoCatene (Chains, 1949), Tormento (1951), I figli di
nessuno (Nobodys children, 1951), and also Giuseppe Verdi
(1953)and its most cherished actors, the couple Amedeo

Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson. In comedy, there was the

`the most inspired
extraordinary phenomenon of Toto
clown of the second half of the centurywhose Toto` a colori
of 1955 was the first Italian film in Ferraniacolor, and the
emergence of Alberto Sordi as a genuine archetype of the
vices and virtues of the contemporary Italian. In the field
of the epic costume drama, or supercolossus, Hollywood
was challenged at its own game by Camerinis Ulysses
(Ulisse, 1954) with Kirk Douglas, King Vidors War and Peace
(1956), Lattuadas La tempesta (The tempest, 1958), and
Henry Kosters La Maja desnuda (The Naked Maja, 1958).
These films paved the way for the creation of a new genre,
the historical-mythological film, initiated with Le fatiche di
Ercole (The labours of Hercules, 1958) by Pietro Francisci.
There was also sustained success for the so-called neorealismo rosa (rose-tinted neo-realism), in the shape of
Luigi Comencinis Bread, Love and Dreams (Pane, amore e
fantasia, 1953) and Dino Risis Poveri ma belli (Poor but
beautiful, 1956) among others.
During the 1950s, Cinecitta
` became known as the
Hollywood on the Tiber, but the euphoria proved to be
fragile and ephemeral. The industry would have to pay
the price of a chaotic and excessive production system

Anna Magnani with the little

Tina Apicella in Luchino
Viscontis Bellissima (1951)

359

Vittorio De Sica
(19011974)

Best known outside Italy as the director of Bicycle Thieves

(Ladri di biciclette, 1948), Vittorio De Sica had a long and
varied career. Between 1940 and his death in 1973 he
directed some thirty films, but he acted in no fewer
than 150 between his emergence as a child actor in the
early 1910s and his final appearance in Ettore Scolas
Ceravamo tanto amati (We all loved each other so much),
released in 1975. The key to understanding him lies in
this long career as a professional actor, and in his constant display of amiability and narcissism. In the 1930s,
after his success in Camerinis Gli uomini, che mascalzoni ...
(Men, what scoundrels . . ., 1932), he became the top star
of Italian sentimental comedy cinema, a charmeur as
both actor and singer. And he built not only his image as
an actor on his sympathetic charm, but also his work as a
director, in which, as Franco Pecori (1980) observes, the
language of narcissism takes over and narrates its own
history.
His career as a director divides into four periods: (1) a
preparatory phase (19404), with six films, including an
important precursor of neo-realism, I bambini ci guardano
(The children are watching us, 1943), which also marked
the beginning of his collaboration with the writer Cesare
Zavattini. (2) A creative phase (194652), with four major
films: Sciusci, (Shoeshine, 1946), Bicycle Thieves, Miracolo
a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1950), and Umberto D (1952).
The successes of this period can be put down to the balance between De Sicas careful direction, the use of nonprofessional actors, and the theoretical input of
Zavattini, who championed a poetics of everyday life and
of the normal man. (3) A period of compromise (195365),
with eleven films of which the most critically successful
were Loro di Napoli (The gold of Naples, 1954) and Two
Women (La ciociara, 1960for which Sophia Loren won an

360

Oscar). (4) Decline (196674), with ten films. Of these only

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini,
1971), whose elegiac beauty won it the Oscar for the Best
Foreign Film, is at all memorable.
De Sicas collaboration with Zavattini stretched over
twenty-three of his thirty-one films, but it remains unclear who was the brain and who the heart behind their
work together. Any assessment of De Sica must acknowledge his undeniable expertise as an actor and as a
director of actors. Aside from this talent, he managed to
sustain in his films a natural, bourgeois elegance which
reined in his at times excessive performing instincts. He
also demonstrated an acute sensitivity which made him
an unknowing prophet of the human sciences, and,
finally, a certain degree of tenderness, which in later
years verged on a sense of melancholy and a fear of loneliness.
MORANDO MORANDINI
Select Filmography
As actor
Laffare Clemenceau (1918); Gli uomini, che mascalzoni . . .
(1932); Dar un milione (1935); Il signor Max (1937); Madame
de . . . (1953); Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love, and Dreams)
(1953); Il generale Della Rovere (1959); Ceravamo tanto amati
(1975)
As director
Teresa Venerd (1941); I bambini ci guardano (1943); Sciusci
(Shoeshine) (1946); Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves / The
Bicycle Thief) (1948); Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan)
(1950); Umberto D (1952); Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an
American Wife) (1953); Loro di Napoli (1954); Il tetto (1955); La
ciociara (Two Women) (1960); Boccaccio 70 (episode) (1961);
Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) (1963); Il
giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1971)
Bibliography
Pecori, Franco (1980), De Sica.

Vittorio De Sica directing Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette,

1948)

britain at the end of empire

and an imprudent and disorganized administration. A

chain of bankrupt production and distribution companies
was but one symptom of the problem.
On the high level of art cinema, the trio Visconti
FelliniAntonioni replaced the 1940s trio RosselliniDe
SicaVisconti. After La terra trema (1948), more a sort of
enchanting Marxist mystery play than the apotheosis of
neo-realism seen in it by many critics (in retrospect, Bellissima was probably his most neo-realist film), Visconti
moved on to Senso (1954), where his penchant for profaned
Romanticism and collapse came to the fore. Together with
The Leopard (Il gattopardo, 1962) and Ludwig (1972), Senso
parades more than elsewhere Viscontis qualities as a
master of sumptuous mise-en-sce`ne, who struggles to reconcile his taste for cultural decadence and his lay, progressive humanism with the scope of the novel and a
vocation for melodrama. Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi
fratelli, 1960), on the other hand, narrates the destiny of a
family when it emigrates from the deep south to the Milan
of the boom years and the film represents a return to neorealism and a sort of ideal continuation of La terra trema.
It was the national-popular (to use the phrase of Antonio
Gramsci) work which Visconti had set his sights on from
early in his career.
The two most significant auteurs to emerge in the 1950s
were Antonioni and Fellini. Michelangelo Antonioni had
from his first film, Cronaca di un amore (Chronicle of a
love affair, 1950), set himself apart from neo-realism
through his lucid and concentrated analysis of bourgeois
psychology. From then, with an obstinacy which at times
verged on monotony, he confronted the themes and
problems, or better the neuroses, of a neo-capitalist
society: couples, emotional crises, loneliness, difficulties
of communication, existential alienation. His films are

the blues of bourgeois crises, in which thinly veiled

autobiography serves as a record of the time. Their
rejection of traditional plot structures, and insistence
on the dead time, or stasis, of dramatic action, are
designed to restore full causal significance to events and
phenomena. His films of the period include Il grido (The
cry, 1957) and the trilogy made up of Lavventura (The
adventure, 1960), La notte (The night, 1961), and The
Eclipse (Leclisse, 1962).
If Antonioni seemed, by inspiration and by temperament, European, Federico Fellini seemed conversely
intensely provincial, caught between Rome and his native
Romagna. After Lo sceicco bianco (The white sheik, 1952)
and I vitelloni (The layabouts, 1953), whose grotesque and
at times acutely satirical ironyhelped by the writer Ennio
Flaianos screenplayremained rooted in a precise social
context, Fellini moved into an inner, visionary dreamworlda first-person cinemawith La strada (The road,
1954). From the spectacle of La strada it was then a small
step to the self-display which begins with La dolce vita (The
good life, 1960), a film which marks a watershed in the
history of Italian cinema.
Bibliography
Apra
`, Adriano, and Pistagnesi, Patrizia (eds.) (1979), The Fabulous
Thirties.
Bondanella, Peter (1990), Italian Cinema: from neorealism to the
present.
Brunetta, Gian Piero, Centanni di cinema italiano.
, Storia del cinema italiano, Vol I: 19051945.
, Storia del cinema italiano, Vol II: Dal 1945 agli anni ottanta.
Faldini, Franca, and Fofi, Goffredo (1979), Lavventurosa storia del
cinema italiano raccontato dai suoi protagonisti, 19351959.
Leprohon, Pierre (1972), The Italian Cinema.
Marcus, Millicent (1986), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism.

Britain at the End of Empire

antonia lant
The commercial exploitation of synchronized sound
cinema came about in Britain almost entirely with American technology. Warner Bros. Vitaphone wax discs, and
then Foxs Movietone sound-on-film process, spoke and
sang in Britain in the 1930s, with the German Tobis
Company jostling for some of the action. This was yet one
more sign of the American domination of the British film
industry by the 1920s, the outcome of several combined
advantages. America had the largest home audience of
any national film industry, so producers were able to cover
production costs at home, making practically all earnings
abroad into profits. American distributors thus had the

flexibility to undercut their competitors in foreign

markets; even the strongest non-American circuits were
unable to overcome the American business practices of
price undercutting, block booking, and blind bidding.
In 1927 between 80 and 90 per cent of feature films in
circulation in Britain were American.
The popularity of American films with audiences made
British exhibitors reluctant to book British-made films,
further disabling the home industry. The situation
became so dire that in November 1924, dubbed Black
November, film output ceased entirely. As a result the
Conservative government passed protectionist measures
361