La Fabbrica dei Sogni: Italian Cinematography, Collective Memory and National Identity

Abstract

Italian cinematography is not a culturally and politically neutral means of artistic communication. A web of historical, political and sociocultural instances, as well as the technical features characterizing cinematography itself, configured the production of national visual narratives and their fruition in the Italian movie theaters as the two generative poles of a constantly reiterated ritualistic process. This form of social drama aims at a strategic construction of a collective Italian historical memory. Italian films are very much a means of cultural production. Their structural ownership by the state is organic to the hegemonic reification of a politically driven feeling of Italian national identity.

Notes

The notion of collective memory has been broadly employed and discussed by many authoritative theorists [see, e.g., Halbwachs 1992; Khun 1988; Nora 1978], who often contributed to explore the structural links existing between its construction/reification in Italy and the visual narratives expressed by the film medium [see, e.g., O'Leary 2007]. I will employ in this article, for the sake of simplicity, the working definition of collective memory elaborated by Pierre Nora. According to Nora, collective memory is any conscious or unconscious memory, or ensemble of memories, regarding experiences that have been lived and/or mythologized by any given contemporary social group considering its past as an integral part of its own cultural identity [Nora 1978: 398]. The narratives mythologized by the Fascist regime through its propagandistic machine aimed at the naturalization among Italian persons of its own ideological categories, which became part of the Italians' collective memory [Barthes 1972: 128].

A process of collective memory-making is defined here as one allowing the individuals' experiences to become historically meaningful for the entire social groups to which they belong as social identity markers.

A perfect example of this is the LUCE Institute newsreels about Mussolini's Battle for Grain in 1925 [Ben-Ghiat, 2001: 71].

The popular slogan “La cinematografia è l'arma più forte” was pronounced for the first time in 1932 by Benito Mussolini during a public speech on the occasion of the Venice Film Festival's first inauguration. Interestingly, this sentence has been successively transformed into a true motto, being diffused by the Fascist propagandistic machine via a broad set of noncinematographic mass media (radio, newspapers, graffiti on public buildings, etc. …) [Zagarrio 2007: 200–201]. In the fledgling Soviet Union V. I. Lenin had told his Commissar of Education, A. V. Lunacharsky, exactly the same thing.

The integral 14-min. last speech of the recently departed Italian filmmaker Mario Monicelli can be found, in Italian, on the RAI2 TV Network official website: http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-f86dc5b7-a7dc-42b2-8a3a-c37a0570cfc3.html?p=1 (accessed May 30, 2011).

See the official website of the CineCittà Studios S.p.a. at http://www.cinecittastudios.it/ (accessed May 27, 2011).

Here again my main source was the CineCittà Studios S.p.a. official website, which can be found at http://www.cinecittastudios.it/ (accessed May 30, 2011).

See the data published on http://guida69.interfree.it/oscar.htm (accessed May 30, 2011).

Source: Documentatione Statistica per lo Spettacolo 1936–2010 (Statistical Documentation for the Show Business 1936–2010), published on line by the ISTAT (Italian National Statistical Institute) at http://www.istat.it (accessed May 27, 2011).

See note 9.

See note 9.

“Salvatore Di Vita” can be meaningfully translated in English with “Savior of life,” but also as “Salvatore the experienced” and as “Saviour of the experienced ones.”

Fellini actively participated in the composition of the Roma città aperta screenplay.

Mussolini's visits to Rimini during the ventennio were frequent and well documented, since the Italian dictator also, like Federico Fellini, spent his childhood in Romagna.

Attila's name reminds us that the bloody Hun leader, as the Fury of God, suddenly arrived from the mysterious East in order to brutally maraud the Roman Empire.

Benigni is the author of La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), a powerful tragicomic visual narrative exploring the alienating experience of an Italian Jewish father during the ventennio. Guzzanti is the filmmaker of Fascisti su Marte (Fascists on Mars, 2006), an independent cinematographic extravaganza depicting, through visual parody of the Fascist newsreels produced by the Istituto Luce, the grotesque adventures of some camice nere sent by Mussolini during the 1930s to colonize the Red Planet in order to turn it into the Black one.

This article has necessarily been concerned solely with Italian film directors, and their relations with both the state and the public. For a light-hearted contrast, readers might like to look at Hollywood in James Clapp's article, “The Romantic Travel Movie, Italian-Style,” in an earlier issue of Visual Anthropology [22(1): 52–63].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salvatore Giusto

SALVATORE GIUSTO is an M.A. student in sociocultural anthropology at Brandeis University. His main academic interests are economic and political anthropology as well as mass-media studies. He will start a Ph.D. program in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto in September 2011. As a literary author, he has published in Italian Ritzomena. Cose che danzano [Lubrina edizioni, 2000] and, with Donato Losa, Le Ragazze non guardano lattai [Sperling and Kupfer edizioni, 2003].