This themed issue of the journal includes the results of some of the research that was conducted in the course of a large AHRC-sponsored research project on ‘Producers and Production Practices in the History of Italian Cinema, 1949-1975’.1 Though research into it has hardly been exhaustive, the Italian film industry has often aroused interest because of its capacity to reconcile a number of opposites: prestigious art films and routine genre productions, national specificity and international plots and settings, fragmented production system and big-budget operations, a limited domestic market and worldwide distribution, heavy state intervention and private ownership. These tensions have meant that the industry has rarely been stable. It has been beset by repeated crisis deriving from many different sources, though the most frequent were problems in winning and maintaining a share of the internal market, especially in the face of American competition, and changes or interruptions in the system of state support and regulation.
The film industry in the postwar period was never dominated by large studios, although some companies, notably Lux and Titanus, both with long histories of involvement in the distribution sector, engaged in continuous film production at several levels of the market. During the heyday of Italian cinema, in the 1950s and 1960s, several medium-sized companies also played a significant role, with Franco Cristaldi’s Vides company producing many art films and systematically pursuing a policy of co-production. By contrast, a plethora of small production companies, such as Italo Zingarelli’s West Film, were specialised in genre productions, relying on advances on distribution and state support in order to quickly satisfy the needs of regional and national markets.
Although academic interest in the film industry dates back to the 1980s, remarkably little is known about many of its production companies, key personalities, production practices, methods of financing films, relations with the wider economy or marketing strategies.2 This is a particular issue in the Italian context, where the lack of permanency of the production companies made it particularly challenging to reconstruct the history of the industry by patching together archival material.
It has been our aim in this research project to begin to rectify this situation by exploring the work of a range of producers and production companies through hitherto untapped archival resources. The Cristaldi archive, held at the Cineteca di Bologna, has been catalogued and selectively digitised with the support of the AHRC and now constitutes a significant resource for researchers.3
The present issue consists of five articles and one dialogue between two members of the research team.
Stephen Gundle and Michela Zegna’s exploration of the contribution of Alessandro Blasetti covers the period from the rebirth of Italian cinema at the start of the sound era to its affirmation in the late 1950s. Blasetti, whose vast personal archive is also held in Bologna, is not very well-known abroad. A film director active from the late 1920s until the 1970s, he was a key promoter of the national industry in both the Fascist and republican periods. Throughout his career, he established fruitful relations with producers and championed an idea of cinema as a collective art against the doctrine of the auteur. Much light can be shed on the strengths and weaknesses of the industry through an analysis of his interventions and practices, as well as his compromises and political allegiances.
Italian cinema’s postwar resurgence owed much to the international recognition that was accorded to such classics of neorealism as Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948). The period is known as one in which there was little regular production, with some established companies holding back until the reconstruction was completed and more stable arrangements established. The end of Fascist centralisation and the determination to place cinema at the service of a project of social and political renewal led to a number of novel and cooperative production initiatives. Marina Nicoli considers one of the most interesting of these: the production by the association of ex-partisans ANPI of the first film by the critic-turned-director Giuseppe De Santis, who would go on to make Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) for Lux. A drama about the struggle to establish an agricultural cooperative in a context in which the scars of war are still open, Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) was a film that was beset with problems from the start. Many of these were financial, but others derived from the difficulty or reconciling the political concerns of the Communist Party (of which De Santis was a member) with the director’s insistence on artistic freedom. Nicoli accords special importance to the role of executive producer Giorgio Agliani, a former partisan commander, whose task it was to mediate between the different forces in play to bring the film to a conclusion. Agliani would go on to produce other films after this experience.
In his article, Stephen Gundle discusses an aspect of Italian cinema that has scarcely been examined as far as the postwar period is concerned, that is the sphere of film promotion. When the Americans returned to the Italian market after the war, they did so with a full armoury of promotional techniques and experiences through which they turned films into events. In Italy, there was little knowledge of how to drum up business except by the established means of artistic posters. Gundle explores how production companies, encouraged by the trade press, learned from the Americans while developing advertising that was adapted to the content of films and the value that was accorded to them. He offers close analysis of the way Italy's development of its own star system fed into promotion and of how the practice of product placement was embraced and how it evolved during the phase of rapid economic growth. He argues that cinema, no less than television, was embedded in the development of consumer culture in Italy.
Barbara Corsi examines the brief history of Italian-Soviet co-productions. Italian companies engaged most frequently in co-productions with France, but they also sought many other collaborations. Corsi shows that links with the Soviet film industry followed a thaw in international relations in the 1960s. She explores the case of The Red Tent (Mikhail Kalatosov, 1969), a co-production between Cristaldi’s Vides company and Mosfilm that evoked the events which followed the crash of the airship Italia on the Arctic ice pack in 1928 and the rescue that was led by the USSR. The collaboration was fraught with difficulties that mostly derived from the entirely different ways of operating of the Italian company and the Soviet industry and the different expectations of each regarding the completed film, Nevertheless, Cristaldi emerges as a man of considerable foresight and business acumen who managed to carry a problematic enterprise through to a largely successful conclusion.
In recent years, popular Italian cinema has become increasingly at the centre of academic investigation,4 though more needs to be discovered about producers who specialised in genre productions and their practices. Stefano Baschiera offers an analysis of Zingarelli’s intuition that there was a market for family films which combined comedy and the western theme. He situates the films Lo chiamavano Trinità (They Call Me Trinity, Enzo Barboni, 1970) and …continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity is Still My Name, Enzo Barboni, 1971) in the context of the Spaghetti Western, a genre that was in sharp decline when Zingarelli intervened. The films brought the duo of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill to international attention. The films were extraordinarily successful at home and abroad and showed the ability of Italian genre production to reach an international audience and to challenge better-funded production companies.
Karl Schoonover and Barbara Corsi’s conversation uncovers a unique set of strategies that Italian producers used to generate capital for their films. They discuss how their recent archival finds reveal the particular role of property and property companies played for producers who saw these ventures as a means of securing locations, offsetting production costs, and providing collateral for loans to finance riskier film projects. In the context of the period’s ‘economic miracle’, they discover an industry investing in the value of real estate both on screen and off.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded their large research project between 2016 and 2019, the Cineteca di Bologna and its director, Gianluca Farinelli, and to Michela Zegna, for a collaboration that resulted in the cataloguing and digitisation of the Cristaldi archive. They also worked closely with the Cineteca on the project exhibition ‘Dream Makers: Italian Cinema and Its Great Producers’, which was inaugurated at the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna in 2018 and ran from June to September of that year.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stefano Baschiera
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of several books on Italian cinema and society, including most recently Death and the Dolce Vita (Canongate 2011), Mussolini's Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (Berghahn, 2013) and Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism (Berghahn, 2019). Between 2016 and 2019, he was Principal Investigator on the AHRC project ‘Producers and Production Practices in the History of Italian Cinema’. Karl Schoonover is Associate Professor and Reader of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Brutal Vision: the Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and co-editor of Global Art Cinema (Oxford UP, 2010). With Rosalind Galt, he wrote the book Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), which received SCMS's Katherine Singer Kovács Award for outstanding book in film and media. Stefano Baschiera is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen's University Belfast. His work on European cinema, material culture, and film industries has been published in a variety of edited collections and journals including, Studies in Euroepan Cinema, Bianco e Nero, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies.
Notes
1 The project was conducted by the following team: Stephen Gundle (Principal Investigator), Karl Schoonover and Stefano Baschiera (Co-Investigators), Barbara Corsi and Marina Nicoli (Research Fellows). In addition, Vanessa Roghi (also Research Fellow) prepared and directed a documentary on the production of Spaghetti Westerns. The project involved the University of Warwick, Queen’s University Belfast and, as project partner, the Cineteca di Bologna. Michela Zegna coordinated the collaboration on behalf of the Cineteca and contributed to several aspects of the research. For further information, please visit the project website: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/research/current/italian_producers_project/ Copies of the small format bilingual Italian-English catalogue produced for the exhibition ‘Dream Makers: Italian Cinema and Its Great Producers’ may be requested free of charge from Stephen Gundle.
2 For many years, the sole reference point for research on the film industry was L. Quaglietti, Storia economico-politica del cinema italiano (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980). Barbara Corsi’s Con qualche dollaro in meno: storia economica del cinema italiano (Rome: Ediori Riuniti) was published in 2001. In the course of the 1980s, several volumes, produced under the auspices of the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema (Pesaro), laid the basis for an industrial approach to Italian film history. These include: C. Camerini e R. Redi (eds), Cinecittà 1: Industria e mercato nel cinema italiano tra le due guerre (Venice: Marsilio, 1985), E. Magrelli (ed.), Sull’industria cinematografica italiana (Venice: Marsilio 1986) and V. Zagarrio (ed.), Dietro lo schermo: ragionamenti sui modi di produzione cinematografici in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1988).
3 The archive is accessible online at: https://progettocristaldi.cinetecadibologna.it/
4 Popular Italian cinema has been the subject of several volumes, including, most notably, G. Manzoli, Da Ercole a Fantozzi: cinema popolare e società italiana dal boom econoico alla neotelevisione (1958-76) (Rome: Carocci, 2012) and L. Bayman and S. Rigoletto, eds., Popular Italian Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).