New Wave Italian Style

Abstract

An investigation of the long controversy around the definition of an Italian New Wave cinema of the 1960s, this essay engages (and takes issue) with the reasons behind the critics’ reluctance to recognise its existence. After establishing a theoretical and historical framework for a transnational understanding of the phenomenon of the European and World New Waves, it offers a reasoned analysis of the multiple industrial and artistic attempts at a generational renewal of Italian cinema that were made in Italy during the 1960s. Ultimately, the essay suggests that it would not only be appropriate, but also highly productive to reconsider the vibrant and heterogeneous young Italian cinema of the 1960s under the generational and transnational New Wave label, instead of continuing to approach the decade exclusively in the light of Neorealism.

Keywords:

• New Wave cinema
• Neorealism
• nouvelle vague
• film industry
• transnational cinema
• Bertolucci
• Bellocchio.

Notes

1 See for instance Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 1939–1990 (Routledge: London and New York, 1991), and Peter Cowie, Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s (London: Faber&Faber, 2004).

2 See Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance. Film in Italy From 1942 to Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum Press, 2009)

3 Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano. Dal miracolo economico agli anni novanta, (Editori Riuniti, Rome, 2001), pp. 7–9.

4 Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, p. 190

5 See for instance the contributions collected in Poetiche delle nouvelles vagues, ed. by Patrizia Pistagnesi (Venice: Marsilio, 1991).

6 Barbara Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno. Storia economica del cinema italiano (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001), p. 133.

7 Lino Micciché, Il cinema italiano: gli anni ’60 e oltre (Venice: Marsilio, 1995); ‘La nuova ondata e la politica dei debutti: percorsi cinematografici’, in Storia del cinema italiano — Volume X — 1960/1964, ed. by G. De Vincenti (Venice: Marsilio, Edizioni Bianco & Nero, 2003), pp. 136–59.

8 Micciché, Il cinema italiano, pp. 58–75

9 Micciché, Il cinema italiano, p. 59.

10 Micciché, Il cinema italiano, p. 60.

11 Micciché, Il cinema italiano, p. 61.

12 Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno, p. 91.

13 Anne Jåckel, European Film Industries (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 7–8.

14 Micciché, Il cinema italiano, p. 61.

15 It is also noteworthy that one of the masters of Italian cinema such as Alberto Lattuada tried with I dolci inganni (1960) to deal with the nouvelle vague influence both in terms of style (the film is closer to Rohmer’s style) and themes.

16 Sorlin, European Cinemas, p. 145.

17 Micciché, ‘La nuova ondata’, p. 137.

18 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves (New York, London: Continuum), p. 152.

19 Gianni Canova ‘La perdita della trasparenza. Cinema e società nell’Italia della seconda metà degli anni ’60’, in Storia del cinema italiano. Volume XI, 1965/1969, ed. by Gianni Canova (Venice: Marsilio, Edizioni di Bianco & Nero, 2002), pp. 3–29 (p. 6).

20 Canova, ‘La perdita della trasparenza’, p. 6.

21 On masculine trauma after the war in Italian cinema see Jaimey Fisher, ‘On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Neorealism and the German Rubble-Film’, in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, ed. by Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), pp. 25–53 (esp. pp. 28–30).

22 Canova, ‘La perdita della trasparenza’, pp. 6–7.

23 Jean Douchet, The French New Wave (New York: Distributed Art Producers, 1999), p. 9.

24 Marco Bellocchio, ‘La Rivoluzione al cinema’, in Marco Bellocchio: Catalogo Ragionato, ed. by Paola Malanga (Milan: Olivares, 1988), p. 28.

25 Among the debuts of the period 1961–1963 are the following plot lines: the son of a tailor has a nervous breakdown and ends up in a lunatic asylum, while his family falls apart (Giorno per giorno, disperatamente, Alfredo Giannetti, 1961); a political activist reacts against the mafia (Un uomo da bruciare Taviani, Orsini, 1962); a factory worker protests against the condition of the commuters (Pelle viva, Giuseppe Fina, 1962); children of the high bourgeoisie go to Switzerland to have an abortion (Una storia milanese, Eriprando Visconti, 1962); a young subproletarian who has just been released from jail finds his family completely torn apart (Luciano, una vita bruciata, Gian Vittorio Baldi, 1962); a semi-documentary enquiry into the Italian youth depicts the devastating legacy of the economic boom on the new generations (I nuovi angeli, Ugo Gregoretti, 1962); a young unemployed man wanders pointlessly around the streets of Venice, debating about the meaning of life and anarchy (Chi lavora è perduto, Tinto Brass, 1963).

26 Nowell-Smith rightly underlines that during the 1960s the comedies Italian-style managed to satirize many of the idiosyncrasies of Italian society, however, albeit with an ironic acceptance: Nowell-Smith, Making Waves, p. 160.

27 Adriano Aprà, ‘Le Nouvelles Vagues’, in Enciclopedia Del Cinema Mondiale — Vol. 1 L’Europa, ed. by Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 905.

28 Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding The New Wave: Youth and The Rejuvenation Of France After The Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 37.

29 Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, ‘Nouvelle Vague, in Encyclopédie: la ville au cinéma, ed. by Thierry Jousse and Thierry Paquot (Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 2005) pp. 193–99 (p. 193) my translation.

30 See Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), p. 20.

31 Sorlin, European Cinemas, p. 144. It is sufficient to think that during the 1960s Bertolucci used to give interviews only in French, because it is the ‘language of cinema’.

32 Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies. The Key Concepts (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 148.

33 Sorlin, European Cinemas, p. 144. On this topic the debate is also still open. I would argue that the scholars who point out that the directors who debuted at the beginning of the 1960s were not complete beginners as they had some technical experience (mostly limited to a short career as screenwriters, or as directors of a few short films or one documentary) ignore that only a few years before, such a level of experience was considered absolutely insufficient to direct a film.

34 Micciché, Il cinema italiano, p. 69.

35 Baxter, writing about Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (1952), indirectly describes the necessary steps to take in order to debut behind the camera before the campaign: ‘“Somewhere along the line”, he [Lattuada] claimed, I said to Fellini, an extraordinarily talented young man who was my assistant-director: ‘As our wives are working side by side and you are working so close to me, and as we’ve written two or three films together, why don’t you sign as co-director?’ And that was how his name appeared in the credits — after mine, of course. ‘In this way you will have your name on the screen as a director, and this will open the way to your becoming one. You will have your “degree”’, John Baxter, Fellini (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), pp. 86–87.

36 See Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno, p. 82.

37 In fact, while in the first half of the 1950s the few majors (Titanus, Lux, Minerva, Excelsa, Rizzoli, etc.) were focusing mostly on their own productions or on ambitious projects in collaboration with independent producers such as De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, starting from the second half of the 1950s they acted mainly as distributors of small companies’ products. I am thinking for instance of a film like I soliti ignoti (Monicelli, 1958) co-produced by Vides Cinematografica and Lux, shot in the studios of Cinecittà and distributed by Lux.

38 The direct involvement of the studios, aimed at promoting a significant series of debuts in the first years of the 1960s, paradoxically offered another argument to those who wished to deny the existence of the Italian New Wave. They argued, in fact, that it was created artificially by producers (‘politica dei produttori’, as Micciché defined it), and not by a spontaneous movement, which is certainty true; but the same condition never cast doubts on the existence, for instance, of the Japanese New Wave.

39 The establishment of small independent companies created ad hoc for the production of the films of the young authors is also a key feature of the British New Wave, for instance Woodfall Film Productions.

40 Patrick Rumble, ‘Accattone’, in The Cinema of Italy, ed. by Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), pp. 103–13 (p. 104).

41 I am thinking, for instance, of films like Edoardo Bruno’s La sua giornata di gloria (1968), which was screened just once at the Berlin film festival in 1969, and which only recently emerged from oblivion with its distribution on DVD in Italy and the US (in the latter case, as bonus on the 2005 No Shame edition of Bertolucci’s Partner), advertised as ‘the hidden gem of the Italian New Wave’, see Richard T. James Partner — DVD No Shame films.

42 Catherine, O’Rawe, ‘“I padri e i maestri”: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies’, Italian Studies, 63.2 (2008), p. 189.

43 See for instance Stefano Baschiera and Francesco Di Chiara, ‘Once Upon a Time in Italy: Transnational Features of Genre Production, 1960s–1970s’, in Film International, 8.6 (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), pp. 30–39.