Another artistic current in Italy was the Scapigliatura, an Italian translation for the French word boheme, which took its name from a novel by Cletti Arrighi La scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio The most icon- oclastic application of the new scientific influences in Italy was by F. Marinetti whose Futurist movement arose before WWI. Marinetti's Futurists adapted sci- entific terminology to the arts by idealizing mechanized forms and questioning the relevance of Italy's centuries' old artistic traditions in a rapidly changing world.
In his hyperbolic enthusiasm for everything modern Marinetti rejected the past in his manifestos and free verse sound poems such as Zang Tumb Tub He called for the destruction of museums and the glorification of war as the "hygiene of the world"; in fact many of his Futurist followers would expire in WWI. A most important and influential cultural figure remained Gabriele D'Annunzio whose reach extended from politics to literature, the theater, and even the cinema. D'Annunzio's charismatic political influence was fundamental in the campaign for Italy to enter WWI and later in his adventure at Fiume and influence over Mussolini and Italian fascism.
D'Annunzio was also an exponent of Decadentism, a post-Romantic artistic movement, which exalted an individual artist's sense of refinement and, self-importance with an interest in exotic sensuality and mystery at times bordering on self-destruction. D'Annunzio's flamboyant personality and his ability to adapt artistic currents like Decandentism into an Italian cultural context and beyond made him a pivotal Italian cultural figure in the first half of the twentieth century.
As early as the s, the topic of animation had interested scientists and photographers. British photographer Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope showed the sequential movements of a galloping horse. Ohio born inventor Thomas Edison developed his kinetoscope and made a sequential film of a sneeze in The Lumiere brothers in France invented their cinematographe and made short fihns that projected aspects of real life, linking film with reality.
In , the Edison Kinetoscope made a presentation in Turin. A cinematographic machine had also been developed in Italy. Also in , a license for a cinematographic instrument for shooting, pro- jection, and developing film was issued for Filoteo Alberini's kinetografo. Alberini, however, did not have sufiBcient capital to develop his project, and the arrival of the Lumieres cinematographe in Italy halted his efforts. The cinematographe Lumiere made its first appearance in Italy in , when Lumiere's Italian representative, Vittorio Calcina, promoted an enthusiastically received show in Milan.
By , permanent cinema halls opened in Rome and in Naples. In , Calcina opened the first successful public cinema hall in Turin. Because of the brevity of the cinematographic shows — maximum minutes — the halls used for such shows integrated films with other performances. Thus, from its origins the Italian cinema shared space with vaudeville music-hall performances and comic sketches, a theatrical practice that would continue into the s.
In the early s, Alberini opened more cinema halls in several Italian cities. Alberini also became one of the first Italian filmmakers. In , he directed The Taking of Rome , the first Italian feature film based on a final episode of Italian unification. Italian cinematographers and projectionists also worked to perfect the documentary format that became a genre favored as a politi- cal tool by the Fascist regime and later during the post-WWII neorealist period. Between and , Italian films entered the world market with a variety of genres including slapstick starring Frenchman Andre Deed, known as Cretinetti in Italy, who appeared in over a hundred films pro- duced at the Itala studios in Turin.
Gione's incredible facial mimicry, later used to effect by Italian comedian Toto , was dramatized by a special use of light techniques that favored violent contrasts of black and white in order to accentuate the sharpness of his facial features. These performers and others appeared in shorts that were produced on an industrial scale tintil the outbreak of WWI. There were also melodramas and comedies and even films about everyday life inspired by Italian verismo.
By and , the cinema had become an accepted facet of the Itahan entertainment industry. In , the government instituted censorship standards and taxes on both films and tickets. In this period, filmmaking was conducted primarily inside studios with artificial lighting. Naples became particularly important because of the efforts of Gustavo Lombardo, later of the Titanus production com- pany, who began as a foreign film distributor who founded the magazine Lux in with the intention of increasing the cultural status of the cinema.
There were also futurist films such as A. Bragaglia's Thais in accordance with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto on Cinema of the same year, a declaration about experimental cinema in accordance with the futur- ists, desire to find forms of expression that reflected the mechanized and industrial changes in Italy and the world. The founding of the Cines studios in made Rome one of the centers of the Italian cinema industry. Cines aimed to conquer international film markets with large investments producing about 50 titles per year beginning in One of the most important filmmakers working for Cines was Enrico Guazzoni whose adap- tation of the Henryk Sienkiewicz novel with strong Christian themes Quo Vadis?
Despite activity in Rome and even in Venice, Turin was the first capital of the Italian film industry during the silent period. Turin was the country's industrial cen- ter, home of the Italian automobile industry. A Turin-based production company, Pasquali and Tempo, was rim by Ernesto Maria Pasquali, a journalist and playwright who created the Polidor comic films.
Other pro- duction companies in Turin included Ambrosio and Itala Film. Ambrosio succeeded in attracting important directors such as Luigi Maggi, who made the first version of The Last Days of Pompeii , a meter-long film, which became one of the first Italian films to break into the American market. The Itala studios featured Giovanni Pastrone a director who started his career with comic films and then moved into the historical genre. Cabiria opened with a full orchestra led by respected conductor Manilo Mazza perform- ing the Symphony of Fire theme composed by renowned composer Ildebrando Pizzetti.
Instead Cabiria has a hero, Fulvio Axilla, and his shaved-headed, barrel-chested Mussolini-like African servant, Maciste, in a story of a republican-era Rome fighting a rival Mediterranean empire Carthage and a foreign religion Baal or Moloch. Producers correctly expected Italian audiences in to read the similarities between the Roman victory in the second Punic War over the Baalite Carthaginians and the Italian defeat of an Islamic Turkish empire during the invasion of Libya.
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Thus besides being a technical and artistic achievement, Cabiria anticipates the political and ideological currents that culminated in the efforts of pro-WWI interventionists such as D'Annunzio and Mussolini, who were instrumental in the decision of the Italian government to enter the War in Casa Ambrosio, a main competitor of Pastrone's Itala studios in Turin, bought the rights to many of D'Annunzio's novels and plays.
Between and at least 21 films of D'Annunzian derivation were produced in Italy. Indeed Pastrone's name does not appear in the open- ing title sequences, giving the impression that the film is entirely D'Annunzio's work. Due to D'Annunzio's influence everything in the film became more florid and bombastic. D'Annunzio derived the name Maciste from the Greek superlative for "Large. The sequences involving Sophonisba are made more exotic by the fact that her death symbolizes the disappearance of an entire civilization.
Carthage is destroyed because Cabiria was not sacrificed to the fire god Moloch. This plot fit into a decadentist discourse where self-annihilation is a culminating erotic experience. Sophonisba's exotic drawing room, smoking incense pots, and statuettes seem like the decorating catalogue for D'Annunzio's home on Lake Garda, the Vittoriale, with an art nouveau or liberty emphasis on rarity, extravagance, luxury, and oriental motifs. It is an atmosphere that has often been equated with illicit sex, decadence, drugs, and illness, especially in authors such as Andre Huysmans, a source for D'Annunzio.
The film's decor and plot exploited the transgressive elements implicit in such a setting and behavior, which was part of D'Annunzio's appeal and mirrored his lifestyle and reputation. But technology and the marvel of machines and inventions, the flash of Futurist propaganda, make an entrance in Cabiria. D'Annunzian culture was fascinated with light, explosions, and the machine aes- thetics likely borrowed from F. T Marinetti's futurist excitement about mechanized glory. As a pilot during WWI, D'Annunzio had dropped heroic poems over Vienna, a feat that became well documented for it was one of the few examples of individual heroism that could be celebrated in that war.
One scene in Cabiria that appealed to the turn-of-the century romantic fascination with technology is the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse by Archimedes's sun-reflecting mirrors. Archimedes's ecstatic joy at his technological genius recalls the later commonplace of the mad scientist who pushes the limits of nature.
Besides the technical achievements in portraying Moloch with thousands of extras and the use of high wattage flood-lights to simulate the escaping heat, the Moloch flesh furnace is a voyeuristic marvel, which plays on the primal fears of the specta- tor. Another of D'Annunzio's screenwriting contributions. In Metropolis , German director Fritz Lang adopted a similar theme when the workers' children are threatened by the break- down of the giant machine also called Moloch that powers the futuristic city. The true star of Cabiria is Maciste, the strong man slave and the brawn to Fulvio's brains.
The direct source of the character is the good giant, Ursus, who protects the Christian slave girl, Licia, in the novel Quo vadis? Turin, the city where Cabiria was produced and largely filmed, was also the epicenter of the Italian automobile industry with its Fordist manufacturing methods. In the pro-machine, futurist-romanticized culture and in the industrial and technological reality of the twentieth century, the physical body had lost power, particularly in warfare. Ironically, one of the most popular films in the Maciste film series ten such films were produced between and was The Warrior In the film an Itala film troupe is caught behind Austrian lines at the outbreak of the war, providing Bartolomeo Pagano, who plays Maciste, with an opportunity to manhandle extras in Austrian military uniforms.
This image of Maciste defeating the enemy in physical combat is emblematic of the divide between official and popular culture and the technological reality of the war. The Maciste figure has been one of the most enduring in film history from the Italian peplum epics of the s starring Steve Reeves as Hercules to the Hollywood films with Arnold Schwarzenegger as muscular robot in the Terminator series.
In the Maciste cycle it was common for Maciste not only to remain removed from any long-term love interest but also to work to reunite young lovers. Cabiria ends with Maciste playing the lute on a honeymoon yacht of Fixlvio and Cabiria with angles flying around the young lovers as they kiss. The most enduring legacy of Cabiria is the apparent influence that the figure of Maciste had over Benito Mussolini, who would rule Italy as Fascist dictator from to Between and , Mussolini transformed his public image from an anticlerical Socialist revolutionary into the Fascist icon of a naturally powerful tyrant dedicated to the memory and traditions of Roman glory.
The physical similarities between the Duce and the personality cult developed in the s around Mussolini and Maciste cannot be casual. As Maciste, Bartolomeo Pagano devel- oped a signature gait, with eyes glaring with arms folded and head thrown back, later adopted by Mussolini see figure 1. It is not clear who was the source of 14 ip33? Istituto LUCE newsreels in the s feature MussoUni with a bare chest and shaved head helping farmers to collect grain looking like an aged stunt double for Bartolomeo Pagano's Maciste in Cabiria. The public image cultivated by Mussolini during the Fascist period as the all powerful Duce could be read as a Maciste-like figure speaking the language of D'Annunzio.
Cabiria expressed another potential foxmdational narrative for the newly unified Italian nation of a pre-Christian romanita Romaness , particularly important for the later nationalist cxilture espoused by Mussolini's Fascist regime , which attempted to identify the newly imited Italy with the past glories of ancient Rome. The film now lost was remade in by CamUlo Mastrocinque with Vittorio De Sica in the role of a blind gentleman who helps an unfortunate girl. Another Neapolitan, Elvira Notari, made approximately 60 films between and Notari was inspired by themes of the everyday life of the common peo- ple of Naples, especially of women, dealing with their passions and unhappiness.
An important diva was Francesca Bertini, who began her career in the theater and then moved on to the cinema to work for the Film d'Arte Production Company in Naples. Bertini's best-known work is Assunta Spina , an adaptation of a play by Neapolitan poet and dramatist Salvatore Di Giacomo The film, which Bertini codirected with Gustavo Serena, has been praised for the manner in which the details of everyday life in Naples are presented in an unadorned fashion.
These include her violent tempered fiance Michele, his jealous rival the ne'er-do-well Raffaele, and the corrupt court official Federico who convinces Assunta to accept his sexual advances in exchange for the chance to see Michele in prison. The turning point of the drama occurs when Michele slashes Assunta's face and is sentenced to two years in prison despite Assunta's attempt during his trial to accept blame for his actions.
When Michele is released and kills Federico, Assunta takes the blame for the murder, her tragedy complete. The character of the long-suffering female was well established in the operatic tra- dition in works such as La traviata, Manon Lescalt, or La Bohenie to mention only a few nineteenth-century operas that feature doomed female protagonists. Films such as Bertini's Assunta Spina established the cinema as a venue for what would become the strappalacrime weepie or tearjerker melodrama.
Pastrone's Cabiria had provided Maciste, a character who may be interpreted as a metaphor for Italian nationalistic impulses. The suicidal princess Sophonisba in Cabiria is emblematic of the influence of trends such as decadentism and European high art in Italian consciousness see figure 1. In contrast, Assunta Spina represents a more humble sphere in everyday Italian society.
Assunta is identified with the bare streets of Naples often appearing under a portrait of the Madonna with child in her room. She is deceived and brutalized by the immature males in her life and responds with self-sacrificial fatalism. In , just before Italy's entry into WWI the Italian film industry produced 90 feature-length films and penetrated world markets, including the United States, where films such as Pastrone's Cabiria enjoyed long runs and wide distribution.
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After WWI the Italian film industry lost its position in world markets, a fate shared in countries like France, which also had vibrant prewar film industries. The political and economic situation was extremely tense with strikes, demonstrations, and the reduction of the value of middle-class savings between and When universal male suffrage was granted in Italy in and competition began for the new voters.
Catholic forces entered into politics with Don Sturzo's Partita Popolare after the lifting of the reruni novarum, the papal encyclical prohibiting Catholic participation in politics. However the events that would bring Italy under Fascist totalitarian rule were already in motion. He resigned as editor of the chief Socialist newspaper Avanti out of frustration at the Socialist Party's refusal to support Italian intervention in WWI.
In the political uncertainty and civil unrest following WWI, Mussolini formed his own organiza- tion, the Fascist Party, which eventually aligned with the nationalists. The election saw gains for the Socialists and the Catholic Popolari. Yet the two parties were unable to form a coalition.
For the next election, Mussolini moved further to the political Right so that his platform had more in common with the policies of a conservative, moderate government — fiscal restraint, law and order and a nationalist foreign policy. Mussolini also made concessions to the Socialists by promising to form Fascist worker and farmer unions in order to position his Fascist Party for a dominant role in Italian politics.
In and the economic crisis that had followed the end of the war wors- ened and the continuing strikes and political unrest were not suppressed by the last moderate government.
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The Socialists feared Allied military intervention in the event of a Marxist revolution as had occurred in Russia in In late , Mussolini's Fascists began a campaign of political violence, at times with the appar- ent consent of public safety officials. According to Fascist propaganda between and , Mussolini prevented a Bolshevik-style totalitarian revolution from taking place in Italy.
Fascism brought the end of representative parliamentary government and the institution of Fascist totalitarian dictatorship. The ruling elite allowed and even encouraged Mussolini to enter into the government who was viewed as a milder, more controllable alternative to D'Annunzio, fresh fi-om his Fiume adventure. But D'Annunzio's political methodology did not evolve in a vacuum. Trends in philosophy and sociology that influenced D'Annunzio and Mussolini included thinkers such as Gustav Le Bon and his theories on the effectiveness of political violence and dema- goguery to mold public opinion.
Marinetti's iconoclastic call for spontaneity, impulse, and violence fostered a sense of bravado amorality as did Freidrich Nietzsche , with his reading of the Judeo-Christian tradition as slave morality. But Fascism also had anti-bourgeois elements, holdovers from Mussolini's days as a Socialist revolutionary. The diffidence toward the upper middle class may be interpreted in the light of Oswald Spengler's reading of Western decadence, which in turn owed much to Darwinian theories on natural competi- tion. The Fascists, as D'Annunzio's Fiume volimteers before them, saw themselves as Darwinian agents whose violence coxald be rationalized as a consequence of their strength and audacity.
Of course it is easy to dress up in philosophical and cultural terms what may have actually been a generational conflict between Fascist black shirt squads whose fight song Giovinezza Youth was directed against their aging liberal. Catholic, monarchist or Socialist fathers. But a series of rifts in the Socialist leadership led to the formation of the Italian Communist Party in by Antonio Gramsci The division of the Italian Left into opposing factions rendered it incapable of profiting from the political and economic situation. The government, led by the Liberal Party, failed to secure a peaceful solution and Italians responded to Mussolini's call for a return to law and order.
The middle and property-owning classes were fearfiil that these difficult economic and political conditions could lead to a revolution patterned on the Russian Bolshevik revolution. The situ- ation was ripe for an opportunistic and decided leader like Mussolini to impose his will and his Fascist Party on the nation.
A pivotal event was the decision by the Fascist leadership to march from their party congress in Naples to Rome in October Once in Rome, parading Fascists occupied the post office and other government buildings. Support for the Fascists grew and in October of MussoHni was asked by the king to replace Luigi Facta as prime minister, perhaps unaware that he had just invited in a dictatorship that would last 21 years. Mussolini's appeal was based mainly on his promise of a "return to law and order," an end to strikes and the "fear of Bolshevism," a reassurance to the new middle class that they would not become "proletariarized," and finally, a promise that through dedication to military virtues Italy could become a Great Power reevoking the Roman Empire.
An important first step in the Fascist promulgation of the totalitarian state was the Acerbo Bill, which guaranteed the party receiving most votes in an election two-thirds of the seats in parliament. In , the Fascists attained a majority in parliament using a proportional representation law, which in various guises has continued sporadically to be a feature of the Italian parliamentary system. Mussolini's early policies appeased politicians who had acceded to his inclusion in government.
In a speech to parliament in , Mussolini accepted responsibility for Fascist violence, a moment that commenta- tors have seen as the moment of the beginning of Fascist totalitarian dictatorship. The Fascist movement thus led the country to dictatorship with the banning of opposition political parties after an attempt on Mussolini's life in Yet Mussolini was careful not to alienate the previous governing establishment, and to this end the Fascist Party slowly purged itself of its most violent black shirt, revolutionary elements.
Mussolini fur- ther secured his position, appeasing Catholic sentiment by signing the Lateran accords in , creating the independent status of the Vatican under the gover- nance of the Catholic Church, and establishing Roman Catholicism as the official state religion, quite a jump from Mussolini's early days as an anticlerical agitator. The Fascist system of Corporatism, which developed gradually and finally crystal- lized into the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations in , professed to be a sys- tem in which political representation was based not on residence, but on occupation whether in agriculture, transport, manufacturing, or self-employed professionals.
Supposedly such a system would have eliminated class conflict. But in practice Corporatism allowed the Fascist Party to maintain rigid control over the unions eliminating Catholic and Socialist union groups , while favoring busi- ness interests. By accepting a right-wing revolution in , the governing establishment underestimated Mussolini's abilities from his past as a journalist and communica- tor. Other historians noted that the republican ideology of Mazzini's Risorgimento had never been a mass movement but was instead directed and con- trolled by an elite whose hold on popular consciousness was weak and who were overly dependent on Garibaldi's charisma, the Piedmontese monarchy, and its able prime minister Cavour.
The regime's policy of exiling political dissidents, among them writers such as Cesare Pavese and Carlo Levi, furthered the formation of a conformist society that perpetuated Fascist rule. The Fascist years did bring changes for large segments of the population, particularly in demographic and economic terms. Despite the restrictions of the regime, the s evidenced a movement toward urban, modern life characterized by a growth in consumer culture and sports attitudes perhaps best reflected in the romantic comedies directed by Mario Bonnard or Mario Camerini.
Sociologically these trends began with the movement toward the cities, an internal migration away from the countryside caused by demographic increases. Mussolini did achieve some successes in controlling the economy during the Great Depression.
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The regime oversaw the draining of marshes and the propagandistic high point of improving transportation scheduling — "making the trains run on time. Fascism awarded a structural bureaucratic approach to economic and social wealth. It was the culture of clientilismo political patronage rather than the entrepreneurial verve that had characterized Italian economic development in the early part of the century by bourgeois industrialist families.
The totalitarian nature of Fascist government expanded with MussoHni's restrictions on freedom of the press and his autarkic policies of national self-sufficiency, which relieved the public of the responsibility of involvement in governmental or economic deci- sions. The world economic crisis of the s brought even more state control with the formation of large state-run industrial holding companies the IMI, the IRI, postwar ENI , and a national pension system the INPS created in to the point that by the late s Fascist Italy rivaled Soviet Russia for the level of state involvement in the economy.
In response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the League of Nations instituted economic sanctions on trade with Italy. Films from the late s like Mario Camerini's U Signor Max have references to the consumption of embar- goed foreign products as unpatriotic. Mussolini's regime reacted by turning fur- ther inward and instituted economic and cultural politics known by the catch word autarchia autarky or self-sufficiency.
The regime policy of national eco- nomic self-sufficiency or autarky had already been evoked in attempts to resolve a grain shortage with the Battle of Grain in , even turning some city parks into grain fields. The Battle of the Lira and the freezing of exchange rates for the Italian lira with major currencies such as the British Sterling at quota novanta ninety lire per British pound and the Battle of Gold were further autarkic attempts to stop the rienforce the national currency, the lira.
After the conclusion of the war in Ethiopia May and before the Pact of Munich May and alliance with Hitler's Nazi Germany, Mussolini declared a period of peace, which was well received by the populace. In September of , Mussolini's Fascist regime passed the leggi razziali racial statutes , which prohibited Jews from inter- marriage, attending public schools, holding public office.
There were even limits put on the amount of real estate that an Italian Jew could possess in his own country. When university professors were required to sign a loyalty oath and join the party, few gave up their chairs and refused. Some intellectuals who rose to prominence in the postwar period have subsequently been embarrassed by the reappearance of syco- phantic letters to Mussolini or by evidence of concrete ties to the regime, although many cultural figures including Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Carlo Emilio Gadda were at times supporters of the regime during periods of the ventennio.
Fascism originally had Utopian and anti-bourgeois elements, held over from Mussolini's days as a Socialist revolutionary. Once in power, Mussolini was careful not to alienate the upper class and the establishment. By the s, Fascist high functionaries aspired to noble titles to legitimize their position in society. The Fascist gerarchi leadership gained ever-closer ties to the upper echelons of Italian society best demonstrated by the showy wedding in between Mussolini's daughter Edda and Count Galeazzo Ciano, the son of an industrialist who had flown missions with D'Annunzio in WWI.
Ciano later became head of Mussolini's press office in , a position upgraded to the Undersecretariat for the Press and Propaganda in The position eventually came a separate ministry, the Ministry of Cixlture and Propaganda Miniculpop , which oversaw an agreement reached with the United States for the limitation of Hollywood film exports to Italy to films per year. Despite the desire of Fascist officials for aristocratic legitimacy, the regime did have an anti-aristocratic policy, at least linguistically.
The campaign to require the second person plural voi as the common form of address instead of the feudal and feminine third person singular Lei was at its height in with complete substi- tution promulgated in 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.
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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.
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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. 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.
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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.
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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.
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