The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry

Marina Nicoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138790056
• eBook ISBN: 9781317654360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Italian cinema triumphed globally in the 1960, with directors such as Rossellini, Fellini, and Leone, and actors like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni known to audiences around the world. But by the end of the 1980s, the Italian film industry was all but dead. The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry traces the rise of the industry from its origins in the 19th century to its worldwide success in the 1960s, and its rapid decline in the subsequent decades. It does so by looking at cinema as an institution – subject to the interplay between the spheres of art, business, and politics at the national and international level.

By examining the roles of a wide range of stakeholders (including film directors, producers, exhibitors, the public, and the critics) as well as the system of funding and the influence of governments, author Marina Nicoli demonstrates that the Italian film industry succeeded when all three spheres were aligned, but suffered and ultimately failed when they each pursued contradictory objectives. This in-depth case study makes an important contribution to the long-standing debate about promoting and protecting domestic cultures, particularly in the face of culturally dominant and politically- and economically-powerful creative industries from the United States. The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry will be of particular interest to business and economic historians, cinema historians, media specialists, and cultural economists.

Part I

The Early Making of an Industry

1 The “Thinkability” of the Cinema

Is It Art or Is It a Business?

A new art, even though made of modest ambitions.

A simple replication of other form of entertainment has born.¹

This art … which art: this celluloid industry, a dishonest daughter.

What is exactly this strong industry—aggressive as money making to our lives?²

The Cinema: The Eye of the Twentieth Century³

The first public film show took place at the Cinématographe Lumière on 28 December 1895, and is usually said to mark the birth of cinema, with brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière of Lyon taking the credit for its invention.

Cinema appeared as a totally modern art, almost the natural outcome of the new industrial and technical era. It was the completion of photographic objectivity, the technological convergence of a series of cultural forms already present in modern society.⁴ At first, it was a technological and scientific experiment, seen as an investigative technique with a special language of moving images to use in exploring fields of scientific research that had been developed in the previous century, like the study of human and animal movement.⁵

However, the invention of a technology for projecting images cannot be compared with the impact of the cinema as a social and cultural institution. This exciting novelty permeated contemporary society, affecting many of life’s economic, social, cultural, political and artistic aspects. If every historical era has its own “eye”, i.e. a particular way of viewing the world that is reflected in society’s visual products, then the cinema was the “eye” of the twentieth century.

The cinema seemed to have been created to become a mass spectacle that was able to touch the emotions of more demanding spectators and working classes alike. It gave every social class, linguistic group and country an activity that was a more culturally and economically accessible form of entertainment and recreation than the traditionally bourgeois spectacles like theatre and music. The cinema became a factory of myths, symbols, illusions and identity.⁶

The cinema is an enormous encyclopaedia written with moving images, and it can be said that there is not one single entry in this universal encyclopaedia, in other words not one single film, which does not inspire a positive or negative reaction in the spectator, no matter how bland or banal the film may be. The cinema contributes to the spectator’s psychological and mental experience and to the creation of his awareness. In brief, it contributes to the spectator’s interpretation of the world.⁷

The most fascinating feature of the cinema was that it could open a window on the world, revealing far-off countries, events and personalities that were outside the experience of most members of the audience.

The novelty of moving pictures was enough to attract the public, and the first improvised cine operators filmed everything around them. Lumière filmed workers coming out of a factory in Lyon, a train arriving in the station, the family having breakfast. The cinema gave everything, including images of daily life, a new communicative force. Most of the early moving images showed people and events in other countries, information previously given only by the press. Lumière cine operators travelled to the furthest corners of the world, and were soon imitated in other countries, thus paving the way for the development of national film industries.⁸

Pioneers of the new technology were uncertain about the direction for future development of this “invention” that could be a scientific instrument, a means of recording events, and a form of entertainment. No one seeing the first footage of landscapes could have imagined that this new form of expression would permeate everyday life to become a popular mass spectacle, a collective ritual of vision capable of forging a national patrimony of shared values and symbols. Gradual recognition of the cinema’s communicative potential would involve not only its artistic and expressive levels, but also its political and economic potential. Films could communicate across national borders, making them one of the most effective vehicles of cultural hegemony and imperialism. Contemporary observers felt that the cinema could define the character and soul of a nation.⁹ The cinema was industrialised entertainment, creating products distributed on a global scale.

In Italy—as elsewhere—there was intense expansion in the early years, with a proliferation of halls showing the first rudimentary films.¹⁰ Newspapers portrayed the cinema as a spectacle far removed from the upper classes, a sort of poor man’s theatre providing inexpensive entertainment for the urban working classes (factory workers and artisans).

After a hard day’s work, for just a few coins, the cinema offers the most imaginative illusions, sometimes projected in the workers’ local café. The cinema meets the needs of people who have little time for fun, and who want to feel strong emotions rather than intellectual pleasures.¹¹

The rapid development of the cinema, the overwhelming enthusiasm of public audiences and especially the spread of permanent projection halls (changes occurring in most national film industries between 1906 and 1910) meant that the cinema became a focus of intellectual and social debate.

The Legitimation Issue

Added to the problems of a social nature were those of a more cultural type: the cinema lacked real legitimacy. The cultural context of the time recognised no relationship between popular entertainment and the traditional arts like theatre, music and literature. The two spheres were seen as totally independent and incompatible, due to their different audiences: the educated bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other.

Moreover, when the cinema first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, the arts system was already defined. Popular shows like the circus, music hall and waxworks museums were classed as mere money-making activities, while the traditional arts had acquired full institutional status, with the legal recognition of copyright, the formation of literary, theatrical and musical writers’ groups, and aesthetics as a subject of academic study. Italian theatre journals were among the cinema’s most vehement opponents. In particular, L’Argante¹² published articles denigrating the cinema as an excessively populist form of entertainment, and created a movement strong enough to promote a conference calling on the state to curb the cinemas. The diatribe over the “artistic” merits of the cinema continued in many national film industries at least until the 1920s, and so many articles focused on the constant conflict between theatre and cinema that it seemed as though the cinema’s claims to “artistic nobility” were at stake.

The first attempt to explain the cinema came from Giovanni Papini, with an article entitled La filosofia del cinematografo (The Philosophy of the Cinema) in La Stampa on 18 May 1907. After a brief review attempting to explain the miraculous expansion of cinemas, Papini invited philosophers to reflect on “these new entertainment factories”, which should not be dismissed as a simple curiosity for young people, women and common people. Papini claimed that the cinema had many qualities:

In comparison with the theatre, the cinema has the advantage of that the shows are shorter, less tiring and less expensive… . For thirty cents, everyone can take part in this brief magic lantern show for twenty minutes, and it does not require too much culture, too much attention, or too much effort.

Although Papini recognised that the cinema had some positive qualities in comparison with the theatre, he still saw it as inferior. The cinema could reproduce vast and complex events, even real events of just a few days ago, not just a description in words or a still picture, but a succession of movements filmed from real life. In this first stage of development, the cinema had not yet managed to find its own ideals or artistic independence and was still seeking to define its own cultural status by imitating the theatre, music and literature, and drawing on their contents for its subjects and texts.

In France, Pathé launched Film d’Art in the late 1910s, a production company targeting a bourgeois audience. It drew mainly on the theatre, both for contents and for human resources, signing contracts with actors from the “Comédie Française” and the writers’ union (Société des Gens de Lettres). Film d’Art films had literary or historical subjects and copied the typical narrative and acting models of the theatre, especially pantomime. Thus, high-level culture and the great texts of world literature became accessible to the lower classes: “Everything in the cinema’s artistic field needs to be created and recreated. But the public still flocks in, so we can rejoice that in the current desire for art in the cinema as a small step towards improvement, and we can see that poetry is making progress in the cinema”.¹³

For commercial reasons, the cinema preferred existent literary and theatrical works to original texts, in the same way that its acting drew on the theatre. Unfortunately, these techniques and styles were often unsuitable, because action was the principal characteristic of the cinema.

Interest in the cinema grew constantly. In 1914, the first newspaper film columns and cinema journals appeared, but this did not translate into critical and aesthetic criticism. Most of the cinema journals gave information about film showings and news about the cinema and production companies, sometimes with some critical and theoretical articles. At the European level, a 1913 article on the cinema by Lukacs laid claim to definitions and evaluations to be included in the study of aesthetics.¹⁴

The most significant step towards legitimating the cinema in Italy was D’Annunzio’s work on Cabiria, previewed on the evening of 18 April 1914 at Turin’s Teatro Vittorio Emanuele. Produced by Turin-based Itala, Cabiria was directed by Giovanni Pastrone, the real deus ex machina of the entire project. Although Pastrone also wrote the screenplay, it was actually attributed to D’Annunzio, who therefore became the film’s leading author and promoter. Cinema first attracted intellectuals, especially writers and poets, mostly for economic reasons, since the industry could pay them much more than they could traditionally earn with literature. Intellectuals and men of letters viewed the fascinating world of cinema with a certain distaste and disquiet, seeing it as a medium that completely transformed the role of the intellectual, who was no longer the centre of the creative process, but just one of many cogs needed for the complex mechanism of film production to work. As far as cinema is concerned, intellectuals are paid for their services, and screenwriters, directors and actors adapt their work as they perform it. This was certainly alienating for intellectuals, who now found themselves working on a form of expression reduced to an industrial product rather than being perceived as an art form. The problem with a film is that it is not a unique product, like an artistic or cultural event or a play, where the artist’s contribution is a one-off event, whether the artist be a writer or an actor. A film presents the same story and the same creation ad infinitum; this certainly makes it immortal, but this means that film lacks the aura of uniqueness that makes a work of art.

In this respect, Pirandello’s novel I quaderni di Serafino Gubbio Operatore (Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, cine operator) is emblematic. The labyrinthine plot involves many characters vainly seeking their emotional and existential goals; it expresses Pirandello’s particular vision of the relationship between man and machine, and the alienation caused by the increasing presence of machines. When he speaks about the invention of the cine camera and the passive role of the cine operator, Serafino Gubbio says: “They invented it. It has to act; it has to feed. It feeds on everything, any stupidity they put in front of it. I tell you, it will feed on you as well, it feeds on everything!”

Opposition to the cinema continued right through the first decade of the 1900s. In 1913, Sabatino Lopez, playwright and director of the Società Italiana Autori (Italian Writers’ Union), wrote a letter to La Vita Cinematografica (Cinema Life) claiming that the cinema was “art for illiterates and deaf mutes”, and inviting authors to refuse all forms of direct or indirect collaboration. Not all literary writers and intellectuals supported Lopez in his criticism. Piedmontese intellectual Nino Oxilia was a vigorous supporter of the value and dignity of the seventh art: “Is the cinema an adjunct to the theatre? No. The cinema is an art form in itself. It is absolutely different from the theatre, but has its own elegance. The opponents of this silent art say that no form of art can come into being or perish, since art and human life are bound together… . But the cinema is a new form of art”.

Oxilia collaborated with Itala Film and Cines. He was the first and most fervent supporter of the need for an active and constructive dialogue between literary writers and the cinema. According to Oxilia, the cinema needed intellectuals to elevate it to a form of expression and communication, to a make it a true art form. On the other hand, artists needed to learn from th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Graphs
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Early Making of an Industry
• Part II The Design of a “Powerful Weapon”: Cinema under Fascism
• Part III Building the Cinematic Miracle: Cinema under Democracy
• Part IV “Shooting the Miracle”
• Index