You’re part of the research project Italian Cinema Audiences which is investigating Italian cinema-going habits in the 1950s. How did this project come to be, what was the inspiration behind it?
We developed this project with colleagues from Oxford Brookes and Exeter which is aiming to try and reconstruct this experience of going to the cinema between 1945 and 1960. It aims to find out more about what kind of films people during that period liked and why they liked them, as well as the stars they liked and things like whether they preferred Italian or American stars and their feelings on neorealism. We’re also looking at what cinema meant in that period. Going to the cinema was the main leisure activity for Italians at that time; it was very cheap and a lot of people we’ve interviewed have said it was a very important social activity for them. Many women have said that it was the only place they could be alone with their boyfriend, for example. There are all sorts of things going on apart from just the films. That was part of the reason I got involved; I wanted to find out more about that period, beyond what the official histories have told us. The website is here: http://italiancinemaaudiences.org/
You’ve published some work on female character tropes within Italian cinema, particularly the femme fatale. Hollywood cinema in particular has been criticised recently as lacking in interesting, developed roles for women; do you feel that this is also the case in Italian cinema?
Yes, in fact I was just discussing this in Rome with students there. One of the reasons I wrote my book on masculinity in Italian cinema was that I noticed how many good roles there have been in the last 15 years or so for men. All the films about recent history and the anni di piombo [years of lead] focus on groups of men and there are very few interesting roles for women. They’re usually the girlfriend, the wife, the mother or the sex symbol; there’s very little apart from that. It does partly reflect quite a male-dominated perspective in Italian life and certainly an inability, in some ways, to think beyond certain kinds of representation. It’s very limiting, especially when you go to Italy and meet all these fabulous Italian women who are interesting and doing all these amazing things and then you watch films and they’re either neurotic wives, nagging mothers or sex symbols who say a few lines and disappear. All these questions of national identity are being explored through masculinity. It’s interesting but very frustrating! Even in popular cinema, Italy doesn’t really make boy-meets-girl rom-coms like Hollywood does. When you talk to Italian producers about why this is, they say that there aren’t enough female stars in Italy that they could put in the films to attract a large audience. They have lots of male stars, which means they end up making choral comedies with 8 or 9 male protagonists, all of whom get different plotlines, rather than the Hollywood-style rom-com with one male and one female star.
We developed this project with colleagues from Oxford Brookes and Exeter which is aiming to try and reconstruct this experience of going to the cinema between 1945 and 1960. It aims to find out more about what kind of films people during that period liked and why they liked them, as well as the stars they liked and things like whether they preferred Italian or American stars and their feelings on neorealism. We’re also looking at what cinema meant in that period. Going to the cinema was the main leisure activity for Italians at that time; it was very cheap and a lot of people we’ve interviewed have said it was a very important social activity for them. Many women have said that it was the only place they could be alone with their boyfriend, for example. There are all sorts of things going on apart from just the films. That was part of the reason I got involved; I wanted to find out more about that period, beyond what the official histories have told us. The website is here: http://italiancinemaaudiences.org/
You’ve published some work on female character tropes within Italian cinema, particularly the femme fatale. Hollywood cinema in particular has been criticised recently as lacking in interesting, developed roles for women; do you feel that this is also the case in Italian cinema?
Yes, in fact I was just discussing this in Rome with students there. One of the reasons I wrote my book on masculinity in Italian cinema was that I noticed how many good roles there have been in the last 15 years or so for men. All the films about recent history and the anni di piombo [years of lead] focus on groups of men and there are very few interesting roles for women. They’re usually the girlfriend, the wife, the mother or the sex symbol; there’s very little apart from that. It does partly reflect quite a male-dominated perspective in Italian life and certainly an inability, in some ways, to think beyond certain kinds of representation. It’s very limiting, especially when you go to Italy and meet all these fabulous Italian women who are interesting and doing all these amazing things and then you watch films and they’re either neurotic wives, nagging mothers or sex symbols who say a few lines and disappear. All these questions of national identity are being explored through masculinity. It’s interesting but very frustrating! Even in popular cinema, Italy doesn’t really make boy-meets-girl rom-coms like Hollywood does. When you talk to Italian producers about why this is, they say that there aren’t enough female stars in Italy that they could put in the films to attract a large audience. They have lots of male stars, which means they end up making choral comedies with 8 or 9 male protagonists, all of whom get different plotlines, rather than the Hollywood-style rom-com with one male and one female star.
il dipartimento
here at Bristol, we like the fact that we have more of a range and can study anything from Renaissance literature to contemporary comedy.
you go to Italy and meet all these fabulous Italian women who are interesting and doing all these amazing things and then you watch films and they’re either neurotic wives, nagging mothers or sex symbols who say a few lines and disappear
Photography: Flickr