The Cinema of Resistance : Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano and the Italian Film Industry

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Italian Film

From Conan the Barbarian to Gunan il guerriero: Re-contextualizing spaghetti sword and sorcery

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfio Leotta
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Sword And Sorcery ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
The Aesthetic

The release of Conan the Barbarian (1982) played a crucial role in the emergence of the sword and sorcery film, a subgenre of fantasy cinema featuring muscular heroes in violent conflict with wizards and other supernatural creatures. Italian genre filmmakers attempted to capitalize on the international popularity of sword and sorcery by quickly producing a number of low-budget films, which emulated the stylistic and narrative features of Conan. Over a period of six years, between 1982 and 1987, the Italian film industry produced almost two dozen sword and sorcery films, which achieved mixed results at the box office. Although recently an increasing number of international film scholars have focused on the critical examination of Italian genre cinema, to date, little attention has been devoted to the study of Italian sword and sorcery. By examining the aesthetic features of four Italian sword and sorcery films (Gunan il guerriero [1982], Ator l’invincibile [1982], Hercules [1983] and The Barbarians [1987]), as well as their modes of production and distribution, this article proposes the first comprehensive critical examination of this filone.

Eleonora Duse: An Actress-Manager for the Italian Film Industry in the 1910s

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Maria Pia Pagani
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
White Hair ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Original Case ◽  
Italian Film

From a historiographical point of view, the Italian diva Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) as an actress-manager offers an original case study in relation to her only film performance in Cenere ( Ashes, 1916). This is a film adapted from the eponymous novel by Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926). In the 1910s, when Duse decided to work in the Italian film industry, she was a celebrity and her name was a guarantee of success for the Ambrosio Company in Turin. The film producers wanted to use her celebrity in order to ensure success at the box office. As an actress-manager with a long and acclaimed international career in the theatre, Duse knew this mechanism very well, but her position was contrary to their expectations. In fact, she aimed to present herself as an anti-diva, with her wrinkle-furrowed face and white hair, proposing a fascinating artistic creation based on the ‘mother roles’ that she had created for the theatre. This paper explores new elements concerning the position of Duse as an actress-manager for the Italian film industry in the 1910s. It is focused on her strategy of reiterating her stage success in playing a mother. On film, she did not want to be an instrument used for commercial purposes, and she did not want to create a common popular diva film. With Cenere, Duse's capability as an actress-manager can be seen in her creation of this non-conventional, poetic role for the silent film industry in wartime Italy.

Bava Goes Fashion

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-14
Author(s):  
Roberto Curti ◽  
Roberto Curti
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Foreign Markets ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The World ◽  
Italian Film

This chapter recounts Mario Bava's seventh official solo feature film as a director, a present-day thriller set in the world of high fashion titled The Atelier of Death (L'atelier della morte). It also mentions Bava's two other Gothic horror movies released in Italy in the summer of 1963 that were destined primarily for foreign markets, especially in America. It discusses I tre volti della paura starring Boris Karloff and Mark Damon, and La frusta e il corpo with Christopher Lee and Daliah Lavi. The chapter describes Bava's debut film La maschera del demonio in 1960, which distributed overseas by American International Pictures under the title Black Sunday. It points out how the Italian film industry had increasingly been involved in bilateral and multinational co-productions since the first agreement signed with France in 1949.

The Italian Film Industry (1945–1985)

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War ◽  
Film Market ◽  
First Time

The chapter provides an overview of the history of the post-war Italian film industry from crisis to crisis, that is to say from the ground zero of 1945 (when the whole Italian film business had to be politically and economically reorganised, together with the rest of the war-torn country) to the ground zero of 1985 (the year in which, for the first time in almost three decades, Italian film production fell below the rate of 100 films made per year, as the culmination of a crisis that started in the mid-1970s). The chapter opens with an in-depth production history of I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), followed by an account of the 1958-1964 boom in the production of pepla, the historical-mythological adventures of the sword-and-sandal kind. Both cases (an isolated commercial failure the former; a short-lived box-office goldmine, or filone, the latter) are emblematic of the functioning of the Italian film industry between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s – a state-subsidised system mostly based on a constellation of medium, small and minuscule business ventures piggy-backing on popular genres/trends in the local and/or global film market.

scholarly journals EXPRESS: Investments in nascent project-based enterprises: The interplay between role-congruent reputations and institutional endorsement

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062199452
Author(s):  
Angelo Tomaselli ◽  
Joris Jan Ebbers ◽  
Giuseppe Torluccio
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Theory ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Upper Echelons ◽  
Private Investments ◽  
Project Idea ◽  
Italian Film

We study nascent project-based enterprises (PBEs) through the lens of upper echelons and institutional theory. We analyse the interplay between the different role-congruent reputations of their project entrepreneurs and the institutional endorsement of their project idea, theorizing how these affect PBEs’ ability to attract private investments. In the context of the Italian film industry, we find that the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role is crucial for attracting investors, while the artistic reputation of the project entrepreneur in the creative director role is crucial for attaining institutional endorsement of the project idea. Finally, we find that the effect of the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role on attracting investments is mediated by the institutional endorsement. We contribute to the literature on PBEs by demonstrating how specific combinations of project entrepreneurs’ roles and (role-congruent) reputations can directly and indirectly attract investments.

Bavaesque: The Making of Mario Bava as Italian Horror Auteur

2016 ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Peter Hutchings
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
Italian Film

In 2007 the writer/critic Tim Lucas published Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. This massive tome, glossily produced, extensively illustrated, and over 1,100 pages long, has since been described, with some justification, as ‘one of the most impressive books ever to have been written about any director’ (Williams, 2011: 162). The end result of over thirty years’ research, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark has served to underline, reinforce and possibly clinch once and for all Mario Bava’s status as a major figure not merely in Italian horror cinema but in world horror as well. However, such status has been bestowed entirely retrospectively, for during his directorial career – which ran from 1960 through to the mid-1970s – Bava, while a respected figure in the Italian film industry, received little critical attention and was not generally known to the film-going public, either in his native Italy or elsewhere.

Entrepreneurs and the State in the Italian Film Industry, 1919–1935

2011 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-798
Author(s):  
Marina Nicoli
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Joint Stock Company ◽  
Stock Company ◽  
Benito Mussolini ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
Italian Film

During its early years, entrepreneurs in the Italian film industry maintained a complicated relation with the state. The arrangements between the joint-stock company Società Anonima Stefano Pittaluga and the Italian government in the interwar period were typical. Initially, Italian banks financed productions, despite the difficulties entailed in assessing a film's potential profitability. Following the rise of Benito Mussolini, the state invested in the industry, viewing it as a means of building nationalism and shaping the country's culture. While the deal was disastrous for the quality of the films, it nevertheless enabled filmmakers to gain technical experience and acquire production facilities that they were later able to put to better use.

scholarly journals Practices and Contexts of the Italian Film Industry: An Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Stephen Gundle ◽  
Karl Schoonover ◽  
Stefano Baschiera
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Italian Film
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