Visual Anthropology, 24: 287305, 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online

DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2011.583564

La Fabbrica dei Sogni: Italian Cinematography, Collective Memory and National Identity
Salvatore Giusto
Italian cinematography is not a culturally and politically neutral means of artistic communication. A web of historical, political and sociocultural instances, as well as the technical features characterizing cinematography itself, configured the production of national visual narratives and their fruition in the Italian movie theaters as the two generative poles of a constantly reiterated ritualistic process. This form of social drama aims at a strategic construction of a collective Italian historical memory. Italian films are very much a means of cultural production. Their structural ownership by the state is organic to the hegemonic reification of a politically driven feeling of Italian national identity.

Cinematography is a powerful artificial device aiming at the construction of an alternative to the real life realities. Real life provides cinematography only with raw materials. Umberto Eco Cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake. Alfred Hitchcock

BLACK AND WHITE CINEMA: A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION The rise and establishment of the Italian Fascist regime during the so-called ventennio (19251945) was not a random historical phenomenon or the symptom of a peculiar form of Italian sociopolitical illness. Fascism was instead one of the most violent instruments through which the Italian capitalist class attempted to achieve the definitive regimentation of any contending social agency animating the national political debate of that age, including the working class, the labor unions and political parties. Fascism in Italy was a reactionary mass phenomenon
SALVATORE GIUSTO is an M.A. student in sociocultural anthropology at Brandeis University. His main academic interests are economic and political anthropology as well as mass-media studies. He will start a Ph.D. program in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto in September 2011. As a literary author, he has published in Italian Ritzomena. Cose che danzano [Lubrina edizioni, 2000] and, with Donato Losa, Le Ragazze non guardano lattai [Sperling and Kupfer edizioni, 2003]. E-mail: sgiusto@brandeis.edu or clearco82@hotmail.com 287

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founded, at the structural level, on national capital and supported, at the superstructural level, by ideological approval of the Italian middle class. The political alliance mediated by the Fascist Party between the Italian high bourgeoisie and the middle class was achieved, in an initial historical bloc (19201924), through the violent superimposition of a stable social order over the turbulent Italian civil society of the post-World War I period. This artificial though nevertheless effective social order was attained by the Fascists through repression of any form of political dissent and of socioeconomic claims of the politically organized working class. After the controversial election of Benito Mussolini as the Italian Prime Minister in 1924, assent to Fascism among the Italian public was ensured and reified through a series of culturally constructed and publicly imposed mythologies (through the media of the day and the educational system), which included the concept of a universal Empire, itself based on the undisputed superior nature of the Italian race, its political system and its military power. Structural violence, imperialist ideology, political totalitarianism and national capitalism represented the infrastructural base of the Fascist phenomenon. This can be interpreted, in ultima analisi, as the political product of the peculiar forms of class struggle characteristic of the Italian social space in the first half of the 20th century. From a sociocultural viewpoint the Fascist experience triggered a rapid acceleration of the progressive cultural process of Italianizzazione promoted by the central governments since the political unification of the Bel Paese in 1861. Following Count Camillo Benso di Cavours famous slogan, Today we created Italy, tomorrow we shall create the Italians [Zagarrio 2007: 54], the Fascists linked the enduring success of the Italian Empire to a process of ideological regimentation of the various regional cultures into a national hegemonic cultural mainstream. This mainstream was strategically defined by the Fascist state itself through its cultural and artistic institutions [ibid.: 56]. As claimed by Benedict Anderson, the political success of a nationalist revolution can be determined, in the long run, by its capacity to encompass the social actors cultural categories within a regimenting ideal notion of national communitas. The emergence of this ideological category in a population can be eventually controlled by the employment of ad hoc narratives establishing new linguistic, rhetorical and iconographic cognitive patterns [Anderson 1983: 1140]. The Italian Fascist revolution was no exception. Nationalist ideology was conceptualized and promoted by the Fascist authorities through a broad set of journalistic, literary, academic and artistic narratives that served as the instrumental vehicles for the production of a culturally as well as politically homogeneous citizenry, in a country characterized historically by important forms of cultural and economic localisms. This ambitious project was supported during the ventennio not only by the capitalist and the middle classes but also by most of the Italian intellectuals, who in many cases became organic to the Fascist cultural system and to its peculiar institutions [Panarari 2010: 13]. Fascist authorities, vice versa, always recognized that the effective accomplishment of their ambitions in terms of cultural hegemony over the masses depended on their strategic employment of national intellectual and artistic resources. In fact they were aware that the intellectuals efforts, if channeled politically, could potentially attract to the Fascist orbit the political consent

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of the proletarian masses of workers and peasants, thereby obtaining a de facto pacification of the Italian social landscape. In other words, Fascist organic intellectuals were officially put in charge of politically reshaping the cultural categories characterizing both the public and private spheres of the Italians daily lives. Their final aim was to transform those of the Italian population historically reluctant to any form of central authority into a docile mass of citizens, soldiers and consumers. Walter Benjamin argued that the Fascist authority was a product of its own aesthetic [Benjamin 1968: 241]. The Fascist state obtained a cultural monopoly of all public media outlets, and this allowed it to construct the narrative and semiotic fields through which it could develop any original form of political ideology and historical collective memory1 in Italy. These cultural constructions were assembled by Fascist intellectuals, as well as being promoted and distributed by the Fascist authorities, as commercial commodities. National cultural and artistic productions were openly employed by Mussolinis entourage to involve the Italians quietly in a totalizing process of collective memory-making.2 The information, the iconography and the rhetoric distributed publicly by the press in Italy, as well as by radio, theater, schools and the film industry, were conceptualized as an organic ideological bloc, the role of which was to support and legitimize the national capitalistic economic structures that represented the real source of any Fascist power. Consequently an ambitious, coherent and capillary propagandistic machine, based on a centralized distribution of public images, was created by the Fascist intelligentsia so as to legitimize to the masses the presence of this totalitarian order [Zagarrio 2007: 23]. This centralized system of controlled images produced by intellectuals and distributed among the masses by the state was made possible through the broad promotion and constant employment of the most modern technologies of visual representation available at that time, especially cinema. Since the 1920s the Italian film industry was openly supported, promoted and financed by public authorities with the purpose of enacting a capillary and homogeneous process of moral ` 1999: 348]. Mussolini himand aesthetic education of the Italian masses [Micciche self in 1923 supervised the foundation of the Luce Institute (Luce is Italian for Light but is also a poetic acronym for LUnione Cinematografica Educativa [The Educational Cinematographic Union]); a very authoritative Italian public institution to this day, in charge of producing and distributing detailed visual narratives about national historical, political and sociocultural trends [Zagarrio 2007: 182]. The rhetorical forms promulgated to Italian audiences by Fascist cinema were based semiotically on the iconic relationship between two opposing values that had historicly represented the spirit of the regime and the Italian nation. The first value was a teleological and quasi-positivistic sense of modernity indexed by both Fascist films plots [e.g., Costa 2001: par. 2] and by the technologies that allowed the very existence of the film medium in Italy. The second value was a constant choreographic and linguistic tension structurally encapsulating the Fascist need for modernity into the superior sense of duty required by the ancient (and politically reconstructed) national mos maiorum [Ben-Ghiat 2001: 7374]. The substantiation of this semiotic mediation through overly diffused visual narratives aimed at regimenting institutionally the

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public interpretation of the narratives themselves, and of the events they were mirroring.3 Fascist cinematographic narratives, themselves supported by a broader set of media (newspapers, radio, and academic institutions) promoted a de facto process of semiotic naturalization of the ideologies and social actions promoted by the regime [Parmentier 1994: 125155]. Thanks to the efforts of the Fascist state cinematography, which in the Duces own words was the most powerful weapon of the Italian regime,4 was deployed in the private and public life of Italians as a communicative and cognitive instrument, thereby becoming an integral part of their daily experience and cultural practices [Argentieri 1979; Hay 1987; Zagarrio 2007]. The specific cultural and political functions assumed by the Italian film industry during the Fascist regime had a huge impact on the way in which Italians integrated this powerful mass medium into their cultural landscape. On the one hand the masses conceptualized their consumption of visual narratives at movie theaters as important moments of social aggregation as well as collective formative experiences. On the other hand, Italian filmmakers became used to seeing themselves (and being seen by their own society) not just as artists but, most importantly, as publicly legitimated educators with a fundamental political and social role. As Mario Monicelli claimed recently during his last appearance in front of the cameras of RAI public television,5 this role was (and, as I will show, still is) one of producing visual narratives through which Italians private memories could not only be interpreted artistically but also fixed iconically. Most importantly they can be objectified into perennially reproducible representations of a common ideological past belonging to the Italian communitas. Consequently Italian films became a means of production of a collective Italian nationalhistorical memory through reiterated public enactments. The ultimate aim of this important process of memory-making was to educate Italians about their own social role in order to coordinate, coherently, their social actions according to the historical sociopolitical trends expressed by the filmmakers. In other words, this process aimed to establish and diachronically reify politically driven forms of Gramscian cultural hegemony [Gramsci 2007: 1519]. The sociocultural and political role assumed by the Italian cinema (and by its filmmakers) during the Fascist regime did not disappear from the Italian cultural landscape after the end of the Second World War. Since the creation of the Italian Republic in 1946 a new class of anti-Fascist filmmakers legitimated, ideologically and financially, by a new anti-Fascist political leadership, assumed the task of mediating between the Italians and their collective memory through the creation of ad hoc visual narratives. Italian filmmakers thus became interpreters of the sociocultural change characterizing both the post-war and contemporary Italian political conjunctures and, at the same time, were the jealous keepers of the Italian national past. Not surprisingly one of the main efforts to which post-war Italian filmmakers dedicated themselves was the elaboration of visual narratives synthesizing the collective experience lived by Italians under the Fascist dictatorship, in order to explain it to post-Fascist citizens and, on the other hand, to contextualize it within the cultural and political landscape hegemonically shaped by the new republican order. This endeavor was not a simple one. On the one hand post-war Italian filmmakers felt an ideological need to be coherent with their own

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anti-Fascist political and cultural background, the main superstructural source of their renovated social role. On the other hand their organic function under the post-war sociopolitical order (which was not entirely alien to the Cavourian and Mussolinian dream of realizing a culturally homogeneous Italian country through the superimposition of a national-cultural system over that of local actors) did not allow them to condemn tout court the pro-Fascist collaborationist attitude that had been shown by the social body during the ventennio. In the following pages I will show how the visual and narrative solutions employed by post-war Italian filmmakers for the production of their films, with the Fascist ventennio as a historical setting, were functional to the resolution of the paradoxes implicitly embodied in their own sociocultural role. This role was a product of the Fascist way of conceiving cinematography as an artistic expression and at the same time the most powerful weapon possessed by the Italian republican order to protect itself from its own controversial past. I will realize my programmatic aim in two steps integral to each other. In the next section I will outline why the production and consumption of national film products has become in Italy one of the main sources of collective historical memory for Italian persons. In so doing I will stress how the sociocultural role assumed by filmmakers, as organic intellectuals, was not imposed randomly on them by historical and political hegemonic agencies: it was instead a consequence of some of the specific technical features characterizing their films as public means of social communication. In the second part of this article I will perform a critical analysis of some of the most representative films through which Italian cinema successfully constructed its own reinterpretation of the Fascist age. As I will show, this interpretation influenced profoundly and often consciously contemporary Italians cultural understanding of their own recent past, and consequently their own selves, as integral parts of a historically and politically determined national and social body.

A NATIONAL FACTORY OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY The complex process of memory-making allowed by the production and distribution among the Italian population of original forms of national film narratives can be explained as the result of the dialectic interaction between two intertwined structural factors: (1) The direct ideological and economic support historically guaranteed by the Italian state (before and after the Fascist era) to the national film industry; (2) The way in which Italian people conceived culturally, since the Fascist era, the very act of going to the movies. It is not viewed by Italians as merely a form of entertainment but as a truly educative as well as ritualistic pedagogic experience. These two factors are both closely tied to the complex social and intellectual history of the Italian peninsula and to the technical features characterizing cinematography as a specific form of mass medium. The unconditional support given by the Fascist regime to the cinematographic `cle cultural conjuncture in form of expression finds its deep roots in the fin de sie which both Italian nationalist ideology and Italian cinema were historically

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conceived. In fact the history of the Italian cinema, as well as that of Italian nationalism, began at the end of the 19th century. ` re brothers themselves exported their technology to Rome during The Lumie the 1890s [Carabba 1974: 86]. Unlike France, in Italy filmic practice was conceived since the beginning not as a form of popular entertainment but as a bourgeois and intellectual artistic expression, the main function of which was to record national history through the mediation of the creative effort of a filmmaker. Consequently it is not surprising that the first known Italian film is a two-minute long documentary depicting a public blessing performed in the Vatican gardens by Pope Leo XIII, who on that occasion granted a special and heartfelt blessing for the camera recording the event [Carabba 1974: 52]. This sort of historicist spirit applied to film art directly inspired artistic work as well as the political ideology of the main exponents of Italian Futurism, whose objective was to produce a precise visual representation of complex and dynamic historical realities [Marinetti 1909]. Marinetti, Balla, Boccioni and the other Futurists looked explicitly to cinematography, Italian colonial expansion in Africa, and the Italian military intervention in World War I when they produced their artistic creations [Benjamin 1968: 242]. Ideologically speaking, the Italian colonial wars and military intervention in that Great War, both promoted by the Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti in the 1910s, were the foundational moments of Italian political nationalism. Italian Fascists inherited their positive attitude toward the film medium and their obsession for the nation, seen as the product of collective history, from the proximity of their own organic intellectuals to Futurist ideology, which was conceptualized by them not just as a way of artistic expression but as a dynamic philosophy of life [Carabba 1974: 114115]. The foundation of the Luce Institute in 1925 was the legislative act that openly established the first form of direct connection between Italian public authority and national cinema. However, it was not the only and structurally speaking the most important one. In 1937 Mussolini himself promoted and inaugurated ` (City of Cinema Studios). These large-scale stuin Rome the Studi di Cinecitta dios, occupying a large area of the Eternal City, were conceived and built with public funds on the Hollywood model in order to centralize, control and at the same time promote any creative form of Italian national cinema [Zagarrio 2007: ` would provide the best tech238]. According to the Fascist authorities, Cinecitta nologically advanced setting and infrastructure possible to Italian filmmakers and producers for the most economically competitive price available on the national market, pushing them to position their artistic productions within the public bureaucracy [ibid.: 239]. Moreover in 1939 the Italian government discussed and approved the so-called Alfieri law, which granted any filmmaker and producer willing to produce his=her visual narratives in Italy, and especially ` , important amounts of public funding as well as robust tax reliefs in Cinecitta [ibid.: 136]. The role assumed by the Fascist state in the national film industry as main financier, as well as owner of the means of production (the studios) through which the films were produced in Italy, determined a practice among filmmakers of perceiving their own professional identity as well as their political role as that of organic intellectuals.

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The collapse of Fascist power and political ideology in 1945, and its substitution with a new democratic regime founded on the compromise between parties ideally united only by their anti-Fascist approach to the res publica, generated in Italy a great deal of sociocultural change as well as a series of drastic political reforms in constitutional, internal and foreign politics [Krause 2010: 78]. Despite this the politics employed by the Republic in regard to cinema remained more or less the same as that adopted by the Fascist government, from the end of the ` Studios continued to be a public Second World War until the present. Cinecitta patrimony directly owned and administered by the Italian state until 1997, when the Ministry for Cultural Goods bestowed its direct management onto the ` Studios S.p.a., a private holding co-owned by private investors and CineCitta by the Ministry of the Economy.6 The Alfieri law which guarantees, at least nominally, public financing to any form of national cinema remains in effect today [Zagarrio 2007: 121]. Since the end of the 1940s all the major Italian filmmakers, including Rossellini, Fellini, Visconti, Bertolucci, and more recently Roberto ` Studios S.p.a.) filmed at Benigni (one of the main private investors of CineCitta ` , financed by the public least some of their most important movies in Cinecitta authority through the Alfieri law.7 Naturally I am not claiming here that the visual narratives produced by these authors, who were often very critical of the political system, have been subjected to the direct artistic supervision of the states public authority. I am just outlining how the agencies expressed by both the state and Italian filmmakers in the ongoing process of construction of a national cinema in the Bel Paese remained structurally intertwined during the Fascist era as well as during the post-war conjuncture. The relationship between these two agencies was determined historically by the Republic authorities will in imposing new forms of cultural hegemony on national public opinion and by the political role assumed since the post-war era by anti-Fascist organic intellectuals. The economic structure of production on which Italian cinema was based determined the superstructural regimentation of its authors within the cultural project pursued by the Italian state. In fact Italian post-war filmmakers, concretely absorbed into the same mode of artistic production in which their Fascist antagonists had been disciplined, shared with them the same conception of cinema as well as the same instruments of political activism. Consequently post-war Italian cinema has been developed in a state of structural and functional continuity from its prewar counterpart [Brunetta 2009: 89], aiming to be a true guiding form of art in terms of public representation of any officially recognized historical and political national category [ibid.: ix]. Post-war filmmakers became the new craftsmen and interpreters of Italian collective memory. At the same time they were the high priests orchestrating and celebrating the very ritual through which this collective memory could be adopted, interiorized and eventually negotiated by the personal experiences of the Italian people consuming their films as cultural commodities at movie theaters. The various historical variations of the ongoing process of collective memorymaking, promoted until the 1920s by the Italian governments through the regimentation of national cinema, were not only based on the creative role assumed by Italian filmmakers but also on the receptive role assumed by their audience.

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The intrinsic characteristics of the cinematographic instrument as a public mass medium, as well as the ways in which its execution was presented to the public audience, become functional in Italy to the realization of a hegemonic project aiming to impose a politically driven and universally accepted collective (re)interpretation of the Italian past. My argument can be exemplified by some quantitative data regarding the forms of post-war cinema that were most successfully promoted, at least in commercial terms, among both national and international audiences: 69 percent (18 out of 26) of all the Academy Award recipients among Italian film productions from 1948 to the present are historical films. The other 31 percent (8 out of 26) are movies explicitly addressing the Italian sociopolitical conjuncture characterizing the years in which they were produced.8 These data are especially important because the Italian films presented to the AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in Hollywood) for a possible nomination for an Oscar are previously selected in Italy according to their success with the national audience and critics. This selection is done every year by an ad hoc commission mainly composed of Italian public and private film produ` 2011: 8891]. cers under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture [Mamm As depicted masterfully by Giuseppe Tornatore in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (or anglophone Cinema Paradiso, 1988), the cinema experience has been promoted among the Italian population (especially by its subaltern components, in the industrial North as well as in the rural Mezzogiorno) by filmmakers (and by the public authority structurally supporting their labor) as a totalizing collective ritual through which individuals, as organic members of a local community of paesani, could find the instruments to connect their own selves to the national (and metonymically universal) communitas. Consequently the national audiences memories of the past, present social condition of life and its cultural values were constantly connected to those projected on the screens of their local public movie theaters. Italian films (and, more recently and controversially, Italian newspapers and television) become the visual medium through which, locally and regionally, people in Italy could be transformed into informed and experienced citizens without completely abandoning the structures and superstructures typifying their own local realities. It is not surprising that from 1936 to 1970 both the number of movie theaters available per 100,000 inhabitants in Italy as well as the per capita amount of money spent every year by people for the consumption of visual narratives constantly increased.9 As demonstrated by the quantitative data collected by ISTAT (the Italian National Statistical Institute) for the period under consideration, such a growth has not only been triggered by the exponential development of new movie theaters in the most peripheral areas of the country.10 But it has, most importantly, been supported by a parallel growth in film consumption among every Italian socioeconomic, geographic, age and gender group.11 The cultural role given in Italy, at least in the eyes of filmmakers and public authorities, to the consumption of films is depicted successfully in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso through the eager curiosity, almost a state of anxiety, expressed by the main protagonist of the movie, Salvatore Di Vita;12 for him it is finally possible to watch during his adulthood all the love scenes that had been cut out by his hometown moral authority (the priest of this Sicilian village) from the films that

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he had watched at the theater during his childhood. At the end of Tornatores visual narrative, Salvatores consumption in Rome of footage finally revealing to him these forbidden scenes allows him to contextualize his own unfortunate sentimental life within a universally shared notion of love (because universally projected on theater screens) and consequently to give a coherence to his personal experiences. In other words, the Italian way of watching films inside movie theaters or arenas en plein air is a very ritualistic one, because it allows transformative passages of status among persons, through their collective participation in a performative drama in which movie theater operators, film producers and audiences are deeply involved together [Auslander 2010; Turner 1974]. The protagonists of the ritualistic social drama promoted and allowed by Italian cinema institutions are the audience (in its double status as group of locally determined individuals and as an indistinct mass of citizens), the theater workers (as local cultural operators), and the workers who produced the film (as national cultural operators). Structurally speaking, the drama is achieved by a double exchange between labor and value. The first exchange is produced between the audience as a group of local individuals and the two groups of workers just referred to. The spectators private value (their money) is exchanged for tickets allowing them entrance to the theater. This value will pay the workers wage, will be transformed into new movies or new projections (and eventually into surplus-value). In other words, it is required of the spectators to allow consciously the diachronic reiteration of the ritual itself through a symbolic financial sacrifice. The second exchange is instead achieved by the public as an indistinct mass of national citizens who, through payment of their taxes to the state, allow the realization of national films. The existing dichotomy between the public and the private nature of the audience in Italian movie theaters is dialectically resolved through the ` la Van Gennep ritual itself. According to the most classic interpretations a [2004], the ritual produces the very passage of the spectators from their original status as individuals characterized by atomized and anarchic memories into a new status where, as informed citizens, they can legitimately consider themselves to be integrated into a collectively shared national set of values and historical experiences. In so doing, the ritual generates the diachronic perpetuation of the superstructures legitimizing and at the same time shaping Italian society as a political body. During the first ritual phase the spectators, whose values and memories are relegated to their local and even private experiences, are separated by their local society and conducted into a closed space (the movie theater, the arena). Their state of separation is formalized and permitted by a symbolic economic sacrifice (the ticket fee), which is generated by a personal act of will (spectators as individuals freely deciding to go to the movies). During the second ritual phase, the spectators are deprived of their own mobility (being constrained to sit down in a theater seat) and of their capacity to look at their own local reality (the movie theaters walls and the bodies of other spectators cannot be observed by spectators during the film projection, for every artificial light is turned off). Nobody should talk during the projection of a film, at least, not in Italy. Nobody can freely express his=herself or personal opinions

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to other spectators until the end of the film. This condition of physical and sensorial deprivation pushes the spectator to fix all of his=her attention on the only source of overwhelming light inside the theater, which is of course the screen. These physical factors stimulate spectators capacity to co-participate emotionally and intellectually, as a united social body, in the virtual reality constructed artistically for us by the filmmaker, and to re-enact in real time its semiotic interpretation [Eco 2000: 132]. In other words, the liminal condition of the immobile spectators gives them the perceptive illusion of a spatial and temporal mobility, over-stimulating their perception and finally allowing them to interject into their own memories the representations that are projected on the screen [Friedberg 1994: 20]. The final result of this process is the construction, at a cultural as well as an experiential level, of a direct connection between the spectators experiences, feelings and memories and the ones lived by the characters in the narrative. These fictional experiences are perceived by spectators as universal as well as iconic of their own memories; because the mechanical reproducibility of the film frames deprives the images they depict of any possibility of being immediately contextualized by the observers in a determinate space and time or, as Benjamin would argue, of their aura [Benjamin 1968: 224225]. Consequently, during the liminal phase of the ritual, the fictional universality of the film shots can be finally connected by the Italian public to the universal cultural authority represented by an idea of nation promoted by the state. In fact the national state in Italy is not only the main agency allowing the production of films; it is, most importantly, a political and cultural agency constantly appearing as ephemeral to the individuals perception. The state, like the virtual realities created by filmmakers, cannot be easily contextualized in a determinate space or time, by virtue of its being a superstructural construction. The third ritual and last phase is characterized by the reintegration of the public into the local reality. The credits of the movie are projected onto the screen, revealing to a spectator the real names of the actors impersonating the protagonists of the visual fiction they have observed during the liminal phase. Ex abrupto, the lights are turned on: the spectators can then choose their options freely. They can remain seated or, if they prefer, stand on their feet. They can remain in the theater or, if they prefer, can return to a private dimension. They can start to communicate with each other, just being careful not to reveal too many details about the movie they have just watched to whomever will attend the next projection of that film. Finally, at the theater exit, the audience is no longer groups of individuals: it is instead an organic collective of informed citizens. These spectators are connected to each other, and to any other citizen=spectator in the country, by a common superstructural interpretation of the reality that, promoted pragmatically by the state, has been transmitted through an act of labor and interiorized by the national audience through its own perception. The constant tensions between public representation of reality and private experience, and between the creative efforts of Italian filmmakers and the interpretive ones enacted by the national audience, both being modulated by the regimenting and hegemonic authority of the Italian state, which has constantly shaped the forms and the content of Italian cinema over the last ninety years. The cultural mission awarded to filmmakers during and after the post-war

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conjuncture was to promote the construction and diffusion of a unitary anti-Fascist popular culture based on a collective fictional experience of personal detachment from the era of Fascism. This mission has been permitted and promoted by structural dynamics in which Italian cinema had been involved, paradoxically, with the same Fascist governments during the 1920s. Finally, this cultural mission has been accomplished, as I will show in the next section, through the strategic employment of every ideological, technical, visual, and ritual resource that was available to the Italian cinema Maestris grasp.

DEALING WITH A NEW PAST: THE ITALIAN FILMMAKERS (RE)INTERPRETATION OF THE FASCIST VENTENNIO The specific cultural role of Italian cinema was and still is to produce and publicly show fictional realities that, being experienced by the audience ritualistically, can influence Italians perception of their own past in order to promote processes of self-identification with a hegemonically superimposed national cultural mainstream. Given this, it is no surprise that one of the first and most important priorities expressed by post-war Italian cinema was to provide its audience with the instruments to deal ideologically with the crisis of national identity that had been generated by the recently ended Fascist historical experience. On the one hand the structural violence on which the Fascist model of national culture was based and imposed, the atrocities of the Second World War, and the general sense of loss generated by the drastic sociopolitical change characterizing the post-war conjuncture, stimulated among Italians (and among filmmakers) a certain urgency for elaborating a new form of national identity as well as a new way to interpret collectively their recent past [Krause 2010: 4759]. On the other hand the degree of collusion between different components of the Italian social body and the Fascist power was historically evident and culturally disturbing to post-war Italian public opinion as well as to the new anti-Fascist Italian political leadership. Fascism, as a cultural and historical hegemonic agency deeply re-shaping Italian society, could not be avoided and at the same time accepted. Italian filmmakers (like many other sociocultural operators in Italy, such as literary authors, academic authorities and journalists) tried to resolve this paradox through progressive introduction inside the national ideological repertoire of a new model of Italianness antithetical to the one proposed during the Fascist era. According to this new pattern of values of national identity, Italians should not view themselves as a people of hard workers, warriors or legislators sharing with each other the teleological aim to guide the world through the moral and political authority of their Empire. They should instead think about themselves as a creative and liberal people, characterized by an innate sense of smartness and romanticism, whose universal cultural mission was to connect the entire Western World to its own historical roots through their genio. If the Fascist model of Italianness was iconically linked to a creative reinterpretation of the Roman Ages aesthetic and cultural values, the new Republican order promoted a pattern of national identity with profound historical roots in the Florentine and

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Venetian Renaissance, in the Risorgimentos claim for national independence, and in the Partisans struggle against the Fascist State. These two models were always depicted by Italian cinema as mutually contradictory, alien to each other, and impossible to be mediated by any kind of dialectic process. The very existence of a Fascist pattern of Italianness within the social and personal experience of Italians has never been depicted by the national cinema, with very few contemporary exceptions, as the result of a historical, economic and political process in which the entire Italian social body co-participated. It has instead been shown as a sort of irrational perversion that polluted the original cultural spirit of some Italians, who imposed their power on the others through their inexplicable brutality. In other words, Italians were basically not Fascists: they were the victims of the Fascists. Fascism in Italy was an alien virus corrupting the moral health of the country (but whence?), a collective mental illness that was in no way generated by the socioeconomic contradictions implicitly belonging to the economic system. Fascist violence was shown by Italian post-war cinema only when it was directly damaging, humiliating and over-powering of the Italian populace. It was instead instrumentally and systematically hidden when it was directed to non-Italian targets in the context of World War II, of the internal racial persecutions, of the horrors generated by Italian colonial administrations. Any mention of the structural collusion between the Fascist Party, Italian capitalism and the middle class (the two socioeconomic agencies still hegemonic during the new Republican conjuncture), which was so over-stressed by Fascist rhetoric during the ventennio, suddenly disappeared from the screens of Italian theaters. Meaningful examples of the visual and narrative expedients employed by Italian filmmakers to promote politically correct interpretations of the recent past can be found since the late 1940s in the film masterpieces realized by the main exponents of Italian Neorealism. This original Italian style of film expression, whose aesthetic and political ambitions were influenced by the post-war publication of the Gramscian theory about intellectuals culturally and economically propulsive role within their own society [Gramsci 2007: 1386], openly aimed at challenging any reintegration of the Fascist historical ` 1999: 911]. experience into the Italian national-popular landscape [Micciche ` aperta (in English, Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellinis masterpiece Roma citta 1945), probably the most representative Neorealist visual manifesto, is in this sense a paradigmatic example. His visual narrative is set in Rome, during the months anticipating June 4, 1944, when American troops entered the capital, thus finally freeing it from the Fascist regime and from German military occupation. The films protagonists are a heterogeneous group of Roman Partisans belonging to different social classes and schools of thought, including Communist activists and Don Pietro, a profoundly anti-Fascist Catholic priest. The Partisans attempts at restoring the democratic order in Italy are constantly frustrated not just by the brutal efficiency of the German invaders but most importantly by their own private and irrational ambitions, indexing to Fascist values. The romantic jealousy felt by Marina, one of the Partisans, for her own comrade Manfredi, pushes the girl to denounce him to the Nazi authorities. This instigates their violent repression of the entire Partisan cell. The Roman populace is depicted as completely alien from

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the Fascist sociocultural order, which is not even represented visually in the movie, being replaced metonymically by the presence of the German occupants. The only possible cultural connection and political alliance between Romans and Fascists or Germans is determined by a strong feeling of jealousy, which is depicted not just as the perverted product of the intrinsically romantic nature of Italians but, most importantly, as a form of irrational and egoistic craziness. There is no possible dialogue between the true Italians represented in the movie and the Fascist or German aliens occupying their social landscape. In one of the most celebrated scenes in the film, Pina, a Roman Partisan fabulously interpreted by Anna Magnani, is forced to assist impotently in the capture of her beloved comrade Francesco by the German Army. In the first frames Pina is shown in front of an ancient church, indexing her belonging to the Italian cultural order, when a German officer is trying to harass her sexually in front of her own young son, who is dressed as an altar boy. The passage in front of the church by a truck containing the recently captured Francesco gives Pina the strength to slam the German officer and run to the truck, followed by the young boy. Suddenly a machine-gun blasts and Pina literally falls like a rag-doll onto the asphalt. The first worry of the German officers, whose facial traitstheir own identity as human beingsare never framed by the camera, is to separate the young altar boy from the dead body of his own mother. The kid tries to resist but is dragged away violently by a guard in black uniform who has neither a face nor even a voice. In the last long shot of the scene the only person allowed by the circumstances and by Rossellinis camera to embrace Pinas dead body is Don Pietro. His embrace is depicted in a fashion that recalls very closely Michelangelos `among the most celebrated artistic productions of the Italian Renaissance. Pieta A different kind of visual rhetoric has been employed for the same political and cultural purposes by Federico Fellini, formerly a Neorealist filmmaker13 who during his long career became one of the most celebrated and internationally influential exponents of Italian cinema. In Amarcord (a Romagnol dialectal expression for it comes back to my heart, most commonly translated, in Italian as well as in English, with I remember, 1973), Fellini depicts, with his dreamlike aesthetic and narrative style, the daily life during the 1930s of an imaginary town in Emilia Romagna which reminds one very closely of the city of Rimini where the director spent his childhood. Fellinis camera represents the paesani of the town visually with the kind of sight that a child might have [Brunetta 2009: 232]. An actor interpreting Fellini himself gives, as a storyteller, the narrative tempo to the entire plot. A long film scene shows a military parade organized by the local authorities in honor of Benito Mussolinis visit to the little place14 for a public speech. When the Duce arrives at the local train station a dense and mysterious cloud of black smoke invades the piazza where all the local Fascist authorities are waiting for him. Suddenly the camera is pointed toward the huge crowd of paesani waiting for the event. They look hyperactive, out of their minds, irrationally seized by sacred fury as in some ancient Dionysiac ritual. A woman yells that she needs to touch Mussolini in order to get healed. Suddenly the smoke disappears. The camera has no time to frame the Duce because the Fascists, headed by their leader, start to run furiously across the street as if in a sort of noisy and confused carnival. Fellinis camera closes

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up on the faces of some of the running Fascists who, one by one, explain to the spectators the reasons why they deserve their loyalty to the regime. Their short speeches are very funny, abstract and made with either baroque rhetoric or scurrilous irony. Fellinis Fascists dont really look organic to any coherent Fascist ideology. They just run like crazy without any serious reason. The only calm person at the scene is the narrator, Fellinis avatar. He pronounces his own last speech directly to the spectator, claiming to be proud of being Italian because of his countrys real history that, just like the Renaissance buildings composing the town, nobody is honoring anymore. Italian peoples support for the Fascist state does not look in Amarcord to be anything logically or even economically motivated. The Fellinian Fascists are empty characters: they are true expressions of an alien and decontextualized rhetoric that for a while pervaded the country as a collective coup de fou. This rhetoric mysteriously arrived at the town some day, but mysteriously disappeared the day after, like the black smoke surrounding Mussolinis body. The day after the parade, the town comes back to being inhabited by a calm, hard-working community. Nobody would talk again about Fascism for the rest of the film. Mussolini went away after the parade, the Renaissance buildings remained. During the 1970s another Maestro of Italian cinematography, Bernardo Bertolucci, expressed his own interpretation of the Italian Fascist past. His Novecento (in English, 1900, 1976) is a five-hour epic movie, aiming to depict the social struggles structurally generating the Italian sociocultural landscape during the 20th century. The movies narrative plot is focused on the vicissitudes of two friends who, both born on January 27, 1901, in the same cascina (Northern Italian sharecropping farm), are constrained by their lives, and by the Marxist theoretical model visually hinted at by Bertoluccis camera, to be irreducible enemies. Olmo is a Communist peasant, Alfredo the libertine son of the local landlord. The intertwined political, familial and sexual experiences of these two characters, as well as the forms assumed by the social struggle of the Italian proletariat and capitalist classes, are at some point overturned by the Fascist regime. This is iconized, in the cascina context, by Attila,15 a truly vile middle-class bailiff converted to the Fascist cause for opportunistic economic reasons. In Bertoluccis narrative both the capitalistic class and the proletariat, whose perennial struggle structurally shaped any possible form of a national sense of Italianness, were in some way politically and culturally raped by the Fascists. Fascism entered into the Italian social body as a kind of virus pushing Italian society to cannibalize itself from within. Attila is represented as an insanely brutal villain who, shot after shot, kills innocent people, pregnant women and even cute kittens, without any apparent reason and always in the most brutal ways possible. Despite his anti-Fascist political attitude Alfredo, the Italian capitalist, is in no way able to contain or even understand Attilas ambitions and violent excesses. This is because the specific forms assumed by the Fascist authority are deeply eccentric to the traditional cultural and political patterns superstructurally allowed by Italian economic structures. Even Olmo, the Communist activist, is not able to deal effectively with the Fascist power. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film he tries to rebel against Attilas power, covering him with fresh muck that he had purposely taken from his own cow,

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and in front of all the cascinas workers. The proletarians waste of the agrarian means of production (the cows muck) only has the consequence of generating an even more bloody Fascist repression, one dispensed to the dissident peasants in a terrible day of black storms by Attila himself. In the movies last part the end of the Second World War is depicted by Bertolucci as the end of a psychotic and not completely interpretable (at least in Marxist terms) nightmare. Any Fascist character is violently eliminated by Communist Partisans or by other kinds of proletarian agency. Moreover, a true damnatio memoriae is enacted by both the capitalist and the proletarian classes who, freed by the Fascist alien and alienating perversion, can return at last to their traditional forms of social struggle. In other words, they can finally come back to being Italians. The visual (re)interpretation of the Fascist past expressed by Rossellini, Fellini and Bertolucci is connected by a crucial common element: they all describe Fascism as an irrational ideology that, violently superimposed from above on the entire Italian populace, polluted its national identity as a debilitating cultural illness. Generally speaking, this fictional reading of the Italians collective past has been reified also by more recent Italian cinema. Mediterraneo (The Mediterranean Sea, 1991) by Gabriele Salvatores, for example, is focused on the dichotomy between the warm and self-ironic sense of Italianness embodied in its protagonists and the cold, irrational brutality of the Fascist superstructures. Mediterraneo is a tragicomedy presenting the story of an Italian military platoon that, during the Second World War, is sent to colonize a nameless Greek island. Month after month the soldiers are forgotten by their headquarters, separated from their homeland and from the alienating violence of the war. The only option available to the Italian camice nere to survive is establishing deeply human relationships with the defenceless inhabitants of the island (all the islands native male population having been already deported by the Germans) and with each other, so finally rediscovering their true selves. Every single soldier in the platoon visually embodies a specific form of post-Fascist stereotypical Italian character (the romantic lover, the intellectual, the miles gloriosus, the family man, the mountain man from the Alps, the Southern peasant, etc.), as in a sort of postmodern Commedia dellArte. The sense of freedom and self-realization allowed by their concrete and symbolic escape is superbly expressed in one of the most significant scenes in the film: the Italian colonizers improvise a bonfire on the beach, deciding to smoke some marijuana together and, like old friends, talk to each other about their common experience as Fascist soldiers and as runaways. The pipe they ritually share becomes the catalyst unifying these different kinds of Italian into a homogeneous social body. Salvatores camera is staticly framing the entire group of smokers in the first moment, suddenly performing a series of dynamic close-ups when the soldiers become progressively higher. In the last shot Nicola Lo Russo, the former ultra-Fascist sergeant of the platoon (interpreted by a superb Diego Abatantuono), performs a funny parody of a Mussolini-style public speech, peremptorily declaring: Starting from today marijuana will be legally banned from the Italian Empire! His former comrades, and actual friends, answer him in the same tone: Moreover, starting from today whatever else is good for the Italian population will be legally banned from the Italian Empire!

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Irony is the mean of expression through which Gabriele Salvatores, as well as most of the other major authors of contemporary Italian cinema, including Roberto Benigni and Corrado Guzzanti,16 perpetuate the process of memorymaking initially enacted by the Neorealist dramas. This process permits, today as in the immediate post-war era, the superstructural replacement of the personal histories of Italian people with a collectively shared and publicly legitimated fictional version of them. The ultimate aim of this process, made possible by the cinema, is the creation and constant reification of a fictional national collective past. This is a true hegemonic cultural production connecting the different Italian persons to each other in a culturally and politically homogeneous social body. CONCLUSION Cinematography, political power and national ideology, at least in the Italian case, entertain a profoundly intertwined relationship. The specific mode of artistic production established in the Bel Paese during the 1920s by the Fascist dictatorship deeply shaped connections between the Italian collective memory and this powerful mass medium. At the same time it determined the ways in which Italian people look at their (fictional or nonfictional) past in order to define culturally their own selves. This cultural and political process created a circular process aiming to regiment the Italian population into the hegemonic cultural categories promoted by the state. The visual narratives produced by Italian filmmakers become ritualistically the means of production of the Italian collective memory, which is interiorized by the Italians, becoming the means of production of the Italian national identity. This national identity is the source of any loyalty deserved by the Italian actors to the state, which is the owner of the means of production that make possible the realization of filmmakers visual narratives. The constant reiteration since the 1920s until nowadays of this circular cultural process of hegemonic regimentation is one of the main factors determining the ongoing existence of a politically shaped, collectively shared notion of Italian culture.17 NOTES
1. The notion of collective memory has been broadly employed and discussed by many authoritative theorists [see, e.g., Halbwachs 1992; Khun 1988; Nora 1978], who often contributed to explore the structural links existing between its construction=reification in Italy and the visual narratives expressed by the film medium [see, e.g., OLeary 2007]. I will employ in this article, for the sake of simplicity, the working definition of collective memory elaborated by Pierre Nora. According to Nora, collective memory is any conscious or unconscious memory, or ensemble of memories, regarding experiences that have been lived and=or mythologized by any given contemporary social group considering its past as an integral part of its own cultural identity [Nora 1978: 398]. The narratives mythologized by the Fascist regime through its propagandistic machine aimed at the naturalization among Italian persons of its own ideological categories, which became part of the Italians collective memory [Barthes 1972: 128]. 2. A process of collective memory-making is defined here as one allowing the individuals experiences to become historically meaningful for the entire social groups to which they belong as social identity markers.

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3. A perfect example of this is the LUCE Institute newsreels about Mussolinis Battle for Grain in 1925 [Ben-Ghiat, 2001: 71]. ` larma piu ` forte was pronounced for the 4. The popular slogan La cinematografia e first time in 1932 by Benito Mussolini during a public speech on the occasion of the Venice Film Festivals first inauguration. Interestingly, this sentence has been successively transformed into a true motto, being diffused by the Fascist propagandistic machine via a broad set of noncinematographic mass media (radio, newspapers, graffiti on public buildings, etc. . . .) [Zagarrio 2007: 200201]. In the fledgling Soviet Union V. I. Lenin had told his Commissar of Education, A. V. Lunacharsky, exactly the same thing. 5. The integral 14-min. last speech of the recently departed Italian filmmaker Mario Monicelli can be found, in Italian, on the RAI2 TV Network official website: http:// www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-f86dc5b7-a7dc-42b2-8a3ac37a0570cfc3.html?p=1 (accessed May 30, 2011). ` Studios S.p.a. at http://www.cinecittastudios. 6. See the official website of the CineCitta it/ (accessed May 27, 2011). ` Studios S.p.a. official website, which can 7. Here again my main source was the CineCitta be found at http://www.cinecittastudios.it/ (accessed May 30, 2011). 8. See the data published on http://guida69.interfree.it/oscar.htm (accessed May 30, 2011). 9. Source: Documentatione Statistica per lo Spettacolo 19362010 (Statistical Documentation for the Show Business 19362010), published on line by the ISTAT (Italian National Statistical Institute) at http://www.istat.it (accessed May 27, 2011). 10. See note 9. 11. See note 9. 12. Salvatore Di Vita can be meaningfully translated in English with Savior of life, but also as Salvatore the experienced and as Saviour of the experienced ones. ` aperta screenplay. 13. Fellini actively participated in the composition of the Roma citta 14. Mussolinis visits to Rimini during the ventennio were frequent and well documented, since the Italian dictator also, like Federico Fellini, spent his childhood in Romagna. 15. Attilas name reminds us that the bloody Hun leader, as the Fury of God, suddenly arrived from the mysterious East in order to brutally maraud the Roman Empire. ` bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), a powerful tragicomic 16. Benigni is the author of La vita e visual narrative exploring the alienating experience of an Italian Jewish father during the ventennio. Guzzanti is the filmmaker of Fascisti su Marte (Fascists on Mars, 2006), an independent cinematographic extravaganza depicting, through visual parody of the Fascist newsreels produced by the Istituto Luce, the grotesque adventures of some camice nere sent by Mussolini during the 1930s to colonize the Red Planet in order to turn it into the Black one. 17. This article has necessarily been concerned solely with Italian film directors, and their relations with both the state and the public. For a light-hearted contrast, readers might like to look at Hollywood in James Clapps article, The Romantic Travel Movie, Italian-Style, in an earlier issue of Visual Anthropology [22(1): 5263].

REFERENCES
Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso. Argentieri, Mino 1979 Locchio del regime. Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo [The Regimes Eye. Information and Propaganda in Fascist Cinema]. Florence: Vallecchi Editore.

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Auslander, Mark 2010 How Families Work. Journal of Family Life. http://www.journaloffamilylife.org/ (accessed May 27, 2011). Barthes, Roland 1972 Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 2001 Fascist Modernities. Italy 19221945. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter 1968 Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Brunetta, Gian Piero 2009 The History of Italian Cinema: from its Origins to the Twenty-first Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carabba, Carlo 1974 Il cinema del ventennio nero [Cinema during the black twenty years]. Florence: Vallecchi Edizioni. Costa, Antonio 2001 Il Cinema del ventennio fascista [Fascist ventennio cinema]. http://www.muspe.unibo.it/ corso/corsi/sci/sintlez2.htm (accessed May 27, 2011). Eco, Umberto 2000 La bustina di Miverva [Athenas sugar-bag]. Milan: Bompiani Edizioni. Friedberg, Anne 1994 Window Shopping: Cinema and the Post-Modern. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gramsci, Antonio 2007 Quaderni dal Carcere [Prison notebooks]. Bologna: Einaudi Edizioni. Halbwachs, Maurice 1992 On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hay, James 1987 Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: the Passing of the Rex. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Khun, Annette 2002 An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd. Krause, Elizabeth 2010 Unraveled, a Weavers Tale of Life Gone Modern. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. `, Alessandra Mamm 2011 Oscar a Perdere [How an Oscar can be trashed]. LEspresso, 57(3): January 20. Marinetti, Tommaso 1909 Futurist Manifesto. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html (accessed May 30, 2011). ` , Lino Micciche 1999 Il Neorealismo cinematografico Italiano. Venice: Marisilio Editori. Nora, Pierre moire collective. In La nouvelle histoire. Jacques le Goffe, ed. Pp. 398401. Paris: Retz. 1978 Me OLeary, Alan 2007 Tragedia allitaliana: Cinema e terrorismo tra Moro e memoria [Italian-style tragedy: Cinema and terrorism, Aldo Moro and memory]. Tissi: Angelica Editore. Panarari, Massimiliano 2010 Legemonia sotto culturale. LItalia da Gramsci al gossip [Subcultural hegemony: Italy from Gramscis age to the Gossip one]. Bologna: Einaudi Edizioni. Parmentier, Richard 1994 Signs in Society. Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

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Turner, Victor 1974 Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Symbolic Actions in Human Societies. London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, Arnold 2004 The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge. Zagarrio, Vito 2007 Primato: arte, cultura, cinema del Fascismo attraverso una rivista esemplare [Primato: Fascist art, culture, and cinema explained through a paradigmatic review]. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

FILMOGRAPHY
Amarcord 1973 Federico Fellini, director. Starring Pupella Maggio, Magali Noel and Ciccio Ingrassia. Color feature film, 127 mins. Produced by F.C. Produzioni. Distributor: The Criterion Collection (USA), PIC Distribuzione (Italy). Fascisti su Marte [Fascists on Mars] 2006 Corrado Guzzanti, and Igor Skofic, directors. Starring Corrado Guzzanti, Marco Marzocca, and Pasquale Lillo Petrolo. Color feature film, 100 mins. Produced by Fandango. Distributor: Fandango Distribuzione. La Vita e bella [Life is Beautiful] 1997 Roberto Benigni, director. Starring Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi. Color feature film, 120 mins. Produced by Cecchi Gori Group and Melampo Cinematografica. Distributor: Miramax Films (USA), Cecchi Gori Distribuzione (Italy). Mediterraneo [The Mediterranean Sea] 1991 Gabriele Salvatores, director. Starring Diego Abatantuono, Claudio Bigagli, Giuseppe Cederna and Ugo Conti. Color feature film, 96 mins. Produced by Silvio Berlusconi Communications, A.M.A. Film, Cecchi Gori Group, and Penta film. Distributors: Miramax Films (USA), Cecchi Gori Home Video (Italy). Novecento [1900] rard Depardieu and Dominique 1976 Bernardo Bertolucci, director. Starring Robert De Niro, Ge Sanda. Color feature film, 318 mins. Produced by Produzioni Europee Associate (Rome), s, and Artemis Film. Distributors: Paramount Pictures Les Productions Artistes Associe (USA), Eagle Pictures (Italy). Nuovo Cinema Paradiso [Cinema Paradiso] 1988 Giuseppe Tornatore, director. Starring Philippe Noiret, Enzo Cannavale and Antonella Attili. Color feature film, 173 mins. Produced by Cristaldifilm. Distributors: HBO Home Video (USA), Dolmen Home Video (Italy). Roma Citta aperta [Rome, Open City] 1945 Roberto Rossellini, director. Starring Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi and Marcello Pagliero. B & W film, 105 mins. Produced by Excelsa Film. Distributors: Image Entertainment (USA), Minerva Film (Italy).

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