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From Cinecittà to the Small Screen: Italian Cinema After theMid‐1970s Crisis

Tiziana Ferrero‐Regis¹

Prologue

Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1986) and Jean‐Jacques Annaud’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1987) were the last two international coproductions that were partially shot in Cinecittà after the 1970s crisis, until Hollywood returned to Cinecittà in the new millennium, via Miramax. Several international and national factors, among these the sudden withdrawal of Hollywood production from Italy, reduced the spaces of film production. The international film studio that was once abuzz—with extras; set and costume designers; directors such as Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, and Vittorio De Sica; and technicians, photographers, and special effects professionals—was left to languish until the early 1990s, when the Italian government devised a rescue plan through which the public film sector would be open to private investors.² After several years of negotiations, in 1997, a group of seven companies bought the complex for US$35 million, concentrating on the production of low‐budget television shows (including reality programs such as Grande Fratello [Big Brother]), music videos, and commercials.

The history of Cinecittà is emblematic because it parallels the history of Italian cinema, detailing its ups and downs, which depended on Hollywood’s offshore production in Italy. It is thus not a surprise that this chapter starts with the end of what had been a golden era for the Italian cinema industry. The decline of the national film industry began with Hollywood’s progressive withdrawal of capital investment from Italy from the middle of the 1960s. The law on cinema passed in 1965 restricted the access of non‐Italians in key roles such as lead actors, screenwriters, producers, and directors, with the aim of protecting the national industry and national identity. A secondary effect was that it became difficult for Italy to export films without famous foreign names and big budgets. Italian producers and directors were forced to work on low‐budget films that often failed to find favor even with Italian audiences. By 1970, Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis had left the country, followed by Carlo Ponti, while the major film company Titanus was forced to divest its distribution arm. De Laurentiis relocated in the United States, where he achieved mixed success. These three big producers of film were synonymous with blockbusters, but also with high quality medium‐budget films—typically, the commedia all’italiana. As De Laurentiis and Ponti left the country, it became clear that the Italian film industry was in an identity and economic crisis.

Introduction

This chapter addresses the Italian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, discussing the cultural and industrial dimensions of Italian cinema of the two decades, and offering a snapshot of the themes and issues that emerged in this period. In terms of culture, the chapter explores the historical environment of the period, which was characterized by a collective retreat into domestic space, in opposition to the exhilarating years of collectivism and activism of the period 1968–1969. The exhaustion of 1970s terrorism led to the arrests of left‐wing militants after the murder of Aldo Moro and opened a period of intense scrutiny of the past. Industrially, the chapter locates recent Italian cinema within changes in filmmaking practices that occurred after the economic collapse of the film industry and Cinecittà studios in the middle of the 1970s. In addition to these elements, the advent of commercial television in the late 1970s caused significant changes in the public broadcasting system. Two related observations will be made in this regard: the first is that both public and commercial television intensified film production and provided a platform for young film directors to train; the second is that the aesthetics required by the television screen radically changed films’ diegetic space, physically and symbolically. While spaces of film production were shrinking in Cinecittà, opportunities opened up in Milan at Silvio Berlusconi’s Canale 5. The collaboration between Penta, Berlusconi’s film production company, and the Cecchi Gori Group, sealed at the end of the 1980s, formalized the synergy and collaboration between cinema and television.

With restricted spaces of production, minimal capital, and aggressive distribution of Hollywood films, the environment in which Italian directors operated became problematic. In particular, this production environment presented difficulties for the emergence of a new generation of directors and other key professionals, such as cinematographers, scriptwriters, actors, and production designers. Within this context, some recent Italian cinema was able to make use of hybrid forms of storytelling through the television medium. To make my case, I will consider elements that surrounded the decline of Cinecittà, and, consequently, the changed conditions of film production. To build on this analysis, I use the theoretical paradigm concerning the “new international division of labour” (NIDL) (Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye 1980), subsequently transformed into the “new international cultural division of labour” (NICDL) (Miller 1996; Miller et al. 2005). I will also examine the cultural conditions that, in the 1980s, allowed the emergence of the intimate‐space film, in which memory and autobiography replaced grand historical events. This section contextualizes the decade of the 1980s within the riflusso (retreat from political commitment) following the murder of Aldo Moro and the April 7 trial, whose nature and importance will become clear shortly. Subsequently, the chapter sheds light on the interplay between industry and image through the examination of the relationship between film and television. Films made with television funding in the early 1980s are mostly unknown, as many of them never circulated, either in the cinemas or on television. Nevertheless, television provided spaces for film production, and, more precisely, it provided training spaces for new directors and professionals. The scarcity of funding and television’s screen‐ratio requirements produced a new genre of filmmaking that privileged introspective stories set in small interiors. This chapter suggests that the aesthetic of interiors is intimately bound to the scarcity of the means of production and to the production model imposed by television. But, at the same time, the introspective and existential character of these films addressed cultural and historical questions related to a general mourning for the loss of an Italian political and radical past. These minimalist films were succeeded by an interrogation of grand historical events that emerged in the 1990s. The relative success of a small number of films and the support from the newly formed European audiovisual programs paved the way for films with higher production values and reinvigorated the industry.

The End of the “Golden Age”

Every non‐American national cinema is, in some way, set against—or framed as emancipation from—Hollywood. The issue of national cinema has been particularly felt in Europe from the early development of the film industry (Forbes and Street 2000). In the face of Hollywood’s pervasive dominance, European film industries have attempted to protect their businesses through a series of measures, including building large studios (Jäckel 2003). Italian cinema was not an exception, except for the fact that, after World War II, Hollywood determined the success of Italian cinema in its homeland and abroad. There were two reasons for Hollywood offshoring production in Italy. The first was internal and had to do with Hollywood’s response to the end of the vertical integration of distribution and exhibition after the Paramount antitrust decision of 1948. The American film industry responded through flexible specialization, using international labor to offset costs and differentiate outputs (Storper 1989). The second reason was international. In the second postwar, Italy offered more incentives and greater flexibility than other countries in Europe, proving attractive for Hollywood runway productions. Film policies put in place by the Italian government, through the Christian Democratic Party, were tailored to aid Hollywood’s economic and cultural interests. Hollywood’s key role in the development of Italian cinema between 1945 and 1960 can also be attributed to the dynamics of mass production at low cost, a first instance of what Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye (1980) have defined NIDL, which is based on peripheral countries producing for world markets, and is best understood through the concept of regional development on social, economic, and political levels (Moulaert and Wilson Salinas 1983). Offshore manufacturing to underdeveloped countries, through direct foreign investment, creates a transnational space for the circulation of capital and labor, and is about both maximizing profit and minimizing costs. The NIDL is underpinned by free‐trade agreements and it relies on global cities that service the global economy. In the cultural field, the idea of labor specialization is translated into fragmented intellectual and creative skills. In Hollywood’s ever‐expanding global empire, the NIDL manifests itself in terms of differentiation and internationalization of cultural labor, with economic advantages similar to those of other industrial sectors. Thus, NICDL (Miller 1996; Miller et al. 2005, especially 111–72) is Hollywood’s modus operandi through constant direct foreign investment, the appropriation of new markets, and exploitation of local talent in specific sectors.

In these circumstances, Cinecittà’s postwar reconstruction was instrumental in not only rebuilding the industry’s infrastructures but also remodeling Italy culturally, in agreement with the American model of mass consumption, prosperity, and productivity. In the period between 1945 and 1960, the operations of Hollywood in the “Eternal City” transformed Cinecittà from a national film studio to an international production epicenter. Foreign capital investment in personnel and infrastructures had a snowballing effect, and the local industry flourished. Bondanella (2004) defined this period as Cinecittà’s “golden age,”³ when, with the production of high‐budget and auteur films, spaghetti westerns, the peplum, and Italian comedy, the national market share for Italian films reached 65% of the total box office, causing Italian cinema, for a short period, to rival the big Hollywood studios. This early example of the globalization of cultural labor sustained art cinema as a Euro‐American genre internationally distributed—while the art films opened up avenues for more popular films, such as the Italian comedy, to be distributed and appreciated internationally—for example, Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, Vittorio De Sica, 1964). But, when the major Hollywood studios moved their assets back home, starting in the middle of the 1960s, a major crisis of the audiovisual sector disturbed the equilibrium. This crisis was felt in the 1970s, and limited the industry to sporadic accomplishments of individual Italian filmmakers and professionals. These triumphs were measured through the number of Oscars received each year. The continuous search for Hollywood’s recognition de facto erased, in the last decades of the century, every effort to turn the local industry into a profitable national industry that was able to talk to, and represent, the national imaginary.

In the 1980s, after several fires destroyed sets, only a few films were made in Cinecittà. Hollywood committed only limited investments: The Name of the Rose was distributed by 20th Century Fox and L’ultimo imperatore was distributed by Columbia, while European coproduction agreements covered the high production budgets of both films. Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta in America (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984) was also partly made at Cinecittà. In the 1980s, the studio complex was still considered the most modern in Europe, and the professional level of its permanent crew of 600 technicians and craftsmen very high, but in post‐Fordist times, this model was no longer economically feasible. Hollywood’s return to Cinecittà in 2000 was mainly due to Miramax’s patronage and investments in Italian coproductions, and the distribution and production of a few blockbusters. Miramax went as far as setting up in Rome its only division outside the United States. This phenomenon was called miramaxizzazione (Coletti 2000), a process whereby Miramax’s investment in Italian–American films only went to films whose aesthetics and content pleased American audiences—that is, stereotypical films depicting nostalgia, melancholia, and beautiful women, such as Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000), a film with Monica Bellucci, set in Sicily during World War II. Nevertheless, foreign‐capital investment in the studio facilities and workforce enabled once again the production of a few Italian mid‐quality films.⁴

The April 7 Trial

Cinema audiences in Italy dropped from 513 million in 1975 to 123 million in 1985 (Nowell‐Smith, Hay, and Volpi 1996, 162–63). On the other hand, the number of films on the small screen increased exponentially to about 5,400 films broadcast by 1988 among the public broadcaster Rai, Berlusconi’s networks, Odeon TV, and Montecarlo (Wolf 1994, 592). This individual consumption of films on the small screen meant that Italians increasingly retreated into lives confined to their apartments. Italian film critic Lino Micciché attributed Italian cinema’s decline from the early 1970s to a “planetary” crisis of film culture (quoted in Brunetta 1998, 427). This position originated from a belief among Italian film critics that film authorship had undergone considerable transformations. Hollywood had partially assimilated the concept, turning auteurism into a personality cult strategically exploited for commercial aims. Conversely, young Italian directors of the 1970s and 1980s interpreted auteurism as intense introspective storytelling, which quickly produced a genre of low‐budget films made in interiors. This transformation of content and aesthetics was suitable for television, for in the 1980s both public and private networks became almost the only production option available to filmmakers. Linked to introspective storytelling was the growth of memoirs that was due not only to specifically Italian circumstances but also to what Lyotard (1984) defined in 1979 “the cultural turn,” with its postmodern critique of grand histories and knowledge, especially in the humanistic disciplines.

One crucial event in the Italian political and cultural life of the period can be seen as the catalyst for the production of collective memory in the form of autobiography as a vehicle for generational cultural transmission. On April 7, 1979, former and current members of the left‐wing group Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy) were arrested. The case had great media coverage and gained momentum in 1984 with the trial, which came to be known as the “April 7” trial. The arrests were the direct outcome of emergency legislation approved to defeat terrorism after the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the Christian Democratic Party secretary, at the hands of the Red Brigades in 1978. It is generally recognized that the death of Aldo Moro not only represented the pinnacle of left‐wing terrorism in terms of organization and audacity, but it also marked the crisis of Italian red terrorism. The kidnapping and murder of Moro provoked a backlash, as unions, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and the Christian Democrats joined to condemn the act. Increasing defections left terrorist groups more and more isolated from intermediary groups and individuals that provided logistic support. The arrests of April 7, 1979, were crucial in bringing about the end of the radical left. A period of political conformism, along with a process of historical revisionism, ensued.

During the trial of the 71 leaders (militants and university professors from some of the most radical groups of the 1970s), oral testimony of the so‐called pentiti, former terrorists who denounced their comrades, played a fundamental role in the reconstruction or reinterpretation of the recent past. “The heroes of the alleged revolutionary uprising were now disillusioned representatives of generational self‐criticism” (Ferrero‐Regis 2009, 148). The law on pentiti operated through public confession, state forgiveness, and a reduced sentence, which returned the pentito to the community after a short period in prison. The April 7 trial became a highly mediated event with partial publication of the proceedings. Repentance became a theater that offered the spectacle of confession, punishment, and discipline: the ultimate and ironic defeat for the ex‐terrorists. In fact, the Red Brigades initiated the ritual of confession with their proletarian trials of kidnapped people and daily release of communiqués to the media revealing the confessions of their prisoners. This practice was perfected during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, as he was required by his abductors to confess his political sins. Marco Bellocchio’s film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003), a film that focuses on the 8‐week captivity of Aldo Moro, offers the viewers the spectacle of Moro’s alleged repentance (Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1 Aldo Moro’s kidnappers watch the news of the kidnapping on television. Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, Marco Bellocchio, 2003). Screen grab.

Nanni Moretti points his finger at left‐wing terrorism and repentance in the first segment of his film Caro Diario (Dear Diary, 1993), winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes. While touring the streets of Rome on his Vespa, Moretti comments bitterly about the poor state of Italian cinema, remarking that during the summer it is only possible to find porn films, American B‐grade and splatter films, or a certain kind of Italian film. At this point, Moretti inserts a fictional fragment supposedly from that kind of film. The scene mocks the genre of “interior” movies, as four “ageing” characters in their mid‐40s, with professional jobs, sit in a living room and commiserate about the mistakes they made when, in 1968 and in the 1970s, they were political activists in radical left‐wing movements. Regretting their actions, they also reflect on their current imborghesimento (“bourgeoisification”): “We are old, bitter, dishonest. We used to shout awful, violent slogans! Look how ugly we’ve gotten.” Repentance here is transferred from the courtrooms of the April 7 trial to the living room, made available to an entire generation through the medium of film. Through his subdued characters, Moretti also makes a strong statement against the falsity of repentance and redemption, so typical of Italian Catholic mentality and upbringing. The feeling of failure and defeat emerges again in a film directed by Mimmo Calopresti, La seconda volta (The Second Time, 1995), in which Moretti plays Alberto, a professor of economics at the University of Turin. In a poignant scene, he expresses his indignation against ex‐terrorists who in the 1990s occupied center stage of cultural and media life, publishing their memoirs. After reading aloud a long paragraph from a book supposedly written by Renato Curcio and Rosanna Faranda—two of the historical leaders of the Red Brigades—Moretti/Alberto shouts: “They are all out and about: Red Brigades, Front Line. They are all busy writing books. And they get published.”

The April 7 arrests and subsequent trial focused media attention on the most extreme aspect of left‐wing movements of the 1970s: terrorism. The result of this process was that terrorism colonized all historical accounts of 1968 and the 1970s, canceling other significant experiences, such as feminism and unionism, from common memory. This political amnesia erased the creative, carnivalesque, defiant aspects of 1968, and the cultural transformations that involved all the domains of human agency and interpersonal relationships, from those involving intimacy to customs and habit, were buried under the weight of the anni di piombo.⁵ Neofascist terrorism, the so‐called trame nere⁶ (covert operations), have not attracted much interest from Italian filmmakers and writers, with the exception of Marco Bechis’s Garage Olimpo (2002), which displaces the threat of a neofascist coup in the early 1970s in Italy onto the tragedy of the Argentinean desaparecidos. In contrast, in the years leading up to and around the 30th anniversary of 1968, a large number of books were published about the bombing of Piazza Fontana in Milan on December 12, 1969, and the strategy of tension.⁷

The films produced in the 1980s and 1990s—part of a phenomenon that has continued well into the first decade of the 2000s—clearly indicate an overlapping of elements: the new generation of filmmakers belonged to the generation of 1968, and they were making movies reflecting upon their own experiences and emotions. Common to many films were a minimalist language and shrinking budgets. In these films, there is no immediate reference to previous cinema movements and aesthetics. There is, instead, an intention to avoid the kind of “framing” or accentuating of the director’s gaze that was so central to auteur cinema. Stories unfold inside apartments where everyday life and everyday objects come to define what film critic Cristiana Paternò (2000) called “the aesthetic of the coffee machine on the stove.”

Politics and Economy of the Intimate Screen

Paternò’s comment refers to a poverty of interior decor and mise‐en‐scène. One of the best‐known films of this genre is Francesca Archibugi’s debut feature Mignon è partita (1988), in which the director avoids sophisticated framing. Her naturalistic use of the camera, which seems to focus almost accidentally on mundane objects such as the room heater, is matched by a narrative that looks at simple stories of everyday life of teenagers in Rome. Italian critics could not find a way to classify these films, and offered up terms such as neoneorealist, minimalist, or carino (“dear” or “cute”). Writer and film critic Massimo Galimberti (1996, 366) called this kind of cinema “the unaware son” of weak thought, paraphrasing Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti’s philosophical concept that emerged in 1983 with their publication of Il pensiero debole. The concept of “weak thought” arose as a reaction to the intellectual and teleological crises that emerged within debates about modernism and postmodernism. This intellectual crisis created a profound disillusionment with 1980s political and cultural reality. In 1991, Sandro Petraglia, in an article for the left‐wing newspaper Il manifesto, fittingly summarized generational disillusionment with grand political theories by writing “out there, there is nothing, or, there is little, and it is very tiring to go out and look for it. And anyway, we no longer have enough strength to do it” (quoted in Galimberti 1996, 366). The “little” to which Petraglia refers is the experience of the everyday, a point of departure for Vattimo’s weak thought. The broad cultural, political, and economic changes that occurred from the 1970s and that irreversibly modified relationships between genders and among races, political power, and social classes, coincided with the collapse of grand narratives, the spread of “weak thought,” and identity fragmentation. This retreat into the domestic sphere in pursuit of individual pleasures, which characterized the 1980s, was reflected in cinema in fragmented modes of production and minimalist aesthetics.

The retreat into introspective stories and intimate spaces was the expression of the riflusso caused not only by April 7 but also by a new ethos, an “enterprise culture,” that seemed to have “found its natural home in Italy” (Ginsborg 1990, 408). The 1980s became the hedonistic decade dedicated to the material world, and it was characterized by an obsession with fitness, career, pop stars, fashion, and brands. In 1982, Giorgio Armani made the cover of Time magazine. The event opened up the American market to Italian fashion in a new way, and the concept “Made in Italy” replaced Italian cinema as the most important international ambassador for national culture and craftsmanship. The new wind of opportunity and innovation originated from Milan. With the crisis of Cinecittà, the proliferation of commercial television—mainly thanks to property developer and emerging media magnate Silvio Berlusconi—transformed the city, as Foot (2001, 99) argues, into “a powerful source of ideological and financial opposition to the monopolistic and clientelistic state/public axis based in Rome.” Director Kiko Stella (2000), one of the founders of the entity Filmmaker (see below) in the 1980s, remembers that, at the time, young filmmakers in Milan made a bet that the city would become the city of cinema—similar to the rise of New York in the late 1970s with Woody Allen’s films. Milan was dubbed the East Coast of Italian cinema, in opposition to Cinecittà, considered then “archaeological” (Serenellini 1985, 115). The disbanded left, now without “father‐like” figures,⁸ embraced the freedom that private television seemed to represent, as opposed to the bureaucratic strictures of the public broadcaster Rai. The film Ratataplan (Maurizio Nichetti, 1979), set in Milan’s case di ringhiera,⁹ featuring actors well known in the local community theater circuit and moving within anarchist political circles, had considerable success in the niche market of Milanese leftist intelligentsia. Actors from the theater group Quelli di Grock also featured in Nichetti’s second feature Ho fatto splash (1980). Both films were produced by Franco Cristaldi and Nicola Carraro for Vides Film. In Ho fatto splash and his later Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief, 1989), Nichetti develops his critique not so much of television, but rather of the hybridization of the two media, film and television, and their languages. Paradoxically, Ladri di saponette, which comments on the pervasiveness of television in people’s private life, was coproduced by one of Berlusconi’s private channels, Reteitalia.

Thus, with the growth of Berlusconi’s networks, Milan became the media city. Commercial television offered various opportunities to young filmmakers to train in the audiovisual industry. Local channels were in fact appropriate sites for the commercials of small and medium enterprises that could access the local market via local television stations. In reality, since the 1960s and 1970s, young directors, screenwriters, and other professionals in the film industry had already started working with television through small production companies. They collaborated in sceneggiati (television series in a longer format), experimental programs, and films for television; however, this was an informal collaboration, not a systematic or programmed one (Menduni 2002, 82). But with the decreasing costs of new technology (mainly the introduction of super‐8 cameras), the integration among film, television, and music (once separate sectors) increased. Music videos, shorts, and advertisements for 1,594 local television stations by 1982 created economic opportunities for local agencies and small production companies. In 1981, this new production environment was formalized through the creation in Milan of a structure that gathered independent and experimental filmmakers: the aforementioned Filmmaker. The group included Bruno Bigoni, Silvio Soldini, Kiko Stella, and Giancarlo Soldi, as well as cinematographer Luca Bigazzi (who has worked with directors such as Silvio Soldini, Gianni Amelio, Mario Martone, Abbas Kiarostami, and Paolo Sorrentino). Many other directors formed cooperatives in which the figure of the director‐producer became a fundamental feature of the new production mode. An organization collecting four of these small companies, Cooperativa Indigena, headed by Minnie Ferrara, and collecting emergent filmmakers Soldini, Bigoni, Stella, Daniele Segre, Enrico Ghezzi, Francesca Marciano, and Roberta Mazzoni, provided a framework for alternative distribution and networking with other small companies in other parts of Italy (Stella 2000). Indigena was particularly active in the 1980s, though it closed in 1989.

1968: “Like Polaroids”

Italian cultural and historical crises, with their sense of loss and disorientation, translated into filmic representation in two phases. The first occurred in the 1980s, and it was characterized essentially by low production values and poverty of means; the second occurred in the late 1990s and 2000s, and it was characterized by films with higher production values. The first phase can be related to the intimate screen, the film for television, which kept the film industry going in a time of decline. The intimate‐space films are sketches of everyday life, delivered through fragmented images that are like Polaroids, as Enzo Montaleone (2000) says—Polaroids, as Serenelli (1985, 116) puts it, “hanging on the fridge in the kitchen.” These images are like a series of “notes, a bit casual and dispersed, with a lot of longing for action and a lot of disillusionment: the beer bar, the disco, and the countryside excursion are refuge‐islands, a waiting for something that will come.” Luciano Ligabue’s Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow), adapted from the filmmaker’s book Fuori e dentro il borgo (1997), recalls this atmosphere. Although released in 1998, this film is situated two decades earlier and recalls the life of “Freccia,” a young man who died in 1975 from a heroin overdose. In the film, set in a provincial town, the bar is the meeting place for the town’s young people, “waiting for something to come” (Figure 17.2).

Figure 17.2 Freccia at the local “refuge‐island” bar in Radiofreccia (Radio Arrow, Luciano Ligabue, 1998). Famed singer–songwriter Francesco Guccini plays the bartender. Screen grab.

Failure is the leitmotif in the films set in the big industrial cities of northern Italy. Venerdì sera, lunedì mattina (Alberto Chiantaretto and Daniela Pianciola, 1983), set in Turin, tells the story of the failure of a commune in a city pervaded by angst caused by Fiat’s economic crisis and by the exhaustion and seeming futility of political opposition. (1980 had witnessed the historic failure of a strike at Fiat in Turin, which became a negative turning point for the workers’ movement in Italy.) Giulia in ottobre (1984) is Silvio Soldini’s second feature film after Paesaggio con figure (1983). The film depicts a failed love story. It was made in 16 mm and revealed the director’s interest in women’s stories delivered through a realist aesthetic, which will eventually lead to Soldini’s box‐office success Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips, 2000). Marco Tullio Giordana debuted in 1980 with his feature film Maledetti vi amerò (To Love the Damned) followed by La caduta degli angeli ribelli (1981), which were the first two films to reflect on the generation of 1968. Both films present a negative revisionist perspective of 1968. Maledetti vi amerò is told from the point of view of Svitol, who was 20 in 1968, and returns to Italy after having spent some years in South America to find his ex‐comrades disillusioned from politics or having fallen prey to drugs. La caduta degli angeli ribelli tells the story of Vittorio, who repents his actions as a terrorist and therefore is condemned to death by his ex‐comrades. The film combines the motif of repentance with the aesthetics of enclosure to communicate a suffocating environment and a dangerous outside world.

Both Venerdì sera, lunedì mattina and Giulia in ottobre were less than 70 minutes, a length common to many films made in the period, for economic reasons. Serenelli (1985, 116) referred to the films of the first half of the 1980s in terms of “kitchen, one bedroom and a camera,” which, if coupled with the aesthetics of the “coffee machine on the stove,” clearly indicates the claustrophobic aesthetics of the intimate spaces, the retreat into a minimalist and introspective cinema, and, metaphorically, the retreat into the confessional, where the protagonists repent. This was an autarchic cinema that did not offer pleasure through spectacular special effects; it was a cinema that Italian film critics attacked for its lack of strong stories and sophisticated mise‐en‐scène (Micciché 1995; Fofi 1994; Fofi 1997). This cinema existed at the margins of empire Hollywood, which by then, had invested in buying and upgrading European theaters, including in Italy, to show its first crop of special effects films.

The second phase of the filmic representation of historical revisionism can be associated with the return to grand narratives and the production of films that tackled problems and issues originating with Italian unification: for example, Domani accadrà (Daniele Luchetti, 1988), a film that made a favorable impression on French critics at the 1987 Cannes festival. The Resistance, the Holocaust, World War II, and the postwar provided fertile material: Jona che visse nella balena (Look to the Sky, Roberto Faenza, 1993), Io e il re (Lucio Gaudino, 1995), Nemici d’infanzia (Childhood Enemies, Luigi Magni, 1995), Il postino (Il Postino: The Postman, Michael Radford, 1995), La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997), I piccoli maestri (Little Teachers, Daniele Luchetti, 1997), Porzûs (Renzo Martinelli, 1997), I cento passi (One Hundred Steps, Marco Tullio Giordana, 2000), Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan, Guido Chiesa, 2000), Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition, Ettore Scola, 2001), Placido Rizzotto (Pasquale Scimeca, 2001), and El‐Alamein (Enzo Montaleone, 2002). In this second phase, directors were able to increase their budgets with television and European funding, which in turn enabled them to secure state funding, and, from 2000, also funding from regional commissions. These films narrated grand events in the form of memory and linked to autobiographical stories, and they presented higher production values, with more characters, more complex mise‐en‐scène, richer costuming, and outdoor filming that incorporated grand landscape backgrounds.

The transition from minimalist and intimate cinema to grand narratives is represented by the films of Gabriele Salvatores and Gianni Amelio. The road‐movie genre, whose characters’ destination is always the South or exotic Third World places, helped Italian cinema exit the impasse created by a scarcity of means of production and of ideas. In regard to Salvatores’ films, it is important to note that once again values and cultural backgrounds from 1968 played an important role in the choice of stories to be represented. Salvatores and Enzo Montaleone, who cowrote the screenplays of Kamikazen ultima notte a Milano (1987), Marrakesh Express (1989), Mediterraneo (1991), and Puerto Escondido (1992), use friendship as the counterpoint to the individualism of the 1980s, and the road trip as escape from everyday life and claustrophobic interiors. Fascination with the South and exotic places, a new form of cinematic Orientalism, recalls the fascination that the post‐1968 generation had with India, Morocco, and Greece, which were routes of escape from the leaden years. In all early Salvatores movies, existentialism and self‐consciousness, common to all other films of the period, are delivered in the form of commedia all’italiana. Salvatores reinvents the genre using Diego Abatantuono as his antihero, in the same way that Alberto Sordi represented the middling Italian in the 1950s and 1960s. The use of the same group of actors; the soccer game, which is played wherever the characters happen to be; and the soundtracks evocative of the 1970s, created a pattern of recognition and identity for the generation that was in their 20s in that decade.

Figure 17.3 Diego Abatantuono escapes to Puerto Escondido. Puerto Escondido (Gabriele Salvatores, 1992). Screen grab.

On the other hand, Gianni Amelio’s films have often been simplistically defined as neorealist cinema, because of their focus on social reality. The use of children, nonprofessional actors, realist coding, and regional dialects are some of the features of Amelio’s films, but these are only surface elements of a cinema that in reality tackles deep‐seated divisions in a nation whose cohesive element is still the small cell of the family or local group. In Amelio’s films Ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992) and Lamerica (1994), nomadism is, in contrast to the films of Salvatores, an element of estrangement, to remind Italians of their past poverty and displacement as migrants.

As discussed previously, the intimate cinema produced in the 1980s provided a platform for identity in which the ideology of 1968, nostalgia, and the generation of baby boomers converged. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the intimate film contributed to the formation of a particular shape and logic of production. Since ambience, clothes, music, and atmosphere provide the background for mnemonic recollection and identification, and since subjective and introspective narrative replaces a collective political agenda, the intimist film becomes a discrete genre that awakens viewers’ pleasure of gazing at come eravamo (the way we were), a trend that had become popular with 1980s popular television programs Fuori orario, Schegge, and Blob. These programs showed film fragments, authorial shorts, and old news spliced together in a way that constructed satirical viewpoints on politics. The technique of splicing historical documentary footage from television into narrative film became very popular, adding historical authoritativeness to biographical stories. The use of historical footage also cut costs, as reconstructing the past through sets, costumes/fashion, and the use of extras, clearly required larger budgets. Films that use a mix of mnemonic recollection and documentary footage are: Il caso Moro (Giuseppe Ferrara, 1985) and Buongiorno, notte, both films about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro; La vera vita di Antonio H. (Enzo Montaleone, 1994), in which actor Alessandro Haber tells the story of Italy and its cinema through a mix of fictional video interviews and real television footage, complicating the boundaries between fiction and reality; Pasolini, un delitto italiano (Pasolini, An Italian Crime, Marco Tullio Giordana, 1995), a film that narrates Pasolini’s murder in 1975; Ormai è fatta (Enzo Montaleone, 1999), an adaptation from robber Horst Fantazzini’s autobiography; and Aprile (Nanni Moretti, 1999), a film that documents the parties of the Left’s crushing defeat and Berlusconi’s victory at the 1994 elections.

From a social perspective, the sustained production of films that represented the past created a space for collectively remembering 1968 and restoring a cultural ground that was common to audience and filmmakers. The reproposition of past images contributed to a sense of continuity, counterbalancing the new hedonism and individualism of the 1980s—and the anxieties these created.

How to Make a Movie in Time of Crisis

One of the effects of the film‐industry crisis was the collapse of vertical integration and the start of a process of decentralization. Italian film historian Gian Piero Brunetta (1991, 625) called this phenomenon “polverizzazione della produzione” (fragmentation of production), comparing it to the formation of an “archipelago” of small production companies scattered throughout the peninsula. This system of horizontally oriented production was related to the unpredictability of the Italian market and the inability of the industry to compete with American economies of scale. Thus the fragmentation served—as it did in many other European national cinemas—as a strategy for achieving production flexibility. Flexibility meant that directors, writers, cinematographers, producers, actors, and other professionals could work on different productions in various capacities and in different places. This network of production came together on an ad hoc basis, without appropriate policies that could sustain the shift. In 1997, some film commissions were formed and started to operate locally on regional policy that became formalized in 2000. Film commissions were formed on the model offered by the first film commissions established in the 1950s in the United States, when local government had well understood that support to film was a way to exploit and develop opportunities offered by places with strong cinematic potential (Storper 1989; Versace et al. 2008, 278). Along with this, securing funding from regional film commissions enabled access to national and European funding; thus, starting from the late 1990s, films started to display richer mise‐en‐scène as well as stronger stories.

The 1980s growth of local television networks, which reinvented local economies and provided a space for a new generation of directors and professionals to train and gain access to small funding, began a process of significant geographical dispersion. Davide Ferrario and Guido Chiesa were based in Turin; Gabriele Salvatores and Silvio Soldini operated from Milan. Rome was home to Domenico Procacci, whose company Fandango was fundamental in supporting a new crop of directors; Francesca Archibugi; and Nanni Moretti’s company Sacher. (Sacher was a point of reference for other directors such as Daniele Luchetti and actor Silvio Orlando.) Tuscany was home to Roberto Benigni, Francesco Nuti, Leonardo Pieraccioni, and Cinzia T. H. Torrini. Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, Pasquale Scimeca and Dante Majorana, and Roberta Torre worked in Sicily, while Mario Martone, Pappi Corsicato, Antonietta De Lillo, Antonio Capuano, and Giuseppe Gaudino were based in Naples. Screenwriters, cinematographers, and actors rotated and collaborated with different producers and companies, establishing a creative network throughout the Italian peninsula. For example, Enzo Montaleone, originally from Padua, collaborated with Salvatores on his early films, but also with Cinzia T. H. Torrini, before settling in Rome. Silvio Orlando worked in many films, alternating between Turin and Rome, and Luca Bigazzi also worked with other filmmakers based in different cities. This decentralization of production meant that, from the point of view of content and settings, a variety of dialects, stories, and locations emerged in Italian cinema in the 1990s, leading to the growth of films with strong aesthetics based on the Italian landscape.¹⁰ It also meant the creation of clusters of production away from the traditional center, Rome, which in turn contributed to the cultural revitalization and development of other areas, especially in the South: Naples, Sicily, and, more recently with the cinema of Edoardo Winspeare, Puglia.

In order to better understand 1980s filmmaking, we need to place it briefly in the context of historical film‐related legislation and its effect on funding. In contrast to the development of regional film commissions, policy and regulations concerning cinema have always been state‐centered. The original law on cinema, the “Legge Corona” (number 1213), was passed in 1965, with subsequent modifications and amendments approved as legal decrees. The decree Interventi urgenti in favore del cinema was passed in 1994. This meant that the 1970s and 1980s were virtually unregulated, despite the rapid technological changes in the industry brought about by special effects and Dolby sound. With this absence of policy and with an outdated law, the duopoly Rai and Berlusconi’s Fininvest financed almost all film production. Article 28 was instituted by way of the Legge Corona to fund films with artistic intentions. Among the best films produced under the aegis of Article 28 were Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s I sovversivi (1967), Valentino Orsini’s I dannati della terra (1969), and Giuseppe Ferrara’s Il sasso in bocca (1970). The fund was very little used in the 1970s, but after the crisis, it became a staple in film production. The “28,” as it was notoriously referred to by young directors, was used to fund first feature films, eventually becoming a proper production structure, as almost the only public funding accessible to young directors. To access the fund, directors exploited the experimental and artistic specifications of Article 28, which often translated into an exacerbated disconnection between young directors and social reality. In the 1980s, very few of the films that were produced with the “28” reached regular distribution and exposure in theaters. A few films were successful at the box office and were able to repay the loan from the state. These included Nanni Moretti’s Ecce Bombo (1978); Salvatore Piscicelli’s Immacolata e Concetta: l’altra gelosia (Immacolata and Concetta: The Other Jealousy, 1980) and Le occasioni di Rosa (1981); Giordana’s Maledetti vi amerò; and Antonietta De Lillo’s Una casa in bilico (Tottering in the Dark, 1986). Many of the films produced with the “28” were also supported by Gaumont distribution; two films in particular, signaled the beginning of a new interest by American distributors in Italian cinema. These were Peter Del Monte’s Piccoli fuochi (Little Flames, 20th Century Fox, 1985) and Cinzia T. H. Torrini’s Hotel Colonial (Columbia, 1987). In 1995, Article 28 was replaced by Article 8, but the conceptual framework remained unchanged.

In the 1980s, high labor costs influenced the number of shooting weeks, which dropped from an average of 8–9 weeks to 6–7, and imposed cuts on the number of professionals on set. Producers opted mainly for an executive role, which meant finding and managing money. There were very few production companies that invested capital directly. Table 17.1 highlights this situation, which indicates that companies were often formed around specific projects, mainly to protect the director’s creative work and rights, and if the film did not make money, the company would dissolve. Many companies shown in the table repeat from one year to the next, but many disappeared, confirming the situation‐specific nature of their creation.

Table 17.1 Films produced by production companies, 1980–1985

Source: Adapted from Martini 1987, 38–44.

Year	Films produced	Production companies
1980–1981	87	63 (plus Rai)
1981–1982	109	78 (plus Rai)
1982–1983	112	84 (plus Rai)
1983–1984	104	73 (plus Rai)
1984–1985	97	81 (plus Rai)
Total	509	379

Production companies with the most consistent number of films were Dania and Capital, later transformed into CG Silver and then Cecchi Gori. Some of the companies listed in Table 17.2 specialized in popular low‐budget comedies (Cecchi Gori, International Film, Filmauro). Other companies specialized in the soft‐porn genre, especially linked to the couple Lino Banfi‐Edwige Fenech (Dania, Medusa, and Filmes) (Martini 1987, 23–24). Table 17.2 lists only companies that produced more than one film in the period analyzed. This fragmentation continued throughout the 1990s, more than doubling the number of production companies from 200 to more than 500 in 2000 (see Figure 17.4). Also, data collected in 2004 confirm that the majority of Italian production companies are small, artisan‐like enterprises, as the companies employing between one and four people constitute 65.4% of the total of production companies (Il mercato cinematografico italiano, 2000–2004). According to Pam Cook (1981, 72), this small‐scale system of production implies that artisanal production “lies outside the dominant system,” therefore requiring support through patronage or from state institutions.

Table 17.2 Average number of films produced annually, by production company

Source: Adapted from Martini, 40.

Production company	Average of films produced annually 1980–1985
Dania	Increased from 6 to 7
Capital (Cecchi Gori)	5
International Italian Film	3
Clemi	3
Dean	3
Filmauro	Increased from 2 to 3
Faso	Increased from 1 to 6
Ama	2
Opera	2

Figure 17.4 The growth in number of production companies.

Source: Il mercato cinematografico italiano 2000–2004.

Four factors indicated a partial recovery of the Italian cinema system at the end of the millennium. The first was the reemergence of the figure of the producer as investor and talent scout, which had been lost in the 1970s. Production was thus based less on the triangulation director–screenwriter–actor so popular in the 1980s, moving to producer‐driven projects. Second, a whole new generation of professionals such as directors, cinematographers, producers, and screenwriters reinvigorated the industry. (Barbara Corsi, in this volume also points to a renewed awareness of the craft on the part of the new generation of film professionals.) The third factor was the series of reforms kicked off by the center–left government in 1998 which, despite their inadequacy in the face of the acceleration of global communications systems and the emergence of multiple delivery platforms, contributed to bringing Italian cultural policy to the level of other European nations—namely, France and Great Britain. The fourth and last element was the impact of various European funds, in particular, the programs MEDIA and Eurimages,¹¹ which sustained development, distribution, and promotion of European film. European policy was particularly successful in its strategy to address common economic needs of European nations through mobilizing transnational resources in support of national and regional cinemas. In fact, European and single‐state subsidies are strictly related: securing support from one of the funds available at the European level qualifies a film for national subsidies, and vice versa. As Corsi also points out, the new generation of professionals in the industry became increasingly adept at securing many sources of funding.

Conclusion

Looking back to the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, we can see that Italian filmic output cannot be separated from the contingencies of the two decades. In its minimalist approach to filmmaking, 1980s cinema was able to make use of hybrid forms of storytelling in the best way it could, considering the negative circumstances in which it operated, domestically and internationally. The use of super‐8 allowed many young directors to experiment with themes and forms, producing 70‐ or 80‐minute films that were suitable for the small screen. However, eventually, the crisis of the industry converged with a crisis of representation. Cofinanced with television and state funding, the Italian cinema of the early‐ and mid‐1980s found itself immersed in cultural and political issues, valuing intellectual content rather than entertainment. The minimalist, introspective, cinema whose mode of narration was the individual mnemonic recollection of history, reflected a wide cultural shift that had occurred in Western society in the 1970s, coinciding with the demise of the grand ideologies of socialist tradition. Despite the fact that some films dealt with grand narratives (Amelio’s, Moretti’s, and Salvatores’ films about migration, terrorism and 1968), the films produced in the 1980s and 1990s clearly privileged remembering and individual memories, in a way that was often controversial and divisive.

References

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Notes

1 Editor’s note: For related discussion of film industry history, see the chapters by Corsi and Wood in this volume; for further discussion of the relationship between terrorism and Italian cinema, see Uva.

2 For a detailed account of Cinecittà’s reorganization in the early 1990s, see Ferrero‐Regis 2009, 55–63.

3 However, in this article, Bondanella omits the fundamental influence Hollywood had on Italian cinema’s “golden age.”

4 See the list in Ferrero‐Regis 2009, 58.

5 The 1970s became known as the anni di piombo—literally, “the leaden years”: the Italian translation of Margarethe Von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981). The film had a tremendous success in Italy. Its release 2 years after the April 7 trial crystallized the angst of the Italian sessantottini (“‘68ers,” or those whose consciousness was formed around the politics of 1968) about their immediate past.

6 Collusion between right‐wing military and paramilitary forces, such as Gladio, also linked to the secret services and the Masonic lodge P2. The Gladio paramilitary organization was set up by the Americans in the 1940s to carry out acts of sabotage and armed warfare in the case of a Communist invasion (Gundle and Parker 1995, 7).

7 The term “strategy of tension” first appeared in an article by Leslie Finer in the Observer, around the time of the bombing in Piazza Fontana, to indicate terrorist actions perpetrated by neofascist and paramilitary groups to stop the growth of supporters of the Italian Communist Party. The Observer alleged that these groups had international connections (Lanza 2009). The term was adopted within Italian political discourse as strategia di tensione.

8 The expression emerged after the arrests of April 7. It is related to the loss, either real or symbolic, of political leaders Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Daniel Cohn‐Bendit. For a detailed reconstruction of this particular episode, see Ferrero‐Regis (2009).

9 Popular housing built around central courtyards, where individual units open off continuous balconies overlooking the courtyard. They can be found in urban or country environments.

10 For a detailed discussion of landscape and memory, see Galt (2006). For an analysis of the Italian southern landscape in cinematic representations see Ferrero‐Regis (2009), 214–21.

11 Eurimages is part of the Council of Europe and includes today 36 member states; it supports coproductions among two and more countries of the European Union (28 members), as well as among 36 of the 47 countries of the Council of Europe.