18
Contemporary Italian Film in the New Media World1

Mary P. Wood

The year 1980 seems to represent a period deep in archaeological time when placed in the light of our experience of films in the new millennium. Against the background of that time, my aim in this chapter is to explore the political, cultural, and commercial context for Italian cinema in the twenty‐first century in order to expose processes of change and to reach some understanding of patterns of production and consumption—illustrating why and how some types of film are made and some are not, how films target and reach a constituency, how and why films are successful (or not). Using some contemporary examples, I will seek to demonstrate what Italian cinema reveals about today’s film and media world and how we experience it.

In 1980, Italian audiences saw big‐budget films in first‐run city‐center cinemas in major cities (prima visione), where films quickly made the majority of their returns. They would then join lower‐budget films in suburban cinemas in large‐ to medium‐sized cities (seconda visione), in small town cinemas (terza visione), and in a variety of church halls, political association meeting spaces, seaside and other seasonal venues—in a chain of exhibition that might, for low‐budget films, last 2 years. Faced with rising crime and terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s, many seconda visione cinemas closed, or specialized in sex films (the luci rosse). American media companies had bought into Italian distribution since the 1960s, dominating the box office by 1985, leaving the remaining space in the market typically to national film genres (Wood 2005, 28). Auteurist directors also made genre films, but aimed to secure the larger budgets that would attract state subventions for “quality” and international distribution. Despite the closure of cinemas, cinema buildings still proved to have social and cultural functions, and many retained the crucial commercial role that they developed in the 1980s as the media industries expanded. By the end of the 1980s, fears that the cinema exhibition sector would become unimportant and wither were supplanted by the realization of the usefulness of a cinema release as an indicator of potential success at other levels of exploitation (e.g., via VHS). In 1980, it was possible to understand how successful an Italian film was (at least in Italy), what audience it had reached, and what its critical reception was. With the exclusion of the soft‐porn industry, which Bruno Ventavoli (2000, 151) claimed releases 1,000 films a year, Italian trade papers examined the box‐office receipts of a film’s release in each of the 12 national territories, allowing producers and distributors (the primary investors) to gauge the likelihood of a return on their investment, and to estimate the risk involved in any new project. Detailed statistical information on returns listed creative personnel associated with individual projects, together with analyses of genre profiles.

The necessity of reducing risk, and the naming of the major creative players in film production, indicated the complexity of the practices structuring the Italian film industry. Techniques of risk management, such as attention to the bottom line and identification of creative people able to deliver a particular cultural product, coupled with creative accounting and administration practices endemic in the Italian film industry, account for the filone phenomenon. A filone is a cluster of films, in the nature of spin‐offs, often exploiting the success of a forerunner or first instance and lacking the formal structure of a genre. Careful attention to statistics by producers, and news of international trends, would lead to a strand of similar, quickly made, films and a swift identification of the next trend (Wood 2005, 11). Information was only approximate, given the practice of “black payments” (e.g., to actors), and the lack of information about foreign sales, but was nonetheless important in segmenting the Italian cinema field into identifiable spheres with their own rules and dispositions. The working practices typical of any sphere were validated by commercial success.

Seismic changes had taken place in the Italian media industries from the mid‐1970s, starting with the rise of commercial television and the consolidation of Silvio Berlusconi’s vertically and horizontally integrated empire. As noted, audiences abandoned suburban cinemas, amid increased crime and violence in the late 1970s and 1980s. As a consequence, television was able to lure the mass audience with some of its favorite genres and filoni, such as the comedies featuring established comics, the giallo and detective fiction, and the family film. As Matthew Hibberd (2008, 70–74) has pointed out, Ettore Bernabei’s shake‐up and modernization of the state television service Rai between 1961 and 1974 was unable to prevent political control and interference, resulting in lottizzazione (political interests dominating a channel or sector of the company) and preventing coherent policies on its role in film production. In the 1980s, the Rai policy of producing films by established auteurs for reasons of national prestige and to differentiate its television channels from commercial fare was accompanied by a failure to fund films for television that the public, and particularly young people, might actually want to see. In the 2000s, Rai has increased its involvement in film production, fulfilling both its cultural remit and the commercial necessities of the expanded media sphere.

Rai entered especially rocky phases in the early 1990s and 2000s. A political void was created after 1992 when so many Italian politicians were imprisoned in the wake of the tangentopoli (kickback) scandals that state institutions entered a period of uncertainty. Media mogul Silvio Berlusconi stepped into this turbulent situation, founding the Forza Italia center‐right political party in 1994 and winning that year’s national elections. During his four stints as prime minister of Italy, and his subsequent attempts to hang on to political power in spite of sex scandals and allegations of corruption and tax fraud, Berlusconi maintained ownership and control of his media company, Mediaset. For the purposes of this chapter, it is sufficient to indicate that Berlusconi’s interference in Rai and his domination of the media industries through his Fininvest empire have had a deleterious effect in the 2000s. Although owning a media empire, during his periods in power he showed little interest in supporting Italy’s cultural institutions or protecting national television and film interests. Attempts to inject a greater sense of commercial reality into Rai were accompanied by what Stephen Gundle and Stephen Parker (1996, 12) have typified as “a new and virulent form of political control, which, unlike the old practice of lottizzazione, effectively excluded the opposition.” His commercial mind‐set remained similar to that forged in the late 1970s when maximum profits were to be obtained by buying cheap foreign television programs and films to fill the schedules of his companies. So unconcerned was he about the consequences for the Italian film industries and its revenues that his government’s decision, early in 2011, to “reduce Italy’s single arts fund FUS (Fondo Unico Spettacolo) from EUR 428 to EUR 258 [million]” was only modified after considerable protest (European Audiovisual Observatory—hereafter referred to as EAO—2011, 27). Among other institutions, the Venice Film Festival and Cinecittà studios were under threat. The recessions of 2008–2009 and 2011 affected operating profits of film and media companies. Mediaset’s revenues were down by 12.5% in 2010–2011 as a result of the severe decrease in the television advertising market (EAO 2012, 87). Being less dependent on advertising revenue, Rai’s television and radio activities showed a modest increase of 1.38% from 2010 to 2011 (77). This intertwining of political and commercial interests has had important repercussions on the shape of the film industry since 1980.

The Italian state has been involved in financial assistance to the sectors of the film industry since the end of World War II, more or less generously, depending on the ideological inclination of those in power at the time such arrangements were renegotiated, and, more recently, on the state of the economy (Quaglietti 1980; Wood 2005; Lange and Westcott 2004, 38–39). Support for the Italian film industry is provided through the Direzione Generale per il Cinema (DG Cinema)—a section of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e di turismo (MiBACT).² The DG Cinema receives its funding from a share of the FUS, whose budget and its attributions are voted yearly by parliament (Newman‐Baudais 2011, 101). The majority of feature films apply for subventions, and there have been attempts to ensure that, if a film is unsuccessful at the box office, future applications will be unsuccessful. Tax‐credit and tax‐shelter schemes were introduced in 2009. Both the difficulties in obtaining a theatrical release, and the fact that the audience’s experience of a film may not be in a cinema, have currently led to the questioning of the subventions system. That European production had to be supported on both economic and cultural grounds was recognized by the European Commission in its 2010 Audio‐Visual Media Services Directive. As a member state, Italy is “required to guarantee the promotion by on‐demand AVMS providers of the production of and access to European works” (EAO 2013c, 15).³ The European Commission’s 2015 Report on its monitoring of the implementation of its directive identifies the difficulties in obtaining the kind of information from global media services operators upon which any revenues could be determined (European Commission 2015). As André Lange (2015, 7–8) has observed, funding arrangements are likely to be jeopardized where some national media operators are compelled to pay compulsory contributions and their competitors established abroad are not. Moreover, when it becomes impossible to gauge a film’s revenues from video‐on‐demand, Internet access, and so on, state subventions that are only based on box‐office receipts become problematic.

Technological advances since 1980 led to new commercial products and new ways of using them, starting processes of enormous cultural change. Such developments were mirrored in other European countries, prompting a series of important interventions by the European Community for the support of European cinema and, more widely, media. In order to maintain cultural diversity in the member states of the European Community, faced with the perceived threat of homogenized media content provided by global corporations, a variety of pan‐European funding mechanisms were put in place, the most important of which for film production have been (as also noted by Ferrero‐Regis in this volume) Eurimages, set up by the Council of Europe in 1988, and the MEDIA programs to support the cultural and industrial activities of the European audiovisual sectors, set up by the Council of Europe in 1990 and renewed with slightly changing remits at regular intervals. In January 2014, the MEDIA program was replaced by the Creative Europe program, running from 2014 to 2020 with a budget of €1.46 billion. With a wider remit, Creative Europe brings together a culture subprogram and a MEDIA subprogram that invests in film, television, new media, and games. The large sums of money supplied by national governments—and therefore by taxpayers—requires justification, hence the setting up of the monitoring functions carried out by the EAO. The Observatory’s research, published in yearbooks, legal summaries, and specially commissioned reports, started modestly by identifying exactly what commercial and state structures were out there, and it has evolved to examine the implications of fast‐moving changes in the sector. All those engaged in the Italian film and media industries have therefore to keep an eye on the results of the internationalizing of the audiovisual industries, navigating the tensions between national regulations and structures, and those of the European Community.

In the early 1990s, Italian film production moved from the relatively simple capitalist mode of production outlined at the beginning of this chapter to a much more complex model. The modes of exploitation of films increased, including cinema release; pay‐television broadcast; satellite, then digital terrestrial, television broadcast; videocassette; videocassette sales to Italian news kiosks; games; music cassette; packaged sales to minor satellite channels; and so on. If interviews with producers, directors, actors, writers, and cinematographers were prized for shedding light on the creative inputs to a film’s production up until the advent of video cassettes in the early 1980s, the raft of interviewees at the end of the twentieth century would have had to include “sales agents; directors of film festivals; commissioning editors for terrestrial and satellite television; producers of DVD extras; CEOs of regional, national, and international funds and institutions; PR companies; Internet journalists; fiscal representatives; actor/directors, actor/producers; and so on” (Wood 2009, 302). Such is the pace of technological change, fueled by digitalization and faster broadband speeds, others would now have to be added to this list: those responsible for film in the main “convergent players,” such as Telecom Italia; programmers of video‐on‐demand (VOD) channels; buyers and commissioning editors for pay‐DTT (pay‐digital terrestrial television) and IPTV (Internet protocol television) (EAO 2013b, 102); satellite program packagers; regional film funders. In the digital era, rapid change requires swift adaptation and the seizing of commercial opportunities. Interviewed in 2015, Gianpaolo Giusti of 64Biz described how his company provided not only specialist creative products such as trailers, graphics, and subtitles, but also digital distribution and the secure digital archiving of content for clients (Monastra 2015, 32). The context of film production and exploitation is increasingly complex. Changes in the field of Italian and European cinema are hard to assess, because commercial information is either regarded as sensitive or simply not available (Lange 2013, 7–9)—an issue I will return to later.

With hindsight, it is clear that Berlusconi’s moves to dominate the Italian commercial television scene and to add ownership of terrestrial and satellite television companies, newspapers, publications, a public relations company, and a supermarket to his film production, distribution, and exhibition interests were in fact an astute recognition of patterns of concentration in media ownership typical of large, mainly American, commercial conglomerates whose activities are now typified as examples of convergence culture (Jenkins 2006; Zecca 2012).

Henry Jenkins (2006, 2–3) defines convergence as:

The flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural and social changes depending on who’s speaking and what they think they’re talking about.

The notion of convergence has the advantage of bringing together and explaining the outlines of Berlusconi’s commercial empire; the use of YouTube and social media; and the increasing opportunities to access and personalize the resources of mobile phones, cameras, tablets, and personal computers. First with the growth, then with the decline, of rental and retail VHS production—then the proliferation of terrestrial and satellite television, the reign of DVDs, and Internet streaming—it has become very difficult to project the financial success of a film, with a consequent plethora of attempts to limit financial risk and to find ways to make the consumer pay for the richness of media content available.

Some niche audiences are willing to pay. The idea of convergence in our digital world encompasses the survival and presence in the market place of low‐budget cult films made in the 1960s and 1970s, and the development of more or less obsessive fan communities. The impetus toward branding and the identification and development of niche audiences are the result of the huge levels of uncertainty about returns on investment in cinema. Italian cannibal films might be thought to have disappeared once exploited to the full in peripheral and grindhouse cinemas in the 1970s and 1980s. Not so. Ruggero Deodato’s claim that his film Cannibal Holocaust (1980) made the enormous (at the time) sum of 10 million lire in 10 days (Nepoti 1999, 39) suggested its potential to continue to earn money for whoever held the rights to exploit it. The Italian cult film magazine Nocturno devoted its copiously illustrated “Dossier 12” (2003) to cannibal films and where to get them. Cannibal Holocaust circulated on VHS—and then on DVD with multiple language subtitles. It was rereleased in 2011 by Shameless Screen Entertainment in a two‐disk DVD edition comprising the original film plus the director’s 2011 reedit, with a DVD extras disk entitled The Long Road Back From Hell, produced by Chain Production Ltd to coincide with the Cine Excess film festival in London in 2011. Deodato’s reedit toned down the killing of the muskrat in the original (but not the scenes of rape and torture of young naked women), enabling the film to get its “18” certificate in Great Britain with a mere 15 seconds of cuts, rather than the original 4½ minutes. The reedit and the “serious academic content” (provided by Kim Newman and myself) conferred some respectability while at the same time allowing the DVD box to trumpet the film’s nastiness, violence, and depravity.

I mention this example for several reasons. Older, cheap genre films deliver an already identified constituency, and are an example of dechronologization in the media market. The horror film viewer fits the category of “hyperconnected movie addict” identified by a 2014 audience report (European Commission 2014, 69). This niche constituency constitutes a fan community that sustains publications; a shop (Profondo Rosso in Rome); specialist DVD publishers, small companies producing DVD/Blu‐ray extras; and online fan communities that upload favorite scenes, or entire films, on YouTube and comment on social media or the Internet Movie Data Base. Media provider and fan have a symbiotic relationship. With years of commercial experience behind them, companies operating in any cult film habitus break the traditional, linear distribution patterns outlined earlier, and can achieve economies of scale by “multidimensional” distribution as identified by the European Commission (2012). They also illustrate the importance of various media platforms, particularly DVD extras, in keeping the directorial profile alive for successive generations. The DVD retail sector may be in decline (European Audiovisual Observatory 2012, 242), but announcements of its death may be premature. True, consumption of films streamed and downloaded may be increasing exponentially, but the DVD sector may merely be shrinking to the core cinephile constituency that in earlier days collected its own videoteche. Blu‐ray releases concentrate on blockbusters, including those Italian films included in the year’s top ten. Italy’s low broadband penetration plus high levels of online piracy have deterred large international multiterritorial platforms from aggressive online expansion; revenues from online VOD and EST (electronic sell‐through) remain minimal, so that DVD/Blu‐ray sales through kiosks, although declining, have an increased share of the Italian home entertainment market (International Video Federation 2013).⁴

I would suggest that the market does not necessarily impose complete acceptance of its terms on cultural texts such as the horror film. The interaction between films and the societies that produce them, and the global circumstances in which they are now received, are extremely complex. The fact that investors put money into film production in the expectation of making a profit on their investment is acknowledged by those in the horror‐film business, but occluded by a professional practice that translates the market imperatives of “small investment, large return” into the creative ability to fashion spectacular special effects with poor materials and out of low budgets. The fetishizing of the creativity behind professional competence can be seen as a strategy to control and put a brake on commercial norms that survives from the 1980s.

Transgressive content is one feature of a type of cinema that John Corner (2009, 114) typifies as the “bad popular”—the popular defined by the market. Another is the stress on professionalism that underlies one of the attractions of DVD and Blu‐ray extras. Cheap, high‐quality, sensitive cameras, computer generated images, and special effects have ironically spawned interest in a more individualistic and autonomous mode of production by younger generations—as well as interest in Mario Bava’s and Dario Argento’s trucchi (tricks), their inventiveness, their use of in‐camera trickery, and their triumph over the limits of minimal resources. Professional expertise is regarded as a mark of superior authenticity, not only in critically despised filoni, but also in sectors of art cinema that rely on knowledge of the constraints of television production (Wood 2009, 202–203). In this context, professionalism, rather than metaphysical themes—although some lay claim to these—becomes the defining characteristic of films and the source of their authority: both a product of the history and practice of producing genres and filoni in the field of Italian cinema, and an arena in which authority figures are those who conform best to the unwritten, and mostly unconscious, standards of their particular filmmaking milieu. Creativity in the use of cinematic means at their disposal and a stance of transgressiveness distinguish horror and giallo filoni, but visual flair and openness to trends in international culture, team work, and clear possession of the skills necessary to overcome difficulties and construct complex films are the rules of many another cinematic habitus.

The context becomes very complicated in the 2000s. Media public relations creatives may attempt to construct a brand profile in order to build and target an audience, but the more traditional association of connoisseurship with highbrow tastes has been weakened by increased consumer desire to partake in a wide variety of media. The educated consumer may not only enjoy recognizing the Fellinian quotations in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013) but also distinguish himself or herself by the ability to critique giallo films, while also being an early aficionado of Game of Thrones. New and different styles of consumption and cultural appreciation are now influencing and generating social networks.

The success of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, for example, has enabled him to attract ever‐higher budgets. His films show the similar preoccupations demanded of earlier “great directors,” but demonstrate his awareness that his tertiary‐educated audience possesses a wider media culture than that which earlier auteur directors could assume of their audience. Multigeneric and complex at the same time, his films can be appreciated for their spectacle and superb visual organization, the presence of Luca Bigazzi’s photography, the positioning of clues to interpretation, and examples of subcultural as well as high‐culture expertise. The presence of the neon sign of the Hotel New Europe, and the title on the screen (see Figure 18.2) in the conference room where the protagonist Titta Di Girolamo meets the mafia boss in Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, 2004) function as access points to the heterotopia of mafia operations, showing a mode of exercising power that resembles that of global corporations (Wood 2011, 358–60). David Byrne’s music and visual reference to the lead singer of The Cure in This Must Be the Place (2011) signal Sorrentino’s subcultural credentials. The “great directors” who feature in all books on Italian cinema—Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini—have not been followed by other “great directors,” but by types of film practice that have taken account of changing circumstances in the film industries, different types of film auteurs, and new niche markets.

Figure 18.1 Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980). Naked, impaled, young woman filmed within the film. Screen grab.

Figure 18.2 Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, Paolo Sorrentino, 2004). Titta goes to meet the mafia boss in a hotel conference room, suggesting mafia penetration of the world‐at‐large and, in the context of the film, the link between mafia business practices and those of multinational corporations. Screen grab.

These characteristics have been fundamental to the development of quality cinema since the 1980s, aiming at the traditional high‐profile cinema release model. Certain directors and creative workers were identified as having the originality and professional expertise necessary to deliver work with high production values, sometimes with large budgets, and aimed at large, international audiences. Festival appearances, prestigious awards, and nominations—and regular success in attracting Italian state subventions for quality and tax breaks—are the cornerstone of this sector of European cinema (Wood 2007, 43–44).

On the one hand, we can see the development of characteristic postmodern industrial forms that Harvey (1990, 147) refers to as “flexible accumulation.” This is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production; new ways of providing financial services; new markets; and greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. On the other hand, the film industry has polarized, so that only a director who has already proved financial success can make a very individualistic unconventional film at the high‐budget end of the market—while such films are more common in the low‐budget sector. High‐budget films have to be exploited in as many territories as possible. “Quality” cinema can be defined as big‐budget, authorial, and international, with clarity of ideas and exposition, and creative quality in terms of visuals, performance, and ideas. Spectacular visuals are one way of offering creative quality. One of the interesting things about Paolo Sorrentino is that he combines public pronouncements stressing his affinities with the “great director” profile, while concealing the work of putting together a production package and the financing involved in attaining that profile. The irony of this position is fundamental to this sector of the Italian film industry in which a business‐management approach is firmly embedded in a more or less uncritical acceptance of capitalist principles, and of postmodern business practices. The emphasis is on product success in financial terms, rather than artistic reward, and on making sure that a film production is not just a one‐off, but can be quantified in some way so that the financial outcome of subsequent films can be more accurately gauged, and investment found. Sorrentino’s conquest of authorial status came via small, modestly budgeted, films made with a Neapolitan production company, Indigo Films, that made very little money but attracted critical attention at festivals because of their subject matter and spectacular visual sense. His breakthrough came with Le conseguenze dell’amore, which won a slew of David di Donatello prizes—Italy’s equivalent of the Oscars—and was nominated for a Cannes Palme d’Or. Sorrentino interlaces conventions of the gangster film with those of Italian film noir to provide a recognizable genre structure, but one overlaid with his spectacular mise‐en‐scène and editing. The quality of Sorrentino’s filmmaking can be appreciated from the sequence in which Titta is being driven to his death for having embezzled 220 billion Italian lire from the mafia. The hoods drive into a long motorway tunnel, lit in sodium yellow light, while singing along to Ornella Vanoni’s song, Rossetto e Cioccolato (lipstick and chocolate). Titta’s gaze out of the car window signals flashbacks recalling how he outwitted the two mafia henchmen sent to his Swiss hotel to steal a suitcase of money. The high‐contrast lighting and narrative situation are familiar American noir and neonoir characteristics, but the flashes of yellow light and contrasting visual regimes of cool tones and warm baroque decoration are typical of Italian film noir. The catchy tune and words of Ornella Vanoni’s pop song are motivated by the class profile of the hoods and give access to Titta’s personality at a deeper level: the tension between patience and ability, recklessness and sensuality. Noir conventions and a neobaroque aesthetic are used to access a deeper level of meaning.

The film’s success, and the presence of big distributors Fandango and Medusa, enabled Sorrentino to put together another personal and one‐off film, L’amico di famiglia (The Family Friend, 2006) and then a bigger production, Il divo (2008), which consolidated the seriousness of purpose of his work, helpfully pointed out to the public via interviews and articles. In short, Le conseguenze dell’amore was Sorrentino’s calling card to auteur status.

Although L’amico di famiglia did not do well at the box office, the presence of Fandango and Medusa in the production/distribution package indicated that an international television/satellite rollout was planned. By contrast, Il divo, with an estimated budget of €5.7 million, had a more complex roll call of production partnerships including Indigo; the big distributor Lucky Red; subventions from Eurimages, MiBAC, and a variety of film commissions; and cultural television bodies such as Arte. Helped by a considerable number of sales to foreign distributors and satellite packagers, its box office was US$11.26 million worldwide, on top of its €4.5 million in Italy. This pattern has been repeated with La grande bellezza, which won the 2014 foreign‐language Oscar but received mixed reactions in Italy. The cinefiliaritrovata blog of the Cineteca di Bologna posted positive foreign reviews as evidence that the film had been made for an international audience, full of Italian stereotypes and easy Fellinian quotations (“Sorrentino per stranieri” 2014). Its budget of €8 million necessitated another complex production package with Indigo Film, Medusa, and the Banca Popolare di Vicenza on the Italian side, Babe Films, Pathé, and France 2 Cinéma on the French. For the producer Nicola Giuliano, one of the founders of Indigo Films, the difficult financial task was made easier by the “fact that Paolo Sorrentino is considered an international director abroad: he’s a great auteur whose enormous talent has been recognized outside Italy” (Spagnoli 2014, 10).

In talking about his work, Sorrentino mentions his affinities with other directors with high status in the authorial world. In an interview about Il divo, there are admiring references to Marco Bellocchio, Gianni Amelio, and Nanni Moretti, and the stress on the complexity of his task:

Given the complexity of the character [of Giulio Andreotti], of the subject and the myriad themes within the film, I think that what is on the screen respects this complexity by sometimes being realistic, sometimes dreamlike, grotesque and comic. (Zaccagni and Spagnoletti 2008, 109–10)

The “confession” sequence illustrates his claim. Andreotti comes out of the dark into a gloomy room, sits, and, invoking his wife Livia, confesses to direct or indirect responsibility for the massacres and deaths in Italy between 1969 and 1984. In a series of unmotivated framings, the camera films him from the front, side, three‐quarters, head and shoulders, and close‐up. The actor (Toni Servillo) is in costume and in role, approximating the physical appearance of the politician but emphasizing his grotesque stance. He speaks faster and faster, attention on his performance only varied by light‐toned scenes of a couple walking past rows of white crosses. The mise‐en‐scène and performance are so excessive as to generate doubts as to the veracity of the representation of Andreotti. Through this kind of aporia, Sorrentino indicates that it is never possible to fully know another person, and that our own reactions to his film are also contingent.

Claiming to be an outsider, like his fellow director Matteo Garrone, Sorrentino reveals his countercultural creative credentials while also making a bid for authorial status, marking himself out as occupying a position of authority by virtue of his distance from mainstream filmmaking. Past political filmmakers Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi are mentioned in connection with his aim to “show the mechanisms of power, solitude, arrogance, the tendency to construct a life based exclusively on violent relationships” (Zaccagni and Spagnoletti 2008, 116). His goal is also to demonstrate that “whoever exercises power belongs to this culture” (116). To conquer auteur status means conforming to the symbolic capital and stereotypical aspects of filmmaking practice perceived as natural and “common sense” in that sector. The name‐dropping of important directors has a function within the field of the Italian film industry because it is “both a strategy and culture of practice. Fare bella figura, putting yourself to best advantage by mentioning important names and showing that they have recognized your worth, is a strategy for conquering a place in the field’s hierarchy of power, rather than a demonstration of intrinsic talent” (Wood 2009, 300). Complex narratives and the ability to overcome difficulties, while indicating an additional source of auteur authority by stressing individuality and maverick status in interviews also have a function. Sorrentino’s move into English‐language filmmaking with This Must Be the Place, in conjunction with maverick actor/director Sean Penn and the film’s rock‐star ambiance and Holocaust quest, is fully consistent with this.

More modest ambitions structure the approaches of other directors who also produce quality work but rely on coproduction with television in their production package. Like Michele Placido, they avoid pretensions to auteur status (Costantini 1994, 42). Rai functions as the minority coproducer and does not wholly fund these quality productions, which cost between €8 and 10 million. For the head of Rai Cinema, Paolo Del Brocco, such films are essential even in difficult financial times (Spagnoli 2013, 18). The number of coproductions with other European countries has been decreasing in the 2000s (D’Ambros 2015, 18), reflecting the difficulties that European films have in accessing a theatrical release in their own, let alone more than one, European market. The cultural value of television coproductions lies in their exploration of Italian realities so that Italian filmmakers can speak with their own voice. However, given the steady closing of cinemas, the renewal of the tax‐credit system at the end of 2013 was essential in order to diversify genres, stories, and film language, and reach different audiences (Spagnoli 2013a, 18–19). In spite of the recession, the number of feature films produced increased by 15.8% to 155 between 2010 and 2011, further increasing to 166 in 2012 and 167 in 2013 (EAO 2013c, 194; EAO 2013a, 26–27). Film production reached 201 in 2014, the highest level in a decade, with television networks continuing to contribute around 30% of budgets (Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo/MiBACT—hereinafter FES/MiBACT—2015, 142). The number of digital screens has increased slowly, but cinema admissions have dropped 17% since 2009 (EAO 2013a, 26–27). Given that the market share of national films was 27.8% of the box office in 2014 (EAO 2015b, 2015c), it is clear that television coproduction has been crucial. Rai has been at the forefront here; 1,245 national films were shown on Italian terrestrial channels in 2011 (EAO 2012, 145–46). Of the 567 Italian films shown on Rai channels in 2014, 105 were recent productions, although not necessarily shown at peak times (FES/MiBACT 2015, 107). There have, however, been a few films coproduced with Rai that have responded to the financial crisis in southern Europe and to revelations of corporate malfeasance and corruption in the financial world by examining the modes of operation of commercial companies. These films have not signaled themselves as political in the sense of employing Godardian countercultural modes of filmmaking and/or hard‐hitting investigative narratives typical of Italian political cinema, but have employed the noir style to delineate the habitus of those in power in financial circles, exploring the context, for example, of the Parmalat scandal (Il gioiellino, Andrea Molaioli, 2011) the deleterious effect of financial greed on the part of the banks (L’industriale, Giuliano Montaldo, 2011), and precarious working conditions (Pietro, Daniele Gaglianone, 2010). Since American films dominate cinema circuits worldwide, noir style is ubiquitous and its codes and conventions easily understood (Wood 2016). Structured around easily understood narratives and fully formed characters, these films both entertain and deliver a political viewpoint.

In general, those involved in this sector of Italian cinema stress their awareness of the structural, technical, and commercial necessities of filming for television. Precarious employment conditions were also the subject of Smetto quando voglio (I Can Quit Whenever I Want, Sydney Sibilia, 2014), a Rai coproduction. The hugely popular comedy followed a group of downtrodden or unemployed academics who move into drug production, clearly striking a chord with educated Italian audiences affected by Italy’s recession. Occasionally the delivery of a viewpoint via television coproduction may go awry. Rai partly paid for, and Silvio Berlusconi and Umberto Bossi (member of parliament for the Northern League, who also appeared in it) backed it, as a celebration of northern Italian pride, but Barbarossa (Sword of Pride, Renzo Martinelli, 2009) split opinion in Italy and was not a box‐office success (Kington 2009, 37). Given its budget estimated by some sources as €9 million, and by others as €30 million, it has been estimated that a (possible) box office of €1 million would not even cover the government funding it received. Even with its Rai 01 Distribution abroad, estimated as a possible €140,000 (Pasquale 2013, 60), it will have been a huge financial (as well as critical) failure. On this occasion, the “intensive practices of self‐monitoring or ‘reflexivity’ necessary to ensure cost‐effective production” failed to work (McRobbie 2005, 376).

A slightly different trajectory has been taken by Luca Guadagnino, who began his career with Melissa P. (2005), an adaptation of Melissa Panarello’s soft‐porn account of her sexual adventures, 100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire (2003; translated into English as One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, 2004). In industry terms, the various shades of porn cinema constitute an extremely lucrative parallel world to that of “legitimate” Italian filmmaking—providing opportunities to filmmakers and actors to gain industry experience.⁵ Guadagnino’s jump up to the authorial habitus was achieved via contact and friendship with the British actor, Tilda Swinton, resulting in two short films that attracted critical interest, and the feature, Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, 2009). Swinton has made the crossover from avant‐garde to mainstream cinema, and now has an international, quantifiable profile. She is, in commercial terms, a brand. That is, she guarantees a quality professional performance, taking roles as negative characters in American films that showcase her talents, and setting up her own Scottish arts festival—in the wake of her backstory of daring and alternative European films. Although the story of an upper‐class Milanese family, Io sono l’amore was an international project from the start. Its estimated US$10 million budget was raised by producers First Sun and Mikado, Rai Cinema, MiBAC, and the Italian Riviera Film Commission (one of the characters lives in San Remo). The presence of Mikado is significant, as that company has a tradition of producing and distributing art cinema. It was a surprise hit at the Venice film festival, was picked up in a wide variety of distribution deals, and made US$10 million box office worldwide. As a family saga and drama of extramarital love and desire, its affinity with soap opera helped its international appeal. Ironically (though the film is not unique in this respect), Io sono l’amore’s success outside Italy is what provoked Italian audiences to go see it. Interestingly, Guadagnino too name‐drops—Hitchcock, Visconti, Antonioni, and John Huston (Morgoglione 2010)—a line‐up fitting for Mikado’s art cinema/quirky commercial cinema profile.

The film has the spectacular look of the quality film, and the mise‐en‐scène offers possibilities of deeper interpretations of contemporary issues such as the persistence of inherited wealth and influence, the effects of globalization and the changes in industrial practice associated with it, personal and commercial integrity versus greed, hidebound social manners versus warmth, creativity versus commodification. By tight framing of the characters within their luxurious domestic environment, the mise‐en‐scène manages to suggest the social world of the extremely wealthy, and how it traps and constrains its members (Figure 18.3).

Figure 18.3 Io sono l’amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009). Characters dwarfed by elegant, dehumanizing surroundings. Screen grab.

Given the difficulties of access to cinema release in the bigger venues, but not to the Internet, and the availability of relatively cheap digital filmmaking equipment mentioned earlier, Italian documentary and low‐budget filmmaking currently has higher visibility than in the past. Television and the Internet provide exhibition and distribution opportunities, although overtly anti‐Berlusconi documentaries have fallen foul of these avenues. The trailer of Videocracy (a non‐Italian production directed by the half‐Italian, half‐Swedish director Erik Gandini, 2009) was denied access to both Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels, and to Rai. (This was not considered a total disaster, as the film concluded with the statement that the liberal, politicized target audience was not one that uses television as its primary source of information [Marshall 2009].) To celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2014, the Istituto Luce (the cultural organization set up under Fascism to produce, distribute, and archive Italian cinema) invited nine young filmmakers to make 10‐minute films using material drawn from the riches of its archive. These short films are available on YouTube as well as on the Istituto Luce website, providing greater exposure than they would enjoy at film festivals or on television.

Because Italy has had enough scandals and gray zones in political life to support documentary investigations, larger publishing companies, such as Feltrinelli, Einaudi, and others, have taken to bringing out DVDs of such work, together with an accompanying slim volume, for under €20. A collaboration of Rai2, the communist newspaper L’Unità, and Einaudi produced Vajont (Marco Paolini and Gabriele Vacis, 2001) about the background to the Vajont Dam disaster. Einaudi has also released some of Carlo Lucarelli’s Blu notte. Misteri italiani programs in the same format, which are also available on the Rai3 website and YouTube. Feltrinelli brought out a similar set containing Qualunquemente (Giulio Manfredonia, 2010) and has a publishing section devoted to books + DVDs, with links with YouTube. These are but physical manifestations of the myriad levels of cinephilia that have spawned a plethora of websites, offering more or less informed reviews, blogs, or personal lists, some with links to other sites, trailers, or downloads.

If capitalism has figured out ways to exploit and manipulate the new, individualistic social movements into niche markets, there has been, in turn, as David Harvey (2010, 131) suggested, a contrary movement of resistance to the commodification of desires, manifested in reluctance to pay for cinephile enthusiasms and obsessions. The reluctance to pay is a problem for the low‐budget independent filmmaker, or indeed for anyone wishing to have some compensation for his or her creativity or even a career in cinema. Sabina Guzzanti’s website (www.sabinaguzzanti.it) has links to MYmovies for reviews and trailers (www.mymovies.it) and to the Internet Bookshop Italia (www.ibs.it) for purchases. Alice Autelitano (2012, 100) suggests that MYmovies, which was set up in 2000 and has a huge number of news items, interviews, photo galleries, and trailers, is still growing. Although most searches are for reviews, MYmovies provides an opportunity to find out just what films are out there on the web, or where they can be seen near you, benefitting films such as Guzzanti’s Draquila—L’Italia che trema (Draquila: Italy Trembles, 2010). A biting documentary examining what happened in the year after the L’Aquila earthquake, Draquila investigates into the illegal links between the economic and political worlds, and consequently into mechanisms of censorship and control of the media, in Italy. Guzzanti is an actor and satirist; her television sketches featuring Berlusconi are coruscating and hilarious (though, of course, she ended up having five of the six episodes of her show Raiot cancelled). She is also a brand, consisting of a combination of her looks and her left‐wing filmic and satirical credentials, which are employed in an experiential mode of communication, in that she communicates with her constituency via her films, her performances, and her websites, and via the left‐wing, alternative, and political organizations that align themselves with her and protect her from attack. This is her habitus and, although she receives funding from the European Union for her presence at festivals, and distribution via Rai, her position is outside the mainstream of Italian film production.

When she presented Draquila—L’Italia che trema at the 2010 London Film Festival, Guzzanti mentioned the difficulties her film had in making any money. Normally, a documentary would have television support, but, since it was so critical of Berlusconi—indeed, it lampoons him mercilessly—Draquila was denied access to any of the terrestrial or satellite channels linked to him, to Medusa distribution, or to any of the media channels owned by Berlusconi. This effectively prevented the film from getting normal, postmodern patterns of exposure. Draquila exemplifies the fact that, since Italian films today are either made with state subventions or with television, anything else is artisanal production.

Someone who has neither auteur nor brand status is Daniele Gaglianone, although reviews, Internet articles, and his presence at film festivals indicate that his talents are highly regarded. Director of documentaries and feature films that have garnered recognition internationally, he is diffident about authorial status but stresses his professional profile in interviews. His film Pietro (2010) is the story of a slightly disabled young man who makes a precarious living delivering leaflets for an abusive employer, and who lives with his drug‐addict brother in a scruffy apartment left to them by their parents. It was filmed with the involvement of friends as actors and with the use of another friend’s recently acquired run‐down apartment (Figure 18.4).

Figure 18.4 Pietro (Daniele Gaglianone, 2010). Pietro bullied by his drug‐addict brother. Screen grab.

Gaglianone’s use of the sensitive and versatile RedOne camera allowed him to shoot in low light, keeping costs down, but this required extreme discipline in working out the shots and shooting schedule beforehand. Pietro’s producer, Gianluca Arcopinto, is well known for backing “new” or nonmainstream films, and for achieving some success with them. Pietro was marketed with a slim book by Arcopinto accompanying the DVD, obtainable (with great difficulty) from a left website (http://www.deriveapprodi.org/2011/09/pietro/). Arcopinto describes his constituency not as independent cinema but as cinema autonoma. Pietro’s €200,000 budget had a large input from the Turin Film Commission, but is almost invisible, in spite of festival acclaim. Tax‐break mechanisms would not have assisted Pietro directly but only to the extent that they benefit production partners such as Rai. The Italian film trade press concentrates on the effects of tax breaks on upper‐middle to large‐budget films, rather than on the effects of cuts to funding for low‐budget films or cinema autonoma. Gaglianone’s subjects are not soft or easy; his subsequent films, Ruggine (2011), the story of child sexual abuse among southern immigrants living in the desolate periphery of a northern city, and La mia classe (2013), exploring the reality of legal and illegal (clandestini) immigrants through their Italian language class, are beautifully organized and filmed explorations of lives generally ignored by Italian cinema. Both represent steps up in budget, with the participation of Rai as well as of regional film commissions. When I asked Gaglianone, during the 2013 London Film Festival, how he had managed to get Rai on board, he replied that he had made them such a low‐budget estimate that they could not refuse. Modesty has paid off in terms of well‐known actors’ participation, and the look of money on the screen. For those involved, low‐budget/no‐budget does not imply low quality but opportunities to explore different ideas (Guglielmino 2013, 31) and to gain recognition through the CinemaZERO film festival.

Daniele Gaglianone is an example of a phenomenon that greatly preoccupies both MiBACT and professional groups—that is, the preponderance of low‐budget films each year that attracts new and creative entrants to the industry, most of whom will never have well‐paid careers, and the proliferation of small companies providing a variety of services, which means the spread and thinning of little money over a growing field. The number of films produced with exceptionally low budgets (up to €200,000) increased from seven in 2007 to 69 in 2014, and low‐budget films in general dominate yearly production (FES/MiBACT 2015, 118–22). When foreign films (mainly American) dominate 67.8% of the Italian box office, it is easy to see that low‐budget films have to consider outlets other than a cinema release (FES/MiBACT 2015, 174–76). Just as in the 1990s, when commercial sensitivity made it impossible to discover how much revenue VHS video companies made from the rights they had acquired cheaply, there is a current lack of transparency regarding rights and revenues of audiovisual service providers operating in Italy—but mainly based outside it (Lange 2015, 9). The suspicion is that, if producers knew sales volumes, they would receive more advantageous returns for sales of rights.

Cinema closures affect the cultural life of Italian cities and towns. The independent cinemas that survive do so by embedding themselves in their communities; encouraging young people to build their film culture; working with schools; employing “event” projections of theatre and opera performances, student loyalty cards, discounts advertised on Facebook, and many other innovative tactics to attract different audiences to their venue (Gelato 2013, 12–16). European Union grants (through the MEDIA program) supporting the digitization of cinemas, benefitted the independent‐cinema sector, making film hire cheaper because delivered from remote servers rather than on celluloid. Independents have greater flexibility in choosing day, date, and time of day for the hiring of digital films. Simon, Sanz, and de Prato (2014, 182) claim that the balance of power in the globalized media “has shifted towards downstream, away from the upstream, or from the production side of the media toward the distribution side,” in which large marketing and distribution companies and large retailers, such as Carrefour and Amazon, are “taking backward control of production.” This ignores the fact that such companies are greedy for content and that even small independent production companies have an archive or back catalogue that can be an asset in their survival strategies.

This study has concentrated on a few representative films to explore cultural and commercial change. Many of the practices of the 1980s have survived, such as subventions for production and distribution in Italy and abroad; the division of production into genres; and the identification of serious/art films that can be showcased in film festivals—even though such categories have merged in the contemporary world. In a globalized digital world, the differences between previously separate cultural spheres such as film, television, and opera disappear in opportunities to exploit productions in new ways, such as the “event” phenomenon of digital recordings of live opera productions, which attract considerable audiences to cinemas. In spite of the power wielded by global media giants to dominate markets, the Italian film industry survives, albeit in an increasingly restricted area of its own audiovisual space. It manages to respond to its own cultural reality, nurturing creativity at various production levels, and taking advantage of opportunities that the media giants deem too small to be worth exploiting. At a time that negotiations on the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) are in process, the EAO’s 2015 Yearbook will include an extensive study of what it calls “Foreign Affiliates Statistics (FATS)”—that is, aspects of the wider international trade in audiovisual services (EAO 2015a). The TTIP arrangements would represent an additional level of competition for Italian cinema.⁶ The complexity of contemporary media production and consumption masks important realities. As Gianluca Arcopinto (2011, 71) says, you have to fight “for a cinema which is not homogenized, or absorbed, that hasn’t given in.” This means a cinema that encompasses Paolo Sorrentino and Daniele Gaglianone, and is not just entertainment and spectacle, but also aesthetic reflection of the world in which Italians live.

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Notes

1 Editor’s note: See the chapters by Corsi and Ferrero‐Regis in this volume for further discussion of film practices and the Italian film industry. See Caminati and Sasso for a full discussion of contemporary Italia documentary filmmaking, addressed in the latter part of Wood’s chapter.

2 MiBACT was MiBAC until 2013, when the ministry acquired responsibility for tourism.

3 Article 13 of the EC AVMS Directive states that “Member States shall ensure that on‐demand audiovisual media services provided by media service providers under their jurisdiction promote, where practicable and by appropriate means, the production of and access to European works.” Promotion could relate to financial contributions to production or rights acquisition or to the share and/or prominence of European works in a VOD (video‐on‐demand) catalogue. States are obliged to report on implementation of the directive to the EAO (EAO 2013c, 15).

4 Although market penetration of Blu‐ray players rose to 18.5% in 2014, the format has lagged seriously behind that of DVD and has already shown signs of decline due to the economic crisis (International Video Federation 2014).

5 The European Commission’s 2015 report on on‐demand audiovisual services included an assessment of the soft‐porn industry but, information about catalogue content, numbers of sales, and income are regarded as commercially sensitive. These categories are blacked out in the publically downloadable document.

6 For a succinct note about the consequences of and secrecy surrounding the TTIP negotiations, see p. 37 (downloadable) of Cabrera Blázquez et al. (2015).