4 Cold War Photoromances

A short documentary produced by the Catholic educational film producer San Paolo Film on the sixth commandment, titled Non commettere atti impuri (Thou shalt not commit adultery) features a scene about the deleterious effects of sinful readings and the threat they pose to the moral and sexual behaviors of youth and women alike.1 Over the image of Carlo, a young boy who is looking at a postcard picture of Saint Mary, folded in the book that he is studying, a male voice-over comments: “Beware not to get caught by fantasies, let’s pray to the Madonna to free us from the suggestion of the mind” (figure 4.1a).2 A medium shot of two women reading an issue of Sogno together is sandwiched in between the image of the boy (figure 4.1b) and the close-up of a man playing Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and with blood on his face (figure 4.1c). In a montage intended to be instructive, the easily interpretable visual analogy is further explained (in a didactic tone) by the commentator: “We must avoid bad readings and bad company,” he says, “sins of thought are like so many thorns that we stick in Jesus’ head.”3 Behind the women, a man seems to supervise their reading or, perhaps, he is simply there to once again suggest that “bad readings” go hand in hand with promiscuity (figure 4.1b).

The disapproval of photoromances in a Catholic educational reel does not make news. What is worth more attention is the very use of a mass media to preach the Catholic faith. Thou shalt not commit adultery is only an episode in a series of shorts based on the Ten Commandments, and typical of the publisher’s educational program. San Paolo Film is a branch of Edizioni San Paolo, funded by Father Giacomo Alberione of the religious congregation Società San Paolo in the 1920s. After War World II, San Paolo was developed in line with other firms such as Rizzoli and Mondadori, expanding from publishing to filmmaking, and investing in the rotogravure.4 Father Giuseppe Zilli, who directed Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family [FC]) the widely read illustrated magazine published by Edizioni San Paolo, explicitly promoted the idea of a “catechesi fatta in lingua rotocalco” (cathechesis in the language of tabloid) during his tenure from 1955 to 1981. By the 1970s, Edizioni San Paolo had become a media corporation involved in publishing, film, music (Paoline Editoriali Audiovisivi), radio (Nova Radio), and television (Telenova). Across media platforms, the Catholic media industry responded to the decline in organized religion that, according to Chris Rojek, paralleled the rise of celebrity culture, the democratization of society, and the commodification of everyday life.5 If mass media representation is key in the formation of celebrity, the case of San Paolo shows how Christianity exploited the same devices of consumer culture “in branding belief and communicating faith.”6

The innovative role played by Edizioni San Paolo in the direction of media convergence and consumer culture is relevant not only in reference to the political stance of Christian Democracy (waging war against illustrated magazines and other products of the industries) but also across the political spectrum, by comparison to the experiments of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). As Stephen Gundle has shown, the PCI held an ambiguous position in the postwar period: on the one hand, PCI’s official line was to resist standardization and consumerism by rejecting mass culture; on the other, members of the same party understood the need to employ popular genres and the mass media in order to attract and maintain voters and membership.7 It is within this context that, in the late 1950s, different local agencies of the PCI went against the grain by creating and publishing photoromances. Communist photoromances were single issues that narrated stories of troubled sentimental relationships that ended in marriage or with the reconciliation of the married couple, as well as with the political conversion of the female protagonist (usually from an undecided voter to a fervent Communist). Soon after, in the early 1960s, San Paolo’s Famiglia Cristiana seemed to respond to the Communist initiative by publishing a series of photoromances that narrated the lives of popular female saints, but adopted the successful formula in installments. The goal of Catholic and Communist publishers was one and the same: to win the consensus of Italian women via their vote or their worship.

PCI and FC did not simply recycle an established photoromance form according to their own political and moral agendas.8 The Communist agency and the Catholic publisher engaged with the photoromance medium, both its content and its style. In this chapter, I analyze aspects relating to the host media, the kind of stories, and the type of signs, including the types of photography, in order to understand the degree to which Communist and Catholic photo-textual narratives draw and depart from the commercial model, and from each other. Close reading of texts will highlight differences and continuities in social and cultural discourses, with particular regard to femininity, womanhood, and consumer culture. I will study how the visual-textual narratives embrace (or reject) the behavioral models and the politics of gender that magazines such as Bolero Film conveyed to their readership. In this way, I will also explore similarities between Catholic and Communist models of social, sexual, and moral conduct. According to historian Sandro Bellassai, despite the opposite political stands, Catholic and Communist cultures in the postwar period did not differ much in relation to the moral values and behaviors they upheld: “the two cultures effectively tend to be so indistinct from one another as to make one think that analysis should turn towards a third ground with which the osmosis of the Communist and Catholic cultures is not only constant but even fundamental.”9 This “third ground” is, in Bellassai’s words, “a deep cultural humus, of a traditionalist and chauvinist character.”10 This chapter will examine how, in the practice of making popular culture, the two blocs not only fought the same battle against a common enemy (the cultural industry), but also built upon this shared humus in order to win the hearts of Italian women: that is to say, on the very “third ground” that the escapist fantasies of popular romances threatened to destabilize.

The main difference between Catholic and Communist photoromances consisted, rather, in the type of readers. The intention of the Office of Propaganda was to reach out to working-class female audiences in an attempt to politicize them. Wives, fiancées, and daughters of Italian workers were both the privileged readers and protagonists of Communist readings. Instead, the goal of FC was to homogenize its readership across the social ladder, in the name of modern culture. With one million copies sold in 1961, the Catholic magazine was mostly successful among middle-class women in the small provincial towns of Northern Italy, but the publisher’s objective was to expand the market in larger urban centers also in the South, where both working-class and peasant readers were prevalent.11 In the words of Mario Marazziti: “FC carries out a work of wide cultural dissemination and of the ‘modernization’ of the masses, thus contributing to the diffusion of a koinè of the uses and manners of civil coexistence that are more homogeneous between city and country, between workers and the small middle classes.”12 In addition, both Catholic and Communist photoromances were not available at newsstands and could only be bought in Catholic churches, Communist Party headquarters, or from door-to-door activists (PCI or Catholic Action).13 Thus, their audience was self-selective, which suggests that the producers’ goal was not to find new converts but to make sure that those who were already under their supervision would not stray or let their family members do the same.

Grand Hotel, Communist Style

In the early 1950s, in Quaderno dell’attivista (Notebook of the Activist), Giuliana Saladino sharply addressed Communist Party members for their lack of understanding in regard to women’s attachment to photoromances, particularly those women in the poorest rural areas of Sicily. Saladino acknowledged not only the cultural potential of the media, but also the active role played by young women who, in the poorest conditions, would find time to gather and to read or listen to other women reading.14 In the PCI, it was mostly women who spoke in favor of photoromances in order to foster literacy and, therefore, political awareness. Already on May 18, 1947, Marisa Musu wrote in PCI’s illustrated magazine Vie Nuove an article entitled “Young Women Dream,” in which she claimed that “if at the National Conference of Communist Youth some delegates have Grand Hotel in their purses, . . . we should not be scandalized: even in such a way, the girls are moving towards democracy.”15 Musu’s perspective clashed with the general opinion expressed in Vie Nuove that photoromances not only spread bourgeois and capitalist “insidious propaganda,” but also mortified women, who were sexually objectified in their photographs. Such evaluations were oblivious of women’s desires that could be satisfied by these readings, according to Teresa Noce, the secretary of the Textile Union. In a letter published in 1952 in the Socialist newspaper Il Lavoro, Noce reminded PCI executives that whether female readers were married or not, they needed a “prince charming” because what “he” meant for them was often “only the aspiration for something better than the present, that is, a nicer and more happy life, less difficult and strenuous, more peaceful and civil, without having to worry about unemployment or an insufficient salary, about a small and noxious house, about an unsafe tomorrow.”16 Despite their similarly positive take on photoromances, Saladino’s and Musu’s accounts are different from Noce’s. While the first two women reevaluate the media for educational purposes, the latter appears to criticize the idea that culture must necessarily be educational. What if the issues of Grand Hotel in the handbags of Communist women were there solely to entertain rather than to educate them? And on what basis would PCI decide to publish photoromances: to use them as tools to educate women (building on their existing familiarity with the genre and their love for romances), or to exploit the potential of cultural entertainment as a tool of propaganda? In other words, the question is whether Communist photoromances simply exploited the form to convey a political message (eliminating any escapist elements in the narratives), or instead embraced both content and signs of the commercial model to please their readers while also persuading them.17

To address the questions just raised, I will use a sample of seven photoromances collected at the Istituto Gramsci in Rome, the only ones currently available (Gundle and Giovanna Calvenzi mention an earlier experiment in Sicily during the 1953 elections, a photoromance titled “Per chi vota Caterina Pipitone?” [For Whom Does Caterina Pipitone Vote?], but I could not locate any copy it).18 One of these seven (“Il destino in pugno” [Destiny in Your Hand]) is drawn, while the rest use photographs. “Destiny in Your Hand” (1959) is also the only one to be published by the Regional Committee of the Communist Party in Sicily. The other six were published by the Sezione Stampa e Propaganda of the Central Committee in Rome. “La grande speranza” (The Great Hope) and “Più forte del destino” (Stronger Than Destiny) were published in 1958, “Cuore di emigranti” (Heart of Emigrants) and “Frontiera tra gli sposi” (Border between Spouses) in 1963, and “Diritto di amare” (The Right to Love) in 1964.19 “La vita cambierà” (Life Will Change) does not have a date, but from the style and content it is most likely from the early 1960s (figure 4.2). Six out of seven narratives end with election days and have an invitation to vote for the Communist Party (“Vote Communist,” “Vote PCI,” “Vote Like This”) on the back page; only “Border between Spouses” ends simply with reconciliation in the family and says “Enlist in P.C.I.” on the back cover (figure 4.3).

Most of these photoromances employ a fixed grid of nine (and up to twelve) images per page that rarely make use of close-ups and, most frequently, frame characters in a medium shot. Maintaining the same settings and types of shot for each narrative unit, photographs are usually sequenced with minimal changes from one to another, and these are limited to the position of characters within the frame. There are no emotional pauses on the faces of the protagonists and, with no ellipsis or gaps to be filled in the gutters (the white lines between photographs), readers are rarely forced to interpret. In sum, the focus is mostly on dialogues and captions, on the story more than on the visual quality of the text. Two exceptions are “Life Will Change” and “The Right to Love,” which show some craft in page composition and in the use of photographs and captions. Rather than repetitively using a fixed grid, these texts creatively play with different sizes of photographs and caption boxes. In both cases, the romantic plot revolves around unmarried couples. These couples are also featured on the back or front cover, or both, a move that places more emphasis on their relationships than in any other case in which the family is central in the plot and also featured on the cover. Thus, it seems that the latest photoromances are also the closest to the commercial example both in their stylistic elements and in their content. In particular, in both “Life Will Change” and “The Right to Love,” visual narratives develop by syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic sequences of photographs. These sequences do not represent different moments of an action but rather the same situation from different angles (figure 4.4). Consequently, the customary representation of time as chronological development seems to be replaced in these instances by a static field of vision that rotates from left to right, from top to bottom, around the couple in conversation.

These stylistic elements are relevant to a main aspect in Communist photoromances. All of them take place in the historical time of the readers, never in what Serge Saint-Michel describes as “the a-historical, mythical, time of the eternal feminine.”20 They are bound to historical contingency instead of being collocated in the atemporal space of fantasy. Furthermore, their stories project readers into the future while also addressing their present. “Life Will Change,” “The Great Hope,” “Destiny in Your Hand,” “Stronger Than Destiny”: these titles do not refer to an unknown future, but to a future that readers can control should they join the Communist cause. Most PCI photoromances are set in Southern Italy, where the message of faith in historical progress directly addresses cultural and social issues dependent on a logic of fatalism, that is, the belief that nothing can be done to change one’s fate. Layered through centuries of exploitation by local, national, and foreign colonizing forces, fatalism was a detriment to the working classes because it nurtured hopelessness and distrust toward any kind of authority. In the Communist photoromances, the resolution of romantic and familial vicissitudes constitutes the material proof that change is possible. These private matters are inextricable from economic and political factors, particularly unemployment and the Christian Democratic politics on emigration. Couples are separated because of unemployment, which forced Italian men (husbands or fiancées) to emigrate to Germany or Switzerland. In “Border between Spouses,” for example, the husband works abroad (in this case, in Switzerland) under difficult circumstances—and so does his brother-in-law—while his pregnant wife must stay in Italy because she could not otherwise receive free medical assistance. The story eventually ends with the family reunited in their small southern Italian village and with a message of hope for the future: the male protagonist declares to his wife his certainty regarding their chances of finding a better life in their hometown, especially should they sustain the activities of the Communist Party. Several other photoromances deal with the issue of emigration and the horrible pains and injustices that emigrants endure in order to support their families. “Heart of Emigrants” more generally describes oppression and exploitation in the workplace in Germany, as well as the poor living conditions of workers, who must share a room and cannot have a place of their own. Also, “Heart of Emigrants” describes the isolation of workers and their lack of any contact with local people (not even women, to engage in love affairs!). Furthermore, these workers are frequently victims of racist comments or discrimination. In “The Great Hope,” workers tell their stories as they return to Italy in order to vote. As the Christian Democrats are blamed for abandoning the emigrants to their fate, emigration is presented simultaneously as a curse and a necessity.

As Evelyne Sullerot points out, emigration is also a main trope in commercial photoromances, and is portrayed as the cause of love troubles.21 Although the French scholar suggests that the photoromance exploits emigration exclusively as a narrative device impeding the realization of the love fantasy, in the Communist narratives romance is the means to acquire awareness of both economic and emotional exploitation, and, thus, to trigger women’s support. The commentary placed at the end of “Heart of Emigrants” concludes: “From the story of Giovanna and Carlo appears the true, real, human condition of hundreds of thousands of Italian families that have been divided by the migrant politics followed by the governments that until now have had a turn in guiding the country. . . . It is necessary therefore to deny votes to the D.C. [Christian Democracy] and to all the other governmental parties responsible for mass emigration and division of hundreds of thousands of Italian families.”22 Also similar to the commercial examples surveyed by Sullerot, Communist photoromances exercise, vis-à-vis their readers, “a compensation of profound frustration on the affective level.”23 These photoromances did not envision the fantasy of a Socialist revolution. Ultimately, they represented the verisimilar reality of the personal conversion of workers’ wives and fiancées from undecided or apolitical to Communists. The emotional toll that the men’s departure provokes in the female protagonists, as well as the greatest satisfaction triggered by the men’s return to the motherland (and to the wife/fiancées), takes a central role in relation to the struggle against capitalists and the Christian Democratic government.

Similar to other cases of Marxist-inspired narratives of the period, an aesthetic of realism is not the only explanation for this narrative solution.24 Rather, I see the decision to focus on individual stories as a way to relate personally to female readers. The effects of such stories are still relevant politically, since they may produce microsocial change precisely by compensating frustrations at the affective level. Through the resolution of conflicts within couples (married or engaged) or between family members (usually between daughters and fathers), romantic stories among working-class characters are politically charged with converting women to Communism by raising awareness about the workers’ (i.e., their husbands’) condition of exploitation. Earthly justice is then transferred from the hands of the exploited to the greater entity of the PCI and projected into the future. In the meantime, women can vote righteously at the next election or enlist in the local branch of the party.

As my brief summaries already highlighted, gender roles are traditionally assigned in Communist photoromances: women are entrusted with the care of the family and children, and, although young women may sometimes study, they do not work and all wish to get married. Women’s suffering is only consequent to that of their husbands and fiancés, and their role in the domestic sphere is taken for granted, just as is their devotion to male characters. Indeed, women acquire political awareness by accepting their husband’s or father’s values and point of view. Female characters also do not have leading roles, but instead act as companions of male workers, whose stories remain at the core of each narrative regardless of whether it takes place in Italy or abroad. Even in “Life Will Change,” in which the main female character Maria is a constant presence throughout the story, the male characters (her suitor Franco and her father Pasquale) are the ones who lead the action and move the plot forward. Pasquale refuses to submit to a “psycho-technical” test that is required to get a job at the new factory, which he helped to build, claiming that anyone in need should be employed, not—as the company’s doctor replies to him—according to a scientific evaluation. Unemployed, Pasquale must emigrate and leave Maria and the family behind. Consequently, Maria decides to join PCI and to lead a protest against the corrupt Christian Democratic local government, which is behind the decision of the factory owner to eventually reject all Communist workers’ applications, overriding the initial plan to hire according to the results of the test. Blackmailed by the politician who helped him receive the subcontract, the corrupted industrialist agrees that the factory needed politically aligned workers rather than the best workers for the jobs. Franco, however, disavows the PCI so that he can find employment at the same factory. For this reason, Maria rejects Franco, even though she has fallen in love with him. After an accident at work, in which he loses his hand, Franco reverts to his initial political position and joins the comrades by announcing that he will vote Communist in the next election. With Maria’s father finally having returned home, she is now ready to marry Franco. On the last page of the photoromance, Maria suggests that political commitment is the main drive behind her decision to marry Franco, rejecting physical attraction as a reason for being together (she does not mind that he lost his hand). On the very day in which they will both vote Communist, Maria asks Franco to promise “to never leave her again” so that the same day will be for them “the celebration of feelings.”25

This story is particularly emblematic because it charges the female protagonist with increasing power in the social context, yet without any radical change in gender hierarchies and identities. In fact, Maria’s leadership aims at fulfilling the demands of male workers: all employees in the factory are men and her political efforts are generally concentrated on fighting male unemployment.26 Maria does not consider any specific women’s issues either at work or in the private sphere. Instead, she replaces her mother (a housewife), who appears to be unable to deal with the loss of her husband, and then is ready to return to her previous role of devoted companion once her fiancée returns to her and to the Communist Party. “Judge the past, look at the future: Vote Communist:” the propaganda motto on the back cover synthetizes narrative time in “Life Will Change,” wherein the female protagonist is inspired by her father to take the lead in fighting for workers’ rights in her southern village, but also to consider her future, that is, the male worker whom she wishes to marry. Perhaps due to her leading role in the story, Maria is an exception, as she looks straight at readers in the headshot on the cover of “Life Will Change.” All the other actresses not only are modestly dressed, but also never gaze directly toward the camera and rarely look directly into another character’s eyes—including those of their partner, even when they are married. Baetens argues that this type of composition is typical in photoromances, in which characters appear to be isolated in the space where they act, a fact that excludes intimacy with their viewers.27 In addition, from a gendered perspective, rather than looking into their partner’s eyes, the women in these photoromances are looked at; they are submissive and docile bodies, even when they act as political subjects (who exhibit their support of the Communist Party).

Ultimately, Communist photoromances failed to speak to women for two reasons. First, by conforming to a patriarchal logic, they did not investigate issues relevant to the female subject (such as sexuality). Second, even though they cast women in traditional roles of mother and spouse, they never really addressed problems specifically relevant to gender (such as motherhood). Rather, conforming to the same patriarchal logic, they treated only those problems that were dependent on men’s troubles (in the economic or political sphere). In this respect, the Catholic Edizioni San Paolo demonstrated a deeper interest in the psychology of female readers, albeit in the name of their moral education. In FC, the illustrated magazine for “family and women,” most photoromances star female saints, explore female subjectivities, and address the issue of governing women’s desires.28 These photo-hagiographies convey Catholic rules of conduct, especially with regard to sexuality and the family, through the means of popular culture. In a fast-changing society, where sexual liberties are potentially dangerous to the traditional family and thus to the regulation of people’s conduct, FC exploits the photoromance in order to speak to women’s hearts and teach them how to behave.

Maria Goretti Superstar

Of the twelve photoromances published between 1959 and 1966 in FC, only four have male protagonists.29 Moreover, several features in the hagiographies of these men correspond to those of women: martyrdom, chastity, conversion, and poverty.30 Furthermore, all protagonists are laywomen and laymen, with the exception only of Saint Anthony, who was not a member of an official order, but a Franciscan Friar. Beginning in the early 1950s, the stories of these so-called “saints dressed in pants and jackets” were published in FC, as a “novella” (short fiction) in a series of installments in a section with the same title.31 The column was meant to provide examples of everyday sainthood. According to Marazziti, holding the “internal front” of the battle against secularization, it displayed “heroic and silent individuals,” whose role was juxtaposed to that of saints on the “external front”—missionaries working toward individual and mass conversion. The magazine perceived the global job of missionaries as dependent on male virtues even though both men and women starred in the column. My research shows that a specific interest in female saints only becomes evident when the column is replaced by the photoromance, a feminine-labeled media. At this point, the saints who are meant to put forward “accessible ideals to common believers in their everyday life” are mostly women.32 At home, where the Catholic war against modern society’s secularization takes place “in front of the TV,” FC preaches Catholicism “in tabloid language,” specifically by addressing female audiences via visual narratives that sanctified virgins and faithful wives.

Even though FC was quite open to consumerism, photoromances confirm Niahm Cullen’s opinion that the magazine was not open to changes in matters of sexual conduct and gender relations.33 Other columns such as Talking to the Father sustain this assumption. In a letter published in 1955 and titled “Uomini bestiali” (Beastlike Husbands), Father Atanasio preached to his readers “the virtues of a female soul”: “The priest will reproach a beastlike husband, but good mothers and faithful wives must continue to offer up their daily martyrdom with faith in the Lord.”34 The same preaching articulates the narrative of Saint Rita’s life in “La rosa rossa (Santa Rita)” (The Red Rose [Saint Rita]) (figure 4.5).35 Although Father Atanasio did not foresee this outcome in his counseling about “everyday martyrdom,” it is an effect that aptly represents the excess that characterizes the hagiographies of photoromances with respect to the other columns in the magazine. In the last episodes of the photoromance, Rita becomes a nun after her husband’s violent death, and moments of ecstasy fully visualize her inner desires. Projected into the afterlife, while on her deathbed calling out for Jesus, Rita’s passionate inner feelings are idealized and spiritualized, and her past carnal relationship is said to have been a duty she fulfilled for the sake of her parents and her children. The photoromance narrates Rita’s experiences as the wife of an abusive and alcoholic husband, whom she never left and never stopped serving, and whom she never even wanted to marry (her desire was to become a nun, but her parents forced her to marry the rich man). Eventually, Rita succeeded in converting her husband to the point that he was killed for his faith.

The case of Maria Goretti is also exemplary. In the words of Cullen, “The cult of Maria Goretti, a young girl who, at the turn of the twentieth century had been brutally murdered for resisting an attempt at rape to preserve her virginity and was canonized in 1950 was symptomatic of [the Church’s] desperate attempt to turn back the tides of modernity.”36 Her story appeared in FC in the form of a serial novel, in six issues, from April to May 1952, and then as a photoromance in seventeen issues, from October, 16, 1960, to February 5, 1961, titled “Sangue sulla palude: La storia di Maria Goretti” (“Blood on the Swamp: The Story of Maria Goretti).”37 Maria’s story in FC is not only popularized via pulp fiction and photoromance, but also through tabloid news. The first episode of the photoromance appeared in the same issue as an interview with Sandro Serenelli, the girl’s murderer, who was then seventy-six years old and living in a convent. According to both “Blood on the Swamp” and the interview, Maria forgave Serenelli before she died; later, he claimed that she miraculously appeared to him several times when he was in prison. Having repented, Serenelli was released from jail after twenty-seven years and went on to become one of the greatest promoters of Maria’s canonization. He reconciled with the Goretti family, and, in the article on FC, he is portrayed in a picture with Assunta, Maria’s mother.

“Blood on the Swamp” is written by Sara Fuzier du Cayla (aka Zia Betta, author of a popular advice column in the same magazine), also the author of Assunta’s biography (1956), in which Maria’s story is told from her mother’s perspective.38 The opening caption in the first episode of “Blood on the Swamp” includes a quotation from the Gospel (Matthew 6:10; Luke 11:12): “Do not fear those who kill your body: they cannot kill your soul; fear instead him who can damn your soul and send your body to Hell.”39 For those who knew the story of Maria Goretti (and in 1960, these were many, especially among readers of FC), the citation clearly summarized the moral content of the events: teenager Sandro Serenelli could kill nine-year-old Maria’s body, but he could not conquer her soul and, most important, could not taint her purity, meaning her virginity. In this light, I disagree with Marazziti who claims that, since the 1930s and 1940s, FC “presents itself with all the traits of the popular-Catholic ‘sub-culture’ that is primarily interested not in information or politics, but in education, in the evident sense of a clear and articulate continuation of Sunday’s preaching.”40 Rather than opposing “education” to “politics,” photoromances recounting the lives of female saints can be examined for their political relevance, both for what they avoid addressing in narratives (thus maintaining certain social structures), and because of how they fashion their protagonists, for example, by exalting the natural predisposition of women to sacrifice and martyrdom. These traditionally feminine qualities make women preferred political subjects (in this sense, they empower them), for women are seemingly naturally accepting in their conduct and defer ultimate decisions to God’s will. In this perspective, women’s will to power is one of self-denial and masochism, and, in the eyes of God, it is as such that they excel against male villains.

David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle have already argued how the Vatican used Maria Goretti’s case for political purposes. They write: “The Church repressed not only the violence of the episode but also the other possible reading: that such acts of sexual coercion might be influenced by social conditions of extreme poverty and forced cohabitation; that Maria’s refusal may have been prompted not by her religiosity but simply by fear; that acts of sexual violence such as Serenelli’s were sustained by a culture of male supremacy that the Church not only did not condemn but, with its advocacy of female submissiveness and obedience and its tacit acceptance of coercive customs such as the “deflowering” of virgin brides on their wedding night, helped to sustain.”41 A reading of “Blood on the Swamp” both supports and problematizes Forgacs and Gundle’s assessment. First of all, “Blood on the Swamp” emphasizes that Serenelli’s sexual attraction to Maria, his attempted assaults, and his final murderous act were due to the bad influence of popular culture, more specifically, illustrated magazines. Just before assaulting Maria for the first time, Sandro is lying on his bed and reading a magazine that, according to the caption, did not have any “moral content.” The same caption reads: “For some time, the boy has desperately indulged in unhealthy readings” (figure 4.6).42 In the subsequent photograph in the same page, Sandro appears in a medium shot, with his gaze fixated on an invisible object and his hand on his chest, underneath his open shirt. Here the caption comments: “Readings that excite him and leave him distraught. While a murky thought, steady like a nail, has not left him for some time.”43 Immediately after, Sandro turns his thoughts into action and we see him standing in front of the window looking outside and downward. Between photographs, the gutter does not connect an action to another action. Rather, each photograph represents Sandro’s reaction to his inner emotions and desire: (1) he reads and, because of what he reads; (2) he touches his body and looks distraught, and, because of what he feels; and (3) he goes and looks outside the window. While these photographs visualize the invisible narrative of Sandro’s psychology, the following photograph shows readers, via the filmic style of a subjective take, what Sandro sees outside the window: Maria walking down the street. The caption comments on Maria’s photograph that “the girl in that moment is passing by and does not suspect that impure eyes are scrutinizing her from a window.”44 Again, in perfect cinematic style, Maria is made into a sexual object by Sandro’s act of looking and by the photograph that embodies his gaze. Her body, however, is not exposed but rather excessively covered so that moral temptation depends, once more, on the gazing subject himself and the effects that previous readings had on him: Sandro’s gaze is “impuro” (impure) and “si anima di una luce sinistra” (comes alive with an evil light).

In the last photograph, Sandro’s face, shown in a close-up, conveys his distress and anticipates the action that will follow. A balloon indicates what he is thinking (“Right away . . . no more waiting . . . Now! Here she is, she’s coming.”), and creates expectations of violence for the next page.45 In fact, very little will happen, and the reader will be able to see even less: Maria’s assault is reduced to a single shot in which Sandro touches her hand. The setting suddenly moves to the cemetery where Maria goes to visit her father’s grave and prays that he take her to him, so that she would not have to see Sandro again (figure 4.7).

Throughout the photoromance, sex is synonymous to violence. Maria’s father is the only positive male figure (if we exclude the priest), and, in fact, his relationship with Assunta is not romantic; his paternal role identifies him as a seemingly asexual individual. The men’s relationship to women takes place through oppression and exploitation, with the goal to possess them both psychologically and physically. In this sense, there is an attempt in “Blood on the Swamp” to criticize what Forgacs and Gundle refer to as the “culture of male supremacy.” Sandro is not the only man to have obsessive thoughts toward women and to sexually assault one of them: his father also harassed Maria’s mother, an aspect of the story that was not included in the official account of the saint’s life. Ultimately, “Blood on the Swamp” does not show much violence, yet it is structurally permeated by the constant fear of male violence, a fear perpetrated against all women in the story. Assunta must withstand Sandro’s father Giovanni’s requests twice. On the second occasion, her refusal triggers the man’s abusive behavior toward the entire Goretti family: “After Assunta’s refusal that time, life at the ironworks becomes impossible,” the captions recounts.46 It also prompts Sandro’s second attempt to possess Maria, who appears to catalyze all of her family’s misery. We read in the same page that “her sad face clearly communicates all the suffering, all the fears, all the deprivation to which the family has always been submitted.”47 Maria embodies her family’s oppression, creating a link between the social condition of the peasant family and the condition of the female subject, both of whom are violated by male abusive power.

The two main female figures in the photoromance (Maria and her mother Assunta) are not only the embodiment of oppression, but also champions of religious faith as they consistently remind everyone of the necessity to believe in Providence. They also exemplify modesty in their behaviors and clothing. Assunta rejects having another relationship after her husband’s death; Maria, who is a child, completely ignores the existence of sex (she does not understand what Sandro wants from her, and thinks he is simply upset), and, when she is eventually murdered, she does not seem to consciously reject Sandro to protect her virginal purity, but rather—as the caption I previously mentioned indicates—does so out of fear, the fear in which she and her family have always lived. In other words, her killing is the ultimate gesture of abuse, the most brutal because it is against an innocent child. By no means does the photoromance appear to make a radical statement regarding the social and political conditions in which Maria and her family lived, for justice still remains in the hands of God and not in those of the oppressed. At the same time, however, “Blood on the Swamp” does speak of Maria’s story as something more than solely an example of chastity. The social relevance of her murder is not denied, but exploited in order to address both middle-class and lower-class audiences, particularly women.

This double targeting of middle- and lower-class audiences is also demonstrated in the stylistic choices that are modeled on current commercial productions of photoromances. First, by using the traditional format of installments, which often end episodes with a cliff-hanger, Catholic photoromances attempt to create suspense, to excite readers’ expectations, and to attract loyal customers. “Beware of monotony!” declared Father Alberione, founder of San Paolo Edizioni.48 Also, Catholic photoromances dealt with readers that most likely already knew the stories being presented, and thus exploited the same mechanism of expectation that one can find, as Umberto Eco points out, in popular fiction such as Love Story: “Cautioning the reader, from the beginning, that s/he will follow the apparently cheerful loves stories of two young people already marked by a tragic destiny, promotes the acceptance of the final shock, places it under the sign of necessity, empties it of any provocative power, and furthermore helps the reader to anticipate the expected implications page by page.”49 Eco’s comment highlights how popular fictions could both entertain readers and enact conservative politics of social containment. In the case of hagiographies, the necessity of the saints’ lives, in which any action is meant ultimately to fulfill a prophecy of sainthood, perfectly agrees with the form of Love Story. Most readers of FC in the late 1950s knew Goretti’s story and thus also how “Blood on the Swamp” would end; the pleasure of reading derived from retracing the sequence of events and celebrating the necessity of Maria’s sacrifice. In this sense, “Blood on the Swamp” both engages the reader and empties any possible subversive value from the saint’s final act of rebellion against male violence.

Not unlike other illustrated magazines’ displays of film stars, FC photoromances created the myth of exceptional, but relatable, female saints interpreted by modestly dressed but physically attractive actresses. The type of photography used appears to be closer to the popular model that, according to Baetens, responded to both “the glamourized eroticism of the face” and the “payout principles of the new magazines.”50 Here, the paradox of a Catholic magazine aiming to preach the Gospel and, at the same time, to entertain the modern reader becomes evident. Although film stars were banned from the magazine, the prevalence of close-ups (rather than medium shots, as used in the Communist magazines) in its photoromances fashion female actresses quite similarly, as their faces are often portrayed with expressions of longing and anguish, while their make-up and hairdos give them a stylish appearance (figure 4.8).51

Furthermore, close-ups emphasize the emotional and moral struggle that are at stake in the narratives and that take place internally with the characters. Thus, photography responds to the magazine’s need to market sexual morality via emotional, as much as rational, means of communication. In other words, female saints not only speak well, as they follow Catholic rules of conduct, but they also look good, according to the same principles of beauty and modernity that defined the mothers who dominated (together with their children) the front covers of FC: “always beautiful, but it is worth highlighting that they are often blond and somewhat American-looking, with slim waists and stylish dresses” (figure 4.9).52 Considering that readers were predominantly middle-class, from northern and provincial Italy, these images corresponded to the same model of bourgeois propriety and well-mannered femininity that therefore allowed for the process of identification needed in order to promote the status quo. Emphasizing desire, as opposed to conformism, photoromances instead represented the excess of these models both in the sexual appetite and violent acts of male characters, and in the gestures of devotion and love for God of female protagonists.

The Struggle for Women’s Minds

The Communist Party’s decision to publish photoromances was not about lowering expectations or giving the popular audience some debased form of entertainment: the goal was to fashion the PCI itself in a new light, one that put it closer to the people and their preferred forms of entertainment. In the context of a Catholic magazine such as FC, photoromances played the role of educational tools as well as entertaining materials, aiming at popularizing hagiographies while engaging female believers with the same and latest technologies of the cultural industries. Communist and Catholic photoromances both attempted to educate Italian women by mobilizing their emotions rather than by indoctrination. This aspect was particularly relevant at the time when the Christian Democratic Office of Propaganda produced several short films that exploited fictional narratives and generic conventions in order to attract people’s attention and their emotional reactions toward the government’s initiatives, such as the Agrarian Reform or urban planning.53 Even if PCI did not participate in the same kind of film productions, however, the decision to publish photoromances can be seen in the same context of innovation and transformation of propaganda practices that were initiated by the government. In the same vein, San Paolo was interested in the emotional effects that reading had on believers (especially young women), and used films to stir their fears for punishment when indulging in magazines that were deemed too risqué.

At the same time, the patriarchal and sexist logic based on which both Catholic and Communist sponsors fashioned female subjectivities in the photoromances, prevented the agencies from truly addressing their readers’ expectations and concerns. The stories of Communist families do not tackle issues of sexual conduct, and while FC photoromances consistently allude to sex, they do so exclusively as violence, abuse, or moral deviance. In this way, FC photo-hagiographies chastise sexual desire but also shed light on the actual threat that these products of mass culture posed to Italian society. The challenge was not that Bolero Film distracted Italian women from politics, worship, or urgent matters; the danger was that photoromances could affect sexual conduct. A few years later, in the mid-1970s, the Italian Association for Demographic Education (AIED) would turn this logic upside down by engendering the migration of celebrities into the realm of sexual rights activism. As I will show in chapter 5, the 1975 AIED campaign to promote birth control methods revolutionized the political use of photoromances because it employed, for the first time, notorious public figures. Actress Paola Pitagora and TV contestant Mario Valdemarin, among others, anticipated Leonardo Di Caprio and the like in their testimonials for social causes, by appearing in photo-stories that popularized sexual liberation while voicing their support for the contraceptive pill in the press.