153 ragioni per essere ottimisti (La cultura) (Italian Edition)

Edge in the News: 2010

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Angefangen hat das alles ja schon mit dem Telefon, als jeder Anruf aufregend war und sofort beantwortet wurde. Dann galt es als Statussymbol, wenn das Telefon permanent klingelte, oft hatten Chefs mehr als einen Apparat auf dem Schreibtisch stehen — man war wichtig und bedeutend. Das galt so lange, bis die Mobiltelefone in Mode kamen. Jetzt scheint es mir, dass die Gesellschaft zweigeteilt ist: Sie sind von uns so abgelenkt, dass sie ihren eigenen Aufgaben nicht mehr nachkommen. Sie verwahrlosen, jagen nicht mehr gemeinsam in der Gruppe, essen wenig und verhungern manchmal sogar.

There are many wonderful ideas to glean from this incredible collection of essays, but I was especially interested in what the replies suggested for the future of journalism and — perhaps a separate issue — the future of journalists. The application of this analogy to journalism is obvious and, to varying degrees, the concept has already been put into practice. More generally, the surge in claims and opinions that now appear on the internet would seem, by sheer probability, to have increased the amount of accurate or useful information that is available to the public.

Attorney story, in which the work of amateur internet journalists has had beneficial consequences for society, there have been, one assumes, many more instances of misinformation, slander and inanity. There is also the problematic tendency of independent online publishers to redistribute professional content without compensating authors. In other words, critics argue that the internet threatens quality cultural content, including quality journalism, in two ways: This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs a threshold we will cross this year means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not?

If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages. So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens. As ideas battle for survival, we become the arbiters of which ideas live and which ideas die. But weeding through them is cognitively demanding, and our minds may be ill-suited to the task. For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact.

Every fact has its anti-fact…I am less interested in Truth, with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. Each week, we publish an extract from a book that is topical or of general interest. This Will Change Everything: What would your reply be to this question about change: A collection of short essays where imagination, ideas and propositions know no bounds. He says it with affection, an honorific won from my ability to make his phone read his e-mail.

A geek is not a nerd or, God forbid, a dweeb; nerds are smart and dweebs are socially incapable. A geek is obsessed and pulls things apart. Whether he puts them back together is immaterial, as is whether everyone else has left the room. But then a funny thing happened. The geeks grew up, and it wasn't so bad. The internet was a geek-hungry machine; it plucked the geek from in front of his ham radio and deposited him among sales and marketing staff, and sometimes even near girls.

Several geeks became billionaires. It became possible to be a geek and something else, too. The data packed into the black boxes of our phones and web browsers reveal things about us, trails of where we have been and what we have desired. We request that you stay in the room. If you're going to step out for a bit, maybe grab us a Coke. Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism", which looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.

Brand maintained that given access to the information we need, humanity can make the world a better place. The Whole Earth Catalog magazine he founded was promoted as a "compendium of tools, texts and information" which sought to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities. About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? What did it do for us? The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change.

Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective. Starting from a book the other day, our readers "What is your most dangerous idea," he asked. Danger here of course mean, "kill the man, let's bomb bay" is not as murderous ideas. Objective existing economic, political, social, moral order and radical, surprising, memorization will lead to disruptive changes to the ideas put forth.

I've had an interesting collection in a bookstore Mumbai: According to what I am when I returned to Turkey in! In fact in the book "What's Your Dangerous Idea? Where the "dangerous ideas" and implied "murder, massacres, rape, robbery, such as" criminal actions in almost every period, and their planning is not sure. There is talk of a threat by intellectuals in the book: So, the question that a certain moral, social, political or cultural order will change our basic assumptions about life that will shake the ideas Let's say that as a result of scientific research who, what age would die to know we've become This knowledge was really nice to be in our resolve?

In this regard puzzle scientists who study would want to continue? Or as soon as possible discontinuation of funding for research would deal? In linea di massima gli scienziati sono inguaribili ottimisti, lo sguardo rivolto al futuro, certi in cuore di avere le idee giuste per mettere a posto due o tre cosette che non vanno o che ancora non si conoscono. Il Saggiatore porta in libreria in questi giorni ragioni per essere ottimisti pagg. Un gruppo di scienziati risponde alla stessa domanda: Certo, ci sono alcune discrepanze. Affrontato da tutti i punti di vista.

When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in , carried out the slaughter on the London underground in , hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in and , and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.

Our data show that most young people who join the jihad had a moderate and mostly secular education to begin with, rather than a radical religious one. And where in modern society do you find young people who hang on the words of older educators and "moderates"? Youth generally favors actions, not words, and challenge, not calm. That's a big reason so many who are bored, underemployed, overqualified, and underwhelmed by hopes for the future turn on to jihad with their friends.

Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer at least for boys, but girls are web-surfing into the act: Anyone is welcome to try his hand at slicing off the head of Goliath with a paper cutter. If we can discredit their vicious idols show how these bring murder and mayhem to their own people and give these youth new heroes who speak to their hopes rather than just to ours, then we've got a much better shot at slowing the spread of jihad to the next generation than we do just with bullets and bombs. And if we can de-sensationalize terrorist actions, like suicide bombings, and reduce their fame don't help advertise them or broadcast our hysterical response, for publicity is the oxygen of terrorism , the thrill will die down.

If it doesn't make it to the 6'oclock news, then Al Qaeda is not interested. This path to glory leads only to ashes and rot. In the long run, perhaps the most important anti-terrorism measure of all is to provide alternative heroes and hopes that are more enticing and empowering than any moral lessons or material offerings.

Jobs that relieve the terrible boredom and inactivity of immigrant youth in Europe, and with underemployed throughout much of the Muslim world, cannot alone offset the alluring stimulation of playing at war in contexts of continued cultural and political alienation and little sense of shared aspirations and destiny.

It is also important to provide alternate local networks and chat rooms that speak to the inherent idealism, sense of risk and adventure, and need for peer approval that young people everywhere tend towards.

It even could be a 21st-century version of what the Boy Scouts and high school football teams did for immigrants and potentially troublesome youth as America urbanized a century ago. Ask any cop on the beat: But it has to be done with the input and insight of local communities or it won't work: In sum, there are many millions of people who express sympathy with Al Qaeda or other forms of violent political expression that support terrorism. They are stimulated by a massive, media-driven global political awakening which, for the first time in human history, can "instantly" connect anyone, anywhere to a common cause -- provided the message that drives that cause is simple enough not to require much cultural context to understand it: The one with horns butted his head against the defenseless one.

In the next world, Allah switched the horns from one ram to the other, so justice could prevail. When justice and Jihad and are joined to "change" -- the elemental soundbite of our age -- and oxygenated by the publicity given to spectacular acts of violence, then the mix becomes heady and potent. Young people constantly see and discuss among themselves images of war and injustice against "our people," become morally outraged especially if injustice resonates personally, which is more of a problem abroad than at home , and dream of a war for justice that gives their friendship cause.

But of the millions who sympathize with the jihadi cause, only some thousands show willingness to actually commit violence. They almost invariably go on to violence in small groups of volunteers consisting mostly of friends and some kin within specific "scenes": Does Europe especially need to reconsider their approach to the Internet?

EDGE would say yes: Our Algorithmic Culture" by John Brockman:. The intent of the panel was to discuss — for the benefit of a German audience — the import of the recent Frank Schirrmacher interview on Edge entitled 'The Age of the Informavore. All are software engineers or scientists. So what's the point?

To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Here at Edge, we are not immune to such considerations. Book publishers, confronted by the innovation of technology companies, are in a state of panic. Instead of embracing the new digital reading devices as an exciting opportunity, the default response is to disadvantage authors. Television and cable networks are dumbfounded by the move of younger people to watch TV on their computers or cell-phones.

Newspapers and magazine publishers continue to see their advertising model crumble and have no response other than buyouts. Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head. So… if we can just round up and liquidate these EDGE conspirators, then us authors are out of the woods, right? I mean, that would seem to be a clear implication. Did you ever meet an algorithm with a single spark of common sense or humane mercy?

I for one welcome our algorithmic overlords. Not to mention all that existent code written by dead guys. Or ultrarich code-monkey guys who knocked it off and went to cure malaria. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization. I indeed DO look at Europe, and I gotta say that their broadband rocks. The Italians even have the nerve to round up the occasional Google engineer. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: Toffler anticipated the computer revolution, cloning, family fragmentation, cable TV, VCRs, satellites and other things we take for common or create controversy today.

That is, he believed the needed reformation of the education system could not be made by tinkering but be doing away with what existed — and exists still — and starting from scratch so as to teach preparedness for change. As I mention just some of their ideas, consider this a book review and an urging of you to read the book, because even more change is coming. With the current controversy about same-sex marriages, imagine the ethical and legal questions of human-robot marriages!

If we are very unlucky, they will treat us as food. Some foresee quantum computers with power far beyond our current computers. Others foresee life spans of , years and even immortality. More ethical and legal questions. Are we ready for them? Work on the human genome and the genomes of other animals will make it possible, as one essayist describes, to break the species barrier.

If we could, should we? Personalized medicine, based on our individual genomes and physiology will be possible. No more Prozac for all with depression, but individual treatments and medicines, specific just for you, and you, and you. How will we deal with the question of who can afford such treatments? Talk about our current health care controversies! We have searched for extra-terrestrial life for decades and again, science fiction has been written about that, too.

Toffler recommends reading science fiction as a way of learning of change. Essayists believe that we will eventually find extra-terrestrial life, and its form and chemistry basis will have the impact of totally changing our view of who we are and where we fit in the universe. We know that if extra-terrestrial visitors came to Earth, they would be much more advanced than us. How would you react one day waking up to the morning news that such aliens had landed on earth? Would the people of the Earth finally come together as one humanity?

Or would they seek to curry favor with the aliens as separate human nations? Geo-engineering, nuclear applications, cryo-technology, bioengineering, neuro-cosmetics, and many other topics are covered. A philosopher whose name is now forgotten, once suggested that whatever humans can conceive of and invent, they will use. Will an idea or technology emerge anytime soon that will let us exit this lethal cyclotron before we meet our fate head-on and scatter into a million pieces? Will we outsmart our own brilliance before this planet is painted over with yet another layer of people?

Maybe, but I doubt it. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder. The new Age of Wonder might bring together wealthy entrepreneurs like Venter and Kamen Is it possible that we are now entering a new Romantic Age, extending over the first half of the twenty-first century, with the technological billionaires of today playing roles similar to the enlightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century?

It is too soon now to answer this question, but it is not too soon to begin examining the evidence. The evidence for a new Age of Wonder would be a shift backward in the culture of science, from organizations to individuals, from professionals to amateurs, from programs of research to works of art. If the new Romantic Age is real, it will be centered on biology and computers, as the old one was centered on chemistry and poetry.

Who can deny it? And yet, and yet! Dyson again, from the same essay:. If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is still struggling to be born. It must struggle against cultural barriers as well as technical difficulties, against the myth of Frankenstein as well as the reality of genetic defects and deformities. Here's where these techno-utopians lose me, and lose me big time.

www.farmersmarketmusic.com: C. Bartolozzi: Books

The myth of Frankenstein is important precisely because it is a warning against the hubris of scientists who wish to extend their formidable powers over the essence of human life, and in so doing eliminate what it means to be human. And here is a prominent physicist waxing dreamily about the way biotech can be used to create works of art out of living creatures, aestheticizing the very basis of life on earth. If that doesn't cause you to shudder, you aren't taking it seriously enough. On Thursday, October 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig.

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The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don't want to go together. Extracting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus and inserting them into a pig's egg cells, scientists from an Australian company called Stem Cell Sciences and an American company called Biotransplant grew two of the pig-men to cell embryos before destroying them. The embryos would have grown further, the scientists admitted, if they had been implanted in the womb of either a sow or a woman. Either a sow or a woman. A woman or a sow. There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use.

The only intended use is to make animals, the head of Stem Cell Sciences, Peter Mountford, claimed last week, backpedaling furiously once news of the pig-man leaked out of the European Union's patent office. Since the creatures are 3 percent pig, laws against the use of people as research would not apply. But since they are 97 percent human, experiments could be profitably undertaken upon them and they could be used as living meat-lockers for transplantable organs and tissue. But then, too, there has been some suggestion that the creators' purpose is not so much to corrupt humanity as to elevate it.

The creation of the pig-man is proof that we can overcome the genetic barriers that once prevented cross-breeding between humans and other species. At last, then, we may begin to design a new race of beings with perfections that the mere human species lacks: But what difference does it make whether the researchers' intention is to create subhumans or superhumans? Either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race of masters.

And either way, it means the end of our humanity. The thing I don't get about the starry-eyed techno-utopians is that they don't seem to have taken sufficient notice of World War I, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima. That is, they don't seem to have absorbed the lessons of what the 20th century taught us about human nature, science and technology.

Science is a tool that extends human powers over the natural world. It does not change human nature. The two wars and the Holocaust should have once and forever demolished naive optimism about human nature, and what humankind is capable of with its scientific knowledge. Obviously humankind is also capable of putting that knowledge to work to accomplish great good. That is undeniable -- but one is not required to deny it to acknowledge the shadow side of the age of wonder. As I see it, the only real counterweight to techno-utopianism is religion. Religion is concerned with ultimate things, and demands that we weigh our human desires and actions against them.

Scientists, the Promethean heroes, tend to chafe against any restriction on their curiosity -- which is why some of them Dawkins, et alia rage against religion. The best of humankind's religious traditions have been thinking about human nature for centuries, even millenia, and know something deep about who we are, and what we are capable of. How arrogant we are to think the Christian, the Jewish, the Islamic, the Taoist, and other sages have nothing important to say to us moderns! An Essay Against Modern Superstition": It should be fairly clear that a culture has taken a downward step when it forsakes the always difficult artistry that renews what is neither new nor old and replaces it with an artistry that merely exploits what is fashionably or adventitiously "new," or merely displays the "originality" of the artist.

Scientists who believe that "original discovery is everything" justify their work by the "freedom of scientific inquiry," just as would-be originators and innovators in the literary culture justify their work by the "freedom of speech" or "academic freedom. But surely it is no dispraise of freedom to point out that it does not exist spontaneously or alone.

The hard and binding requirement that freedom must answer, if it is to last, or if in any meaningful sense it is to exist, is that of responsibility. For a long time the originators and innovators of the two cultures have made extravagant use of freedom, and in the process have built up a large debt to responsibility, little of which has been paid, and for most of which there is not even a promissory note. On the day after Hitler's troops marched into Prague, the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, then living in that city, wrote in his journal All these things, once valuable, once human, are now dead and rotten.

The nineteenth century thought that machinery was a moral force and would make men better. How could the steam-engine make men better? Hitler marching into Prague is connected to all this. If I look back over the last hundred years it seems to me that we have lost more than we have gained, that what we have lost was valuable, and that what we have gained is trifling, for what we have lost was old and what we have gained is merely new.

What Berry identifies as "superstition" is the belief that science can explain all things, and tells us all we need to know about life and how to live it.

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He is not against science; he only wishes for science to know its place, to accept boundaries. It is not easily dismissable that virtually from the beginning of the progress of science-technology-and-industry that we call the Industrial Revolution, while some have been confidently predicting that science, gonig ahead as it has gone, would solve all problems and answer all questions, others have been in mourning. Among these mourners have been people of the highest intelligence and education, who were speaking, not from nostalgia or reaction or superstitious dread, but from knowledge, hard thought, and the promptings of culture.

What were they afraid of? What were their "deep-set repugnances"? What did they mourn? Without exception, I think, what they feared, what they found repugnant, was the violation of life by an oversimplifying, feelingless utilitarianism; they feared the destruction of the living integrity of creatures, places, communities, cultures, and human souls; they feared the loss of the old prescriptive definition of humankind, according to which we are neither gods nor beasts, though partaking of the nature of both.

What they mourned was the progressive death of the earth. Without each other, both live in darkness, and the destruction each is capable of is terrifying to contemplate -- although I daresay you will not find a monk or a rabbi prescribing altering the genetic code of living organisms for the sake of mankind's artistic amusement.

What troubles me, and troubles me greatly, about the techno-utopians who hail a New Age of Wonder is their optimism uncut by any sense of reality, which is to say, of human history. While films were produced in , only 80 were made in Popular utopia Popularity in the cinema is judged only in its most empirical form by box-office numbers and production figures. What is striking is how often the transformation of public life wrought by the popularity of cinema is thought of as signalling a route to utopia; and not only in the opportunities allowed entrepreneurs for fast, vast riches.

Analysis of interwar film posters, for example, shows how the promised experience is one that: As well as this they are rooted in the reality of a country which at least until the boom of the s was felt as having only partially advanced towards the industrialized modernity which gives rise to a differentiated working-class culture. Models of spectatorship that grant cinema near-mystical powers to induce conformity have left their traces — often problematically — not only on official mistrust of the form, but on discussion of the ideologi- cal effects of popular cinema, which will be discussed further below.

The uses of popularity The idea of a mass audience unified in a non-rational public experience has engendered much official desire to harness the imputed power of cinema. This desire is felt first of all in an aspiration towards artistic quality emerging from anxiety over the lack of cultural legitimacy of a popularly comprehensible entertainment born in the travelling fair.

Italian conceptions of art exhibit the intellectual influence of Benedetto Croce, whose ideal- ist views endowed upon culture an improving purpose: They argue that during this period culture industries such as cinema were powerful forces at play within the public arena, where they fostered an increasing aware- ness for Italian audiences of belonging to a national community.

In fact, one can find a politics of opposition within the emphasis in the Fascist era on representations of popular, national, ordinariness. Gramsci calls for a new genera- tion of intellectuals able to produce culture for the people, but only fol- lowing a true process of identification of their needs. For Gramsci, this culture must be permeated not only with popular sentiment but must be conducive to strengthening a sense of national belonging among the people.

The national-popular, then, represents for Gramsci a political project for a kind of culture which the people might recognize as their own, which might make them feel part of one nation and which might lead them to their social and political emancipation. Here, Spinazzola makes a distinction between two categories of popular cinema: The former, for Spinazzola, are films which show the collective dramas and aspirations of the people and are to be considered the most commendable forms of popular cinema neorealist cinema ; the latter are films which privilege escapism, spectacle and serialized entertainment melodramas, com- edies, epic dramas , thus failing to fulfil the mimetic function of art that constitutes the basis for the formation of a collective will among the people The Fair and the Museum: Framing the Popular 9 While neorealism was felt to have failed to engage a popular audi- ence, the commercial cinema that surrounded it was seen for some time as a return to a cinema di regime of the kind that was believed to have upheld Fascism for an example of this argument, see Tinazzi, This understanding of the political function of popular cinema has come under criticism for offering a model of ideology as a form of displaced political domination […] This model fails to take account of the way in which ideologies […] involve people in a very active way, picking up on real not illusory dissatisfactions and aspirations and mobilizing them in support of this or that policy.

It also ascribes to ideologies a political instru- mentality and coherence which in real situations they rarely seem to possess. That is, [popular films offer] hope, hope in a better world. Framing the Popular 11 In this context of political engagement, national education and real- ist mission, the value of entertainment in its own right — a value this volume maintains — was met with palpable defensiveness. Made between and , the Don Camillo and Peppone film series Figure 1. In other words, popular film was seen really to matter, to be an issue of daily moral, philosophical and artistic concern.

The makers of the most popular films of the period engaged directly with debate to define the purpose of an entertainment form that had achieved greater reach than any other in history. Perhaps it is straying into an elegiac note to suggest that the relatively more detached scholarly analysis which this volume embodies is enabled by an extended period where cinema has simply not had the same cultural and political importance in Italy.

Within the context of such anxiety, it is popularity itself which is the object of criticism: It would be hard to criticize the radical project of Marxist-inspired film critics for expressing anger at acceptance of society as it was; what is of note, however, is how often film critics in the post-war era who took a position on the left were opposed to optimism itself.

Popular, art, and auteurism The perceived popular failure of neorealism is itself a critical constructon which chooses to focus on the poor reception of La Terra Trema and Umberto D. In finding reasons why, one can note that the dominant conception of popular cinema is of a superficial experience peripheral to the true centre of life. Added to this, the consumption model becomes a metaphor which is stretched to the point where it swallows up its orig- inal meaning. While it is true that film is a consumer item if viewing it involves buying a ticket to enter a theatre, this refers no less to arthouse cinema than it does to genre cinema.

The metaphor aims instead to define a cinema that is identical to the last, which is ingested, and has a nutritional value; which, furthermore, is low. None of this of course is literally true. In other words, the film industry establishes particular formulae and star personae with popular appeal but which develop as each new film invents different and unexpected situations.

It is the work of cultural analysis to deter- mine and discuss which elements are repeated and which are different in any given artwork: The promise of new and fantastic productions marks a difference between popular cinema and the folk culture of earlier times, involving as it did repeated songs and tales produced live and non-industrially. What is also worth mentioning here is how, in relation to Italian cinema, novelty has even been taken as definitional of the character of the popular during modernity: The constitution of popular cinema and its relationship to or exclusivity from art cinema occurs through the prac- tices of representatives of official culture as well as according to qualities intrinsic to the artwork.

Framing the Popular 15 of judgements on the very category, criteria and purpose used to analyse popular cinema the division between art and popular being one which Galt re-considers in this volume.

The context of circuses, fairs and variety halls, in whose lineage popular cinema stands, offers a rather different perspective than those perspectives mentioned above which allege a failure to analyse reality. Is a film auteurist because it negates its theatrical and industrial origins? Is it evasive when it is not made for explicit political and pedagogical aims? To maintain this would mean to replace critical analysis of films with verbal formulae [and] ignore the fact that every representation is always also a transformation of the represented object […] , cited in Grande, The first aspect of this challenge was a reconsideration of the radicalism of neorealism itself see Cannella, This approach, Eco maintains, is preferable to the attitude of the critic who negates these products en bloc, thus leaving the meanings of their appeal totally unchallenged.

Our hope is that this volume will likewise chart some of the ambivalences of popular cultural production and reception in Italy. It is also when film studies became instituted as an intellectual discipline, alongside the development of Cultural Studies a term which is left untranslated from the English when discussed in Italian. As well as this, interest turned towards analyses of popular film by means of genre studies, its representation both of reality and of different identity groups, and of pleasure in the cinema.

Culture is here understood as a negotiation Gledhill, and identity as residing not in a supposedly authentic condition of the popular classes, but as being a social process in continual development and redefinition — not least through the prac- tices of culture itself Hall, To widen the scope of scholarship on Italian cinema beyond the auteur and neorealist canons is certainly an objective that this volume endorses.

It does so, however, by being careful not to reinforce precisely that polarized film history that places the art film canon which has been allegedly studied over and over on one side and on the other the lower forms of film production that still need to be studied and appreciated.

Such an agenda mirrors too closely one of the major ways in which popular Italian cinema has been tackled, that is to say, through the politics of rehabilitation. This scholarly practice is based on questioning the dismissal of certain strands of popular film pro- duction individual directors, films or genres in order to demonstrate that they are much more complex if not sophisticated than was previously thought. In , the Venice film festival hosted the retro- spective Italian Kings of the Bs.

Introduced by Quentin Tarantino, the retrospective celebrated a range of low-budget films including horror films, polizieschi and sex comedies made between the s and s. Tarantino himself declared that Italian B movies had been especially influential on him, a point that he forcefully reiterated when he came back to the Venice film festival in to compete with his Inglorious Basterds. So successful has this process been that the retrospective trav- elled to the Tate Modern in and Italian B movie directors Dario Argento in ; Ruggero Deodato in ; Enzo Castellari and Sergio Martino in are regularly invited to Cine-Excess, the annual inter- national conference on global cult cinema which takes place in London.

The practice of rehabilitation is, nevertheless, far from unproblem- atic. In a recent essay, Raffaele Meale points out that the rehabilitation of popu- lar cinema represents one of the most important aspects of the recent critical debate on the state of Italian cinema. This volume aims to move towards an open hypothesis about what popular Italian cinema may look like; we contend that the objective of scholarship on popular Italian cinema should be to engage with a wider variety of film forms that may count as popular entertainment whilst also interrogating the relation of these forms with the art canon see Galt, and Rigoletto, in particular.

Within the varied range of frame- works on offer for understanding the popular, care has also been taken not to forget the value of the projects of class and popular emancipation that have so enlivened Italian film criticism. A recent theorization of popular cinema can be found in La scena rubata by Paola Valentini, taken from the standpoint of three oppositions: The connection of film to other popular forms is made in the Comunicazioni sociali special edition on popular Italian cinema in the s. In this collection, popular cinema is connected to the serialized literature of the nineteenth century through the pho- tostories of the cineromanzo Belloni and De Berti, , the post-war melodramas of Matarazzo to Catholic icon painting Lietti, , and, via the device of the voiceover in post-war comedy, to radio shows and popular pleasure in storytelling Villa, Framing the Popular 19 discussing some of the productive exchanges at play between popular cinematic production on the one hand and theatre, opera, fashion and variety on the other.

The multilayered relation between contemporary Italian cinema and television especially from the s onwards substantiates the useful- ness of this inter-medial approach. One of the distincive features of Italian film production of the last forty years has been the potential of the films for repeated and intense exploitation on the TV circuit after their cinema releases. This is partly due to the Rai cinema-Medusa duopoly which, together with the American majors, controls over 80 per cent of the Italian film market.

This duopoly is reflected in the even more powerful control that their sister companies state channels Rai and the Berlusconi-owned Mediaset have on Italian TV Ghelli, Bearing in mind the closeness between these two media in con- temporary Italy may be useful in unpacking the popular imagery that is currently consumed by film audiences nationwide.

Recent years have seen English language scholarship include popular genres within accounts of the history of Italian cinema. Similarly, it is now standard to include at least the popular cinema of the post-war period and mention of the filoni in any account of Italian cinema. An underlying claim within the volume here is that the popular is a field with manifold connections to a range of aspects of daily life which, as the history of the debates outlined above suggest, is continu- ally reconstituted in a permanent and always only partial process of redefinition.

Added to this, the chapters below seek not to take a filmic text as existing as an answer to a particular pre-defined need nor as pos- sessing a life of its own, pushing or binding the spectator. Film is instead the mid-point in a dynamic interaction between spectator and social context, one which helps construct new needs through the creative invention of emotional experiences that do not pre-exist the viewing of a film. This results in an emphasis on film analysis in the scholarship contained here, performed alongside other aspects of new research so as to understand one principal aspect of film: The chapters that follow draw on a variety of methods of scholarship by academics based in Italian, United Kingdom and US institutions.

He does so to ques- tion the bases of how we understand Italian cinema as popular — and whether we can understand it as such at all. His contribution thus acts as a companion to this chapter, completing an introductory section on the notion of popularity itself. These are films which draw from popular genres and which have been very commercially successful both in Italy and abroad but which often circulate both nationally and internationally as prestige productions. She thereby contributes a major theorization, reconceptualizing aes- thetic categories and the relationship of popular to arthouse cinema.

He argues that melodrama formed the principal form through which, for a certain period, Italian cinema expressed seriousness. This seriousness can be seen through the aesthetic strategies of melodrama and in the relationship it establishes between cinema and other central aspects of Italian life — the family, the Church and opera, amongst others. Along with song and melodrama, comedy is another of the motifs present throughout Italian cinema. Typically young and inetto, she considers how the processes of identification with this figure can be read against genera- tional shifts occurring contemporaneously in Italian society.

Taking a different approach to gender and the cinema of the s, Alex Marlow-Mann in Chapter 8 discusses a prolific but rather intellec- tually neglected filone, the poliziesco. Towards a Re-Interpretation of Enzo G. Working from the philosophy of emotion provided by Robert Solomon, he proposes the possibility that rather than offering proto-Fascist responses to the crisis of Italian society in the s, crime films produce ambiguous possibilities regarding catharsis and justice. In his analysis, he considers the relationship between bodybuilding magazines, American culture and Italian masculinity, probing what the different forms and fortunes of two film versions of the Hercules myth can tell us about changes in Italian society from the s to the s.

Taking Bakhtin as his theoretical inspiration, he polemi- cizes for the cinepanettone as a playfully subversive and complex form. Maria Francesca Piredda focuses on a much lesser-known aspect of pop- ular Italian cinema, films made in the silent era by priests. In so doing he charts the place of the mondo film in the transition from s liberalization into the modern media culture of Italy. A model of production that remained the main method of raising finance in the Italian industry.

Framing the Popular 23 2. See Lottini, ; for the cultural distinctions operative in categorizing Italian silent films, see Brunetta, The Vatican maintained a vigorous interest in recommending or advising against films on moral grounds. Per un dibattito sul cinema popolare: Il caso Matarazzo Rimini: Guaraldi Editori , 9— Museo Nazionale del Cinema , — Framing the Popular 25 Belloni, C. Jeremy Parzen Princeton, NJ: Guaraldi Editori , 37— La nascita e lo sviluppo del cinema tra Otto e Novocento Milan: Riti e ambienti del con- sumo cinematografico — Rome: Il cinema comico in Italia dal al Milan: Lumley eds , Italian Cultural Studies: Oxford University Press , 88— Miti, luoghi, divi Turin: Giulio Einaudi , — Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema.

Della Casa eds , Appassionatamente: Edizioni Kaplan , 19— A Reader Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press , — Nowell- Smith, trans W. Palgrave Macmillan , — Framing the Popular 27 Lattuada, A. Edizioni Kaplan , 44—9. Contributi per una storia culturale del cinema italiano — Milan: Il Cinema Italiano — Milan: Contributi a una storia della critica cinemato- grafica italiana Rome: Realismo, formalismo, propaganda e i telefoni bianchi nel cinema italiano di regime — Milan: Il cinema italiano e lo spettacolo popolare — Milan: Mosconi eds , Spettatori: Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema , — Vincendeau eds , Popular European Cinema London: Wagstaff eds , Italy in the Cold-War: Politics, Culture and Society — Oxford: Christopher Wagstaff Two things interest me in this chapter: Is it enough for it to be made in Italy by Italians, or does the investment in production have to be Italian too — and how do we determine the nationality of money?

Do the viewers also have to be in the majority Italians? And if it did, would that modify our interest in the relationship between audience and artefact? See Section 2 on issues surrounding the question of Italian nationality. Are we referring to the absolute monetary sums received at the box-office in comparison with other films, or do we measure it relative to the pro- duction costs of the respective films, or are we referring to the amount of profit or loss accruing to the production company, or do we try to calculate the number of spectators who viewed a particular film, and if the latter, over how long a period?

Section 3 looks at some of the impli- cations of trying to use box-office receipts to characterize audiences. Section 4 reflects on the historical dimension of the distinction between popular and mass cinema. Does this mean that there are elite films with artistic qualities, and popular films without them? And does this amount to an opposition between valuable films and inferior films, and whose interests are served by the existence of such an opposition?

If such an opposition really did exist, why would we accord scarce space in the economy of the educational curriculum to aesthetic objects of dubious value, if this entailed elbowing out of the programmes of study of the young people whom we are charged with educating those films which might challenge, stimulate and enrich them?

Section 5 reflects on the caution necessary when talking about different cultural levels of cinema. Once again, the intention is not to be polemical, but to shine a light on problematic areas. It is taken for granted from this point on that there can be a purely critical-aesthetic interest in popular cinematic artefacts which is not problematic in the least and the final section of this chapter comes to rest in that zone.

When we identify a group as the addressees of a film, are we identi- fying a target audience, or do we simply observe who went to watch a certain film or type of film, and make the assumption that this was the intended target audience? Do we know how to classify the people who bought tickets in the past to watch a film — that is to say, is any infor- mation available about their social, economic or cultural attributes; has anybody collected that information and, if so, how? Are we trying to learn from cultural artefacts about the subordinate and non-dominant classes in Italy?

Might we be studying a certain kind of cinema in order to pursue a vocation to emancipate the working classes originally one of the goals of Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom — see Section 6 below? Or are we instead simply trying to gain knowledge about how, why, and in what circumstances these films were made — so as to know something about the film-making and filmgoing taking place in Italy at a certain time? Are we assuming that the way we look at some of these films now, in our present circumstances, bears much relation to how Italian or foreign audiences watched these films when they were released; or do we feel the need to try and see the films as they were seen at the time — and is that possible a problem that has dogged Film Studies?

Has a reliable body of data on this matter been collected? Does our job as scholars permit us to define the object of study in terms of our own political, social, national, ethnic or gender-identity needs and desires, or does it require us to define the object of study strictly in terms of the certain knowledge we can demonstrate that we have about it? This issue is raised in Section 6 of this chapter. Section 6 discusses the distinction between the two alternatives.

Here the bald questions end, and some of the issues covered by previous questions are picked up, illustrated and discussed. The sum would have paid for well over a hundred Italian films at average costs, or over 40 prestige Franco-Italian co-productions. Considering that the entire Italian film industry was investing 30 billion lire a year in produc- tion and collecting 44 billion lire in receipts and tax refunds, then the significance of an American presence in the market amounting to 21 billion lire a year becomes enormous.

Hollywood can be seen as dealing with a contraction of its home market by quite simply incorporating its foreign markets into a sort of expanded domestic market. Low wages and material costs and European government subsidies reduced produc- tion costs, while the audiences which American movies had lost on the domestic market could be replaced by Italian audiences or even foreign audiences of Italian films made with Hollywood money.

It invested blocked funds in production, in technical facilities, in distribution and in some areas of exhibition. Between and Italy co-produced films with France; in Italy produced films, 75 per cent of which were co-productions, designed for wide, state-subsidized dis- tribution in at least two participating countries — a large proportion of Spaghetti Westerns were both made and viewed by more Spaniards than Italians.

On one night in , 11 million people in Italy watched Umberto D. Eleven million viewers in is a very big television audience indeed it is a great deal bigger than the Evening News on Rai Television. In the need for entertainment at the cinema excluded Umberto D. Immediately after the Second World War box-office receipts were collected, for the most part, in the first-run cinemas in the 14 major cities of Italy, on Sundays double the take of weekdays and Saturdays 20 per cent less than Sundays , and predominantly in winter.

Films distributed by the eight major Hollywood companies accounted for 50 per cent of those prime days. It is to be noted that 5 per cent of the films in circulation constituted 50 per cent of film shows, while 10 per cent of the films took 80 per cent of box office receipts. Moreover, the films that got to be shown in the right place at the right time earned far more than films that got shown, let us say, on a Wednesday in summer. The average expenditure on cinema per head of population in Lire Small Northern Town: Lire Large Southern City: Lire Small Southern Town: Lire For the year , average ticket prices: Lire ; average ticket price in Agrigento: The growth of exhibition in post-war Italy took place proportionately more in smaller centres and rural areas than in the major cities.

These smaller centres with their lower ticket prices very much lower than in provincial capitals: To the popular cinema belong works destined to be consumed by the lower classes exclusively; the mass cinema is instead designed to unify the public, bourgeois and proletarian, and therefore appears to have an interclass value. One derives from a small-scale system of production; the other is a product of a more advanced industri- alization. To begin with, films were shot and projected by the same person who supplied the venue and the machinery.

They were a fairground entertainment. This high cost needed to be mortgaged over large ticket- paying audiences. But bringing a highly flammable material close to a bright, and consequently very hot, source of light, raised dangers for large audiences collected in enclosed spaces, and venues required expensive projection-boxes usherettes were not an extravagant way of getting clients to their seats, but a necessary aid to getting them out of the building when the place caught fire.

The innovation of hav- ing distributors who purchased the film from the producer in order to rent it to the exhibitor brought down the cost of the film. All the other innovations in the cinema required increased investment: Italian and French cinema confronted the problem by raising the cultural level of their films, and in parallel with that their quality. In the earliest days English producers, with one of the smallest home markets in the world, were said to put out a weekly total of new films which was the largest in the world.

This complete dependence on their foreign trade was justified when foreign producers were unable to supply their devouring markets unaided. But this ceased to be so after […] One is left with the impression that in Britain the film had to overcome the resistance of a particularly inelastic social and intellectual pattern. In France and Italy the film might be a younger sister of the arts, in America art itself. In England it was a poor rela- tion, and, moreover, not a very respectable one.

If Cabiria exploited art and culture to develop a mass and international audi- ence, at the same time it produced an offshoot, the Maciste formula, directed towards a smaller and for the most part domestic popular audience. We cannot conflate the popular and the mass, nor can we oppose the art cinema to a cinema for large, diversified audiences.

Indeed, an argument can be mounted for the boundary of the popular being the physical space embracing performer and spectator, in which voice, body-movements and physical contact live music and dancing would be an example are directly experienced historically: Suspect, but not impossible. The blues offers an interesting example. In the s and early s Charley Patton and Son House were undoubtedly popu- lar musicians, operating in a popular cultural context juke joints in the state of Mississippi.

As a form, the blues is so rigidly formulaic that its realization is necessarily auteurist, relying, as does jazz, on individual and one-off improvisation. The performance of a song written and sung by a black Southern farm worker for fellow and contemporary black Southern farm workers is a very different phenomenon from a performance of that same song re-hashed by middle-class art students and merchan- dised by a capitalist commodity producer for a middle-class European teenage audience forty years later.

If pizza served and eaten in the quartieri spagnoli of Naples is popular, at the Savoy Hotel it is not. A song only exists in the singing and listen- ing. A pizza only exists in the cooking, serving and eating. The films were thoroughly denigrated for their popular qualities by northern critics at the time: No, no, in the name of God, never should these spectacles be repeated in an elegant theatre, a theatre like this, centrally located and with such a glorious past!

No, in the name of the good name and propriety of our national cinema! La rivista cinematografica, Let us illustrate this with a quotation from a justly famous essay by Stuart Hall: Popular culture is one of the sites where the struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. In the material analysis, we try to remain aware that films are com- modities designed to meet the needs of the production, distribution and exhibition sectors of an industry which is enormous at the exhibi- tion level, but relatively tiny at the production level.

Production exists only in order to serve, and only inasmuch as it does serve, exhibition. Italian genre films of the s and s gave — and I tried to elaborate a theory of this — quantitative gratifica- tions: This is not qualitatively different splatter from other splatter that of Hollywood , just the same splatter but more often. Like Coca-Cola, you cannot make it nourish you; all you can do is consume more of it. This is the function of a film in the exhibition sector of the market: The function of film A is to get the consumer to return to the cinema to watch film B.

Its function is not to meet some hypothesized needs the consumer might have, but to stimulate repetitive consumption. A deeply rooted conviction holds, instead, that cultural products must meet the needs of the consumers in order to generate exchange value: Where Italian cinema is concerned, this conviction fuels the insistence that it is possible to deduce from the themes of films that successfully sold tickets what social needs were being met of the consum- ers who viewed them.

This conviction has a distinguished Gramscian pedigree later inherited by the Cultural Studies movement in England. It is a story dear to popular audiences, which are drawn immediately to side with the young couple against the arrogance of the powerful man. The villain is very often the lord of the region, a tyrant, and the beautiful girl a member of the common people ruled over by him.

Behind the tearful emotional involvement of the public there is always a feeling of solidarity with the oppressed: The common man of the people, who every day submits to the injustices of the powerful, identifies with the character of the oppressed, who becomes his own implacable avenger from the Count of Monte Cristo to the various characters played by Amedeo Nazzari today , and directs his desire for rebellion against characters in books or in films.

If it were so easy and within the reach of anyone to emotionally arouse an audience, gold and diamond mines would become banal gambles compared with such a sure source of wealth. Italian silent cinema is known throughout the world for its ambitious historical dramas and its high-society melodramas, films directed not at a popular audience at all, but specifically designed to raise and expand the social and cultural level of cinema-going to encourage and justify investment in the industry.

Despite problems with the censor after being widely shown in , it was cut and redistributed in , it was so successful with the public that in it was given a soundtrack and re-released. But before that it was watched by Federico Fellini: What was the first film for me? I watched it while in the arms of my father, standing up in the midst of a crowd of people, wearing a sodden overcoat because it was raining outside. I remember a huge woman with a bare midriff, her belly-button, and the flashing of her fierce eyes heavily made up.

With an imperious gesture she conjured up around Maciste, who was also half-naked and holding a dove, a circle of tongues of fire. The three different foreign models which were scrutinized quite seriously for what they had to offer in Italy were, in turn, Mosfilm in the Soviet Union, UFA in Germany and Hollywood in the United States delegates visited each and reported back. The problems they faced were multiple.

The Soviet model targeted the proletariat, whereas the only readily available audience for Italian cinema was the urban petty bourgeoisie. In fact the majority of these comedies originated in the theatre, and not even in Italian theatre, but in Budapest. Various figures during the inter-war period envisaged a popular cin- ema, offering a popular reflection of popular life for a popular public though not a rural one.

A film that exemplified this aspiration would be Treno popolare, directed by Raffaello Matarazzo in It was not until after the Second World War that the cinema overtook economically all other leisure activities including sport put together. Until then, music hall and variety theatre held a strong place in popular urban culture. Whether the impact of so-called neorealism on the world derived from Rome, Open City is for others to decide.

I see the birth of neo- realism further back: Who can deny that it is these actors who first embodied neorealism? Neorealism is given birth, unconsciously, by the film in dialect; then it becomes conscious of itself in the heat of the human and social problems of the war and its aftermath.

Mass capital- ist commodity production, or the individual craftsman labouring away in his garret — which? Cesare Zavattini and Federico Fellini as scriptwriter were intimately involved simultaneously with the most rarefied zones of the European art cinema and with the most stereotyped, generic vehicles of Italian popular culture. Fellini himself made that popular culture the content of all of his films right up to his death.

Neorealist cinema used il popolo as the source of films in terms of their stories and their performers; it used il popolo as participants in production and financing; it used il popolo as the addressees of the films, in terms of their interests, their experience, and in the case of the aspirations of Zavattini, in a search for a total union between film and il popolo.

When Rome, Open City was first shown, critics and members of the estab- lishment were dubious about its value, and it was the overwhelming response of il popolo which forced them to think again. In a completely different direc- tion, De Santis firmly asserted the right of il popolo to the gratifications and entertainment of generic formulae, and he was the only neorealist filmmaker seriously to address the specifically rural nature of the Italian popolo and its culture.

Germi drew on recognized, successful cinematic genres in order to make his films accessible to a wider public. In something extraordinary and unforeseen happened. An American distribu- tor bought it, spent several million dollars promoting it, and it was a huge success in the United States, ending up on television there. What are generally recognized to be the major filoni were thus launched. Currently, the orthodoxy of treating the erotic as discourse rather than function is hegemonic in film stud- ies, but I shall briefly return to the point in Section 8 of this chapter. The film represents the dialectic of the class struggle, which in its turn is one element of a dialectic between the popular culture celebrated by Gramsci, Pasolini and the Italian Communist Party and the capitalist industrial financing of the film, so that the financial strength of the American capitalist mass- culture industry, accustomed to handing down or selling to the masses a hegemonic ideology, might be used to send an art film that was also a truly popular film to wave the red flag in the American Mid-West.

The film casts its historical material in an essentially family mould, a story of symbolic and emblematic relationships, so that it takes on the form of a saga of the rural peasant tradition, in which the leghe trade unions of the braccianti farm labourers of the Po Valley formed the vanguard of the socialist class struggle in Italy at the beginning of the century, all of this transmitted with the power of spectacle that the cinema can offer a popular audience, and with a rich rural popular iconography: We might question whether or not he has succeeded in all his aims.

Certainly in our sphere, the academic one, he has been criticized for historical inac- curacy, which is probably the least interesting perspective one could possibly take on that film. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement writes: I have a whole shelf of books in which scholars do much the same. That people enjoy watching James Bond films does not guarantee that the films deal with their concerns. I wonder whether two things are often being conflated: Let us take an analogy: Realist cinema in general, and neorealist cinema in particular, are examples of this approach. Firstly, scholars fre- quently and repeatedly remark on the narrative shortcomings of these films: They are characterized by repetition of spectacle in a social situ- ation rather than by the coherent unfolding of narrative for individual comprehension.

And these same features characterize some of the for- mula films produced by the Italian cinema industry since the Second World War: Elsewhere I have argued that the repetitive format met the need of the Italian cinema industry rapidly to increase its output in the absence of sufficient American product and surplus available creative talent Dario Argento recently informed us at a talk at the Italian Cultural Institute in London that he scripted three Spaghetti Westerns in as many months Wagstaff, Source for these data: Con un gesto imperioso del braccio faceva nascere attorno a Maciste, anche lui seminudo e con tortore in mano, un cerchio di lingue di fuoco.

Il neorealismo nasce, inconsciamente, come film dialettale; poi acquista coscienza nel vivo dei problemi umani e sociali della guerra e del dopoguerra. The Man with the Golden Touch Indiana University Press , La rivista cinematografica , Turin, 11 November , quoted in G. British Film Institute , Edinburgh University Press , 41— Lo spettacolo filmico in Italia — Rome: The Bioscope 23 and 30 December.

Rossellini Il mio metodo: Scritti e interviste, ed. Rubenstein eds , Art, Politics, Cinema: The Cineaste Interviews London: Pluto Press , — Cinema Paradiso and Mediterraneo won Oscars for best foreign language film and all the films found huge worldwide audiences. In terms of the sheer volume of people who saw and enjoyed them, these films represent some of the most popular Italian films ever. The very fact of their international success ensured they were read by some as art film, connected by associ- ation with the modernist Italian films of the s and s, screened in urban arthouses and enjoyed by those audiences interested in foreign cinema.

Their emphasis on visual style consolidates this generic loca- tion. Both textually and institutionally, the films hover between the arthouse and the popular. This tension, I will argue, opens up what I call the prettiness of Italian cinema. Two stories about reactions to Cinema Paradiso illustrate the germina- tion of my argument. As we waited in the ticket queue, she saw publicity stills and for a moment was convinced it was a black and white film to boot.

Of course, she loved the film. She still saw it as an art film; just one that was surprisingly enjoyable. Twenty years later, she contacted me on Facebook and wrote of how fondly she remembered that day and how much impact being taken to see Cinema Paradiso had had on her cultural formation. The second story is about the scholars of Italian cinema who have very kindly talked to me about my previous research on these films Galt, It is always nice to hear that someone has read your work, nicer still if they find something positive to say about it, yet I became fascinated by how often Italianists told me how ghastly they found the films I analysed.

Compliments on my argument were invariably hedged with outright disdain of its primary objects. I had repeated conversa- tions at conferences in which people apologized for articulating what they clearly felt was an insult to my terrible taste. My point in telling these stories is not to juxtapose demotic tastes with elitist academics, but to isolate how Cinema Paradiso and its ilk function as the wrong kind of generic mixture for the scholars, and the right kind for the audiences that made the films so successful.

These are fine subjects, but the obviousness of the opposition occludes something equally important: I call this mode the popular art film: Not exactly the same as the middlebrow, with its con- notations of a particularly classed version of serious culture, the popular art film is at once more debased in its melodramatic pleasures and more closely aligned to the international circuits of contemporary art cinema than the solidly national middlebrow. Whereas the middlebrow often emphasizes markers of textual quality serious subject matter, treatment of social problems, literary adapta- tion , some of which can foreclose on international legibility, the popu- lar art film aligns a certain international art-cinematic style with generic narrative forms.

Thus, while part of what makes these films legible as art cinema to foreign spectators is their status as subtitled films, this is not the whole story. Conversely, some Italian films with similar generic markers and styles as the films I discuss do not gain international acclaim. The popular art film has become a significant part of the global cinema landscape, providing a key means of access to international distribution for many producers, and, along- side festival prize-winners, forming the major destination for audiences of foreign films.

Italian cinema, I would suggest, is a particularly useful case study for this mode of filmmaking. Italy has such a strong tradition of art cinema in the English-speaking world that its films are unlikely to provide the sense of discovery that a New New Wave like Romanian or Taiwanese film offers audiences. We already know, or think we do, what Italian cinema looks like. It is therefore relatively difficult for new Italian art films to make a splash in the international marketplace.

Thus, the popular art film has emerged as an important and recognizable niche for Italian cinema. Most of the Italian films that are seen internationally could be classified as popular art films: While the popular art film is an international form, I will argue that Italian cinema has a specific relationship to what I call the pretty, and that these contemporary films are only the latest iteration of the troublesome prettiness of Italian cinema.

We can trace anti-pretty thinking to the Platonic privileging of word over image, with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason and at worst a deceptive and dan- gerous cosmetic. Discourses of cinematic value implic- itly and sometimes explicitly build on these aesthetic ideas, rejecting feminized forms and decorative visual styles as politically reactionary or lacking substance.

Many kinds of film are dismissed as too pretty, but the popular art film is a particularly good fit: This discourse has a particular relevance to Italian cinema, which I think is uniquely concerned with aesthetics at the borders of the popular and art cinema.

Contemporary films like Cinema Paradiso circulate as popular art films, but the relationship of these forms has a long history of defining Italian cinema to the world. We might think of the mythified shift from the white-telephone film to neorealism, long characterized as the defining moment for post-war Italian film culture. This shift is centrally viewed as a transition from Fascist to anti-Fascist aesthetics and from commercial cinema to art film but, insofar as it figures a symbolic rather than literal overcoming of the past, it also posits a shift from pretty to anti-pretty film-making, from the decorative to the real.

This defining moment of Italian national cinema is inscribed as a rejection of the pretty and a connection of that prettiness both to inferior popular forms and extreme political reaction. The taint of this prettiness haunts Italian cinema in both its art-cinematic and popular forms. In what follows, I examine how the critical reception of Italian cinema has characterized films as pretty, drawing connections from the international response to canonical art cinema to that of more recent popular films.

Prettiness as a critical problem The critical reception of Italian art cinema provides an insight into why and how the pretty becomes a problem. In the art cinema of the s, visual asceticism often seems to be the mediator between humanistic realism and radical modernism. And yet, on the other hand, art cinema provides a space in which the cinematic image itself, with all its expressive potential, is of central importance.

Italian art cinema thus builds a tension between valuing the aesthetic and valuing the anti-aesthetic. In this regime, ideas of the decorative are deployed to police the boundaries of acceptable artistry. In contemporary film journals, Italian art cinema is often evaluated negatively via a vocabulary of decoration. Here the term refers to an over-composed view that subordinates serious meaning to pretty pictures. The historical picturesque is often seen as a debased landscape image, lacking both aesthetic depth and realist meaning.

It is also associated with feminine taste. And just as picturesque painters were accused by post-war critics of veiling rural poverty Berger, This argument — that a picturesque, visually rich aesthetic undermines political critique — is one that recurs in much scholarship on historical films and in particular popular art film iterations of the genre. More importantly, the suspicion with which even such canonical auteurs as these are met when their films look too visually composed tells us both how central prettiness is to Italian film history and how forcefully it was, nevertheless, denigrated.

Despite these critiques of Italian art cinema as too pretty, much dis- cussion of more recent Italian film depends on a sense of its inferiority to the period of the modernist art film. I find this type of critique to be a new iteration of anti-pretty rhetoric, this time locating the excluded pretty not in overly formalistic spectacle but in overly com- mercial spectacle; not in stories that are too beautiful to be political but in stories that are too sweet to be political.

The terms of disapprobation have shifted slightly along with cinematic fashions, but the structuring aesthetic logic is exactly the same. The feminizing rhetoric of passivity and sweetness should also be clear. Popular examples of this discourse include the stylized melodrama and cinema carino. Cinema carino is a term that emerges in the s and s to describe the turn away from overt political histories and towards smaller-scale, family stories.

We can immediately see that the concept has much in common with the pretty. While most translations render cinema carino as cute cinema, carino can also be rendered in English as pretty. Either way, its associations are infantilizing and feminizing, an insignifi- cant kind of cinema in comparison with the heroic beauty or, better, heroic ugliness of a masculine cinema like neorealism.

The director has responded in interview by defending the value of an imaginative world in which a positive relationship is possible Sesti, More confrontational is Giuseppe Piccioni, a filmmaker who has been described in the Italian press as a standard-bearer for cinema carino. If the directors of cinema carino films feel the need to bite back at their critics, there is good reason. The questions posed to Piccioni and Archibugi exemplify a broad hostility to cinema carino. This dis- missal is typical. There are a whole series of anti- pretty ideas bundled up here.

First, cinema carino is associated with the feminine qualities of melodrama and sentiment, a reminder of the enormous success of Cinema Paradiso and the gall this success provoked in many Italian film scholars. Secondly, it is associated with the sur- face, a sense that their aesthetic qualities prove that the films are not serious, evoking a Platonic idea of the false cosmetic itself a gendered concept. Thirdly, there is a pervasive sense that what qualifies as depth is a particular kind of national truth, one that neither popular culture nor the feminine sphere of the family can access.

Laviosa tells us that cinema carino is seen as overly influenced by television style and overly concerned with the domestic. If s political cinema claimed moral depth by addressing serious public topics of history and politics, cinema carino could only gaze, like the television set, at the family in the pri- vacy of their living room. Described in this way, the rejection of cinema carino seems evidently inadequate. How could critics dismiss films centring on melodrama or the familial, given the prominence of these modes and themes in Italian film history?

In all these instances, the contrast is between earlier moments in post-war cinema which were political and good, and the present situation, which is carino and bad. However, since critics also condemned s and s films as too pretty, we can see that this discomfort is not solely a response to cultural change, but runs through the history of Italian cinema. Moving on to the stylized melodramas that developed as a major feature of Italian cinema in the s, we see that these genres are not unconnected. William Hope describes a broad pattern in contem- porary Italian film of turning inwards, looking at small groups, fami- lies and individuals.

Narratives of self-analysis are, for him, basically navel-gazing instead of addressing big social issues Hope, The critique of apolitical content is identical to that of cinema carino. With cinema carino, these complaints are not usually connected to sty- listic excess but rather linked to a televisual aesthetic.

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