Introduction 1. a Note on Titles. on the First Mention of a Film, I Give The
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Notes Introduction 1. A note on titles. On the first mention of a film, I give the original Italian title, followed by the English language title used for interna- tional release, or my translation where no such title exists. Subsequent mentions of film titles are in the original Italian; English titles are available in the Filmography. 2. For a full list of the corpus I consulted, see the Filmography. 3. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own. 1 Cinema, Space, Gender 1. In Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (2000), editors Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden set out an overview of the issues linking gender and space in architec- tural studies. In film studies, although we have volumes which link space and cinema (e.g., Konstantarakos, 2000; Everett and Goodbody, 2005; Rhodes and Gorfinkel, 2011a), we currently lack a volume simi- lar to Rendell et al.’s which provides an account of the link between the three concepts space, gender, and cinema. 2. For an overview of the “spatial turn,” see Warf and Arias (2009). 3. For a useful discussion of De Certeau’s take on the terms space and place, see Rhodes and Gorfinkel (2011b: xi). Citing Margaret Kohn, the authors argue that “de Certeau’s terms and his definitions of them are actually ‘poorly chosen metaphors for a politics of domina- tion or nostalgia’” (Kohn, 2003: 21, cited in Rhodes and Gorfinkel, 2011b: xi). 4. On the national archive and the status of its documentation in the Italian filmmaking process, see Pauline Small’s useful overview (2009: 127–8). 5. For an image of a similar Italian shooting schedule from the same period, see the shooting schedule of La ciociara (Two women, 1960) reproduced in Pauline Small’s article “The New Italian Film History” (2010: 274–5). 206 NOTES 6. As Rob Shields recounts (1999: 143), Lefebvre made an extended visit to California in 1983 with an interpreter, which helped spread his ideas among Anglophone geographers and critical theorists before the English translation of his work on space. For an incisive analysis of how these postmodern geographers and theorists failed to account for gender, see Massey (1993: 232–3). 7. Geographers have acknowledged this point, leading to what McDowell has termed “a so-called ‘cultural turn’ in feminist scholarship and indeed in geographical research more generally,” characterized by “a greater emphasis on symbols, meanings and representations” (1999: 7–8). Examples of this cultural turn in geography include Rose’s work on film (1994) and Aitken and Zonn’s edited volume Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle (1994). 8. Mulvey herself explored the place of the look in relation to sexuality (1992) and desire (1996) from a psychoanalytic perspective. 9. For a historical overview of these developments in gendered approaches to film, see Kaplan (2008). 10. On the cinematic city, see, for example, Clarke (1999), Shiel and Fitzmaurice (2001), Krause and Petro (2003), Al Sayyad (2006), Webber and Wilson (2007), and Mennel (2008). The trend is also evident within work on Italian film, as seen, for example, in Shiel (2006), Rhodes (2007) and Wrigley (2008). 11. Examples here include Angelo Restivo’s monograph (2002) on “the Italian art film” in the 1960s, which takes a spatial approach to Italian cinema, focusing in particular on the spaces of the nation and the city, Mirco Melanco (2005) and Noa Steimatsky’s (2008) books, and William Hope’s chapter (2010), which all take up different aspects of Italian cinema’s representation of landscape. A key exception to this focus on larger-scale spaces is Daniela Niccolini’s chapter on “Cinema, Identity, and Everyday Life,” which looks at the spaces of everyday life, including the kitchen, in 1960s Italian cinema (2005). 12. Important early contributions on everyday space in cinema include the attention given to domestic space in work on melodrama (Elsaesser, 1972; Haskell, 1974; Doane, 1987). More recent work has looked at the spaces of the home (Pidduck, 2004), the skyscraper (Schleier, 2009), the apartment (Wallace, 2009; Robertson Wojcik, 2010), the beach (Handyside, 2013), and the swimming pool (Brown and Hirsch, 2014). 2 Comedy, Italian Style 1. The subseries of historical comedies includes titles such as La grande guerra (The Great War, 1959), set during the First World War, or Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960), La marcia su Roma (March on Rome, 1962) and Anni Ruggenti (Roaring Years, 1962), which deal with Italy’s Fascist past, or films such as L’armata Brancaleone NOTES 207 (Brancaleone’s Army, 1966) or L’arcidiavolo (The Devil in Love, 1966), which are set in a fictional middle-ages setting. On the his- torical comedies, see Giacovelli (1995: 49–51 and 69–71). 2. For full lists of the top ten box office performers, see the tables by Umberto Rossi in Volume X (1960–64) and Volume XI (1965–69) of the Marsilio Storia del cinema italiano (Rossi, 2001 and 2002). 3. For a history of Italian film comedy, see Enrico Giacovelli (1999). On contemporary Italian comedy see Ilaria De Pascalis’ study (2012) and on the Italian Christmas comedies see Alan O’Leary (2013). For a discussion of post-2000 Italian comedy with a particular focus on masculinity, see O’Rawe (2014: 45–67). 4. As Maggie Günsberg puts it: “Comedy, Italian Style continues the tradition of Italian cinematic comedy centring on particular star comedians, a dynamic already at work in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte theatre, with its plays improvised around characters famous comic actors had made their own” (2005: 62). 5. The original quote comes from Tudor’s Theories of Film (1974: 139) and is cited in Neale (2000: 18) and Günsberg (2005: 4). 6. See Altman’s discussion of the critical “regenrification” of “melo- drama” in Anglophone film studies via “family melodrama” (Elsaesser, 1972) to the “woman’s film” (Haskell, 1974 and Doane, 1987), all of which are terms, he suggests, which were not used by the producers of the respective films at the time (1999: 69–82). 7. For a table that classifies the performances of Italian actresses in the period according to genre, see Garaguso and Renzetti (1978: 71). 8. Of the 157 films in my 1958–70 Comedy, Italian Style filmography, 43 star Sordi, 33 Gassman, 36 Tognazzi, and 32 Manfredi. One or more of the four star in 112 out of the total 157 films. 9. Apart from Il moralista, Il maestro di Vigevano, and Il boom, the other three films in question are Il mattatore (Love and Larceny, 1960), Il successo (Success, 1963), and I nostri mariti. The documents on production costs are held in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato and are listed in the bibliography. Pauline Small notes that producers were only required to produce an estimated budget to apply for state funding (2009: 129). However, some film files in the state archives also include a document, submitted by the producer at a later date, which lists the actual costs incurred. The budget figures I cite in this chapter are taken from documents listing actual filming costs, unless stated otherwise. 10. For example, Il moralista’s screenplay cost L8,487,500 in total, only slightly less than the L8,697,876 spent on the director. The total amount spent on the screenplay of Il mattatore cost more than the services of the director, Dino Risi: L15,560,000 versus L13,000,000. For Il maestro di Vigevano, L17,666,010 was spent on the screenplay (including a fee of L14,462,000 to Age and Scarpelli), slightly more than the L17,560,513 spent on the director Elio Petri. 208 NOTES 11. Il moralista total cost: L166,369,543; Il mattatore total cost: L203,835,933; Il boom total cost: L435,278,338; Il mae- stro di Vigevano total cost: L431,315,821; Il successo total cost: L264,709,004; I nostri mariti estimated total cost: L400,645,000. 12. Small cites the estimated total costs for the films as follows: I soliti ignoti, 220,600,000; La grande guerra, L472,798,541; Il sor- passo, L298,000,000; Una vita difficile, L348,987,320; I mostri, L301,303,070. It is worth noting that Ieri, oggi e domani and Matrimonio all’italiana, two comedies directed by Vittorio De Sica and starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, had higher estimated budgets: L695,000,000 and L650,000,000 respectively (Small, 2009: 131). 13. For a more extended treatment of Italian episode films of the 1950s and 1960s, see Marco Rossitti’s study (2005). 14. In the cinema journal Bianco e nero Roberto Chiti and Alberto Caldana list films released in Rome in 1960. For films released from April to June, see issue 8–9, pp. 130–56, for films released from July to August, see issue 10–11, pp. 132–52. 15. RAI—Radiotelevisione italiana—is Italy’s national public broadcast- ing company. For details and screening dates, see the Annuario RAI 1967 (for films broadcast in 1966) (RAI, 1967: 255); and Annuario RAI 1968 (for films broadcast in 1967) (RAI, 1968: 273). 16. “Gassman-Tognazzi TV,” curated by Gian Luigi Rondi, was broad- cast in 1966 (RAI 1967: 272). “Italian cinematic comedy” was curated by Domenico Meccoli and broadcast in 1970 (RAI 1971: 325). 17. On the links between Comedy, Italian Style and other media, see Fullwood (2013). 18. For an overview of Italy’s economic miracle, see Chapter 7 of Paul Ginsborg’s history of contemporary Italy (1990). For an account that is particularly sensitive to the role of culture and representation in the miracle, see Guido Crainz’s study (1996).