ACTING ACROSS BORDERS MOBILITY AND IDENTITY IN ITALIAN CINEMA ALBERTO ZAMBENEDETTI Acting Across Borders Acting Across Borders Mobility and Identity in Italian Cinema Alberto Zambenedetti A Lina, Marilisa, Denise e Violetta Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Alberto Zambenedetti, 2021 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3986 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3988 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3989 3 (epub) The right of Alberto Zambenedetti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Acting Across Borders 1 PART ONE: AMEDEO NAZZARI Introduction to Part One: Amedeo Nazzari’s Many Im/mobilities 15 1. Flying: Empire Cinema’s (Aero)Mobilities 23 2. Returning: Im/mobility and Immigrant’s Nostalgia 37 3. Fighting: Wartime Im/mobility in Harlem 61 4. Romancing: Postwar Im/mobilities in Raffaello Matarazzo’s Melodramas 85 5. Migrating: The Pathology of Im/mobility 99 Conclusion to Part One: Driving the Flâneuse: Le notti di Cabiria 105 PART TWO: ALBERTO SORDI Introduction to Part Two: Alberto Sordi’s Mobile Comedies 113 6. Vacationing: The Rise of the Travelling Comedian 123 7. Working: ‘L’Italia è una Repubblica Democratica, fondata sul lavoro’ 139 8. Killing: Criminal Mobilities 161 9. Exploring: Italian Identity Abroad 176 10. Drilling: (Auto)Mobile Satires of Global Petroculture 194 Conclusion to Part Two: Driving Across (Screen) Borders 202 Filmography 208 Bibliography 214 Index 227 Figures 1.1 and 1.2 A foreign cityscape speaks of a faraway home in Luciano Serra pilota 29 1.3 Italian bilocations: liquid surfaces and cinematic cartographies in Montevergine 45 1.4 Mediating cinematic im/mobility: impermeable borders, porous time in Montevergine 47 1.5 ENIC letter to the Sottosegretariato Stampa Spettacolo e Turismo 63 1.6 and 1.7 Report by DGC Director Eitel Monaco to the Minister of Popular Culture Gaetano Polverelli 67, 68 1.8 and 1.9 Amedeo’s mediated im/mobility: reading the news and listening to the radio broadcast of Tommaso’s final fight 69 1.10 and 1.11 Gendered mediated mobilities: Elena and Lina 93 1.12 and 1.13 Amedeo Nazzari’s pre- and postwar vehicular stardom 106 2.1 and 2.2 Celebrity automobility 114, 115 2.3 and 2.4 Families in transit: social mobility via transportation technology 133 2.5 Moving forward, driving east 149 2.6 Italian cinema on Australian (dolly) tracks 157 2.7 and 2.8 Criminal mobilities through the (cinematic) transatlantic gaze 168 2.9 and 2.10 Acting across cinematic traditions: Richard Conte’s transatlantic gaze 173 2.11 and 2.12 Fracturing the (national) self 178 2.13 and 2.14 The imperial seeing-man in the cinematic mirror 187 2.15 Strategies of (mediated) self-stereotyping 197 2.16 Satirizing (American) petroculture: pushing the Model T 199 2.17 Stacking the iconic deck: Catholicism, Romanitas, Verdi, Fellini, and Sordi 206 Acknowledgements Acting Across Borders began as a PhD dissertation at New York University, which I completed under the enlightened advisement of Ruth Ben- Ghiat almost a decade ago. It has since transformed numerous times, shaped by conversations with colleagues, students, friends, and family members; it has evolved into this book, which bears little resemblance to its first incarnation, and better reflects the direction my academic interests took in the intervening time. I am sincerely grateful to the many people who have helped me along the long and tortuous route. First and foremost, I thank my life partner and toughest editor, Denise Birkhofer, who stood by me through years of uncertainty and confusion, consoling me through the loss of my father Umberto and my grandmother Lina, and encouraging me to not give up. I thank my former colleagues at the College of Staten Island, where my academic career began: Valeria Belmonti, Chiara Ferrari, Giancarlo Lombardi, Jane Marcus-Delgado, Gerry Milligan, and Paola Ureni; you will always have a special place in my heart. At Oberlin College I was fortunate to work alongside the wonderful faculty of the Cinema Studies programme: Grace An, Rian Brown-Orso, William Patrick Day, Doron Galili, Burke Hilsabeck, Jeff Pence, and Geoff Pingree, who were always willing to share a coffee and lend an ear to my ramblings about the mobility of Italian actors. The University of Toronto, where I hope to have found a permanent home, is brimming with incredible talent, such as the graduate students who generously contributed to my graduate seminar ‘Diversity and Mobility in Italian Cinema’, where many of these ideas were first put to the test with the help of the distinguished filmmaker and activist Fred Kuwornu. I am also grateful to the postdoctoral fellows I have had the privilege to meet and work with, in primis the extraordinary Jessica L. Harris, who co-taught an iteration of this course, but also Damiano Acciarino, Matteo Brera, Marco Faini, Luca Fiorentini, Eleonora Lima, Marco Malvestio, Andrea Parasiliti, and Jessica L. Whitehead; I have learned a great deal from all of you, and you all own a piece of this book, whether you like it or not. A special thanks goes to the co-organizers of the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group ‘Im/migration, Mobilities, and Circulation’ for viii acting across borders giving me the opportunity to expand my knowledge of Mobility Studies: Laura Bisaillon, Elizabeth Harney, and Rachel Silvey. In the Department of Italian Studies, I am truly fortunate to be sur- rounded by colleagues of the stature of Elisa Brilli, Andrea Lanza, Eloisa Morra, Franco Pierno, Manuela Scarci, Luca Somigli, and Nicholas Terpstra, who have all patiently listened to me talk about Amedeo Nazzari. I am also thankful to those who have since left: Salvatore Bancheri, Konrad Eisenbichler, and Francesco Guardiani. At the Cinema Studies Institute, Kass Banning, James Cahill, Corinn Columpar, Lauren C. Cramer, Angelica Fenner, Charlie Keil, Alice Maurice, Brian Price, Scott Richmond, Sara Saljoughi, Nicholas Sammond, Meghan Sutherland, Bart Testa, and Elizabeth Wijaya have been generously learning way too much about Alberto Sordi. I also wish to acknowledge the present and past administrative staff of both units, Denise Ing, Liz Laurenco, Lucinda Li, Elsie Nisonen, Tony Pi, Andrea Santos, and Anna Vanek, for their continuous support. I am truly grateful to all the friends, family members, and colleagues who selflessly lent their time to this project, snapping into action when conducting research remotely was impossible for many reasons, including during the Covid-19 pandemic: Angela Dalle Vacche, Jessica Goethals, Matt Hauske, Kate Johnson, Pamela Kerpius, Carlo Montanaro, Nicolò Mainardi, Christina Stewart, and my dear brother Lorenzo Zambenedetti. Much gratitude to those who invited me to share my research at their institutions: Luca Caminati, Christine Daigle, Barbara Garbin, and Charles Leavitt. Finally, I am forever indebted to Gillian Leslie, Senior Commissioning Editor at Edinburgh University Press, who has believed in this project from the start and has patiently awaited its manuscript, and to Fiona Conn for transforming it into such a beautiful book. I am also thankful for the extensive and kind editorial support I received from Patrick Marshall, which was generously sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute, and from Eliza Wright. Research for this project was carried out in a number of archives in Italy, and North and South America, many of which I was able to visit over the years thanks to the financial assistance of the University of Toronto Faculty Association and the Department of Italian Studies. These include Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee of La Biennale di Venezia, Archivio Carlo Montanaro, Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini and Cineteca Nazionale at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the Ryerson Image Centre, Mediateca Toscana, Cineteca del Friuli, the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, Biblioteca Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, Cineteca del Friuli, Bibliomediateca Mario Gromo of the Museo Nazionale del acknowledgements ix Cinema di Torino, Biblioteca Renzo Renzi of the Cineteca di Bologna, the Oberlin College Archives, the University of Toronto Media Archives, Archivio centrale di Stato, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, and others I am surely forgetting. I wish to thank all the dedicated librarians, archivists, conservators, curators, and collectors who assisted me in this endeavour; without your knowledge and expertise, this book would not exist. INTRODUCTION: ACTING ACROSS BORDERS Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice. Michel de Certeau (1988: 115) In the December 1915 issue of the biweekly magazine La Vita Cinematografica, prolific actor and director Febo Mari (born Alfredo Giovanni Leopoldo Rodriguez, 1884–1939) launched into a radical eulogy for the relatively new cinematic art, which he positioned en par with Italy’s storied performing traditions, the theatre and the opera, arguing that: We need to proclaim a crusade for the acknowledgement and the uplifting of the art of our century. Once we will arrive at our destination, its patron, the tenth Muse, will reveal herself. But she will be nude, brandishing a torch, and she will have one name: Truth. (La Vita Cinematografica 1915: 135)1 Mari’s own innovative filmmaking practices supported this passionate plea for cinema’s dignity and its elevation to the status of high art, capable as it was, in his view, of immortalizing and rendering life by virtue of its own mechanical apparatus.