The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama 9780748656431

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THE OPERATIC AND THE EVERYDAY IN POST-WAR ITALIAN FILM MELODRAMA

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THE OPERATIC AND THE EVERYDAY IN POST-WAR ITALIAN FILM MELODRAMA

Louis Bayman

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© Louis Bayman, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 5642 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5643 1 (webready PDF) The right of Louis Bayman to be identified as 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).

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CONTENTS

List of figures Preface

Introduction: why melodrama?

Chapter 1 I Genre II Emotion III Worldview

vi viii 1 8 8 27 43

Chapter 2 I Melodrama, realism, modernism II Popular neorealism

76 76 103

Chapter 3 I Opera and cinema II Cultural hybridity III Matarazzo and Visconti

128 129 145 153

Conclusion

182

Filmography Bibliography Index

187 199 215

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FIGURES

I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Una donna ha ucciso 2 Romance and artifice in Appassionatamente and Una donna libera 25 Emotions in Maddalena 29 Menzogna 37 Motifs of restriction in Menzogna, Nel gorgo del peccato and Noi peccatori 42 1.5 Villainy and persecution in Ti ho sempre amato! 46 1.6 The gaze in Anna 60 1.7 Competing directions in Le infedeli, Gelosia and Ti ho sempre amato! 62 1.8 Religion as background and as dramatic culmination in Noi peccatori 68 2.1 The melodramatic artificiality of the German occupiers in Roma città aperta and the landlady in Umberto D. 83 2.2 Melodrama as authenticity in Roma città aperta and Sciuscià 86 2.3 Realism’s excessive signification in La terra trema 90 2.4 Bergman and Rossellini’s development through melodrama from Stromboli to Europa ’51 and Viaggio in Italia 96 2.5 Melodrama mancato in L’avventura 101 2.6 Alienated wanderings in Senza pietà, Il cammino della speranza and La città si difende 111 2.7 Dramatic isolation and collectivity in Riso amaro 117 2.8 Habitations marking poverty and luxury in La città si difende 119

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3.1 The operatic theatricality of Casa Ricordi 132 3.2 Awed spectatorship and narrative disruption in Solo per te 135 3.3 The spoof of a world awash with mass culture in Lo sceicco bianco 150 3.4 ‘Torna!’ in Catene 165 3.5 Confrontations and climax in Catene 169 3.6 Operatic and real life in Senso 172 3.7 Staging in Senso, Le notti bianche and Rocco e i suoi fratelli 175 3.8 Staging in Senso 176

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PREFACE

Scholars of popular culture come to a point at which, to get closer to their topic, they must turn around Baruch Spinoza’s principle not to laugh, not to cry, not to hate, but to understand, and aim instead to laugh, to cry, and to hate, so as to understand. Certainly laughter, tears and hatred have attended the viewing that went into the following study, occasionally its writing. I might hope less so in the reading, for such reactions are not the book’s primary intended purpose. That is instead fairly straightforward: to offer methods for understanding a group of films which, for the brief period of their greatest popularity, depended at a mass level on the intensest emotionality. More specifically, the book is about melodrama in Italian cinema, mostly in the post-war period, and its broader connections to life and culture. My consideration of the topic has taken up a large part of the last decade, which I must say has often made social situations awkward, for the subject poses the combined embarrassments of being relatively obscure, of lacking both gravity and cool, and, most embarrassing of all, of being predicated on taking feelings seriously, in an open, displayed and unbounded form. Somewhat stretching what I believed to be the confines of the politically correct, I was informed by one prominent Marxist-Feminist that only women and gays were interested in melodrama. I thanked her for the original analytical framework and her care to alight my attention on the cultural constructions surrounding emotion. Outside of the conference circuit, if feeling lazy I might say only that I’m writing on Italian cinema, if radical, on popular culture, if flirtatious, on romance, before glancing furtively away. If bored, then ‘Italian films – you

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won’t have heard of them’. Needless to say, it has not been a process through which it was easy to win friends. Many kind acquaintances smatteringly conversant with Italy have corrected me to tell me ‘You mean neorealism/Fellini/ Pasolini’, but, on the whole, I don’t, and the ploughing of this particular scholarly furrow has tended towards the solitary. I shall now withdraw my personhood as far as possible, and ask for the above confessions to be mitigated by the fact that they work towards stating that, although not answering the meaning of life or providing the basis for a cure for cancer, post-war Italian melodrama is a thing to be studied: a thing of interest, because it truly meant something to those who made up its audience, and that to do so involved both an artistry and an engagement with the significant experiences and conceptions of its day. I do not seek to launch a defence of alternative neglected masterpieces. As a sociologist does not interview so as to decide whether s/he likes the chosen social group nor an ethnographer travel to discover good holiday destinations, for this academic study the value of film is not found in reviews. One cannot operate from a value-free perspective, nor would one want to deny values such as whether the films provide adequate diversion from the troubles of life, illuminate our fundamental condition, or contribute to human progress. But these values are vague, and are up for argument. Some of the films I have found to be a very good watch; many, as with many of anything, average; and there are some for which that would be a charitable comment. That is to be expected when the object of research is also an aspect of everyday life. Despite the tyrannical colonisation performed by art cinema of the terrain on which serious discussion of film is meant to occur, we are certainly no longer in the days when analysis of popular culture might be radical in and of itself, and therefore the polemical aims of the volume are attenuated to allow the aims of elucidation greater space. The conference-goer’s eager complacency to justify the discussion of entertainment with the grinning claim that ‘this is a critically despised group of films’ and that ‘no one has seen fit to subject my topic to serious analysis before’ serves often to avoid, rather than argue, why consideration should be given. ‘Conventionally despised’ reproduces the narrow focus that it claims to reject: despised only by a small number of not entirely socially forceful actors – for example, other critics. The responses of public, institutional and political bodies offer different, if more ephemeral, opinions, while it is the process through which conventions come to be constructed, not a flight from engagement with them, that helps ballast a scholarly standpoint. The analysis has avoided both an auteurist (until the closing comparison of Luchino Visconti and Raffaello Matarazzo) and a case studies approach, seeking instead a depth of aesthetic and thematic analysis across a broader range of films than would otherwise be allowed. As such it steers rather close to Man Ray’s comment that ‘The worst films I’ve ever seen, the ones that send

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me to sleep, contain ten or fifteen marvellous minutes. The best films I’ve ever seen contain ten or fifteen valid ones’ (cited in Knowles 2009: 97). Apologies must be asked for the inevitable result that, for anyone more attached to sense and cohesion than your average Dadaist, this will make the book harder to read. A synopsis of each of the main films repeatedly mentioned in the text is provided as an appendix, in the hopes of better orienting the reader through the ‘peeling an onion’ approach to the films’ collective significances. This book is about melodrama. The impulse behind the study is an enthusiasm for melodrama. The enthusiasm comes from an attachment to passion, to strong emotions, to their emphatic representation on film, the daring exhibitionism of the drama that enables them, the artfulness and invention with which they take to the screen, the strength of experience in watching them. An investigation of these factors, and the social and cultural ether that whirls round them, provide the main reasons why I ask for the reader’s attention. In guiding me through the often turbulent emotions and consequently befogged intellectual processes that have attended the writing of this book, I would like most sincerely to thank Rosalie Allain, Carla Cenciarelli, John Champagne, Clelia Clini, Nick Dines, Jonathan Driskell, David Forgacs, Christine Gledhill, Jo Holoway, Amberine Samiya Khan, Hope Liebersohn, Tijana Mamula, Lawrence Napper, Natália Pinazza and Elizabeth Taylor for their very helpful comments on parts of the text. The opportunity to elucidate ideas at conferences and socially has been especially important, and those who have contributed to this are many. Practical help has been given by the cheery staff at the British Film Institute Library, the Libraries at the Universities of Bologna and Turin, the Cineteche in both cities and the Videoteche at the University of Bologna, the Biblioteca Nazionale, Biblioteca Lino Micciché, the Centro Sperimentale and the Frohring library in Rome. Daniela Bozzetto, Maria Anna Garcea and Ben and Helen Kerridge helped me when researching in Italy. Practical aid and friendly advice, in all their manifestations, have been given by Hannah, Margaret and Paul Bayman, Nick Church, Simon Currell, Pablo Griffiths, Laurence Kelvin, Vera Morandini and Chris Muirhead. This study emerged from a PhD thesis carried out at King’s College, London and I thank the staff and scholars there, as well as the AHRC for providing the grant to do the work. Richard Dyer, who supervised the thesis, has been of immense help. I would like to thank very deeply the students on courses related to the topic that I have taught at King’s College, London, Queen Mary University, John Cabot University and London Metropolitan University, communication with whom has given me much to think about with regard to how to present the topic, and, most important, the assumptions underlying it. Some of the arguments presented here have appeared in several other pieces of published research, listed below. I have taken care to repeat as little as possible and to present the evidence in new contexts, for it is an area upon which

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light can be shone from a number of angles. I thank the editors and publishers for giving me the opportunity to develop those ideas. ‘Melodrama as realism in Italian neorealism’, in Lúcia Nagib and Cecilia Mello (eds), Realism and the Audio-visual Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 47–63. ‘Melodrama as seriousness’, in Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto (eds), Popular Italian Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 82–98. ‘Something else besides a man: Melodrama and the maschietto in post-war Italian cinema’, in Danielle Hipkins and Roger Pitt (eds), Re-envisioning the Child in Italian Film, Oxford: Peter Lang [forthcoming].

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INTRODUCTION: WHY MELODRAMA?

Of all the non-professional actors who appeared in post-war Italian cinema, one not usually considered as belonging to a neorealist impulse is Lidia Cirillo. Filmed sitting on a train at the beginning of Una donna ha ucciso [A Woman Has Killed] (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1952), she tells an apparently suicidal fellow female passenger her cautionary tale. This woman has killed, and the story is her own – that is, the story the film is based on is that of a real murder, carried out by Cirillo on her husband, an English soldier. In her study of women in post-war Italy, Garofalo noted that the public was in many ways approving in its reaction to the crime. In her defence Cirillo told the court: ‘I wanted to avenge, along with my honour, that of all the women of Italy’ (Garofalo 1956: 20). What connection does this comment reveal between the particular and the general? Is it revenge against an apparent liberator – a member of the Allied armies who had just freed the country from the Nazis, a redeemer of distressed damsels turned into a stranger within the home? Is this symbolic of Italian reconstruction, of the disappointment in life after the Liberation? In her claim to speak for ‘all the women of Italy’, does she testify to an explosive violence underlying the institution of marriage, or of the return of the repressed of war to the domestic sphere? Is it an overturning of gender relations, a sign of feminine hysteria, that prison is indistinguishable from an unhappy family? Or does it offer a moral tale of deplorable transgression, of the futility of the desire for fulfilment for women, or the language of resistance in the renewed conservatism prior to feminism? The film takes inspiration from a news event, one which seems itself inspired by a film. As a story, it is a point of i­ntersection

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Figure I.1  Una donna ha ucciso

not only between the newspapers and courts, but with mainstream cinema and with the beginnings of what was to be called ‘women’s studies’, as its consideration by Garofalo attests; indicating the common interest in both film and in wider discourses in the conditions of life – be they ordinary, popular, everyday – in Italy. This book concerns melodrama in post-war Italian cinema and, like the Cirillo case, it sees in its topic an opportunity to probe the stimulating connections between reality and imagination. The roots of Italian melodrama can be traced to traditions of public, visual and musical spectacle, an aesthetic flair, the perception of life as a vale of suffering and the importance for dayto-day interaction of performance and gesture, which give rise to a range of phenomena that further influence cinematic melodrama, from opera to the public display of mass politics and the rituals and sentiments of Vatican Catholicism. Melodrama can be seen as the Italian form par excellence, a fact of some historic despair: Bazin, a founder of Cahiers du Cinéma whose philosophy of film drew inspiration from Italian neorealism, lamented that Italians ­‘admittedly [. . .] like the Russians, are the most naturally theatrical of people’ (Bazin 2005: 55), being unable to exorcise ‘the demon of melodrama’ (ibid.: 31) (itself a more melodramatic than materialist description). Earlier again, Gramsci, a founder of the Italian Communist Party, identified the difficulty of spreading a mass critical analysis as a cultural habit when ‘the only literature [the popular classes] know are the libretti of nineteenth-century opera [. . .] [and consequently] members of the popular classes behave “operatically” ’ (Gramsci 1985: 204). This book aims, among other things, to offer some analysis that can distinguish between and re-entwine the melodramatic and the Italian.

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And what then is melodrama? Melodrama delves into the private intimacy of emotion to offer a ‘spontaneous, uninhibited way of seeing things [. . .] It is drama in its elemental form; it is the quintessence of drama’ (Bentley 1965: 216). Melodrama deals in misery, a condition – always miserable, often ­immiserated – that found its glory days in post-war Italian cinema. As such, it gratifies a wider impulse described by David Hume in relation to tragedy, namely that audiences are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion [. . .] The view, or, at least, imagination of high passions, arising from great loss or gain, affects the spectator by sympathy, gives him [sic] some touches of the same passions, and serves him for a momentary entertainment. (Hume 1985: 217) But melodrama is a specific realisation of misery whose elevation occurs within a distinct ordinariness. The realms of dramatic grandeur, of life-ordeath passions, of a heavenly beyond or hellish depths, are suggested within the everyday (Brooks 1995); the protagonists are bounded by the limitations of their station (Goimard 1999), the drama thus suggesting fantasies of escape that the characters cannot achieve, redoubling pathos (Neale 1986). Scenarios of entrapment and disruption make personal emotions the source of shelter and isolation, while melodramatic style suggests, but cannot provide passage to, a higher realm. The world is then melodramatic, in that forceful emotion governs it, and emphasises the weakness of its carriers. Melodrama studies in general makes only the most negligible of references to Italian examples.1 As a discipline, Italian studies is beginning to pay more attention to melodrama, in most extended form through the work of Maggie Günsberg (2005), who devotes a third of her book on gender in Italian cinema to post-war melodrama. English-language works concentrate in particular on the films of Matarazzo,2 or on films known from other contexts, on neorealist films3 or on auteurs (especially Visconti).4 Italian-language scholarship, on the other hand, widens the field of reference with various surveys: of selections taken from the scholarship that has accrued over the years in Appassionatamente (Caldiron and Della Casa 1999) and Forme del melodramma (Pezzotta 1992a), or of the films that make up melodrama, as seen in the two monographs currently available. Morreale’s Così piangevano (2011) is the first full-length monograph in any language to offer an account of the range of melodramatic and romantic dramas of Italian cinema and popular culture in the 1950s. Morreale lays out the opening premises for the study of post-war melodrama well:

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Never has there been so much crying in Italian cinema as in the fifties. And never have so many female protagonists been seen. The theatre stalls of our country were conquered by melodramas [. . .] a confluence of the inheritance of Neapolitan sceneggiata5 and the literary feuilleton, the neorealist background and the innovations of the fotoromanzo6 [. . .] Crying or fallen women, emigrant or veteran men, the figures in this cinema speak to the last public of a peasant Italy. And yet cinematic melodrama is the incubator for the styles and themes that will nourish modern cinema. (2011: 3) More recent still is Cardone’s 2012 Il melodramma, a series of case studies of particular films from Assunta Spina (1915) to Respiro (Emanuele Crialese, 2002). Cardone links her chosen films with ideas such as the operatic, excess and music, the conflict of good and evil, passion. With regard to Matarazzo’s Catene/Chains (1949), her chosen film for the post-war period, she explains: The melodramatic imagination was subject in this period to a very great diffusion, generating a kind of shadowy and sinful loveworld marked by passion and sacrifice, that invades the cinema and the popular press and involves millions of spectators. (2012: 89) Interestingly in historical terms, after Matarazzo she then moves into the arthouse cinema of Zurlini, Bertolucci, the Tavianis, Antonioni, suggesting perhaps a historical change after the bright flame of popular melodramatics burns itself out by the mid-1950s. This monograph seeks to offer a more sustained investigation into popular culture and aesthetics than a survey or case studies format allows. It seeks through extended film analysis to convey the artistry that marks melodrama. Although it is in the experience of the thing itself that its essence is to be found, such descriptions have been necessary for the purposes of analytical incision, and in the circumstance of intellectual inquiry, as they say, a tooth is more to be prized than a diamond. In the first section of this book I consider the five-year heyday of domestic melodrama from 1949 to 1954, the enormous success of which confirmed the re-establishment of the post-war film industry. This is the period both of mammismo, the much satirised mummy’s boy, an ‘image of dependency’ emerging after the destruction wrought by war (Patriarca 2010: 220), and of its reverse side, of a flourishing Marian cult found in sightings, acts of devotion, and in the mothers – suffering, martyred and sacrificed – of the domestic melodrama. I ask what kinds of experiences these pessimistic tales make available and what values make them meaningful, discussing how ‘meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but arises out of a struggle or negotiation between compet-

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ing frames of reference, motivation and experience’ (Gledhill 2006: 114). Their prevailing sense that life is unfair allows a poignant complex of acceptance and protest (Moretti 2005: 180), while as fictions they provide a conventionalisation of the expression of suffering that helps define an emphatic uncertainty. The shared interest in the authenticity and elemental emotions of a situation, of presenting them with vividness and working through an ethical attitude to them, makes the similar historical time frames of post-war melodrama and neorealism more than coincidental. This has meaning for Italian film history, and not only for the reconsideration required if one accepts Pedro Almodóvar’s assertion that ‘when melodrama focuses on unemployment, they call it neo-realism’ (cited in Fofi 2007: 188). It also aids an understanding of melodrama as an artistic realisation of questions of crisis, faith and representation, one which emerges in post-war cinema in a lively relationship with both realism and modernism. The dividing line between high and popular art is set by a process of critical negotiation, a negotiation that in the post-war period in Italy broke out in extended and angry argument. The second section of this book thus widens the analysis to an application of melodrama to questions of realist and arthouse cinema, seeking to account for its place within the post-war rearticulation of the relationship between cinema, art, representation and reality. It considers these factors also for their appearance in neorealismo popolare, crime and romance melodramas with neorealist innovations. Evidence of how dissatisfaction and hope, defeat and impotence, romance and passion, are ambivalent socially, just as they are stimulating artistically, is realised in neorealismo popolare less through the shelter of the family home and individualised romance than of collectivity and public solidarity. In the post-war years, cinema occupied a central place in popular life, years in which the reach of cinema is achieved across the breadth of Italian society. In its contemplation of the experience of crisis and uncertainty within the personal sphere, the melodramatic urge of the post-war era seems to dramatise Garofalo’s opinion that war ‘is also reflected in human relationships and in love, and as well as bridges and houses, the myth of masculine infallibility had collapsed’ (1956: 4). As well as considering how doubt and pain are inscribed into changing versions of manliness and womanhood, the study considers post-war Italy as ‘a foundry of tales’ (Bravo 2003: 67), a comment reminiscent of novelist Italo Calvino’s recollection that after the events of war, resistance and occupation, Italians found themselves ‘bursting with stories to tell’ (Calvino 2000:8). This is realised in a common impulse both for realist description and the pleasure of retelling itself. In the third section of this book I consider the relationship of cinematic melodrama to other forms. Melodrama builds upon the potential of cinema to incorporate a broad heritage – of opera, literature,

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theatre, song, popular presses, iconography – that also determines its fundamental character, thereby not only relaying these other entertainments but becoming itself operatic, theatrical, musical, iconographic. Popular culture, differently from folklore, is marked by such contamination of forms, but in melodrama this hybridity creates a particular kind of longing. When at the beginning of Appassionatamente (Giacomo Gentilomo, 1954) Andrea first gazes at the portrait of his future wife Elena, a piece of music begins to play, a leitmotif for his desire. The music is taken from a 1920s waltz (Dyer 2010: 86) itself called ‘Appassionatamente’ and connects music to romantic emotion, but also brings attention to nostalgia, to recognition, and reminds the spectator of the world outside of the film at the same time as it underlines the feelings that it aims to convey. A distinctive trait of Italian melodrama, and of its mass culture, is the importance of opera. The development from opera into cinema in Italy occurred because: ‘As entertainment, social phenomenon, and – we can even say – public service, cinema fulfills a function analogous to that carried out by opera during the nineteenth century, particularly in Italy’ [. . .] [that offers a] relatively unchanging, canonical repertoire of emotions and sentiments. (Brunetta 2003, citing Giacomo Debenedetti [1935]: 151) This can be seen in cineopera, films in which opera is included within cinematic narratives, often rendering a melodramatic relationship between the opera stage and the lives of those who perform on them. An operatic attitude is in cineopera applied to romance, to national identity, and to the melodramatic artwork itself, and the relationship it posits between opera and prose life. As well as this, an operatic aesthetic is developed in Italian cinema more generally. Operatic theatricality can be seen in character behaviour, with climax marked principally by bodily and vocal expressivity and by tableaux and stasis. The operatic can also be seen in dramatic situations in which moments of highest drama are marked by confrontations and the expansion of emotion beyond the physical restrictions which proliferate at points of climax. I argue that this operatic aesthetic is discernible across Italian cinema, contrasting manifestations of which can be found in the films of Raffaello Matarazzo and Luchino Visconti. They are the two directors responsible for some of the most commercially successful films of the genre, and their dominance only increases when it comes to scholarship on Italian melodrama. For these reasons I have left them to a final comparison at the book’s end, evaluating them as points of summation of many of the main themes informing the rest of the book. Although Visconti is the high art and Matarazzo the main

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popular point of reference for Italian melodrama, they are united by common but unique interests in romance, the popular, neorealism, resulting (if in very differing ways) in cinematic formalisations of popular culture itself, from fotoromanzi to religious icons. This book argues for the centrality of melodrama to post-war Italian cinema and culture. It seeks to add to knowledge of the form within the Italian context and to develop conceptualisations of melodrama more generally. It positions melodrama within popular culture, and elaborates its reference to the problems of everyday life and the search for an elemental vividness. During its writing, I have had in my mind Visconti’s (1958) profession to love melodrama because it is located at the borders of life and theatre [. . .] Theatre and opera, the world of the baroque: these are the motives which tie me to melodrama [. . .] In the mythologies of our time the diva is the incarnation of the rare, the extravagant and the exceptional. (cited in Bacon 1998: 62) It alludes on the one hand to Italian melodrama in its reference both to reality and to the opera stage. Yet it also describes a border, a point of confinement, suggesting the tensions that I describe as central to melodrama. Melodrama does not exist beyond any of the confines that it sets up within itself; it is the border itself, the line at which excess pulls with restriction, formal expressivity with representation, and art with reality. Notes 1. For the main studies of the form, see Brooks 1995, Elsaesser 1987, Goimard 1999, and the collections Bratton, Cook and Gledhill 1994, Dagrada 2007, Gledhill 1987, Landy 1991a, Pesce 2007, Spagnoletti 1999. 2. See Bachman and Calder Williams 2012, Hipkins 2008. 3. Hipkins 2007, Landy 2004, Wood 2006. 4. Hipkins 2006b, Landy 1991b. 5. Dramatic plays or films devised from Neapolitan songs (discussed in Chapter 3). 6. Popular publications made up of dramatic and romantic photostories.

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CHAPTER 1

A principal historical shift was under way in Italian cinema by the end of World War II, which is to say that films in this period took a distinct turn towards the exploration of misfortune. In rediscovering realism and engaging in social analysis, post-war Italian cinema put its dramatic characters through a series of hardships. Alongside such engaged criticism important changes also took place in entertainment. Comedy was found less in material comfort and ever more in states of lucklessness and impoverishment, while crime, adventure, opera and historical films drew energy from the setbacks that befell their often ill-fated protagonists. A perspective which focuses on Italian cinema’s exploration of misfortune invites reconsideration of its film history. A common assertion regarding the development of post-war Italian cinema was that neorealism, the radical turn towards social reality (discussed at length in the following chapter), declined because audiences wanted a rosy picture of life rather than to spend their spare time confronted with misery and suffering. And yet misery and suffering abound in post-war cinema, if anything increasing in intensity as the years of reconstruction began, and maintaining themselves through the concurrent flourishing of the post-war genre system. I Genre As well as entailing a historiographic enterprise regarding film production in post-war Italy, recognition of this broad emphasis on suffering, enabled by

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freedoms from Fascist pressures towards positivity, invites consideration of the substance of enjoyment; that is, of what constitutes enjoyment and of what makes it substantial. The experiences available in the cultural pursuits of any particular society are evidence of what that society may hold to be of value or significance, and how it shapes common desires and anxieties into dramatic fantasies. The following analysis of melodrama in post-war Italian cinema intends to conduct such inquiries through analysis of the aesthetic and cultural bases of a vital popular form. Industrial popularity In 1949, a demonstration of the Movimento per la Difesa del Cinema Italiano marched through Rome under the slogan of protecting ‘Our art, our culture, our work’. This claim of the comprehensive role of film in post-war Italy seems well founded. Italy’s Economic Miracle was not to occur until the late 1950s, but, perhaps indicating the primacy of entertainment during hardship, a sectional miracle presaged it: the blossoming of the film industry from the ‘organised chaos’ (Wood 2005: 12) of the first post-war years. The War had brought a prolific home industry nearly to a halt. With overt cultural imperialism, film policy was then assigned by the American occupiers to their Psychological Warfare Branch. They flooded the market with seven years’ worth of Hollywood films now available to exhibitors (making up for Mussolini’s banning of American cinema since 1938 (Casadio 1990: 11)). The centre of film production, the large Roman studio complex of Cinecittà, had been turned into a refugee camp, LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, which produced documentaries and newsreels and which monitored foreign newsreels) was now inactive, and the training centre the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia was closed. ENIC (Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche), which had been formed by the government to manage the direction of the national film industry, was functioning only to manage its own theatres and to show the influx of American films (Casadio 1990). Despite this, from 1946 to 1954 Italian films grew from 13 to 34 per cent of domestic box office (Brunetta 2003: 114), with the number of films produced in Italy rising from 49 in 1948 to 95 in 1949, 74 in 1950, 115 in 1951, 142 in 1952, reaching a record of 170 in 1953 (Casadio 1990: 16), Italy’s film industry moving from fourth in 1949 to second in 1953 worldwide, surpassing France and the UK (Morreale 2011: 127). Most importantly for us here, the films leading this productive surge show that cinema’s commercial success was due in large part to melodrama. Post-war audiences in Italy showed a pronounced predilection for films that present victims and perpetrators of persecution, that offer emphatic consolation for multiple disappointments and that centre on

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the thwarting of happiness. Catene/Chains, directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, broke box office records in 1949, outstripping its nearest competitor by 220 million to take 735 million lire at the domestic box office that year (Aprà 1976: 21–2), with melodramas including Tormento (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1950), I figli di nessuno/Nobody’s Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951), Anna (Alberto Lattuada, 1951), Core ’ngrato (Guido Brignone 1951), La nemica (Giorgio Bianchi, 1952), Sensualità (Clemente Fracassi, 1952), Perdonami! (Mario Costa, 1953), Chi è senza peccato . . . (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1953), Maddalena (Augusto Genina, 1954), Mambo (Robert Rossen, 1954), Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954) and Casa Ricordi (Carmine Gallone, 1954) among the top places in the subsequent years up to 1954 (Casadio 1995: 23). Catene thus helped usher in the half-decade-long era of melodrama (Anna was the second most successful film of the whole 1945–60 period), a genre whose popularity stretched across the breadth of the country and into rural areas (Wagstaff 1996a: 224) in a period in which cinema-going rose to its height (Monaco 1966). The commercial success of melodrama marked the consolidation of an industry facilitated by state intervention to foster private production. Through the 1949 ‘Andreotti Law’, named after Giulio Andreotti, the under-secretary for entertainments (spettacolo) of the time, a system of ‘minimum guarantees’ was introduced, that is, of funding towards production costs if guarantees could be obtained by producers from distributors before shooting began. Since making a film thus depended on convincing distributors of its commercial potential beforehand, producers leaned heavily on formulas drawn from whatever was currently attracting sufficient cinemagoers. The result of this was a system of film cycles, known as filoni, in which a large number of very similar films would be made in the short periods before the exhaustion of their creative possibilities gave way to new trends (a system that was to last into the major industrial changes that took place in the 1970s (see Brunetta 2003)).1 If one dates the post-war genre system to the cycle of domestic melodramas between 1949 and 1954 (as Wagstaff does, 1996a: 224–6), then these films mark also the turning point of film production for a mass audience into one stratified according to demographic. They were ‘the last manifestation of a national cinema’ (Aprà 1999: 157), produced as cinema was extending itself out of urban centres and into rural towns. They were not marked by a particular youth appeal and the films themselves alternated popular musical pieces, romance and action;2 that is, they were made with the aim of appealing to everyone, even if, in practice, they were especially popular in the South, in the cheaper and more rural seconda and terza visione cinemas that did not play new releases (Morreale 2011: 91), they seem dominated by a female viewpoint, and envisage a spectator without reference points from beyond popular culture and of quite traditional weltanschauung. This turning point is, then, also part

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of a historic shift in cultural consumption and social organisation – and for that matter of social identity and collective experience – from the more unifying patterns that marked entertainment of the first half of the century into the greater variation witnessed in later phases of consumer capitalism and individualism. These melodramas engaged experienced filmmaking talent, working, however, for small production companies rather than large studios. According to Forgacs and Gundle, between 1945 and 1957, 287 production companies started up and went bust (2008: 128–9). Several larger production companies were active in this period, in particular Lux, which produced Senso and was especially adept at making popular films with a greater degree of artistic ambition, and Titanus,3 which produced Matarazzo’s films and drew more directly from entertainment forms with less cultural capital. In a system which was gearing itself towards international export the melodramas were mostly for a domestic market, with Anna being the most successful co-production (with France) of the corpus. As well as the trade with France, the main rivals to domestic melodrama were the Hollywood imports that flooded the market in this era, although this pre-dates the near-baroque indulgence of late 1950s Hollywood. The films instead resemble more Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)era Hollywood, if even more relentlessly bleak, than they do the colour excess of Sirk and Minelli, and Morreale (2011: 63–7) cites a reciprocal influence between Italian and Mexican cinema. Federica Villa (2002a) has described the collaborative system at work in the immediate post-war system in particular in relation to neorealist crime drama Il bandito/The Bandit (Alberto Lattuada, 1946), and the activities of a writer such as Oreste Biancoli – co-screenwriter on Il bandito, but also on the de-dramatised neorealist work Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) and the crime melodrama Nel gorgo del peccato (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1954), among many others – show the diversity required of the industry’s main craftsmen. The collaborative aspect, and the sense of melodrama as a training ground for the rest of post-war cinema, can be seen if we consider the 1953 Perdonami!, directed by Mario Costa (best known for his cineopere), with music by one of the most consistent film composers of the post-war era, Carlo Rustichelli, the script co-written by future commedia all’italiana director Mario Monicelli, and the cinematography by future horror/giallo director Mario Bava. Melodrama employed the famous faces of the Italian and international star system, especially of male heroes like Massimo Girotti and Amedeo Nazzari, and, most consistently, in the villainous form of Folco Lulli, the films featuring also the maggiorate fisiche (physically well-endowed) female stars of the era like Silvana Pampanini and Silvana Mangano. It was not especially a genre that created its own new stars, however – the main example would be Yvonne Sanson, the Greek-born actress who starred alongside Nazzari in

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Matarazzo’s series of films, but she is more ordinary, less fatale, than her historical counterparts, the transgressive divas of the pre-war era.4 What melodrama? Both a general glance and sustained debate would reveal the international character of post-war cinema to be relatively melodramatic, and not only in the romantic dramas that could be found across national film industries but in films as various as musical epics in Indian cinema, French literary adaptations and Hollywood gangster films. As a term, ‘melodrama’ can then be used for markedly different kinds of films. So, while post-war melodrama is in Italian cinema well defined in its time period, it is poorly defined when it comes to its shape as a genre, form or style. Casual observation would tend to describe Italian cinema as all fairly melodramatic, but the obviousness of this appearance becomes a problem if we find ourselves in the position of Augustine when reflecting on trying to describe time: ‘I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled’ (cited in Powell 2012: 1). Everyone agrees that the tetralogy directed by Raffaello Matarazzo and starring Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson, that is, Catene, Tormento, I figli di nessuno, L’angelo bianco/The White Angel (1955), as well as the Luchino Visconti-directed Senso, are important when discussing Italian melodrama. Although these are the most famous reference points, they take up so much space in discussion of post-war Italian melodrama that I shall deal with them separately in the final chapter of this book, the better here to consider the broader character of post-war cinema. But beyond these five films, different critical traditions establish different objects of analysis. Anglo/French scholarship on Italian cinema deals with a more restricted number of films, which are also of a more cohesive type, specifically: Le infedeli/The Unfaithfuls (Mario Monicelli and Steno, 1953), Vulcano/Volcano (William Dieterle, 1950), Chi è senza peccato . . ., Disonorata senza colpa (Giorgio Walter Chili, Italy, 1953), Una donna libera/A Free Woman (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1954), In amore si pecca in due (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1954), Maddalena, Nel gorgo del peccato, La nemica, Perdonami!, Anna, Sensualità, Ti ho sempre amato!/I Always Loved You! (Mario Costa, 1953), Traviata ’53 (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1953), Le due verità (Antonio Leonviola, 1952), Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori/See Naples . . . and Die (Riccardo Freda, 1951) and Vortice (Raffaello Matarazo, 1953).5 In Italian criticism, these films have been considered among ‘i figli di Catene’ [Catene’s offspring] (Morreale 2011: v) and discussed as part of the wider categories film d’appendice and/or neorealismo popolare (larger groups which we shall have opportunity to encounter subsequently). The former category establishes a connection to the nineteenth-century popular literature of the

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f­ euilleton, and the latter places them alongside all films of crime, vice, comedy and passion set among ordinary folk in what are generally considered generic dilutions of the artistically and politically radical neorealism.6 These different categories denote different emphases: English-language scholarship is especially interested in the transnational frameworks of psychoanalytic/ideology critique for which ‘domestic melodrama’ (in the wake, in particular, of Elsaesser’s pioneering study (1987 [1972]) of Eisenhower-era American cinema and the take-up of Douglas Sirk by Screen; see Halliday and Mulvey 1972) is seen to offer especially dynamic instances of aesthetically-charged morality relating to everyday domestic and social relations; meanwhile Italians are more interested in questions of (the films’ often perceived negative role in) national culture and popular life (and the French discuss them under the rubric of national cinema). In choosing to talk about melodrama in post-war Italian cinema, are we actually discussing anything with any real existence? As industrial categories, cinematic genres allow the standardisation of output for the purposes of mass market production, most simply, allowing audiences to know that they are going to see the kind of film they know they like rather than one they know they don’t. The Italian film industry was only just starting to develop the differentiation of genres in the 1940s (della Torre 2002). In inventing genre study, Aristotle divined three types, the ‘epic’, ‘lyric’, and ‘drama’, and immediate post-war film culture in Italy felt no need to go any further, reserving the names ‘avventuroso’, ‘comico’, and ‘passionale’. The films discussed here were marketed as ‘storie d’amore/di passione’ or just as ‘drammi’, with generic individuation suggested by stills or illustrations that encapsulated an emblematic dramatic moment from the film (della Torre 2002: 276).7 Contemporary critics termed these films strappalacrime (tear-jerkers), larmoyant (tearful), film d’appendice and neorealismo popolare, while the filmmakers producing them rejected even these names. A lack of generic articulation is characteristic of many of the cycles of the filone system: precisely because of its impulse for brief intense exploitation, the filone system was highly aware of its adherence to conventions which it often, however, did not name, relying on audience recognition as a more intuitive or felt – or simply iconographic, given the illustrations that advertised the films – experience. There may have been several hundred mythological muscleman films in the five years after Le fatiche di Ercole/Hercules (Pietro Francisci, 1958), and the 1960s may have seen a proliferation of horse-bound adventures set in nineteenth-century America and Mexico and of bleakly cynical comedies, but it was only in retrospect that they were named peplums, spaghetti westerns, and commedia all’italiana (and in each case by foreign critics seeking a vocabulary to discuss the films that interested them). Although these films were not part of a generic designation ‘melodrama’, Italian filmmakers have historically been aware that their films have at least

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had something to do with the word: De Santis said in 1948 of his Riso amaro/ Bitter Rice (1949) that ‘all of us from time to time happen to rediscover the Italian tradition of melodrama’ (cited in Caldwell 2000: 142), and Visconti justified his stylisations by stating that ‘in Italy too there exist melodramatic characters, just as in Sicily there exist illiterate shepherds’ (cited in Rondolino 1981: 311–12). Vittorio Cottafavi spoke of Traviata ’53 that ‘from the basis in melodrama I was aiming for something interior, something true. I was aiming to use cinema to reclaim the secret feelings of the soul’ (cited in Masoni 2007: 48). In all of this, however, the principal referent is opera: in the original Italian melodramma means both ‘melodrama’ and ‘opera’ (a point to be discussed further in Chapter 3), and, although it is sometimes ambiguous exactly which meaning is intended when the word is used in this period, the tendency is opera. With its musical, expressive and emotional emphases melodrama of one form or another could be said to have hegemonised domestic manners of performance in Italy to the extent that it simply was Italian drama of the modern era, a deep wellspring of creative possibilities and a coherent source of ­identification with national cultural traditions. But the relative indefinition of what melodrama means is a problem that goes beyond its absence as a generic designation in post-war Italy. Russell Merritt has in fact claimed that melodrama is an incoherent critical category (Merritt 1983: 28), one which has in its history meant 1930s Hollywood gangster film and westerns (see Neale 1993, 2000), the very films against which Elsaesser initially opposed the emotion-oriented female-centred family dramas he identified as melodrama (Elsaesser 1987). Melodrama is not the only term of wide application: comedy can describe both Dante Alighieri and Christian De Sica, and drama has an even more expansive designation. To state that Oliver Twist and Angst essen seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) draw from a common fount is to assert that they both display a combined value in clarifying issues of justice through absolute conflicts and through pathos and expressive emphasis. Thus, to refer to the films in this chapter as ‘domestic melodrama’ is to say that they are one manifestation of a genre recognised most basically in popular romances that depicted a virtuous individual (usually a woman) or couple (usually lovers) victimised by repressive and inequitable social circumstances, particularly those involving marriage, occupation and the nuclear family. (Schatz 1991: 222) In more general terms, melodrama is an artistic tradition which in the title of Robert Heilman’s book (1968) offers a ‘version of experience’ in which characters are monopathic, that is, wholly innocent or wholly wicked. Thus unlike in tragedy conflict in melodrama occurs not within but between characters,

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with good pitted against evil and weak against powerful. As well as being internally undivided, the protagonists of melodrama are not the kings and demigods of classical tragedy but those of an ordinary station in life (Goimard 1999 [1979]: 80), and its morality is expressed in an elevated use of language that excites popular emotion and places the tribulations of the common person on a higher expressive plane. Beyond the plotlines, settings and characters is an emphasis on – or, better, an emphatic – style. This style creates what, in Peter Brooks’ term, is the mode of excess, in which emotionality is elevated with expressive grandeur but imbued with ordinariness and a demotic sense of intimacy (Brooks 1995 [1976]). Together, such elements contribute towards making melodrama less a genre than a ‘mode of experience’ (Elsaesser 1987: 49, emphasis in original) which, in the domestic melodrama that he specifies, intensifies drama through a symbolic mise-en-scène that renders the family home as a place of intolerable tensions. In this setting editing, composition, camera movement and music give an orchestration to the dramatic world, in which sudden reversals, oppositions and parallels contribute to a sense of trapped and fatal energy surrounding the politics of domesticity. To summarise the point of this discussion, one can say that as well as industrial categories, genres are conceptual categories which can highlight common cultural ground and motifs within or between artistic forms. Because of this, genres are at least in part discursive constructions (cf. Altman 1998, Neale 1993). The discussion is one in which the industry, its marketing, and audiences form parts but not the whole. Generic categorisation also derives from the hypothesis that to say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. (Hall 1997, cited in Harding and Pribram 2009: 2) With ideas in mind of the shared forms of interpretation and expression, of the thought, feeling, and common understanding post-war Italian melodrama creates, we shall for the rest of this study consider the particularities of this intensely productive period of Italian melodrama. Passionately The commercial basis of the corpus is seen in the promise of an all-consuming experience contained in the film’s attention-grabbing titles: Appassionatamente [Passionately], Desiderio [Desire] (Marcello Pagliero/Roberto Rossellini, 1946), Gelosia/Jealousy (Pietro Germi, 1953), Pentimento [Repentance] (Mario Costa, 1952), Romanticismo (Clemente Fracassi, 1950), Senso, Ti

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ho sempre amato! [I Have Always Loved You!], Tormento each give striking declarations of the kinds of affective situation experienced by the characters; Vortice [Vortex], Catene [Chains], I figli di nessuno [Nobody’s Children], Bufere [Storms] (Guido Brignone, 1953), Vulcano [Volcano] declare their aesthetic strategies of an endlessly spiralling, shackled, lonely or explosive elemental condition; L’angelo bianco [The White Angel], Le infedeli [The Unfaithful Ones], Chi è senza peccato . . . [He Who Is Without Sin . . .] (among a whole sub-filone of films with the word peccato, ‘sin’, or its cognates in the title) and Disonorata senza colpa [Dishonoured Without Fault] signal the dramatic and moral attitudes to be considered. Such titles force definite statements into collision with overwhelming and disorienting affective experiences. In this they are definitionally melodramatic, and the three groupings above accord to three of the main strategies of melodrama: the positioning of affect as a narrative concern, the foregrounding of the aesthetic strategies that correspond to these affective states, and the importance of moral categories. The credit sequences offer an introduction to the particular dramatic world of melodrama, typically with the loudness of a full Romantic orchestral score, although swing, traditional song, or modernist chromaticism may also open the films; meanwhile Mambo (Robert Rossen, 1954), which stars Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman, begins with an extended sequence of dance under the watchful eye of Katherine Dunham, who choreographed the film (its modernity a rare thing given the more traditionalist elements of the genre). In Ti ho sempre amato! the opening themes of the credits, the first one more action- or distress-sounding, the second one closer to Tchaikovsky and pathos, play over the sunny daytime scene of an open gate leading into a yard of girls larking with carefree youthfulness. As is typically the case in melodrama, stylistic elements – here, the soundtrack – constitute a warning within an outwardly normal everyday situation, providing with its flowing camera movements the sense from its opera-film director Mario Costa of an overture into the subsequent themes of ruined innocence and the ravages of the outside world. Anna’s credits open over a hospital corridor with an open window that suggests the distant possibility of a world elsewhere, with light and dark dissecting the corridor in a diagonal line to give an abstracted hint of the questions of good and bad with which the film will concern itself. In Appassionatamente the credits roll over the turning pages of a book in a performative emphasis of story­ telling, which is one of the genre’s pleasures, while Vortice’s credits occur over an abstract design which may be a sketch of the wind or some kind of luxury fabric, but which signals a richly swirling sensuousness and invites a tantalisingly near-tactile apprehension of the image. The plots centre on just such tantalising separations: of a protagonist separated from the family s/he is devoted to, or on lovers held apart despite their mutual passion. Matarazzo’s quartet offers the most famous examples of the

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first type of film, as do Maddalena and Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori. In this latter film, Marisa is mistakenly picked up by police as a prostitute after keeping an appointment with a blackmailer. Her husband throws her out and she has to work as a nightclub singer. After three years cast out from the family she is shot by the blackmailers who have meanwhile kidnapped her child, this nearfatal sacrifice enough to convince her husband of his mistake and welcome her back. The second kind of film, that of lovers held apart, illustrates the plight of determined isolation. The heroine of the eponymous Anna works diligently in a hospital as a novice nun until one day she must tend to an injured man – a man she was once engaged to but whom she betrayed for a bartender that the fiancé killed during their wedding preparations. Traviata ’53 and Wanda la peccatrice/ Wanda the Sinner (Duilio Coletti, 1952) focus on males who suffer female infidelity. Vortice and Ti ho sempre amato! combine both plot types: a woman is forced to bring up her daughter apart from the man she loves. Clearly, then, post-war Italian melodramas indicate a general preoccupation with the destruction of the family unit. This was a contemporary political concern. The first congress of the Christian Democrats in Italy in 1946 heard Gonella complain that an invisible and silent atomic bomb has destroyed the family unit [. . .] the state with its wars will tear away from you your husband or your brother, and atheist education or the corruption of the streets will steal the soul of your child. (cited in Ginsborg 1990: 76–7) The War had caused death and destruction to families, homes and towns, while male absence served also to upset the bases of traditional gender roles as women became heads of households and some even Partisan fighters. The consequences of war included homelessness and prostitution, and on the men’s return many women had to leave work, giving a new emphasis for women on the home (Morris 2006b: 7).8 The financial burdens of post-war economic crisis, including the fall in value of the lira and a brake on public spending, led then to a situation in which ‘reconstruction largely unloaded its burden onto families’ (Bravo 2003: 73). With the decline of agriculture women were working less and less in the fields, and so centred more on life in the home (Morreale 2011: 81). Longer-term phenomena that drew individuals away from family life such as patterns of urbanism and migration, and related epochal changes in modern patterns of thinking, also served towards undermining the degree to which the stability of the family could be taken for granted, but it remained a central reference point economically, politically and spiritually and one which was now more than ever a concept subject to idealisation as source of satisfaction (Caldwell 1995: 157).

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The films are, then, expressive of a period in which the family appeared at the centre of moral and social concerns, but as an entity under total threat. This perception offers a great deal of potential for melodramatisation. Separations, unjust imprisonments, illegitimate births and fatal misunderstandings continually stage the nightmare scenario of the loss of the family. A central but precarious nature is one of a series of tensions in how the family is imagined also in relation to longer-term contradictions that mark the historical development of conceptions of the family. Barbagli and Saraceno position analysis of the Italian family in relation to De Rougemont’s comments on the basis of romance in Europe since the eighteenth century on a fundamental conflict between the durability of marriage and the temporariness of romance (Barbagli and Saraceno 1997: 15), or as De Rougemont puts it, on ‘the inescapable conflict in the west between passion and marriage’ (1956: 8). Further, the family’s role is as shelter from social relations, yet one which is intimately structured by such relations: the principal arena through which women are to find meaning and personhood and yet one which is specifically (officially, in post-war Italy) founded on their subordination. Melodrama has adapted to deal with these tensions in particular. Following the work of Friedrich Engels, Kleinhans has discussed melodrama as drawing on the overdetermined nature of the family: owing to how ‘one’s sense of identity and social worth could not be achieved in productive labor under capitalism, the division of social from economic life meant that the family and the area of interpersonal relations took on a huge burden’ (1991: 198). Melodrama enacts this tension through ‘the difficulty which individual characters find in their attempts to accept or conform to the set of symbolic positions around which the network of social relations adhere and where they can both be “themselves” and “at home” ’ (Rodowick 1982: 45). The films interpret this overdetermination in a series of dramatic tensions: of the centrality yet precariousness of the family and of the idealisation and impossibility of stable family life, further realised in how the home hovers in the narratives between being a place of prelapsarian paradise and an existence after the Fall, the place where one’s personhood is to be affirmed even though the actual reality of it is a source of continual dissatisfaction. In discussing the near-contemporary Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Laura Mulvey has discussed how melodramatic tensions are themselves overt recognitions of such contradictions, which thereby ‘provid[e] [ideology] an outlet for its own inconsistencies’ (Mulvey 1987: 75). Together this places weight on the emotionality, over the actuality, brought about by the oft-thwarted desire for the ideals which underpin the ideology on which the family lies. The adherence of these films to formulaic conventions includes a search for ever more shocking and sensational events, yet they are melodramatic (rather than epic, tragic, fantastical, mythological or for that matter ­surrealist)

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because of their degree of familiarity to their audience. Thus, adding a second dynamic to that of idealisation/impossibility, the situations of loneliness, insecurity, unfairness, moral judgement are realised in the way in which ‘blood and mystery intermingle with daily concerns’ (Sorlin 1996: 110), and are exemplary of how in popular narrative ‘quotidianity and excess are the poles, antithetical and complementary, within which stories of love and death are represented’ (Pezzotta 1992b: 31–2). To take Appassionatamente as an example: an impoverished aristocratic family sells its mansion to a mine-owner, Andrea, who is in love with the daughter of the family, Elena. His purchase does not save the family from ruin, and Elena, on finding her father attempting suicide, marries Andrea despite being in love with a young doctor, Carlo, who leaves for Africa to complete his studies. Andrea soon discovers her dishonesty, and after a period of mutual hatred behind a social façade, just as she has been told to leave by a resentful Andrea a team of workers gets trapped in the mine. Andrea is injured and senseless from the rescue attempt and in his convalescence the specialist who comes to give his diagnosis on Andrea’s worsening condition is, by coincidence, a returned Carlo, who informs Andrea that he has been poisoned – the poison, the viewer learns, is being administered by a jealous cousin, Paola, so as to do away with Andrea, get Elena charged for murder and take charge of his property. Elena flees, Paola orders her brother to kill her and feign a suicide but is overheard by a housemaid who informs Andrea, Andrea flees to Elena, and, after the capture of the cousins, the film closes on a final loving embrace between the couple atop a hill. This could hardly be seen as any normal route to married life by audiences of the time. But while the plot is hyperbolic the experiences and situations have a familiarity to them. The extraordinary reasons for Elena’s marriage – ­financial disaster, attempted suicide, family machinations – allow the film to dwell on an all too ordinary situation, the constraining nature of marriage. Elena listens near-silently when at the start of their married life Andrea informs her of the isolation it has in store, which contrasts with the physical abandon that had marked her dash to the train station to see the departure of her true love Carlo as she ran screaming his name, enveloped in bursts of steam. The steam dissolves into incense at the wedding service, occluding Elena and apparently extinguishing her desire. While Andrea can plough his unfulfilled energies into economic life through his position as mine-owner (a montage of the mechanics of mine work seeming a particular displacement of sexual energy), Elena is confined to the empty grandeur of her palatial home. She blames herself for ruining Andrea’s life and writes an unsent letter to her father in which she describes her days as ‘all the same, sad [. . .] I feel alone’. Morreale (2011: 77) contrasts the appearance, in France (in Italy it was immediately placed on the Index of forbidden books), several months before the release of Catene, of

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Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1972 [1949]). In an extremely different way, within its convoluted story, Appassionatamente relays some of the same kinds of sexual and domestic dissatisfaction – isolation, depression, domestic entrapment, the denial of her desire, the social façade – that de Beauvoir discusses also. These melodramas, in which romance is both central and fraught, in which family is idealised and impossible, excessive and quotidian, offer neither direct proof that women in post-war Italy found the dreams of love to be a source of unqualified pleasure, nor alternatively that post-war cinema existed straightforwardly as advertisement for marriage. They offer, instead, dramatisations of a contradiction surrounding the conception of marriage as the source of meaning in women’s life which is in reality unable to live up to the idealisation required to present it as such. Penny Morris cites a DOXA survey from March 1951, for which 43 per cent of women found married life ‘less good’ than expected (Morris 2007: 320)9 – a figure which one could suspect to be an underestimation given the probable wish to present a picture of married bliss to official statisticians. Just as radical criticism has often claimed that happy endings are illusory, binding spectators to a false view that all is right in the world, in post-war Italy it was the Vatican priest Padre Baragli who criticised the morality of happy endings for giving false hopes (1956, cited in Treveri-Gennari 2009: 77). Instead of reconciling women to a happy ending, contemporary discussion of love tended to centre on reconciling women to dissatisfaction. A popular agony aunt cited by Morris interpreted the popular mood by stating ‘Look around you without any preconceptions: no-one is happy. And those who are, have learnt how to content themselves’ (30 June 1951, Morris 2007: 321). This general perception voiced by the social educators of the time was one shared by Catholics and Communists, the Communist writer of the resistance novel L’Agnese va a morire Renata Viganò advising ‘I understand that I am asking a continual sacrifice from you, but life is like that, especially for wives and mothers, in the interests and the affections of their husbands and children’ (3 June 1951, in Morris 2007: 322). The director Vittorio Cottafavi explained preferring female characters in this period because ‘the soul of a woman interests me more, it is more sensitive and more able to penetrate suffering, and in any case more able to reach through suffering into total exasperation’ (cited in Masoni 2007: 43). There were also sociological reasons behind an increased interest in women as dramatic subjects. In discussing the turn to female-centred films in this period, Hipkins recalls that ‘A survey of 700 Roman spectators in 1949–50, which was published immediately in a major film magazine, reported that it was women who particularly lacked faith in the future of Italian cinema and preferred Hollywood’ (Hipkins 2008: 228, see also Grignaffini 1996). With the entry of women into democratic life, making them the majority of the electorate

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(discussed by Garofalo 1956), and the concentration of the Vatican on women as arbiters of spiritual purity, there was now a three-way appeal to women: in politics, in church, and in the cinema. The films themselves combine these popular, social and moral appeals to women through fantastical realisations of common experiences – of marriage as the denial of female feeling, sexuality and social life for the depressing routine of a housebound existence – that were later to be explained through reference to patriarchy. Their fantastical aspect then allows those problems to be ultimately transcended, and confers upon the recognisably familiar a grandeur of expressivity and significance.10 Romance Romantic melodramas give dramatic substance to love through making it a site of multiple struggles. In Appassionatamente, those struggles include Elena’s wish to marry the man she loves and her duty to her stricken family, which lead to the struggle between a social façade and an unhappy marriage; and then strangely, through her sense of guilt and sacrifice, to her struggle to enter into the affections of that same husband, thereby resolving the question of conformity to the institution of married monogamy and the ideology of true love. What is notable is how love is in melodrama a reminder of the lover’s weakness with regard to her own life, the films struggling over whether blame for the dissatisfaction caused owes to the woman, her individual love object(s), or the circumstances to which she belongs. Such conflicts can be enacted in a variety of ways: Un marito per Anna Zaccheo/A Husband for Anna (Giuseppe De Santis, 1953) is a Communist take on romantic fantasy directed by party member Giuseppe De Santis, concerned in a far more directly political way with the social uses of romance than Appassionatamente (in which, nevertheless, financial constraints, family pressure, and the appearance of bourgeois happiness are social causes of the protagonist’s sadness). The plot begins as Anna states in voice-over that each morning she wakes and wonders if this will be the day that she will meet her husband. Anna falls in love with a sailor, Andrea, and to prepare for marriage she gets a job as a model for a photographic agency while he takes a four month voyage. The photographers secretly photograph her legs for a stocking advert campaign and later her boss, Illuminato, rapes her, causing Andrea to reject her on his return. She is courted by an older fish wholesaler but breaks off the engagement, and ends the film back at her parents’ house still searching for love. Romantic hopes conflict with class status: Illuminato’s performance of gallantry deadens the working-class authenticity with which Anna begins the film. Marriage is an extension of this commodification as her engagement to the wholesaler occurs directly after she is propositioned by a stranger. Marriage (with a man she doesn’t love) is another contractual acquisition

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of Anna which offers her little more status than that of the limp fish that the wholesaler proudly owns by the box-load. As well as this conscious class commentary, Anna Zaccheo appears to stage something of a struggle over romance narrative itself, to give an ultimately incoherent conclusion as to whether male sexual oppression or the illusory promise of romantic delight is to blame for Anna’s disappointment. Objectification of Anna is initially encouraged by editing that fragments her body parts during her morning preparations as the camera adopts the position of a window cleaner looking at her through her window frame. His viewpoint catches her surrounded by flowers and fruits in a striking doubly framed composition. While her association with fruit gives a sense of naturalness, the scene looks like a still life, natura morta in Italian, suggesting an oppressiveness to the gaze that freezes Anna and her vitality. A close-up of Anna in a bridal veil after she gets her modelling job is quickly revealed in its artificiality, the camera pulling back to show the society magazine’s photographers who have constructed the false scene for her first shoot at work. This immobilising artifice contrasts with the realism that the film constructs through a fluidity that starts from the opening credits: the Neapolitan song that plays over the shots of Anna’s legs segues to become the diegetic gaze and singing of the windowcleaner. For much of the film, this fluidity takes us through the working class Naples that she inhabits. It is the world of fashion and of bourgeois d ­ omesticity that is false and restricting. By the time Anna is approached by a middle-aged man leering at her thighs (after respectfully waiting for a procession of nuns to pass), the unending, imprisoning presence of sexualised male hypocrisy justifies her decision to tearfully beat him repeatedly. She ends the film back at her parents’ house confined to her bedroom, the closing close-up now not on her bare legs but on her tearful face gazing over the city panorama. Her final regression to girlhood dreams of romance signals the inability within radical but pre-feminist politics to imagine her adult independence in an oppressive social world, and the film is unsure whether to sympathise with or blame her indulgence in romantic hopes. The concentration on romance can move the exploration into love as a site of struggle over meaning and purpose. In Una donna libera, a film which does depict female independence (to a quite daring degree for its period (Moullet 2007)), Liana, an architect, leaves her fiancé after arguing over whether their bourgeois arrangement ‘can really be’ love. She discusses with her mother what ‘happiness’ is, doubting that it lies in domesticity. But it is the word ‘libertà’ that is repeated continually throughout the film, from her opening statement in which she states that when she was young she was ‘ready to defend freedom at any cost’, to the end when she states to herself ‘freedom, freedom, what a strange word, that seems to have no meaning to me now’. Domesticity in Una donna libera is a denial of the passion Liana finds in

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a­ esthetic delights. She first meets Gerardo, a concert pianist, at an exhibition with a portrait of herself on display, which she compares to herself in the mirror, his romantic seduction beginning in a contemplation of her aestheticised image and its relation to reality. Later, Liana throws herself onto her bed after she argues with her mother about the lack of happiness offered to her by domestic stability as the opening of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto begins on the soundtrack. She goes to Gerardo’s apartment where he is miming playing the same concerto which he is listening to on tape, and as the music swells they embrace. As they kiss Liana glances away from Gerardo, suggesting a slight detachment, an indication that romantic feeling is forged in the head and excited by mental processes. This link is reinforced by the shifting status of the music, which originates apparently in her mind yet leads her to its diegetic source at Gerardo’s apartment, before their passionate embrace then returns the music to an extra-diegetic source. A cut from their embrace to the sunlight of the next day, where they frolic in the sea by his house, is smoothed over by the continuous sound of the piano concerto as the couple’s romance develops. The source of the music thus does not make sense in terms of how it is placed within the reality of the film, but progresses synchronously with her desire, being connected first to her decision to go to Gerardo’s house, becoming diegetic as it is acted upon, and then non-diegetic to express the independent force that desire has become in her love for Gerardo. But it is passion based on artifice and Gerardo – who was miming playing the concerto – leaves her to continue his life of pleasure. Liana marries an older, boring businessman, but by chance she meets Gerardo one day and after she turns down his advances he seduces her younger sister. Liana goes to his house to stop him and after Gerardo mocks her pretensions to melodramatic victimhood she shoots him dead. While marriage equals boredom, the dreams of romance have led her to murder. Gerardo abruptly curtailed their romance with the justification that he will not ‘enslave’ her to domesticity and that after their ‘nice romantic dream’ she is ‘free’ again, that is, free of any obligations from or to anyone else. The film begins on a montage of Liana fleeing Gerardo’s house, which comes to an end when she stops to look at herself in a mirror in a shop window and stating that it was not so long ago that she was ready to defend her freedom at any cost. Her story begins with a cut from her image in the mirror to an image of her half-painted portrait for which she is sitting, her passive face being repositioned by Sergio, who is painting her portrait to sell in the upcoming exhibition. The question posed by this moulding of Liana’s image into a commercial object of art is whether she actually was free before. At the film’s end, after the flashback catches up with the present time of its telling, a montage once more shows Liana escape from Gerardo’s house. This time, facing an unknown future, the editing has her move away from, not towards, the camera, s­uggesting in

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wordless contrast to the opening that perhaps, punished for her narcissistic delusions yet independent, she may be free. I have spent some time describing Appassionatamente, Un marito per Anna Zaccheo, and Una donna libera, firstly to show the diversity of melodrama of the period – from the happy ending drama of Appassionatamente to the Communist consideration of romantic fairytales in Anna Zaccheo and the existentialist (at one point they go to an ‘inexistentialist’ party) reflections of Una donna libera. Each of the films makes dramatic conflict out of desire and its relationship to marriage and gender difference, placing at centre stage the question of representation and fantasy: the portrait of Elena which first attracts Andrea to her in Appassionatamente, the interplay of nature and illusion in Anna Zaccheo, the seductive insincerity of art in Una donna libera. Appassionatamente enjoyed a commercial success that eluded the other two films, which in their way are more consciously questioning. But while each of the films can be seen to suggest female dissatisfaction as punishments for romantic daydreaming or for sexual desire, love and the way it is structured by social and particularly gender expectations is invested in each film with being the source of and the refuge from women’s problems. Garofalo, in her account of female experience in the publication L’italiana in Italia, wrote that it feels like a crisis of habits is underway, like one epoch is already over and is giving birth to another and we still don’t know what it will be like, but it will definitely be different. Balance and certainty cannot be expected after such confusion. (1956: 68) Coming between the Resistance and the fundamental changes in family and gender relations of the 1960s, the films allow some articulation of what Simonetta Piccone Stella observes otherwise as ‘underground changes’ in women’s lives, which ‘created small ripples on the apparently smooth surface of the family, where continuity and tradition seemed to continue to reign while everything else was changing’ (cited in Morris 2007: 305). They give substance to the notion of melodrama as an outlet for feelings which cannot yet find conscious articulation of alternatives to heteronormative domesticity, none of them staging the actuality of female independence. Love, in these fictions, offers a transcendent and ultimate truth: as the lonely young protagonist of Ti ho sempre amato! is told, ‘anyone who truly loves is not capable of trickery, even if she was an abandoned child’. The hypothesis advanced here is that in the context in which questions of personal and social relations were centred on the family and the intimate sphere, the popularity of melodramas can be understood in terms of the extent to which they give dramatic elaboration of ‘love [as] a knowledge system, a procedure for ­obtaining,

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Figure 1.1  Romance and artifice in Appassionatamente and Una donna libera

distributing and transforming knowledge of preeminent social value’ (Gell 2011: 2). This is not to suggest that audiences were really interested in having lessons when they went to the cinema. It is that dramas about love act as vehicles for the perplexity one may have about one’s place within the world, interpreting social values in terms which are apparently personal, unique, natural, asocial. This hypothesis regarding the function of melodrama is supported by a parallel phenomenon, the agony columns, which ‘speak to us from a world which is very close to that of the contemporary tearjerkers’ (Morreale 2011: 42, a connection made also by Cardone 2012: 89). In the introduction to her collection of these letters, Parca notes the 5 million letters sent to the piccola posta of the women’s weeklies: ‘Such a vast phenomenon reveals a general sadness and

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a deep spiritual solitude’ (Parca 1964: 13). The letters suggest how uncertainties in love express the uncertainties of the self in a changing and sometimes contradictory social world, a factor recognised by the agony aunts themselves: In her column in Epoca, Alba de Céspedes11 commented that: ‘Generally, customs evolve slowly; but the recent wars, especially given the ideologies that they brought forth, have given this evolution a truly disconcerting speed. Our generation has the difficult task of adjusting itself to these changes’. (20 September 1952, cited in Morris 2007: 307–8) The letters testify to a need for truth, knowledge and understanding, and so to a popular form of sentimental education – from the questions of a young woman about whether the intimate use of her finger can result in pregnancy to the advice sought from an 18-year-old sent to boarding school by a family intent on separating her from her boyfriend. She escaped, was chased out of town by her angry father, her boyfriend was withdrawn from college and reported to the police – thereby losing his job – and she now writes from her room, where she spends her days locked up and sometimes left without food (Parca 1964: 107–8). The films I am discussing share with these letters a common interest in the consequences of love and a common language of expression: ‘the sentiments are always a bit swollen: no-one loves unless “madly”, nor suffers without being “desperate”, every worry becomes a “torment” ’ (ibid.: 14). One correspondent pleads for the reader to ‘Excuse my errors, but it is midnight and I am writing by the glow of a pocket lamp’ (ibid.: 116). Pasolini notes in his introduction to Parca’s collection of letters how the writers are conformist (Pasolini 1964: 8), and this conformism, seen both in the advice sought and in the ways of conceiving of their lives, are evidence of a desire to give a definite and conventionalised form to uncertainty. Given that romance allows topics to be brought up which are fraught both with prohibitions and deep personal meaning, it becomes a vehicle through which to delineate the realms of the socially possible through attention to the personal. Morris notes that ‘despite the apparent intimacy, the advice column is a public forum, and in 1950s Italy this meant finding a way to address issues that were essentially taboo’ (Morris 2007: 312). It is a similar situation that we find in cinematic melodrama. Considering its role, then, as another public means of learning about feeling, melodramatic romance is a tool of knowledge to this extent: Fiction is, where modern societies are concerned, what genealogy is in those societies which have marriage rules, i.e. the means of producing the relationships on which social life depends. Fiction, re-enacted as real

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life, produces the histories on which relationships and society at large are grounded. Thus, despite the apparent arbitrariness of modern love, and the theoretical substitutability of lovers, in the end modern love is no more generated at the level of the individual and the personal than marriage (not on the basis of personal choice) is in Umeda. (Gell 2011: 7) II Emotion The reason melodrama can perform this function lies in its exploration of the emotions. However we may understand melodrama – a mode of excess, expressive emphasis, the conflict of grand moral absolutes, the popular form of the modern age, or simply drama strengthened – it offers first of all an intense experience of emotion. Many forms of cinema, particularly popular forms, create emotion, but this occurs via action, violence, spectacle, musical performance, crime, sex, grossness, and so on. In the films under discussion here, emotional expression is also the theme, the motor to the narrative, and the principal spectacle. As part of a recent collection of essays on the history of emotions in the Italian context, the work of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli has been noted for their ground-breaking approaches to oral history, [which] have highlighted the importance of emotion as a means of understanding the relationship between the individual and society, between subjectivity and history. (Morris et al. 2012: 153) Melodrama, for the reasons already laid out here, offers much material for the further elucidation of such relationships through reference to emotion. As traditionally conceived, emotion is subject to a series of associations, which domestic melodrama furthers: the history of Western philosophy separates emotion from reason and associates the former ‘with the irrational, the physical, the natural, the particular, the private, and, of course, the female’ (Jaggar 2009: 50). However, whilst accounting for these associations in melodrama, the understanding presented below will proceed with the assumption that feelings are no less cultural and no more private than beliefs. [Affects] are instead, cognitions – or more aptly, perhaps, interpretations – always culturally informed, in which the actor finds that body, self, and identity are immediately involved. (Rosaldo 2009: 87)

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Affect In a famous discussion of the correspondence of music to human emotions, Susanne Langer discussed the way in which music offers ‘forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses’ (Langer 1953: 27). In Appassionatamente, a blockage in the mine, whose industrial workings and explosions, cascades of coal and iron machinery have previously accompanied moments of held-in passion, traps several workers underground in the darkness, with the mine-owner Andrea crawling in the dark and blasting through the rock to save them – just as water starts to flood in through further parts of the rock, speeding their exit. Above ground the worried locals crowd and scream while Andrea’s wife rushes forwards and gazes anxiously as he does not return with the other miners, looking downwards and downcast amidst the hugging relatives who crowd her before she grasps the rails at the breaching of the mine walls and screams ‘Andrea!’. In Anna, a similar situation of blockage, collapse, torrential flow and physical impact, surging rushes, violent and overwhelming force, feeds into a more developed extension of pathos from the female star’s performance after the main action has subsided. Anna’s fiancé Andrea encounters his love rival, Vittorio, in the underground mill of his farm during their wedding preparations. Vittorio pulls a gun as the two fight; the editing alternates between Anna screaming and sobbing and the two men splashing in the mill until a gunshot is heard, the water rushes in, Vittorio falls and after a pause Andrea shouts, ‘You have turned me into a murderer, away with you, away!’ The orchestration of the sounds of water, fighting, sobs, the gunshot, and shouting then subsides as the entry of the main musical theme in full orchestral score comes on the soundtrack, the emotional extension maintained during Anna’s long devastated walk away from the mill, to collapse on the roadside and awake in the hospital where she will live the rest of her life. Given such ways in which melodrama renders emotionality, the spectacle it provides is often then of affect itself, understood as a physically felt intensity of experience (Harding and Pribram 2009: 17). In discussing melodramatic experience in early Hollywood cinema, Gunning lists the physical reactions of the frisson, the shudder, the knot in the stomach, stating that melodrama offers a form of sensation which he argues has from around 1860 been ‘one of the keywords of the popular culture of modernity’ (Gunning 1994: 52). In addition to the emotive correspondences of rushes, contrasts, flow and so on, these physical realities bring the audience’s experience of physicality into line with that of the protagonists by encouraging the very tears, breathlessness, or gasps that the characters themselves are frequently represented as having. In Maddalena, for example, a woman confesses to a priest her motiva-

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Figure 1.2  Emotions in Maddalena

tions for taking part as the Virgin Mary in the Venerdì Santo procession, despite being by career a prostitute. Her description is entirely determined by feeling: the happiness, her ‘heart pounding’, she had in going to see her infant daughter make an offer of a letter to the Virgin in Church, her feelings about the other mothers who live with their daughters being that she ‘envied them, how much I hated them’, while, tightly hugging and kissing her daughter, she asserts the need that ‘many mothers feel, to have their daughters always near’. The girls are bringing letters expressing their hearts’ desire to the Virgin, and her daughter’s letter explains that ‘I always cry when mummy isn’t there’,

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leaving Maddalena ‘upset by sadness and joy, it was my fault if she suffered’ as they hug, crying, and praying to the Virgin with ‘all my heart’. In its culmination of these physical descriptions of emotion, the situation becomes suddenly more sensational as a gust of wind blows open the window, the train of the daughter’s dress blows backwards, and she catches flame to terrified screams. We return to the mother who, having retold the story, collapses in tears. The retelling of her story includes a convention of melodramatic narrative, which is structured around thrillingly condensed summations of such emotional experiences that provide some of the main attractions of the genre in the way that car chases do in a policier or numbers in a musical, killings in horror, orgasms in pornography, shoot-outs in a western. As well as ­explaining character motivation through elucidating their feelings, such ­melodramatic moments include direct representations of the emotional and affective responses that the spectator is encouraged to have. To avoid assuming the given-ness of emotion, it is worthwhile, first of all, not to collapse the spectator’s emotional experiences with those of the characters. When, for example, Maddalena’s daughter is incinerated, she presumably feels pain; Maddalena, on the other hand, expresses panic, and acts subsequently out of vengeance; the audience, however, shares most probably in none of these emotions, for her explanation acts to create feelings of understanding and compassion – a more developed unity of feeling and judgement than that allowed to the characters directly involved. Body Such sensational and affective experiences help characterise the needs expressed by the protagonists as natural and intimate and therefore certain and right. This is furthered in melodrama by focusing attention on the effects of the drama’s development on the body. Different historical traditions have made melodrama a site in which the body is invested with particular force, including the censorship of boulevard theatre which meant that potentially subversive meanings were acted out mutely rather than directly stated, or the Roman mime which was a key determinant of early Italian cinema – which itself existed for its first thirty years without voice and so required gesture to speak. Such emphasis is not simply contingent on historical convergences, however, as the aesthetics of embodiment that marks melodrama (Brooks: 1994) continued into sound cinema. It has been pointed out that a particular trait of the form found specifically in Italian cinema is its concentration of ‘emotional intensity in posture and gesture [. . .] in which the body bears the brunt of emotional turmoil’ (Dyer 2007: 230). Melodrama has been considered by Linda Williams alongside pornography

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and horror as a ‘body genre’, popularly successful (although for this same reason relegated to a lower status) for representing and encouraging a physical reaction – principally tears – and ‘offering the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion’ (Williams 1991: 4). Melodrama privileges the expressive capacities of the body, replicating a view of the body as the seat of feeling. Bodies have, for centuries, been entities that philosophers have had a particular attachment to. Giambattista Vico argued in The New Science (1725) that gesture might have been the earliest form of language. Diderot stated that ‘cries, inarticulate words [. . .] tone, gesture, action [. . .] strike us, especially in spectacles that arouse deep passion’, noting in the Encyclopédie that gesture was ‘the primitive language of mankind in his cradle’, while ‘Rousseau himself, in the first chapter of the Essai sur l’origine des langues, identifies gesture as the first sign, the unmediated sign, dependent on its signifying for presence’ (each cited in Brooks 1995: 66). Developing the semantic analysis of the body, Brookes describes its potential to act as the vehicle of a metaphor whose tenor is a vaguely defined yet grandiose emotional or spiritual force that gesture seeks to make present without directly naming it, by pointing toward it [. . .] In the gap of the language code, the grandiose, melodramatic gesture is a gesturing toward a tenor both grandiose and ineffable. (Brooks 1995: 72) The location of meaning within the body is a central aspect of the melodramatic experience. Bodies speak the truth and can give people away. In Vortice, a lawyer hears ‘you’re not convinced by Elena’s innocence, I can read it in your eyes’; the heroine in Ti ho sempre amato! is mocked about the unexplained disappearance of her actually good-hearted boyfriend with ‘Were you fooled by his loyal eyes?’. In Bufere, a brother tells his treacherous sister from his hospital bed that ‘your eyes betray you’. Bodies in melodrama can guarantee virtue: for a rich man to be good, we must see him engaged in physical work, rather than speculating, inheriting, or exploiting; for a woman to be good, she must successfully negotiate giving her body to the one and only right man, to reproduce bodies through childbirth, and garner the spectator’s sympathy through her bodily expression of emotion. In Le infedeli, a woman Liliana tells her ex-maid Cesarina, sacked after taking the blame for a theft that the woman’s lover committed, that she has still not found out who took it – when the maid inadvertently mentions the actual culprit, she bites her lip. The gesture speaks despite her not voicing the truth, also indicating a shade of masochistic sensuality. Rather than enact a Cartesian separation of mind and body, melodrama’s embodiments employ the body as symbol, as dramatic device and as material evidence. In Nel gorgo del peccato an adult son returns to his mother’s home

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after ten years of absence. The film’s key relationships are based upon the affective bonds of the protagonist Alberto to the mother whose body he came from and the fiancée Germaine with whom he has returned, and with whom he has an unhappily sado-masochistic relationship. Meanwhile, the film’s villain Filippo – his villainy first recognised by the scar under his eye – performs acts of disrespect that highlight the fragility of these bodies, coveting and then hospitalising Germaine and ultimately shooting the mother dead, his scarred eye dramatically presaging his unthinking frenzy by twitching maniacally immediately before he commits the act. Bodily expressivity also shifts the significance of the drama: in one scene the landlord of the family home demands money from the mother, who asks for more time. After he leaves the camera moves in on her, alone, as she rubs the sewing machine with a fretful repetitiveness before crying. The scene cuts to Alberto, gleeful at having found work as a petrol pump attendant. Yet the preceding fidgeting and tears set the tone and overshadow the momentary happiness. The melodramatic effect on the body is rendered in states of illness or of emotional excitation – or rather, of illness caused by emotional excitation. Differently from Proust, for whom ‘It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body’ (Proust 1967: 408), in melodrama illness represents the true state of the character in relation to the dramatic narrative. Illness also incarnates victimhood, encouraging forgiveness. The love in Appassionatamente between Elena and Andrea, married because Elena needed his money, is confirmed when she tends to Andrea after his injury in the mine rescue. In Menzogna/Falsehood (Maria Ubaldo del Colle, 1952), a young woman trips and falls on rocks after escaping the advances of a man who withheld testimony to send her fiancé to jail; she recovers when he is released. Such embodiment envisages justice not in terms of the blind impartiality of detachment and codification that forms the basis of modern legal systems: the law courts frequently either accuse the innocent or let the guilty go free, and their detachment stands in opposition to the melodramatic plea for a moral universe which places the feeling subject at its centre rather than the abstractions of a bureaucratised social complex. Thus melodrama is the dramatic form relevant to ‘the discovery of “feeling” [in eighteenth-century culture that] has a potentially democratic fallout to it not only in that it privileges so-called common humanity above class difference but also in that it locates truth in deeply felt emotions rather than in the discourses of dominant institutions’ (Shepherd 1994: 27). The key element of melodrama, of elevation that occurs simultaneously to the common and ordinary, is achieved through this concentration on the body (as described by

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Gledhill 1991), entailing a democratisation of dramatic interest that moves from the spiritual and hereditary privilege of the saints’ and kings’ relationship to God, as was common in pre-modern drama, into that common to all – a body, a self – as the source of extraordinary passion (Braudy 1986: 380–1). As Elsaesser has put it speaking of his foundational piece on cinematic melodrama ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ (1987): The intention was to signal that such a mixed dramatic mode (drama and music) and such a hybrid genre (of high moral seriousness and popular sensationalism) had under specific historical conditions, notably the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the remnants of the aristocracy, been instrumental in articulating a major conflict between private and public spheres. Melodrama, I claimed, showed that the right to privacy, and this included the public right to the emotional unprotectedness of one’s ­feelings, was a political act. (2007: 28) There is nothing transhistorical which links the body to the private – in medieval thought, the health and reproductive activity of kings was considered to be a public matter, for the king both had a body natural and symbolised a body politic (see e.g. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 1997 [1957]). For that matter the continued interest in women’s reproductive capacities and their moral virtues are further arenas of the public interest in the body. Rather, what melodrama enacts are symbolisations of these meanings in a context of uncertainty: The work of Norbert Elias (in The Civilising Process) and Michel Foucault (especially Discipline and Punish), however different in premises, converges in the sense that the modern body is subject to increased control and discipline: from table manners to prison regimes, from the public covering of body parts to the new architecture of domestic privacy, modernity brings a new sense of the limitations imposed upon the uses of the body. . . [After the French Revolution] the person, that relatively new concept, so much indebted to Rousseau, the individual, which could only, finally, be identified by way of the individual body – was held accountable in new ways. (Brooks 1994: 12) Therefore, when melodrama places body and affect at the centre of the dramatic charge, it contributes to a mindset in which character is directly incarnated. In Nel gorgo del peccato, as an example, the mother states that ‘at heart’ mothers will always welcome their children back, and later pleads with the villain that he ‘doesn’t have cold blood’; he refers to her as ‘demented’, Alberto describes Germaine as ‘rotten to the bone’, and she responds by pleading that

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he ‘look in my face’. The audience sees her troubled look, realising her sincere tenderness towards him – but he does not, and only regains his trust when she is physically incapacitated in a coma. Moral capacities have, in Lombrosian theory (to which Shepherd (1994: 27) compares melodrama), been thought to be visible in physical traits, while the illnesses that wrack the characters’ bodies are linked to intense emotion by the concept of hysteria, which for Brooks is a point of convergence between melodrama and psychoanalysis (Brooks 1994: 22). The diva’s performance belongs ‘to that “hysterical cinema” spoken of by Salvador Dalí’ (Brunetta 1993: 82) and femininity is endowed with this function precisely because the body, specifically the female body, is a symbol of weakness, nature and irrationality. This hystericisation becomes itself a metaphor describing melodrama: the eruption of emotion characteristic of melodrama has been described by Nowell-Smith as a form of ‘conversion hysteria’, in which heightened filmic expressivity suggests a rebellion against constraint, as ‘realist representation cannot accommodate the fantasy, just as bourgeois society cannot accommodate its realisation’ (Nowell-Smith 1987: 74). Gesture in melodrama thus affirms what Baudelaire called ‘the emphatic truth of gesture in the great circumstances of life’ (cited in Barthes 1993: 23). Although gesture can act, in Brooks’ terms, because ‘the melodrama’s simple, unadulterated messages must be made absolutely clear’ (1994: 18), such clarification is only partial: goodness, suffering and depth of feeling are each written upon the body, but the strength of the body’s impassioned actions emerges at least in part owing to their ability to indicate essential states without specification, thereby indicating also that the depth of feeling goes beyond rationalisation and even beyond articulable meaning. Instead, they embody a morality that is caught within a tangle of contradictory discourses and the sense of personal identity and integrity on which a new moral order rested becomes dissolved by a growing sense of the precariousness of reason and the materiality of consciousness. (Gunning 1994: 59–60) Bodily expressivity and gesture are considered central to stereotypes of the Italians, but the feminised emotivity of post-war melodrama stands in opposition to the Fascist body of masculine muscularity and makes evident a suffering which cannot be overcome by the hardness of the soldier male or incorporation within a rigid body politic. This is not to say that there were not reactionary implications in the concentration on symbolising the female body as pure nature, but that the weakness which she is ascribed belies emotional and expressive power. Such bodily suffering has meaning for Catholic symbolism, whose faith is based on the meaningfulness of the crucifixion, and specifically

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the regenerative power of suffering: that ‘[those who] accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life’ (Eagleton 2006: 34). In this way, the unarticulated bodily gesture unites basic essence with divine realms, missing out the spheres of rational explanation, of socialised detachment and of virile action. The concentration on the body also enacts the particular conundrum in melodrama regarding what to do about sex, for through motherhood, love subsumes sexual desire for filial feeling and is consecrated with a divine mission. Nel gorgo del peccato closes on the dead mother’s final voice-over as she speaks of the love that her daughter-in-law Germaine has for her son as including her own motherly love. Female martyrdom manages in Italian melodrama to ‘preserve the centrality of the nuclear family, which is the foundation of society: to this end is sacrificed every erotic impulse, every emergence of desire’ (Della Casa 1999: 46), or almost every, for the possibility is that desire is displaced onto intense family relationships, as detailed by Hipkins in relation to the mother–daughter relationship in Vortice (2008: 230). In Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori the pain of ostracism exists not in missing the husband’s physical affections but in not being able to look after one’s children. In Ti ho sempre amato! a mother’s breathy intonation, sobs and gasps result from separation from the father of the child, but are channelled towards feelings of regret over the baby’s future. Meanwhile in La nemica, a mother admits to her adult son that the reason she has always hated him was that he was illegitimate and reminds her always of his dead father’s one night of transgression. The elemental factors described above in relation to affect, of wind and fire, of water and the body, may well provoke responses which are innate in spectators, but our second question regards the cultural construction of the emotions. The term feeling, after all, not only means physical response but to have a feeling about the world in which we find ourselves. Harding and Pribram cite Ahmed in suggesting a shift of focus from emotions as ‘things’ that people ‘have’ to thinking about what emotions ‘do’ [. . .] bringing into being relations among individuals, and between individuals and social structures [. . .] For instance, the family is not only an economic, social and discursive system, but is also produced through feelings of love, a sense of duty and the desire for security. (Harding and Pribram 2009: 4) In melodrama, emotions function to clarify the relation of the self to others, one which is felt through the body, and so provides a morality of social and personal relations which is democratised, personal, and felt – that is, felt as natural and individual, for all its social construction.

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Expressivity To analyse the body’s potential for meaning brings us to the point that, although it represents apparently immediate and natural manifestations of truth, melodramatic expressivity is highly performative. But what is expressed, and how? In Menzogna, Luisa tells her lover Gianni that things are over, having decided to sacrifice their relationship for the sake of the former, forlorn sweetheart Mariella she stole him from. Pushing Gianni away and imploring him to go, his departing shadow passes across her, and she tenses her brow twice and opens her lips, then whispers his name. In a wordless – but highly expressive – minutelong sequence, she looks out of the window in the direction Gianni went as the camera moves to an extreme close-up of her face. She briefly shuts her eyes then casts them downwards and exhales before turning from the window, apparently holding back any expression of emotion while a solo violin begins the lyrical line of the film’s main theme and we cut to a low-angle long-shot that catches her between two items of furniture, trapped in the solitary domestic gloom. She looks again haltingly towards the moonlight as if summoned by hope, then closes the door while the music rises, itself repeating a sense of rising hopefulness stunted as it falls in pitch to repeated bass notes that emphasise ordered regularity and heavy defeat, and she slumps into a chair and places her arm over her face. A close-up shows her face bisected by moonlight and shadow, its muscle tension increasing as she breathes more heavily and her fidgeting hands slowly work away at themselves. She looks occasionally up only to glance each time ever further downwards, her gestures continuing the interplay of emotional repression, irresistible hope and its defeat, all interacting with parallel but not always simultaneous markers of such experiences in the lighting, composition and music. The music moves to full crescendo, restating the theme with the same rise-and-fall pattern that her physical position, breathing and glances have made, reaching full crescendo as the first of her tears becomes visible and then a sawing, discordant fortissimo as a cut is made back to the door, now overshadowed by a man approaching in overcoat and hat. She moves non-naturalistically in time with the music, gasps and places her arm across her mouth as she sees a previous lover arrived, with violent intent. The bodily expressivity occupies a mid-point and crucial pause between two important narrative moments, those of renouncing Gianni and of being killed. The emotional expressivity works to extend sympathy to a ‘loose’ woman who came between two young sweethearts, but confirms also her defeat in its physical realisation of hopeless struggle. This physical realisation is united with aspects of film style which not only emphasise but elevate her expressivity, aided by their apparent provenance from beyond the material environment of her home. Thus the melodrama orchestrates the apparent immediacy of physi-

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Figure 1.3  Menzogna

cal nature with stylised aspects of lighting, music and editing, each of which appears to belong to higher realms and which at times accord with her beaten hope and at times express her ebbed strength as she physically withdraws. It is this relation of hope, defeat and desire, and these shifting relations between interiority, narrative world and extra-narrative stylistic aspects, that define the melodramatic. The expressivity herein helps make defeated interiority visible and audible. Thereby, the melodramatic world is suffused with desire at the levels of emotion and expression, at the same time as this desire is frustrated at the level of narrative agency. She is battling to keep her emotions from welling up. This brings us to another point, which is that it is frequently character inexpressivity that marks climactic moments in melodrama. In a culture which places such importance on expressivity as does Italy’s, moments of near-catatonia and physical immobility that frequently meet devastating loss, the slumped despair, catatonic blankness, and ill immobility, are highly dramatically stimulating. This inexpressivity can instead be made up for by accidents, crashes and explosions which express what the characters refuse to: in Le infedeli Liliana shoots dead a perfidious blackmailer Osvaldo at the moment when her husband says ‘never do I want to hear about any of this again’– the gunshots a sonic confirmation of the wife’s refusal of his ‘not wanting to hear’. Less purposefully, the estranged son Alberto in Nel gorgo del peccato, on saying he doesn’t want to talk about why he never wrote while away, goes to hug his mother but drops a plate which smashes, presaging the later calamities that befall them. Not only providing delight in the pleasure of expression itself, such elements create a

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world, albeit with apparent accident, in which significance accords with the destinies, moralities and emotions of its protagonists, and maintains a further sense of wonder through the appropriateness of the expressivity of chance, inanimate, gestural or extra-diegetic factors to the characters’ emotional states, which yet remain unable to reach the full articulation of language.12 Emotion and expressivity tend to be associated per se with femininity. Villainy is often marked by a disregard marked as male for the emotional significance of events: in Le infedeli blackmailer Osvaldo responds to the news that Cesarina, blamed for a theft he caused, has set herself on fire, that ‘anyway, she’s dead’. The maid’s housekeeper Liliana, who also shares some guilt, repeats the same words, but with a feeling that he doesn’t recognise – directly before Liliana’s English husband withdraws his complaint from the police, ensuring the guilty Osvaldo does not face justice, so as to avoid scandal. And yet these melodramas do not suggest that only the female protagonists have emotions. L’uomo di paglia (Pietro Germi, 1958) and Bufere both feature the excitement and regrets of married men who commit adultery. In Il tradimento (Riccardo Freda, 1951), a father who has languished in prison strikes up a friendship on his release with his grown-up daughter, while in Wanda la peccatrice a prostitute selflessly renounces her love for a man, Stefano, estranged for life from his son, in order that the two males be reconciled. However, their relation to the place and expression of emotion is different. These films express a difficulty in men’s ability to stay within the home, problematising the male’s relationship both to domesticity and to emotional expressivity. In Noi peccatori (Guido Brignone, 1953), a war veteran, Stefano, who has injured his eye after running into a burning building sits in his chair, immobile, in dark glasses, hardly responding, his face in darkness and fist clenched. He then becomes angry that he has risked his life for his country, saved his friend’s life, and now he’ll be blind; the music starts, but it is his wife Lucia who cries and tells him not to lose hope as she embraces him. In Wanda la peccatrice Stefano, after his wife has shot herself on discovering that he has found out about her affair, and as he is now facing imprisonment for her murder, contemplates his dark, palatial home, full of bars and banisters and blocked by its furniture, as the music plays standing in for this personally expressive gap. When, towards the end of the film, his new love Wanda tearfully leaves him over the phone, he winces, shouts and hangs up on her, sighing as he looks out of the window. Thus fluency of emotional expression, as well as sympathy, compassion and sacrifice, belong in particular to women, whilst anger, jealousy, sexual desperation and inexpressivity are more especially (although not always) male. The emphasis on the push and pull of male emotion, its expression in the mise-en-scène but the problematisation of the male protagonist’s relation to that expressivity, opens up questions regarding gender difference and identification. It would be easy to assume that films featuring mostly female protago-

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nists in privileged positions of emotionality are only ‘for women’, but Linda Williams (2009) has questioned the ascriptions of emotionality to gender binaries, for what could be occurring instead is the creation of feminine subject positions that can invite identification from either gender. In fact, while films such as Wanda create an interplay between the inexpressivity of an unfortunate man which seems then to find voice in the expressivity of the lead female performer, this development in itself suggests a fluidity in identification. Not only can fluidity exist then between the expressivity of the performers and the film’s other stylistic elements, but it can also exist between protagonists and between genders. Traviata ’53 stages gender difference with regard to expression which the relationship of the central protagonists ultimately breaks down. A young man, Carlo, receives a letter from a lost, dying love, Rita, and, worried that it will cause scandal, his father would like to suppress it. On return to their palatial family home, the bars of the gate, and then prominent, imprisoning banisters within their home, help illustrate a p ­ atrilineal heritage of entrapment. On his journey to the hospital where she is dying Carlo remembers their relationship. The first strong representations of male emotion in the film are those of his sexual desperation, culminating at one moment when he wants to see the elusive woman, and in her absence grasps instead in longing anguish onto the gates. Two thirds of the way through this recounting of the past, however, the film switches its narrational viewpoint to Rita, alone and fatally ill. She walks to the condominium where they had lived, and, crying regretfully, grasps the large front door of their apartment. The gestures, the mise-enscène and the musical theme that played during his jealousy are repeated, and taken further. She rushes into the street, consumptive, and then back to the home, grasping the wire mesh in the condominium as he had done. When, in the present moment, Carlo arrives too late to her hospital bed he breaks down, goes to the window, grasps the curtain and cries. This description of the film’s emotive high-points may seem somewhat muted on the page, but his too late arrival takes on the force of a gesture that signals simultaneously their physical separation but continuing rapport through the shared repetition of the motifs of their mutual emotionality. The desire for tactility expressed in his grasp of the curtain seems to sum up the capacity of the aesthetic of melodrama to act as a point of almost-breaking-through from deepest desire to ultimately impossible actualisation. These films may privilege a female point of view, but they were made for a universal audience. Rather than post-war Italian melodrama being a ‘woman’s cinema’, which is a specifically Hollywood term, femininity functions in these films as a symbol and a vehicle for emotional expressivity and unboundedness. Rather than the ‘conflation of masculinity and efficaciousness into a theatrical image of performing’ on which the appearance of masculinity in Mediterranean societies has been held to rest (by Gilmore 1990: 36),13 what

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the films theatricalise especially is feminine suffering. In films such as Traviata ’53 the emphasis is on how positions marked by gender difference can be broken down through the common experience of emotional expressivity. One could then posit that one of the potential pleasures for male spectators whose gender identity is based on a denial of such emotion may be in identifying with the position of feminine suffering. When Spinazzola discussed Matarazzo’s melodramas he mentioned that, despite their focus on females, we are certainly not faced with a series of ‘feminist’ films. On the contrary, the acknowledgement of equal rights and duties among the sexes on the level of romantic relationships never challenges or puts male dominance in doubt. (1985: 74) The films are certainly not feminist, dependent as they are on ascriptions to women of limiting characteristics regarding emotion and disorder. But perhaps what melodrama places as more important than dominance is her very emotionality, central as it is to the dramatic experience. The aesthetic of restriction This emphatic expressivity in melodrama brings us to a debate regarding the supposed excess of the form. Brooks’ study is subtitled ‘the mode of excess’, which he argues has a semantic and philosophical value: in presenting extreme states and working from the ‘logic of the excluded middle’ (Brooks 1995: 18), the essential point may be that melodrama, even when it starts from the everyday – as it does in domestic and familial melodrama – refuses to content itself with the repressions, the tonings-down, the half-articulations, the accommodations, and the disappointments of the real. (ibid.: ix) Excess has been found to describe Italian melodrama particularly straightforwardly: Bernardi states that ‘we are confronted [in melodrama] with infinite emotions for an infinite object [. . .] naturally tied to the ability that the melodramatic text has to open out into excess’ (Bernardi 1999: 113). For Pezzotta, melodrama ‘recombines the fundamental drives of Eros and Thanatos, [and so] tends always towards excess’ (Pezzotta 1992b: 18), while for Cardone it is a ‘creature of excess’ (2012: 8). Linda Williams (2009) has argued that to refer to melodramatic ‘excess’ means to mark the form as a deviation from some more sober ideal, but that ‘the supposed excess is much more often the mainstream’ in cinema. One could

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view the problem differently by saying that many forms, monumentalism or the grotesque, tragedy and slapstick, can be excessive, without necessarily being melodramatic. What is important in melodramatic excess is the constancy of its tension with the countervailing factor of restriction. As Elsaesser makes clear, domestic melodrama involves ‘Exaggeration and compression [. . .] pressure and claustrophobia [. . .] restless and yet suppressed energy surfacing sporadically’ (1987: 43–70). As well as this, it is the very restriction of the protagonist’s (excessively felt) wishes which creates pathos, a result of the ‘blockages, barriers and bars to the fulfilment of desire’ (Neale 1986: 12). From this analysis, when Brooks states that melodrama achieves ‘a victory over a blockage’ (1995: 32), that victory, in the domestic melodrama at least, is an emotional one achieved through a reinstitution of tight proximity and structure via family or marriage. Thus, unlike other forms, melodrama continuously brings up its own scale on which to measure excess. The tension between restriction and excess constitutes one of the formal organising principles of melodrama. Motifs of staircases, bed-frames, gates, metal meshes, blinds, fill the mise-en-scène with everyday items of imprisonment. Lighting designs give such imprisonment an ethereal or metaphysical aspect, casting bars across the set, ones also which tend usually to go from a source of light above and right towards the bottom left – that is pointing down, and ‘backwards’ (since in Italian script one reads from left to right). These shafts of light indicate imprisonment but also the entry of the outside world, leading far beyond into the sky, to the entrapped enclosure. In editing, long-shots serve to show the emptiness or entrapment of characters behind or between the inanimate objects of their environment, two-shots capture the intensity of personal relationships, and close-ups highlight the suffering face. Characters discuss both love and duty in terms of being tied, chained, shackled to each other, while they shout out particular emblematic words or names in repetition, highlighting the stalling of rational articulation and foreshortening action. Bodily expressivity that culminates in tears, screams, faints, or all three (if not in delirium or death) serves to express emotion at its strongest physical manifestation while constraining it to the body of the carrier without effect on the outer world. Impassioned characters move towards a stasis that at the moments of highest drama culminates in tableau formation, the narrative dynamics caught in emblematic configurations of the emotional situation to which the dramatic dilemmas have reached. Motifs in melodrama include the mirror, reflecting space back upon itself within a secondary frame in the shot and frequently at a disorienting angle, to simultaneously double while restricting space to the edges of both its frames and announce entry into a new register of emotional disturbance. In La nemica, the music strikes a minor chord when the son Roberto finally confronts his mother and we see him turn to her in her dresser mirror, turning round the

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Figure 1.4  Motifs of restriction in Menzogna, Nel gorgo del peccato and Noi peccatori

spatial relations as well as presenting both faces to the camera without the two looking at each other, the mother, at the front, with her back to the son imploring her in the background. In Nel gorgo del peccato, when Alberto goes in to find Filippo and demand to know where Germaine is, their conversation is shown via Alberto’s reflection in the mirror. The mirror’s disorganisation of space is the opposite of the geometrical stability that may structure scenes of family bliss such as in Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori and in Wanda la peccatrice,

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in each case before unexpected and fatal events tear the respective families apart. The repeated settings of hospitals, nunneries and prisons remove their inhabitants from the public world (as more constricting versions of the stable boundaries of the family home). Frequently, convents, hospitals and prisons are actually physically located within each other’s sites or iconographically overlap, being the sites of containment of the unbearable forces of emotion or dispersal. III Worldview Therefore, to take up once again the question of what emotions in melodrama do, the tension between emotional restriction and excess serves to create the need for structure, for the rightful place for emotional bonds and the proximity to counteract dispersal or chaos. We shall now turn to the place of melodramatic passions within a moral worldview. Who is without sin? Emotion in Italian melodrama has largely been seen to enable a situation in which ‘having intensely lived the intolerability of [the female gender role] out in fantasy, it becomes easily tolerable in reality’ (Mora 1999: 181–2). It does this, the argument would proceed if put in balder terms, by displaying a ‘heavily didactic and anachronistic fixation of femininity within the domestic sphere, [which] point[s] to a fantasy genre of the emotions in the service of patriarchal and Catholic ideologies’ (Günsberg 2005: 19). Such views imply wider assumptions about cultural form and ideology. Moving beyond Italian cinema, melodrama is for Althusser synonymous with the propagation of the myth of personal fulfilment through bourgeois order (Althusser 1977: 133–4), which seems to have a general accordance with the Adornoan article of faith that cinema functions to give spectators the consoling thought that life really ends up happily (see Adorno 1991). Günsberg’s framework widens from melodrama in the assertion that the popularity of the Italian post-war genre system as a whole owes to it being ‘reassuringly reactionary, escapist, pre-capitalist’ (Günsberg 2005: 7). ‘Precapitalist’ is an interesting term, since generic categories in the cinema are determined by requirements of standardisation and mass production. Perhaps instead it is the outlook and style of Italian genre cinema that could be considered pre-capitalist. In an important early article on the tear-jerkers of the period, Pio Baldelli diagnoses what he sees as a ‘tired resignation, falling back on miracles’ (1999 [1967]: 131) through which the genre expresses ‘its fundamental dependency on the archaic socio-cultural forms of the peasant world’. This world was one which according to Baldelli was still ‘isolated in the mud’,

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without running water or electricity and far from the nearest school, in the final years before migration to the north, industrialisation, the penetration of the mass media, changes in the Church and the move towards social democracy were to alter rural life for ever (ibid.: 138–9). Extending Baldelli’s analysis to explain ‘how and why’ melodrama appeared at this point, Morreale (2011: 71–6) lists the era of political reaction, the excommunication of the Communists by Pius XII, the decisive defeat of the left’s electoral hopes in 1948, institutional continuity with Fascism in the magistrature, the police, and bureaucracy; the reassertion of Vatican Catholicism with the tight bond between Church and government and a flourishing of claimed sightings of the Madonna and of miracles, and a policy of spiritual exaltation of the role of women as nurturing mothers and men as heads of household; an immiserated population for whom national income and number of children enrolled in school were, in the immediate post-war years, lower than in 1938, while ‘disadvantaged’ families made up, according to the 1950 parliamentary inquiry, 23.4 per cent of the population, with a nearly 25 per cent rate of illiteracy prevalent in the South (ibid.: 72–3). One could understand why the 1950s could be considered a grim time for progressives, between the popular defeat of Fascism and prior to the liberalisation of the 1960s. The films of post-war Italy might work to affirm the inevitability of such immiseration, insofar as they exploit emotional blackmail, consolation, at times even the promise of miracles, usually in a tear-jerking manner [. . .] these films pushed only towards evasion in a way that was not in the least neutral or devoid of consequences, but that invited the spectator to burst out crying over the fatal misfortunes that life throws forth. (Torri 1979: 39–40) But what basis might there be for assuming that melodrama, so resolutely about private feelings, functions in any socially purposeful manner at all? Melodrama shuns claims to mimetic record and to place it within its historical period entails difficulty. Certainly the heyday of these films is contemporaneous with a renewed conservatism led by the Christian Democrats and reconstruction of a mostly agricultural economy through rapid industrialisation. But the films are rarely if ever directly about these things. The supposition that ‘The films of the later 1940s reflect the conflicts and upheavals of the immediate post-war period, neorealist and political films jostling with melodramas of bereavement, generational conflict and revenge, comedies and adventure films’ (Wood 2005: 14) requires some refinement. Wood elaborates by citing Landy (1998: 11), who suggests that ‘affect, the articulation of emotion on the screen, allows connections to be made, through experiential recognition, to “a conception of world and life” ’ (Wood 2005: 42). The extent to which emotion

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is articulated, or the ways in which one can experientially recognise a conception, might be elucidated through reference to Raymond Williams, who notes, in his concept of a structure of feeling, how cultural products can offer the felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living [. . .] For we find here a particular sense of life, a particular community of experience hardly needing expression. (2009: 35–6) As such, films relate to the circumstances of their production not chiefly because they may record or describe or reflect aspects of it, but in how they demonstrate the assumptions and significances that shape the imaginative and emotional processes they put in motion. Günsberg argues that the reactionary nature of post-war melodrama is based on the notion that the films act ‘in service’ of patriarchal and Catholic ideology, primarily to punish women, and are ‘reminiscent of the exemplum, told from the pulpit’ (2005: 29). This leaves open the question as to why audiences would pay to attend the cinema for a moral lesson they could freely receive in Church. Bearing in mind that actual instances of punishment seen within the films are generally meted out by people who are intended to lose the spectator’s sympathy, central here is the question of what makes the films moving; and that is rarely the confirmation of traditionalist moral rectitude alone. Pathos occurs when the films complicate any easy moral condemnation and dwell instead on suffering as a redemptive state and a route to compassion. The titles should give some clue that a questioning of moral certainties will occur – Wanda la peccatrice [Wanda the Sinner], Noi peccatori [We Sinners], Menzogna [Falsehood], Chi è senza peccato . . . [He Who Is Without Sin . . .], Le infedeli [The Unfaithfuls]. As Viviani has shown, in Italian melodramas the figures of the Virgin and the whore are often found in the same woman (1997). The young woman who leaves the convent orphanage at the opening of Ti ho sempre amato!, head bowed and near silent, is an age-old embodiment of innocent truth as conceived by patriarchy. And yet the cliché is employed only to show that it is untenable – owing to poverty and the villainy of men, and an abundance of trust, she becomes a scantily-clad club performer and then a single mother consigned to a reformatory. In Noi peccatori, a returned soldier, Stefano, having lost his faith and been torn from his impoverished parent’s plot of land in search for work in the city, meets a devout nurse, Lucia, in a convent hospital; he loses his sight after a brave rescue attempt, and to pay for his operation she secretly takes up a job as a nightclub performer (a job uncomfortably close in the world of melodrama to prostitution). On finding out, Stefano immediately leaves her; she runs after him but is knocked down by a tram. The pathos lies in her sacrifice of her honour, her marriage and

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Figure 1.5  Villainy and persecution in Ti ho sempre amato!

ultimately the use of her legs. It also occurs in the need to reconcile faith in the sacredness of married love with the fact of her public sexualised display. Wanda la peccatrice opens on a housewife hearing that news of her affair has become public, while it is Wanda, a prostitute, who subsequently sacrifices her own happiness so that the father of the family will not have to deal with the shame she would bring him. Both Perdonami! and Appassionatamente end with husbands, previously convinced that their wives have wronged them, asking those same wives for forgiveness in a closing clinch. And so on in the films of the period, from discovery of the moral rectitude of fallen women to compassion for sinners and absolution for wrongdoing. The felt sense of life that can be found in post-war Italian melodrama has been described as ‘a predominantly nostalgic, pre-modern vision of social relations [. . .] [that offers] a source of recognition and even consolation for millions of people uprooted or disoriented by a vast and bewildering process of social transformation’ (Gundle 1990: 197). Not only are the feelings of nostalgia, consolation and disorientation operative, it could be added, but also dissatisfaction and unfairness. This ties melodrama to the popular worldview expressed in one evocative title, that Gli innocenti pagano (Luigi Capuano, 1951), ‘the innocent pay’ (and in the words of the main protagonist, they pay because they are innocent). The title of one film, Le due verità (Antonio Leonviola, 1952), brings us to note how melodrama probes the multiplicity of meanings that may be ascribed to truth. In Vortice, the ‘whirlpool’ of the film’s title consists in the contradic-

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tory ways in which truth can be conceived: Elena is held in custody for her husband’s murder after her daughter Anna overhears a conversation that she mistakenly believes is between her parents but is actually of her father with his mistress. There is then the truth of what Anna believes she has witnessed, and its conflict with the truth that the spectator knows about the real identity of the culprit; when Anna states that her mother is ‘in prison because of me, I heard it said so’, it is superficially a ‘true’ statement in that it results from the daughter’s sincere belief, but one whose resulting unfair conviction cannot be pinned on any blame that is truly within the moral or active culpability of the helpless and confused child. Although Elena, on the other hand, is innocent of murder, she is however guilty of a lie of ever greater falsity, of building a family around reasons of personal gain rather than love, and, consequently, guilty of a crime against following her heart’s true love – a true love, however, who maintains his faith in her to the end and whose love she sacrificed only so as to save her father’s honour. Although truth is of determining importance, it has bewilderingly diverse aspects, while the only truth which can be intimately known is the experience of feeling itself. Truth in melodrama can mean truth-telling, truth to the facts of events, truth to the law and other social institutions, or being true to your heart, to tradition, or to God, each of which may at any point conflict with any of the other axes upon which truth lies. In Menzogna, young Mariella falsely testifies that her sweetheart Giorgio was with her the night a murder took place, publicly pretending she has lost her virtue but so as to uphold the greater truth of his innocence. Alberto in Nel gorgo del peccato complains ‘It’s easier to be a rogue than an honest person – even in Hell they’ll ask for your identity papers’. Perdonami! is specifically about a Calabrese immigrant to the northern industrial heart of Genoa, who works on a code of personal revenge to find the killer of his brother – his fiancée instructs him to ‘leave it to the justice of God’ while she is subsequently told, when her brother comes under suspicion, to trust in family – the police and legal impartiality barely even come into their considerations. The mistrust of institutions is traceable to the weak and distant central authority in Italy, a country commonly considered to have an atrophied adherence to civic authority and where a personal interpretation of the law and getting round the rules is known as the arte di arrangiarsi, the art of getting by: albeit occurring in a far more pious way than the equivalent tricks and evasions that make commedia all’italiana (and upholding the morality of lying to institutions in a way that the more modern morality of commedia all’italiana condemns). Value We can state here that the feelings which post-war melodramas present are, then, those of being outside of power, of having no control over events nor any

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stake in anything other than one’s own family and most of all the strength of one’s own feelings. They include awareness of multiple threats and a distrust of one’s own ability to follow the correct path, constitutive of a generalised insecurity but, moreover, an insecurity which is overcome through the compassion and forgiveness brought about by the definitive and universalising experience of suffering. There are some obvious reasons why this might replicate the felt sense of those wondering what kind of ‘normality’ can be returned to after war and the collapse then reconstruction of the social order, not to mention in the midst of the longer-term effects of the march of twentieth-century modernity. As well as replicating how such a life might feel, melodramas perform the important function of establishing what values can make sense of that life. Such an understanding would support the notion that ‘melodrama’s sensational excitements are significant because they are, in the end, grounded in ethical, moral frameworks’ (Gledhill 2001: 67). These frameworks, Gledhill suggests, are themselves subject to historical change, which melodrama participates in by staging a struggle over the forms through which to symbolise values. Therefore the values which melodrama may manifest are not simply repetitions of official assertions of unchanging moral codes, but are part of the dynamics of ‘an ongoing process rather than as the delivery of fixed ideological end-products’ (ibid.: 67). In this manner, and to return to the problems of the social function of culture brought up at the beginning of this section, one can avoid seeing ‘generic movements as unproblematic reflections of shifts in economic or political formations’, and think instead of ‘the relationship between aesthetic practices and social disorder so as to recognise the specificity and relative autonomy of each’ (ibid.: 64–5). In other words, melodrama acts as a popular arena in which values can be stated, restated and transformed in ways that are dramatically and emotionally meaningful. As mentioned, the greatest value of all in post-war Italian melodrama lies in suffering. A knowledge of suffering allows forgiveness: Maddalena in the eponymous film explains that she has sought vengeance on the Madonna ever since her beloved daughter took part in a church service which ended up in her being fatally incinerated. But recounting her story of sorrow serves as explanation, exculpation and instruction, as the priest remarks that ‘you must have suffered a lot [. . .] The Virgin Madonna forgives, but you cannot get revenge on the Virgin Madonna.’ The film’s final words are ‘everything in this world passes except the sorrow of the Sainted Virgin, because it is eternal’. The Marian cult that suffuses the films also suggests the specific value of suffering femininity: women carry moral rectitude which, unlike the sermons given by priests in the films, is understood in the personal realm. One primary value found in the turn towards melodrama after the downfall of Fascism is that in melodrama virtue is separated from its historical connection with

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virility and not expressed through manliness. The values of victimhood and emotionality are marked as female, but are more those of La traviata than of Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (Richardson 1980 [1740]): they are not found in women who embody purity in quite the same way that womanhood did in the foundational forms of eighteenth-century melodrama. The films instead feature women who have a past, and so they turn transgressors into victims. They thereby enact a process of absolving victimhood parallel to that which the country was undergoing after the war, but with the figure of transgression and absolution shifted from public and masculine questions to the private and female sphere. Although femininity is in itself a symbol of value in melodrama, it is often anonymous groups of women who uphold the most rigid sexual morality: the town-dwellers who gossip maliciously and who run Maddalena out of town, the gossipy nuns who work in the hospital in Anna, the anonymous female town-dweller who in Menzogna cries ‘shameless!’ at Mariella when she pretends to have been amorously engaged with her fiancé Gianni all night so as to provide an alibi for his mistaken arrest. Prejudiced morality is gendered as anonymously female, but protagonists who act with villainy are individualised as male: the cowherd who throws the rock that kills Maddalena in Maddalena, Vittorio the evil seducer of Anna, Rocco who withholds evidence to get an innocent man imprisoned for a murder carried out by a second villain, a jealous lover, in Menzogna. Meanwhile detached male authority figures – most often priests – plea for clemency and sympathy, placing men as the stronger figures both in terms of active malignancy and of moral consciousness, thereby reproducing figures of female passivity and male activity. Rather than articulate a straightforwardly reactionary traditionalism, melodramas position their morality as a compassionate compromise which is differentiated from unsympathising inflexibility. Domani è troppo tardi/ Tomorrow Is Too Late (Léonid Moguy, 1950) makes this the overt conflict of the narrative: a liberal teacher runs up against the harsh punitive morality of a high school hierarchy, but it is this very lack of understanding which leads a girl to the point of suicide, while the liberal teacher is the one able to adequately teach the value of sexual propriety. The climax in Menzogna comes as a double rebellion of women against patriarchal heads of households, with young lover Mariella’s mother contravening her father’s disowning of his disobedient daughter, and the housekeeper of the avaricious, jealous Rocco going to the police to offer information that will foil his schemes and save Mariella’s fiancé from false imprisonment. As Mariella insists defiantly to her father in justifying her desire to marry Gianni in Menzogna, ‘to marry someone you need to love them [. . .] My heart cannot be commanded’, at which her father slaps her. This is an example of how the films do not place themselves on the side of the angry fathers, powerful bosses, or law courts that represent official

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order, and represent their values not as imposed but naturally felt. The films thus promote adherence to moral codes of behaviour not through the archaic language of loyalty, tradition and hierarchy but through the categories of happiness, interiority and individual choice. Such an outlook accords with the general needs of bourgeois property and propriety, and holds onto a notion that value transcends social status – a notion that is itself an individualist and bourgeois anti-feudalist one. Mariella refuses the vigorous exploiter Rocco for the poor but good fisherman Gianni. The films are populist, and explicitly anti-aristocratic, taking care to differentiate the condition of decadent luxury from the equally house-bound separation from public, working life that being a wife entails. In Appassionatamente, Andrea is a mine-owner, but he is a self-made man who continues getting his hands dirty, while the villains are Elena’s aristocratic family who got her to marry Andrea for money in the first place, and Andrea’s cousins, keen to hold onto their inheritance over the rights conferred on Elena by marriage to Andrea. In a society in which physical labour is still the main source of economic productivity, hard work is associated with goodness in a way that overlaps with neorealism but diverges from the more consumerist comedies of the Fascist era, the telefoni bianchi films. The nostalgic tones of this association perhaps indicate an awareness that such labour is a basis of economic productivity whose pre-eminence is just beginning to be lost. If these are peasant fantasies, then, they are fantasies of maintaining a life of modest stability rather than attaining glamour, riches or conspicuous consumption, and so can hardly be considered escapist. Luxury, commodification, and greed are associated with unhappiness and murder: in Le infedeli an investigator is hired for 300,000 lire to catch a commendatore’s wife in flagrante delicto, a consumerist, snooping, legalistic and controlling view of behaviour that conflicts with free adhesion to emotional bonds. The investigator, Osvaldo, becomes a blackmailer, the film specifically linking dishonesty, shame, and the financial exploitation of people’s emotional lives. Urban spaces tend to appear not as celebrations of the wonders of modern productive capacities but as anonymous and corrupting places where value is neither human nor spiritual but monetary, and so expressive of exploitation and greed. Fashion is repeatedly associated with prostitution and with narcissism, sexuality, a mistrust of the transitory and ephemeral, and a self-interest that stands in contrast to the images of naïve innocence that the films also contain. Similarly, jazz and swing music, as well as gambling and alcohol and even leisure pursuits and sports, indicate the corrupting allure or unproductive narcissism of the modern world. These aspects are not only immoral but are opposed to what the films conceive of as natural and truthful: in Ti ho sempre amato! Maria, a maid, enters service in an aristocratic mansion, dark and closed from the daylight, where the master of the house, Carlo, drinks, listens to swing, and treats the

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staff as his playthings; she finds in contrast Massimo, and his retreat outside of the city, where birds tweet, and she goes to sleep with the lake behind her. Massimo tells her that ‘the air is good here’, and he resides with his ageing father in a patriarchal continuity of a community whom he describes as ‘simple people, who work, and you’re good, sincere’. In Ti ho sempre amato!, Maria’s conditions of service in an aristocratic mansion represent the breaching by financial obligation and exploitation of the confines of the private home, extended into Carlo’s attempt to rape her. Domestic service is thus a realisation of negative relations of male power over women which occur when the domestic sphere is turned into a workplace and not subject to freely chosen family bonds. Instructed by a kindly female who advises her that to ‘work and gain independence’ is the only way for ‘we women’ to get by, Maria in Ti ho sempre amato! briefly finds work in a department store, this being introduced with wondrous, harp-led music, the shadows of the banisters extending on the wall, crooked and large. She marvels at the open, working world, which itself only leads more forcefully to domesticity as she makes children’s toys, watching the posh women there buying things for their ‘naughty children’. This could almost seem an illustration of Pope Pius XII’s comment made in 1945, that ‘Women who do go out to work become dazed by the chaotic world in which they live, blinded by the tinsel of false glamour and greedy for sinister pleasures’ (cited in Caldwell 1991: 22). Female work is considered exploitation and the workplace an unnatural habitat for the poor female protagonist. It exists close to sexual exploitation, a connection reinforced by the humiliating experience of performing in nightclubs (in Ti ho sempre amato!, Anna, Noi peccatori, Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori). Thus domesticity attains its value as a refuge from malignity, as the site of the appropriate expression of desire, and as a morally sanctioned structure whose appeal, however, lies in its members’ exercise of their free choice rather than through the pre-modern ideologies of tradition, duty, and place within the hierarchy. Quite how the films situate their romantic fairytales can be understood within a kind of bourgeois nostalgia, for the desire to return to the perceived stability of past certainties exists within a modern society that has rendered their naïve purity impossible. With regard to gender, the 1950s saw an increased symbolic power of women as mothers, ‘whose task it was to bring the men of the family back to the faith and protect the traditional institution of the family’ (Scaraffia 1999: 276). The ascription of total innocence only to children, enacting a disillusion with adult figures of authority (on which neorealism also placed much importance), gains currency in a postwar period of defeated Fascism and uncertain reconstruction. These values, placed on class and gender, and on generation, indicate three overlapping historical phases to which the melodrama of this period belongs: the long advance of the bourgeois epoch which had rendered feudal relations obsolete,

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the reconstitution of social roles with the reconstruction, and the reaction to post-war malaise. The films of post-war Italy are not, then, expressions of any unchanging, ahistorical peasant outlook, and their ideological functions do not accord with simple correspondences or instruments of instruction, for culture is not reducible to, but part of, the struggles and uncertainties of its epoch. Agency Showing people in positions not of power but of powerlessness, melodrama’s decision to linger on pain and impotence means that it does not offer catharsis (see Goimard 1999: 80). Such a focus has been linked to the popular across historical epochs: A display of passion alone (the most pleasurable as well as the most painful) without any portrayal of the power of resistance beyond the senses is called common or vulgar, while the opposite is called noble. (Schiller 2005: 49) What is not decided is whether such pathos is necessarily as reactionary as the scholars cited above have suggested. Gledhill, drawing on Elsaesser, argues that pathos, then, unlike pity, both draws the audience into the character’s dilemma in an act of recognition and empathy and distances the audience in the act of criticising the circumstances that produce that dilemma. (1991: 266) It is worthwhile considering how, in Linda Williams’ words, ‘a surprising power [lies] in identifying with victimhood’. This emerges from her consideration, drawn from Gledhill (1992), that, unlike tragedy, melodrama does not reconcile its audience to an inevitable suffering. Rather than raging against a fate that the audience has learned to accept, the female hero often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially questions [. . .] [thereby] melodrama is structured upon the ‘dual recognition’ of how things are and how they should be. (Linda Williams 2009: 339–40) Thereby melodrama, for all the resignation of its characters, suggests the possibility for a resisting, or at least an open-ended, emotionality. In the preceding discussions regarding romance, emotion and morality it

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was stated that melodramas replicate a fundamentally popular experience framed through the conditions of femininity and a peasant worldview, one whose primary sense of identification De Martino has in a different context described as that of ‘being-acted-upon’ (De Martino 2000: 88) in the face of uncertainty. Thomas Elsaesser (1987), in fact, contrasts domestic melodrama with action cinema, since energy in melodrama is invested in emotional tension instead of the activity of its protagonists. It is not that melodrama lacks dynamism. Car crashes, injuries, natural disasters, false imprisonment and financial ruination join heartfelt love and villainous persecution as sudden and total events. Appassionatamente is put in motion by a patriarch’s suicide attempt and brought towards resolution by the collapse of a mine. Vortice begins on a financial disaster, referred to as a ‘bomb going off’, that provokes a successful suicide by the heroine’s father. Elena, his daughter, is blackmailed into marrying a man who later has a car crash whilst eloping with his mistress, who at a further point accidentally fatally poisons him, for which Elena is mistakenly sent to prison, after which she escapes with her infant daughter and is saved at the point of throwing herself and her daughter down a flight of stairs. Wanda la peccatrice’s opening scene involves a phone call that interrupts a mother supervising her son’s play on his train set, to inform her that her affair has been discovered. She goes upstairs and shoots herself just as her husband rushes home, and he is sentenced to hard labour for her murder. The potential for explosion is ever immanent and narrative propulsion is governed by catastrophe, not human control. The characters of melodrama are buffeted within a world which appears at turns indifferent, malign and sometimes eventually provident. The series of calamitous events may eventually bring the family back together perhaps, but in little sense any further forward than they were at the start. Melodramatic plot structures are not propelled by progressive mastery of internal contradictions but by sudden cascades of uncontrollable events and then by extension of the emotional consequences. This form of narrative does not seem to result from a sense of historical progress implied by the heroic agency and rational motivation that would resolve conventional cinematic narratives, and has similarities with Greek ‘adventure time’ as described by Bakhtin, without an elementary ‘biological or maturational duration’ (Bakhtin 1981: 90), the dialectic being the sudden shock of catastrophe as against drawn-out, undifferentiated suffering. The desire simply to be left untroubled by calamity and so to retreat from the world of events into the protection of a bit of property would, rather than directly reflect peasant reality, represent what may have been wished for by those watching the changes of economic reconstruction with anxious wonder. Melodrama, then, joins comedy as one of the two fictional forms in which characters are most subject to events. Writing about comedy, Jerry Palmer (1987) has developed the notion of the logic of the absurd, in which the set-up

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of a gag invites the application of a ‘normal’ logic only to confound such expectations with an absurd occurrence – but an absurdity that accords in reality with a different logic from the one initially prepared for. One can state that melodrama operates according to what we might be able to term the logic of the accidental. The accidental would seem by definition to have no logic, but through the course of the films it is girded with a fatalistic philosophical outlook. The protagonists refer to their lives as governed by chance, luck, misfortune, fate, which accord, however, with an emotional destiny. Thus, coincidence occurs with inevitability: Anna in Anna cloisters herself in a hospital, but one day a crash brings her old fiancé to her hospital. In Appassionatamente, the doctor who tends to Andrea after his mine accident happens to be his wife’s one true love, separated from her but now returned from Africa. In Vortice, Elena similarly finds that the doctor tending to her husband after a car crash is her abandoned love Guido; and then the mistress of her husband happens to enter the same hospital for cosmetic surgery after being in the car crash with him. Accidents in melodrama signify the inescapability of the past and the governing force of love, and have further moral dimensions: in Appassionatamente and in Vortice, the opening financial catastrophes emphasise the fragility of wealth and social standing and their potential to threaten the integrity of the family. The opening accusations of a wife’s infidelity in Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori and Wanda la peccatrice indicate the need for eternal female moral vigilance, while in Vortice the car crash, brought on by treacherous rainswept conditions, appears to be a punishment for the husband’s infidelity and monetary attitude to romantic relations. As well as its moral dimension, accident also leads us to a basic pleasure within melodramatic design, the creation of a sense of harmony amidst random disaster. In explaining the appeal of melodrama, in 1911 Clayton Hamilton wrote: Much of our life – in fact, by far the major share – is casual instead of causal [. . .] Nearly all the good or ill that happens to us is drifted to us, uncommanded, undeserved, upon the tides of chance. It is this immutable truth – the persistency of chance in the serious concerns of life and the inevitable influence of accident on character – that melodrama aims to represent [. . .] Melodrama answers one of the most profound of human needs: it ministers to that motive which philosophers term the will to believe. (cited in Singer 2001: 135) Massimo in Ti ho sempre amato! is told by his father that ‘God doesn’t come into it, men do’, but the sense of design takes on an aspect of mystery or the caprices of the gods. There is sometimes an arithmetic to the scheming of the

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evil characters – a deal is offered to evildoer Giorgio in Ti ho sempre amato! while he plays billiards, mimicking the colliding trajectories of the protagonists before they sink into their resting places. It is an arithmetic that creates a feel of wonder as the mechanism of accident is replicated in the strange patternings that govern the narratives of the films, which employ multiple devices of ­repetition – the double blackmail plots and the deaths of both patriarchs in Vortice, the sicknesses of the two men in Appassionatamente. In Anna, the heroine flashes back from her present tending to her sick ex-fiancé Andrea to her time as a nightclub dancer, involving two catastrophes, two time frames, and two men, remembering the affair she had with a violent barman which ended up in his accidental death at the hands of her good-hearted Andrea. The alternative to such patterning is the barren anonymity of being lost, which is brought about by the absence of the marital home: Lucia in Ti ho sempre amato! says that they went far and wide, but ‘There have been so many people’ who got in between her and Massimo; Massimo says he carries on thinking about her and searching for her but she ‘just disappeared without a word’. Echoing experiences recently lived through in the war, men who go away for years come back unrecognised by growing children – the husbands returned from prison in Il tradimento and Wanda la peccatrice, the older brother in Nel gorgo del peccato. In Traviata ’53 Carlo meets an enchanting society woman on a night out; after four months he happens upon her again and they begin a relationship. Eventually she ends their affair in a letter in which she tells him ‘don’t look for me, it’ll be useless’, and the scene cuts to Carlo driving through the mountains to the hospital where he will be too late to reach her before she dies. Time One way of thinking is to counterpose melodramatic eventfulness to a range of life experiences unavailable to the melodramatic mode as it has developed in world cinema – life experiences based around the routine or repetitive, the apparently banal or mundane, and the uneventful. (Klevan 2000: 1–2) Such excitement has been seen with regards to the sensational eventfulness of early Hollywood melodrama as corresponding to the demands of modernity (see Gunning 1994; Singer 2001). From this perspective of melodrama, the peasant or nostalgic worldview that has been ascribed to Italian melodrama is surely undone, for melodramatic sensation accords to what Georg Simmel in ‘The metropolis and mental life’ [1903] called the ‘“intensification of nervous stimulation” of urban life’ (cited in Doane 2002: 4).

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But alongside the axiomatically melodramatic cascade of catastrophic and coincidental events, melodrama dwells on the experience of blank undifferentiated existence. The relationship, then, is between the sudden eventfulness of confrontations, hair-trigger mistimings and crucial turning points, and the threat of an everlasting suffering that will remove the protagonist from the world of time. In Menzogna the town priest, who maintains his faith in Gianni when he is accused of murder, tells the crowded town square that it is time, if anyone saw the man on the night of the murder, to come forth before the prison gates close on Gianni for ever. In Ti ho sempre amato! the destitute Maria tells her baby that she doesn’t want her to share her destiny, and that ‘You do not know how much I suffer but you must not suffer’, with the baby quietly crying in a wordless affirmation of the repetition of suffering down the generations. When in Vortice Elena happens upon her abandoned love Guido, he tells her he has never forgotten ‘our lost love, and now, after so many years we find each other sad – two destroyed lives, two lost lives’, to which she responds that ‘time cannot destroy how much I love you, how much I have always loved you’. Furthering the question of time and femininity, Tania Modleski has discussed how loss and nostalgia give a particularly female version of time, as women in melodrama enact what Cixous defined as a specifically female pleasure in mourning in ‘taking up the challenge of loss’ (cited in Modleski 1984: 28). As she describes it: Melodrama, then, tends to be concerned with what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘anterior temporal modalities’, these modalities being stereotypically linked with female subjectivity in general [. . .] As Kristeva notes, this conception of time is indissociable from space and is opposed to the idea of time most commonly recognised in Western thought: ‘time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival – in other words, the time of history’. (ibid.: 23) In this sense, melodrama employs what Moretti in relation to moving literature has termed ‘the rhetoric of the too late’ (2005: 159), a realisation of powerlessness because recognition of the way things should be has occurred beyond the moment at which they could have been changed (ibid.: 162). In her book on narrative time, Helen Powell (2012: 115) cites E. P. Thompson’s 1967 article ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’ in discussing how the industrial revolution involved a change in how time was conceived: from governing the world through natural rhythms of the day and the seasons to rationalised, abstracted demarcations of unchanging regularity that can be separated and sold; or to put it another way, as clock time. The philosophy of Henri Bergson has sought to counterpose to such separation a

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sense of durée, of the experience of time, giving back to it its continuousness as it is lived. In the opening sequences of Anna, a mosaic of events sets the scene of the modern city awaking, before a close-up of a clock indicates the commencement of the working day and an ambulance urgently speeds up to a very modern hospital building. In a montage of washing uniforms, steam and artificial lighting, the hospital is presented in a symphony of a great modern organism, a city within the city whose animated mechanics govern the anonymous human interactions within it. As the story plays out, Anna is forced into an encounter with her abandoned fiancé and the narrative culminates as he gives her an ultimatum to leave the hospital with him; we return to a close-up of the clock now given a dramatic rather than abstracted significance. Crucially, she does not go with him but remains in the hospital looking beyond the gates, restricted to the eternal, timeless limbo that she has chosen of service to others. In Appassionatamente, the distinction between clock time and time as it is experienced is explicitly linked to a gendered experience of marriage. Andrea works at the mines he owns, and the film makes frequent references to his punctuality and his working by the clock. Elena, on the other hand, languishes at home, isolated and depressed, told by others how being with one’s husband is itself boring. In melodrama, devotion and suffering each give back to time its continuity. Unlike the situation of a worker with a split between work and personal time, service in the hospital for Anna, or boredom at home for Elena, takes up the melodramatic heroine’s whole life. In her historicisation of eventfulness in cinema, Doane states: Contingency [. . .] emerges as a form of resistance to rationalization which is saturated with ambivalence. Its lure is that of resistance itself – resistance to system, to structure, to meaning [. . .] Accident and chance become productive. Nevertheless, these same attributes are also potentially threatening. Their danger resides in their alliance with meaninglessness, even nonsense. (2002: 11) Therefore, the logic of the accidental works to position contingency in a way which is continuous with the challenge to rationalisation and rational activity described above, but is ordered instead according to the constancy of emotional engagement; most particularly, through a suffering which gives back to experience the sense of duration, or of durée, via the practice of devotion, whether, as the contrasting examples from Anna and Appassionatamente show, domestic or spiritual. Therefore, the chaotic, sensationally accidental narrative occurrences of melodrama do serve a function important to modernity, the function of nostalgia, an experience which values the yearning to return, a yearning which increases in the face of the impossibility of any actual return itself. Appassionatamente

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takes place in an ornate aristocratic mansion sold to mine-owner Andrea after the family’s failing fortunes lead to a financial calamity. Andrea tries to persuade Anna in Anna to go back to him in the unrealised hope that they can return to the days of their lost love. In Ti ho sempre amato! the heroine is remarked upon as being ‘strange’ for a ‘girl of today – you don’t speak much, don’t smoke, don’t dance’. Such comments indicate that melodrama seeks to mourn the loss of values imperilled by the perceived corruption of modern times, and is connected to a sense of the fleeting nature of happiness. In historical terms, it suggests the importance of wishing to go back – not the same as actually having that possibility, but rather the maintenance of the desire so to do. It is a loss of paradise, which, like naivety, can never be regained. The proximity and privacy of the ideal of the petit-bourgeois home, or self-denial in devotion to God, offer shelter from the effects of loss and return continuity and meaning to a world of chaos and contingency. Vision The very prohibitions in the period on the expressions of female desire mean that Italian melodrama ends up challenging one of the foundational aspects of gender difference in cinema, the creation of a sexualised gaze. In her famous piece on cinematic pleasure, Laura Mulvey posited the construction of a male subject position in classical Hollywood narrative (Mulvey 2004). This is not to say that only men find pleasure in films, but that the spectator identifies at least subconsciously as male, sharing the perspective of the male hero and objectifying the female recipients of this male subject’s gaze. Hipkins (2008) criticises an ignorance of questions of the male gaze in Italian film studies. Cottino-Jones, in her book on women in Italian cinema, has characterised the recurrence of ‘Woman as diva and as spectacle – that is, as pleasurable, sexy object of male desire’, saying that this ‘became one of the most prevalent, iconic images of woman in Italian cinema since its origins’ (2010: 2, see Bruno 1989 for comments on Italian feminist studies of gaze). The government minister Andreotti, in promoting beauty pageants as an alternative to neorealist denunciation, reportedly called for ‘less rags, more legs!’ (Wood 2006: 53), but this is not the impulse driving melodrama. What we find is that melodrama is distinguished by its refusal of the male gaze, and suggestion instead of a female gaze.14 In Ti ho sempre amato!, the ex-convent orphan girl who has found work as a magician’s performer provides a mute commentary during the stage act as she tries to pull her costume down to cover herself better in embarrassment. She comments that ‘I’m not made for this life, this job’, to which her boss responds, ‘But if it drives the audience delirious?’ The gaze is recognised as exploitative and is pathologised while it is her shame that is the focus rather than the crea-

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tion of an objectifying sexual spectacle. In Anna, the lead character’s suitor Andrea tells her he doesn’t like being with people who pay to watch her, while the one male whose gaze is shown is the barman Vittorio, with whom she has an affair for which he eventually pays with his life. In Il monastero di Santa Chiara (Mario Sequi, 1949), we begin on a nightclub singer performing ‘Lili Marlene’, but the gaze from which we briefly begin the film turns out to be that of a Nazi soldier, and the singer a Jewish escapee. Even a normally sexualised performer such as Mangano is in Anna presented largely in long-shot when she appears onstage singing ‘El Negro Zumbon’, not fragmenting her body parts with the fetishism that Mulvey ascribes to Hollywood’s presentation of women, but incorporating her movement into a stage ensemble. In the mixed-sex audience the female members are revealed as watching most intently whilst Anna’s performance is itself constituted by a rhythmic series of gazes out to the audience, away from them, above, below, until her gaze eventually alights directly upon her two male stage partners in a reciprocal look as she dances away from them at the performance’s end. This constructs a sense of the independence which will later give her the fortitude to sacrifice herself to the nunnery. Meanwhile, in her long dance sequence with Vittorio Gassman that opens Mambo, she is being gazed at by two women, the boss of the dance troupe and Katherine Dunham (playing herself, who choreographed the film), and it is not until the applause at the sequence’s close that it is even revealed that there is a diegetic audience. Again and again in the films and the images that advertise them, the men are looking (often lasciviously) at the women while the women are looking into some indefinite, metaphysical space appropriate to the films’ appeal to female morality and endurance. In Appassionatamente, an orchestration of the female gaze, which cannot respond to the male gaze, shows the potential for this to become an act of refusal. Elena rushes to the train station to see off her true love Carlo. At his departure she becomes immobile and looks silently down and right. The shot dissolves into her wedding service to a man she does not love. After exchanging rings, she gazes offscreen downwards, but in the opposite direction, as if holding onto the past and rejecting the future. In the following scene in which she begins married life she again looks downwards, a further mute sign that she thinks of Carlo still. Though the solitary, offscreen gaze signals the denial of female agency and desire, it also indicates a refusal to give up her feelings and memories, the realms which in melodrama are the most important to personhood. The gaze offers the female protagonist, within restrictions, an internal life which yearns for something beyond the situation in which she finds herself. In Menzogna, after Gianni and Luisa frolic together on a rock, a cut shifts to her at home, in a chair, looking thoughtfully offscreen, the implication of what has occurred in the intervening period unmistakeable. The gaze thus conveys the

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Figure 1.6  The gaze in Anna

unspeakable. In Anna, the unfaithful heroine tells her fiancé when discussing her affair that she feels like ‘I have two people in me, one is the one you love, the other . . .’, but then she trails away and gazes towards the left of the screen, to state ‘I can’t say it’. In a subsequent scene back at Church, she starts to pray as she looks out of the window, to the left again; her gaze has spoken sexual betrayal and transformed her into an iconographical reminder of the Virgin Mary. Maddalena repeats the iconographic connection set up in Anna. At one

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point, Maddalena starts speaking to an image of the mater dolorosa, the music strikes up, she lolls her head to the side and cries. Then during mass she has a similar exchange of looks with the Mary icon in church, and is strangely overtaken. In the final scene she is driven out of town for her deception and finally stoned to death, but dies on reaching a shrine to the Virgin, and looks up to the side, then into the Priest’s eyes, completing a transformation into resembling the Madonna. The female gaze is not directed towards any person or thing, but is not ‘nowhere’ either. It indicates a communion with realms beyond the world framed by the camera, not only those realms of memory and desire, but also of the spiritual beyond. Sublime The gaze of the spectator neither fully meets this female gaze nor identifies with its position; the spectator is often presented instead with the confusion of a fixed or ordered point of orientation and the removal of a single direction of focus. In Figure 1.7 we can see how the composition offers differing planes of action, to which further destabilising directors of attention are added by the protagonists’ differing lines of sight. Added to such tense dynamics is the aesthetic motif of moving into an enclosed but ever further central point – like Vortice [‘Vortex’ or ‘Whirlpool’], Nel gorgo del peccato [In the Whirl of Sin], designs which are entrapping but indicate also their own infinity. That melodrama emphatically does not offer a gaze of mastery is thus not merely applicable in gender terms, but also to its entire visual organisation. This spatial disorientation counterbalances the sense of harmony which continuity editing and verisimilitude create in conventional cinema. The geometric ordering of the world has been essential to representations of space from the Renaissance, from the Albertian perspective that fixed landscape painting with the stable points of depth cues vanishing into the horizon to new methods for the mapping of the world and universe. Such representational practices produce a position of mastery over ‘a globe that was finite and potentially knowable [. . .] [and] grasped as a finite totality’ (Harvey 1990: 244). While Giordano Bruno wrote of how ‘infinite space is endowed with infinite quality’ (cited in Harvey 1990: 244) the eternal entrapment of the melodramatic world means that it is finitude that has an infinite quality. David Harvey, in his study of space and time, discusses modernism as the representational product of the crisis in such confidence; melodrama must take its place as the popular form of this crisis (for a comparison of melodrama and modernism, see the next chapter), increasing experiential involvement while giving back to space a sense of its existence beyond human control. As with the questions of agency, and those of time, melodrama comprehensively disorders the processes of rational organisation developed across centuries of representation.

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Figure 1.7  Competing directions in Le infedeli, Gelosia and Ti ho sempre amato!

It has been stated that to talk of melodrama is to talk of cinema ‘through its excessive function, the urgent elements of its sublime fascination’ (Bruno 1992: 33), for ‘melodrama becomes a delirious form, a universe where the passions expand to the confines of the possible’ (ibid.: 35). In a definition of the sublime which would seem relevant to the melodramatic imagination, Diderot underlined ‘the emphatic articulation of simple truths and relationships, the clarification of the cosmic moral sense of everyday gestures’ (cited in Brooks 1995: 13–14), while Kant’s notion of the sublime, in which pleasure

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is achieved through displeasure, is linked directly to the nightmare emotional world of melodrama by Bottizoli (1987: 32, see also Kant 1960, 1987). To the other reference points ought to be added Edmund Burke (1990), who focuses on the effect of being overwhelmed in particular through the close relationship of the artwork to bodily sensation, that is, a disordering of reason through the surfeit of sensorial stimulation. The sublime in melodrama can thus describe how the melodramatic experience is marked by the exceeding of the subject’s physical and rational capacities. There can certainly seem to be representations of the overwhelming of the individual subject within melodrama, conveyed in ways which seek to have an affectingly powerful – and negative – effect on the spectator. In Gelosia, a Sicilian marchese murders his mistress’s husband and testifies to send an innocent man to jail. After refusing a priest’s instruction to turn himself in, the marchese walks down his corridor in a sequence in which jealousy and guilt combine into an awestruck terror that takes him beyond his physical and moral capacities. A series of point-of-view shots create the disordering of perspective relations mentioned as a common melodramatic strategy above. The marchese walks, tensely, towards a large icon of Christ in the corridor of his palace. The lighting motifs cast widening lines of moonlight across the darkness in different directions while the repetitive musical theme builds into a high-pitched crescendo. Timed to increase in speed with the musical theme, the editing presents a progressively more rapid series of shot/reverse shots between the marchese and the Christ figure, until he screams out ‘VIA!!!!’ clenching his fists to his head, his perspective of the icon blurs, and he faints. This form of melodramatic sublime combines the awe of religious iconography with the awfulness of an emotionality that reaches a self-annihilating insanity. In Il monastero di Santa Chiara, Jewish singer Esther is taken by her lover, Nazi officer Rudolph, to the monastery of Santa Chiara to flee the SS. He shoots himself, but Esther still hears his voice in her head calling her name, disrupting the tranquillity of the monastery gardens. The third time his voice calls, it is followed directly by the screaming sound of an aerial bombardment, which after some time gives way to the sound of a female chorus singing ‘Ave Maria’. Light shines through a hole blown through the monastery wall, Esther walks towards it and sees the nuns singing to a massive, shadowed and silhouetted Christ on the cross in the foreground. Smoke passing across her face in an extreme close-up, Esther stares at the shadows that the flames from the bombardment pass across the looming body of Christ, before she flees the flaming convent amidst increased bombing. She runs onto the streets screaming for Rudolph in a mad dash that gets her caught and imprisoned, negating the power of religious experience with the hellishness of the bombing raid and the repetition of the dead man’s voice screaming in her head. After the Liberation, Esther is lured to her death at the remaining rubble of

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the monastery. Tricked and shot in the final moments of her luckless life, Esther clutches at her breast with a facial expression repeated from her previous awestruck insanity. The ‘Ave Maria’ chorus begins extra-diegetically and Esther looks upwards, her face bathed in light and the chorus increasing in volume as she takes up a position redolent of the Madonna, her hands clasping her heart. The sublimity of the awestruck madness that overtook her in the previous ‘Ave Maria’ scene is repeated in this second scenario of violence which repeats the chiaroscuro and chorus of the earlier scene, with a return of iconographical symbolism and the memory of the dead Rudolph as her body physically expires. The sense of being haunted to final physical expiration resolves on Esther embodying Catholic iconography, which is supernaturally omnipotent despite her Judaism. As with Gelosia, the sublime involves an awestruck religious experience that is mixed with feelings of sexual denial that are realised in fatal violence. The protagonist’s weak mental state is expressed by an overwhelmed body that cannot handle the intensity of the emotional conflict. Sacred Yet this takes us to another point. It is not coincidental that both these potential examples of a melodramatic sublime occur through encounters with religious iconography. As has been pointed out, in Italian melodrama ‘The Church is as present as parsley’ (Baldelli 1999 [1967]: 131), and reference to religion has had a similarly scattered presence so far throughout this study; yet sometimes it must also make up the meat. If one takes straightforwardly the theorisation of the correspondence of melodrama to the modern age, this ought not to be the case. In his foundational work on melodrama, Brooks described how the origins of melodrama can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath. This is the epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the final liquidation of the traditional sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch), the shattering of the myth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society, and the invalidation of the literary forms – tragedy, comedy of manners – that depended on such a society. (Brooks 1995: 14–15) The crisis of previous forms of moral certainty explains the relentless drama and continual sense of insecurity that marks the melodramatic emphasis on morality, in which values must continually be restated because they are under attack from all forms of villains. As a ‘form for secularised times’, it ‘offers the

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nearest approach to sacred and cosmic values in a world where they no longer have any certain ontology or epistemology’ (ibid.: 205). Therefore, the centre of interest and the scene of the underlying drama reside within what we could call the ‘moral occult’, the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality. The moral occult is not a metaphysical system; it is rather the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth. (ibid.: 5) The absence of a metaphysical system, and the immanence of morality, brings us then to Elsaesser’s (1987, 2007) and Goimard’s (1999) conceptions mentioned earlier about the absence of transcendence in melodrama; its characters suffer but they do not conduct passage to other realms. As Elsaesser has put it: Melodrama, as traditionally understood, confronts its characters with a tragic universe, but it denies them any sense of transcendence, of access to a higher reality where the contradictions they encounter in their life might find a resolution. It is tragedy without the sanction or benevolent gaze of a higher authority: conflicts present themselves on a single plane, but are operative and make themselves felt on two levels at once. Except that the second level is no longer visible either to the characters or the viewer: higher authority has withdrawn from human life. (2007: 42) Italian melodrama is suffused with the traditional sacred, while its aesthetic and affective properties work towards conferring meaning through reference to the beyond. Its moral predicaments are formed by a sense of original sin, as seen from the names of films like Gelosia, Appassionatamente, all the peccato films, Le infedeli. Ideas such as going to a nunnery when children are born out of wedlock, or the responsibility of women for the maintenance of the family home, are never questioned, even when as spectators we sympathise with the distress they are shown to cause. Protagonists live among icons and shrines, attend church services, structure their life events according to weddings, funerals, priestly advice, and depend upon Catholic welfare in orphanages, nunneries, boarding schools, reformatories, hospitals. Human actions are seen in terms of guilt and innocence, goodness, purity and faith, meekness, wickedness and humility, renunciation, sacrifice, expiation or submission to temptations, or in terms of compassion and forgiveness, love and devotion; paths of life are seen as straight and narrow or astray, animated by nostalgia for a prelapsarian past and hope in a paradise beyond the vale of tears that characterises the narrative present, while the characters’ desperate search to make meaning of their suffering structures experience of their torments.

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It could hardly be otherwise in a country surrounding the Vatican state, 95 per cent of whose citizens were baptised, 60 per cent practising Catholics (Allum 2001).15 The liberal publication Famiglia Cristiana had 5 million readers, and sale parocchiali – parish cinemas – made up one third of the country’s 15,000 cinemas in the 1950s, increasing from 559 in 1945 to 5,500 in 1955 (Forgacs and Gundle: 2008: 209). The traditions and public spaces of Italy are so marked by Catholic worship and its democratic reconstruction was based on the direct politicisation of belief, with the Christian Democrats continuously in governmental power. In its search to extend Catholic influence in society after 1948, grassroots campaigns were started up, such as touring statues of the Virgin Mary, the Madonne pellegrine, and the campaign for moral purity that centred around the canonisation of Maria Goretti (ibid.: 255), her life told as a melodrama in the film Cielo sulla palude/Heaven over the Marshes (Augusto Genina, 1949). With regard to the meanings created by the modes of expression of melodrama, Ira Bhaskar has discussed the presence in Indian melodrama of ‘the continuum of the sacred in the everyday, a ritual affirmation of faith in the spiritual that is integrally connected to the significant place of tradition in the nationalist ideology of the modern’ (Bhaskar 2012: 172). Something similar can be said about the way that post-war Italian melodrama envisages the place of Catholic tradition in the midst of reconstruction Italy. The Marian cult explicitly informs films such as Anna, Noi peccatori and Maddalena, whose characters both pray to the Virgin but also directly recall iconographic representations of her. This is at a time in which Pius XII saw women as playing a vital role in the preservation of the traditional, Catholic family; a bulwark against the various threats of Communism, modernism, and individualism. This meant promoting a very traditional, idealized image of self-sacrificing, devoted womanhood – or rather motherhood – seen at its most perfect in the Virgin Mary. (Morris 2006b: 5) Her importance is as a symbolic configuration of guardian of the house, virgin mother, and mater dolorosa. As the virgin mother she represents the idealisation of womanhood in Western culture which defines the lost – and impossible – innocence suffusing femininity in the domestic melodrama. As the mater dolorosa, she allows emotional expression – if not articulation – of the dissatisfaction attendant upon the earthly inability to live up to such ideals. Warner cites Monsignor Salvatore Giardina, thus: ‘a woman who weeps always becomes, in the very act, a mother’ (Warner 1990: 223). An innocent prisoner in Gli innocenti pagano tells his wife that mothers ‘have to suffer’ down the generations, and the grandmother in La nemica tells her daughter that to be a

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mother ‘it is not enough to suffer, you need to suffer without knowing why.’ Obviously, the exaltation of motherly renunciation and dissatisfaction to the realms of the sacred performs a convenient function in a context of renewed conservatism regarding women’s roles; it is worth registering however that within a situation of highly limited options for women, sacrifice allows women to effect some kind of control: Anna renounces Andrea and decides to dedicate herself to service in the hospital; the mother in Nel gorgo del peccato sacrifices her life for the sake of her son’s marriage, and in so doing ascends to a heaven free from the film’s presentation of a life of hard unthanking work, financial pressures, her son’s continual ingratitude and his wife’s unsavoury associates. Remembering that devotion can be religious or earthly, the idiom of the spiritual also helps channel female desire. In Anna, Anna’s explicit alternatives are God or a fiancé (she chooses the former), and in Nel gorgo del peccato, the materialistic and sexualised relationship between Alberto and Germaine transforms into an exaggeratedly chaste picture of domestic bliss in the final images as the mother explains from heaven the continuation of her own love for them in their marriage. The sacred allows the problems of life, love, happiness, loss and family to be given meaning in relation to a Catholic worldview but interpreted within the everyday reality of modern life. The opening sequence of Anna sees an ambulance speed through the city past Milan Cathedral and up to the modern hospital building. The films give a verisimilitudinous basis to the wonder of the miraculous, presenting that which could happen but which nevertheless seems possible only through reference to divine intervention – witness the astounding coincidences that bring characters back together, or what happens when Maddalena in the eponymous film is bathed in light in Church, dressed as the Virgin for the procession. A woman enters, crying and asking for her help. Maddalena goes to the boy’s sickbed and prays with him, light entering the gloom from the window above, and he recovers. The expressive possibilities of devotion, iconography, and the miraculous are taken to melodramatic culmination in the finale to Noi peccatori, when Stefano forgives his wife Lucia for having moonlighted as a nightclub performer and goes to find her, now paralysed after a road accident and being wheeled along to the Our Lady of Pompeii service. He stands outside the church as masses of people flow in to the celebration, the soundtrack led by a juvenile female chorus, its communal, female and regenerative aspects to the fore. He spots Lucia swept up among a crowd surging towards the church, their loss of individual agency subsumed by its greater force. The film’s finale demonstrates how the woman, and femininity as a more general category, is the route for the male’s return to the fold. Sat in the church, Lucia’s face is bathed from a sidelight, while he stands behind her less illuminated. She looks upwards, starts crying, and then looks further upwards

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Figure 1.8  Religion as background and as dramatic culmination in Noi peccatori

as he says he loves her, placing his devotion to her into her communion with a higher realm. She refuses to accept his ‘pity’, proving her capacity for renunciation, before an altar boy swings incense around them adding a further aestheticisation (as well as giving a stronger sense of the ethereality of the space, a metaphor for the near-tangibility of the almost-present metaphysicality of both melodramatic stylisation and the sacred). She collapses then lifts her head as the service begins, and looks upwards in close-up before there follows a series of shot-reverse shots with the church shrine to the Sacra Famiglia surrounded by long candles and glittering with jewels, her communion with it emphasised

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by the glitter of the tears in her eyes. As the chorus rises, it is taken up as the film’s full orchestral soundtrack, an example of the continual linkage of extradiegetic elements in melodrama with the sacred or metaphysical. She rises to walk haltingly towards it before the congregation rises, the interplay of rising and falling recurring as she kneels and prays, her miraculous ability to walk coming at the moment that the couple are reunited, and at the moment that he gets his faith back: telling him to kneel so ‘the divine light’ will enter him, she makes explicit reference to the heavenly prominence of light in terms that are bodily, personal, and romantic, in what appears almost like a wedding service, smoke giving the light shining from the roof a vertical rather than horizontal arrangement to the highly stable composition, linking the order it offers on earth to a movement towards the skies. For Brooks ‘the drama of the ineffable’ (1995: 75) of melodrama occurs by uncovering the moral occult concealed within the everyday. Bhaskar puts it somewhat differently, indicating instead how melodrama intensifies human experience in the light of the sacred, or rather establishes a continuum between the human and the divine, hereby giving hyperbolic expression to human desire [. . .] [while] [o]n the other hand [it] also underscores the circumscribed, even tragic nature of human possibilities. (2012: 173) In Italian melodrama, the characters are trapped but this entrapment exists in tension with the promise of what may lie beyond, while melodramatic strategies such as music and lighting or the gaze offscreen transform the understanding of the boundedness of the everyday. Religion is there when it is explicitly marked as there, and also when it is not. The mise-en-scène is continually organised to recall icon painting within the everyday (Lietti 1995), allowing a communication of moral attributes and signalling intertextuality with Biblical narratives in an apparently ‘intuitive dimension’ whose quick communication ‘becomes the recognisable history of shared memory and communal identity’ (Apostolos-Cappadona 2009: 440–2). Italian melodrama emulates the emotions of religious feeling, affirming the actual suffering of the humble and elevating that suffering through expressive grandeur and faith in a meaning that lies beyond the temporal reality of a vale of tears. In discussing romance narratives, Tania Modleski states that Marx’s argument that religion exists as a confirmation of and protest against real suffering, is ‘equally true of romantic suffering’ (Modleski 1990: 47). While the culminating ‘opium’ metaphor was not original to Marx, it is worthwhile repeating his phrases that precede it: that ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions’. In this, the sacred allows a great deal of possibility to a melodramatic

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rendering of the world, for it gives excessive meaning to dramas constrained within ‘worldly’ realms in narrative terms, allowing film style and emphatic expressivity to suggest the beyond that the characters cannot reach. In Italian melodrama this beyond becomes another measure by which to judge excess, indicating as it does the meaning and expressive significance of the everyday world of the narratives through realms which it cannot however reach. Religious institutions provide succour at the same time as they confirm the absolute state of the wretchedness of its recipients. The heroines of Ti ho sempre amato! and Noi peccatori return to religious sanctuaries when they have each suffered disgrace over their sexual conduct, the former with a baby to put into their care and the latter having lost the use of her legs. Both films end on the relief of the heroines who are taken back by their lovers and so away from the Church, and on the basis of an acceptance of the compromised moral positions of the protagonists that suggest that the Church’s official rules for life are in the modern age untenable. Maddalena and Nel gorgo del peccato culminate in forms of sanctification of their heroines through their accidental martyrdom, presenting the impossibility of their family life or happiness. The Church in Anna and Gelosia punishes in the first film an adulterer, and in the second an adulterous murderer. It may well be the case that the modern age finds very little of dramatic value in straightforward morality tales, or in happy fables about day to day life in houses of God. Yet it does seem important that films so infused with a religious sensibility should at the same time present religion as in one way or another denying the very happiness and personhood that melodrama holds as definitive needs. Despite Anna’s repeated closing lines that ‘I haven’t lost’, the Church and its institutions cannot but represent a selfabnegation that is felt as the greatest possible loss, because it is the loss of the possibility of individual fulfilment. Although religiosity suffuses the melodramatic experience, it conflicts with the protagonists’ happiness while calamity and persecution highlight the futility of their virtue. Italian melodrama has found greatest popularity at times when the role of religion is undergoing greatest change. With the post-war assumption of Government power by the DCI, the temporal power of the Church had reached its greatest point since the establishment of the Italian nation. But this point also marks the moment in the modern era when it steps down from the celestial sphere no longer to abstain from the daily vicissitudes of political life.16 To return to the outlines of an argument offered above with regards to the family, Italian melodrama in the post-war period idealises the religious sensibility in a dramatic context which renders its realisation impossible. It reminds spectators of a universal order that operates according to tradition, hierarchy and God and that stands in confrontation to one understood through personal feeling. Therefore post-war melodrama brings us to the very

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modern dilemma where traditional moral authority dominates the realms of the ought yet retreats from those of the is. Ritual The ideology criticism that has dominated film studies alongside the tendency in Italian criticism to berate popular culture both conclude that genre cinema functions to produce acquiescence to established power. The Church in this period however did not agree, seeing in cinema something that the flock, given its tendency to original sin, ought to be defended against (Baldelli 1968). Pius XII undertook an assessment of the popularity of the cinema in 1955 with his ‘Il Film ideale’ speeches. His starting point was that the cinema’s allure is a ‘kind of enchantment’ ([1955] cited in ibid.: 377), its spectators almost hypnotically and acritically drawn into the spectacle (De Berti 2006: 96). The popular success of cinema, the depths of the passions ascribed to those watching the larger than life events on the luminous screen, had preoccupied commentators from the early 1910s, a connection quickly having been made with religious devotion – cinema being called by Pope Pius XII the ‘Church of the modern man in the big cities’ ([1943] cited in Mosconi 2006: 270–1), while ‘diva’ means deity, divine being. In a similar vein then to Federico Fellini’s youthful fantasies of ‘the fascinating ritual that would unfold within [the theatre]’ (Brunetta 2002: 99), the belief that mass audiences approach the cinema as a site of devotion is widespread. Grasping the dialectic of ritual with modern consumerist sensation, Siegfried Kracauer discussed popular cinema as the ‘Cult of Distraction’, naming Berlin’s picture palaces ‘shrines to the cultivation of pleasure’ (1995: 323). Etymologically, sacred means ‘set aside’, and ‘temple’ concerns a particular experience of time, and so the special moments of diversion in the movie theatre, the time and space of the filmic presentation of the world, contain stimulating connections to ritual practices. Kracauer’s studies stand as part of a more general interest in the transformation of forms of the sacred in the modern era. In the political sphere, Emilio Gentile discussed Fascism as ‘the sacralisation of politics’, (Ferrari 2003: 2) for its mobilisation of the apparently non-rational and emotive properties in ‘the relationship between spectacle and ideology’. As the work of De Martino has detailed, forms of worship and popular life especially in the south of Italy conserved into the modern era forms of ritual that pre-date Christian times and to which Official Catholic doctrine performed an historic accommodation (De Martino 2000). This persistence of pagan rituals is based on the recognition that the ritual repetition of mythic models fulfils the existential function of protection from the terror of history and of providing a

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basis for and perspective on the precariousness of the human condition. (De Martino 1980: 37) In this vein, some of the themes and experiences of melodrama seem strikingly close to those described in ritual, including the warding off of catastrophe, an inability to effect change, preoccupations with crisis: as Filippucci has summarised it, this mindset operates from an awareness ‘of the limited efficacy of human action’ [. . .] the peasants had a fragile sense of self, in danger of ‘floundering’ at times of crisis, like the death of kin. This condition of psychological misery particularly affected women, who were even more oppressed than men in this socio-economic context. Ritualized weeping was a technique to alleviate self-destructive impulses unleashed by grief, containing psychological collapse [. . .] (Filippucci 1996: 61–3) The hypothesis then is that ‘the role of non-rational forms of knowledge (e.g. mythical and religious) in dealing with individual and collective crises’ (Filippuci 1996: 65 summarising Tullio-Altan) can be extended to encompass the cinema, or at least those forms of cinema, most particularly melodrama, concerned with ritualised weeping. In arguing for the correspondences between ritual and cinemagoing, Brunetta states that mass ritual, which spreads and generalizes, identifies the space of vision with the idea of festivity and of the sacred place in which one is initiated into all the fundamental stages of existence. More than a habit, cinema becomes a school of life and thought, a place of sentimental, moral and cultural education [. . .] and, above all, the social dimension in which at the highest level are concentrated collective desires and deep aspirations. (Brunetta 2002: 101–2) Applying ideas of ritual within a more restricted time and place, MarlowMann’s study of Neapolitan cinema (Marlow-Mann 2011: 46) connects its success to changing ways of conceiving of and experiencing community in modern society. I bring up ritual in regard to melodrama not so as to prove any notions about melodrama as an ahistorical or bewitching form, but so as to conclude by considering its capacity to test the border places of the social order (see Gledhill 2001). This would account for its popularity within its particular historical period of felt uncertainty and epochal transition, expressed through reference to an intimate sphere and played out in a space, the cinema theatre,

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that itself exists at the border of public and private. Melodrama works to re-embody social meaning. Here, the importance of the factors considered above – of genre, of the body, of excess, of femininity, of order, of value, of popularity, of the sacred – come into view from a different perspective, that of the special place of socially charged emblems with collectively understood meanings that contribute to the ritual aspect of cinema. Melodrama, as does ritual, considers states of bodily control (e.g. disciplining sexuality) but also of abandon (e.g. screaming), conversion and uncontainedness (tears), rather than disembodied injunctions of advanced legal orders. Hence the emphasis on feeling, embodiment, certainty, but also their fragility. What is important is a conscious testing of limits between self and social order, taboo and conformity, authenticity and exaggeration, imagination and reality, public and private. As Simon Williams has put it, order, in other words, tied as it is to a rationalist ambition of an inherently controllable world, is continuously engaged in a war for survival [. . .] To be sure, bodies, as the history of Western civilisation shows, are amenable to discipline and control – from the prison to the factory, the school to the asylum – but they are also fundamentally ‘excessive’; always leaning, through their libidinal flows and corporeal desires, their pleasures and their pains, their agonies and their ecstasies, in the direction of excess and threatening to ‘overspill’ their culturally constituted boundaries. (Simon Williams 2009: 143) With further reference to the spectacularisation of the limits of order, I have argued for the validity of the term ‘excess’ when seen as conflicting with and measured against the bounds of restriction that define it; of the communion of the world of the diegesis with other realms (either of idealised domestic bliss, a community of fluid emotional expression, personal happiness, or heavenly beyond) suggested through expressive means but which the characters cannot realise; and the excess of the physical capacities of the spectator whether in the sublime overwhelming of the spectator’s rationality or in the concentration on the limit experiences of the body, and, of course, in tears. As part of the folklore of everyday life, melodrama expresses a popular religiosity that intermingles deep fatalism, aspects of pagan ritual, and social solidarity. A ‘sudden flourishing of martyrs, saints and virgins hits Italian cinema in the period from 1943 to 1960’ (Grignaffini 2002: 233–4) bringing to the screen through the exemplary lives of the saints a parallel phenomenon with the martyrdoms witnessed in the films discussed here, with Anna, Nel gorgo, Noi peccatori, Maddalena and more. Together they stage a combined emphasis on femininity, the miraculous, on the function of sacrifice, and on popular figures of identification. As such they position ‘the female as an

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equally abstract site of innocence and blame, damnation or redemption’ (ibid.: 278). The central place of sacrifice, determined by questions of guilt and resolution, denies women happiness as it affirms their privileged place in a cosmology which sees earthly suffering as a necessary prior stage to a better life. Considering the symbolic role of femininity in a very different context, it has been stated that ‘women are bearers, or perhaps the bearers, of group identity, and they thus have a very important part to play in the process of demarcation of group boundaries’ (Goddard 1987: 172). It then follows that since ‘Women may also be seen to represent, and perhaps most forcefully through their sexuality, the privacy and intimacy of the group’ (ibid.: 181), the filtering of experience through femininity witnessed in post-war melodrama once again reinforces the importance of this collection of films for the questions of crisis and group identity. The above analysis has acted to elaborate how melodrama offers a cosmology, one symbolised through the body, through suffering, and through a construction of what constitutes excess. In this context the emphatic performance and conventionalisation of emotionality in melodrama can be seen to be public ways of working through an understanding of the self’s relation to the world. Thus the value of romance, of expression, consolation, femininity and the popular experience of life, of suffering, compassion and forgiveness as processes worked out in common, as well as of the structure, order and proximity brought about by the domestic home, is foregrounded as a way of making sense of and overcoming the catastrophes of the world of events. Notes   1. For further discussion of genre, see the collection of articles in Eugeni and Farinotti 2002.   2. Although, being unalloyed melodrama, and in contradistinction to the Hollywood melodrama that played in Italian cinemas contemporaneously, rarely much comedy.   3. See Barlozzetti et al. 1986, and Bernardini and Martinelli 1986, for information on specific production companies.   4. On Italian stardom see Gundle 2007, Landy 2008 and Wood 2004.   5. In the work of Günsberg 2005, Hipkins et al. 2011, Schifano 1995, Sorlin 1996, Viviani 1997, Wood 2005.   6. An extra word of caution ought to be made here regarding terminology: despite the habit in non-Italian criticism of referring to post-war Italian melodrama as part of neorealismo rosa, usually translated as pink or rosy neorealism, this term is used in Italian scholarship exclusively for comedies which offer an ultimately cheerier dramatic world than do either the melodramas or their contemporary neorealist cousins.   7. On film posters see also Baroni 1999 and Cardone 2003b.   8. On the family in Italy see Barbagli and Saraceno 1997, Caldwell 1986 and 1995, Ginsborg 1990b, Melograni 1988, Wilson 2004.  9. Meno bella.

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10. On women in Italian culture and society see Baranski and Vinall 1991, Cicioni and Prunster 1993, Morris 2006a. 11. Also a writer who contributed to the screenplays of Cento anni d’amore (Lionello De Felice, 1954) and Le amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955). 12. Such an ‘expressionist’ world ought to be distinguished from Expressionism, which, although it has similarities with melodrama, tends towards the supernatural, horrific, or more fully psychologised – rather than simply emotionalised – experiences which remove the faith in innocence and authenticity that melodrama maintains. 13. On gender see also Bellassai and Malatesta 2000. 14. See Doane 1982, Williams 1984 for questions of the female gaze in Hollywood cinema and Cooper Sloan 2013 specifically for its appearance in Hollywood melodrama. 15. See also Allum 1990, Caldwell 1978, Filippucci 1996, McCarthy 2000b, TreveriGennari 2009. 16. ‘The credibility of the D.C. and some of its men was weakened by the first scandals in the history of the Republic’, starting in particular when on 11 April 1953 the body of Wilma Montesi was found at the Lido di Ostia, and the subsequent police investigation uncovered a web of corruption (Scoppola 2006: 40).

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I  Melodrama, Realism, Modernism When choosing the key or representative moments of Italian sound cinema, textbook histories make sure to mention consolatory comedy dominating before the fall of Fascism and then a brief flame of searching, committed neorealism as a response afterwards, settling into a system of arthouse auteurism in the 1950s until crisis hits in the 1970s. These are characterisations which project a particular relationship between culture and society, and have as much to do with how scholarship would like to perceive its own role as anything else. That is, they tell no untruth, but prioritise the separation of art from commerce while attaching popularity to conformity. It is precisely the work of scholarship to select, shape and define, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to deny that such processes are at work in any appraisal of an epoch’s culture, this one included. What I seek to do is add to the more familiar picture of post-war Italian cinema the dynamic of melodrama. Throughout these periods the industry’s commercial and productive bases were a genre system aimed at popular tastes, one that provided the material and artistic grounds from which auteurist experimentation took root and one that helped determine the social function of culture. In the previous section I considered melodrama as a genre, restricted within the period 1949–54. In the longer historical view, melodrama is a response to changed perceptions of selfhood, knowledge, feeling and value wrought by the modern era, and to the consequent crises of older forms of representation.

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In this it constitutes one of the three forms, along with realism and modernism, that respond to the specific needs of the modern age. As well as comedy, each of these forms is particularly important in Italian cinema (limiting the degree to which one can describe Italian cinema through ideals of classicism).1 Furthermore, the post-war period was in Italy one in which cinema was the most prominent terrain on which were posed questions of artistic form and purpose. Given the centrality of Italy internationally to the rearticulation of cinema’s relationship to reality at this point, to sketch the broader place of melodrama in the post-war period will also be to trace some of the contours of the function of culture itself. Passionate realism Realism can be a flexible way of describing the relation between artistic form and reality. As a term it can be used to describe the development in painting during the Renaissance of depth cues that give the illusion of three-dimensional space and a sense of material tactility; in the nineteenth century, the bourgeois theatre of the ‘well-made play’ and its exposition of coherent psychological motivations of individualised protagonists; contemporaneously, the developing use of art for social criticism; and in classical Hollywood, the absorption of the spectator into the illusion of a real world populated by heroic identificatory figures. Italian cinema has historically been most famous for social criticism, and for the formal innovations it has made in presenting the environment in which this criticism occurs. This is most especially the case with neorealism and its revolutionary effects on global cinema.2 Filmed in 1945 and set in 1944, Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini), which won the 1946 Grand Prize at Cannes and enjoyed strong commercial success at home, marked the beginning of neorealism. The film tells the story of recent events concerning the Roman Resistance movement and the Nazi occupation, centring specifically on an alliance between a Communist Partisan and a Catholic Priest. The filming took place on streets marked by considerable war damage, and the necessities of the quick shoot (and, it has to be said, Rossellini’s habits as a director) entailed a distinctly unglamorous, rough feel to the drama, which aims, however, to make a rousing call for popular unity in progressive reconstruction. Its many non-professional actors (the part of Marina, who betrays the partisans to the Nazis, was played by Maria Michi, a cinema usher whom Rossellini encountered) speak in dialect, although the film stars the seasoned local theatrical performers Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, whose careful performances convey emotional force. Many Italian filmmakers after the war wished to use cinema to record and participate in the mass rejection of Fascism and the democratic optimism of Reconstruction that was occurring nationally. This was a task marked by

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enthusiasm and urgency, and it took place with the very limited means on offer in a bombed country and broken industry. Roma città aperta was the first of a ‘trilogy of war’ directed by Rossellini, which included Paisà/Paisan (1946), a film in six episodes following the Allied soldiers’ advance up Italy, and Germania, anno zero/Germany, Year Zero (1948), the bleakest of the three, in post-war Berlin. The inauguration of neorealism was confirmed by Sciuscià/ Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946), another film set in Rome and occurring this time in the American-occupied aftermath of the war, in which two shoeshine boys end up in the juvenile detention system. The film was directed by Vittorio De Sica and scripted by Cesare Zavattini, whose partnership was prolific and included the two films perhaps most definitive of neorealism, Ladri di b ­ iciclette/ Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952). Luchino Visconti contributed La terra trema (1948), and Giuseppe De Santis a ‘trilogy of the earth’ with Caccia tragica/Tragic Pursuit (1947), Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (1949) and Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi/No Peace under the Olives (1950) each taking place in rural settings.3 Alongside these names is a series of film directors rather less often considered among the canon than was the case during neorealism’s early existence, including Luigi Zampa, Luigi Comencini, Alberto Lattuada and Pietro Germi (each of these filmmakers will be discussed further below). A combination of changed artistic priorities, a loss of the popular audience to the more radical experiments in cinema, the political disorientation of the progressive left more generally in 1950s Italy, renewed censorship by the Christian Democrat government and economic stabilisation had by the mid1950s removed the impulses that initially gave neorealism life. Zavattini was the only cineaste to happily call himself a neorealist, and the term describes more a twin impulse to realism and social solidarity in the cinema than any movement or principles. The coherence of neorealism is instead to be found in its participation in the political questions of its historical moment, and in the way it makes evident its intention that the reconstruction of national cinema be part of the reconstruction of the nation. The realism of post-war Italian cinema thus adheres to the fundamentally democratic spirit that Raymond Williams has described as characteristic of realism in a discussion of the development of British theatre: that it is socially extended, and so not about kings, those of rank, or gods, that it is contemporary, secular, and that it contains a moral lesson that could be applied by the audience to their own lives (Williams 1976: 63). Put differently – and with a Catholic inflection – by the filmmaker Vittorio De Sica about his canonical neorealist work Ladri di biciclette, the aim was to capture that state of mind considered too ‘common’ [. . .] That is how I understand realism, which cannot be, in my opinion, mere documentation [. . .] My film is dedicated to the suffering of the humble. (De Sica 1978: 88)

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Such filmmaking thus makes a claim that film has a purpose which is not primarily that of entertainment, commerce, beauty, or propaganda (however much the neorealist faith in the downtrodden might suggest otherwise). As opposed to the peasant worldview and domestic emphasis of the melodramas discussed in the last chapter, Italian neorealism can be placed in the philosophical tradition of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile (Wagstaff 2008: 13–14), endowing on culture an improving and consciously progressive mission. An encounter between Italian and broader European trends, the impulse behind neorealism can be described as a manifestation of left-Croceanism’s ‘characteristically Italian cross-fertilisation between idealist and Marxist thought’ (Forgacs 1990: 158). Those theorising a new, anti-Fascist filmmaking looked to the nineteenthcentury precursor verism, the aim of which, according to French verist novelist Zola was not only to achieve ‘scientific investigation, experimental reasoning’ (cited in Marcus 1989: 8) but, as the Sicilian verist Giovanni Verga put it, a ‘science of the heart’ (cited in ibid.: 12). What would separate this realism from melodrama is the claim to operate according to scientific paradigms of knowledge which are not based, as melodrama is, on embodiment and emotion but on the promise of detached exegesis of circumstance, thus marking the difference as one of the epistemological claims of representation (Gledhill 1992). Such analysis can be reduced to more commonplace assertions, such as that realism, unlike melodrama, concerns itself with the ‘ordinary, not the extraordinary’ (Hallam 2000: 20). In principle, this may all seem quite far from melodrama. The immediate question that concerns us here is how realism in general, and neorealism in particular, seems so often to be so melodramatic. Verismo opera can be considered to be a precursor to the melodramatic narratives of peril and passion that marked the birth of the feature film, including in the impoverished, regional Neapolitan tradition that includes future neorealist reference points Assunta Spina (Francesca Bertini and Gustavo Serena, 1915) and Sperduti nel buio (Nino Martoglio 1914). Their regional urban settings are fitting backdrops to the desperation of poor and persecuted protagonists and elevated passion. These films are essentially populist mixtures of melodrama and realism,4 the work of Neapolitan director Elvira Notari having been described as tear-jerkers, films full of dramatic reversals, studded with crimes of passion, betrayal, and torment [. . .] It was that very realism, that deeply felt depiction of poverty, that annoyed the Fascist regime. (Miscuglio 1988: 153) The operatic landscape of Italian cinema has made itself felt in a number of ways: the ‘feeling for space’ that has been seen as part of the early historical

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epics’ quest for verisimilitude (Leprohon 1972: 27) in films like Quo vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1912) and Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii/The Last Days of Pompeii (Mario Caserini and Eleuterio Rodolfi, 1913) is reminiscent of operatic super-spectacles like Aïda. The upper-class domestic dramas of the formally precise Calligraphist films from the closing years of Fascism included a proto-neorealist attention to the details of life. Demonstrating the development of the thought of one of the main filmmakers to develop neorealism, De Santis in the journal Cinema praised the Calligraphist film Piccolo mondo antico/Old Fashioned World (Mario Soldati, 1941) for showing a landscape not in terms of detached observation, but ‘which corresponded to the humanity of the characters either as an emotive element or as a clue to their feelings’ (De Santis 1978: 127). When Guido Aristarco, from the Marxist journal Cinema Nuovo, sought to combat Fellini’s perceived abandonment of realism in La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954), his weapon was Visconti’s melodrama Senso,5 while Communist intellectual Vittorini, whose project was to instil a critical social consciousness among the masses through creating an oppositional culture, stated that it was literary melodrama that reached a ‘greater truth’ (cited in Tinazzi 1983: 26). To return then to general principles in light of such examples, realism is as often recognised through character type and style as much as through any analytical intent or avoidance of the extraordinary. If we consider that verism was also a form of opera which aspired ‘to present a vivid, melodramatic plot, to arouse sensation by violent contrasts, to paint a cross section of life’ (Jay Grout 1965: 440), we can adopt a more flexible attitude to realism. By definition, its realism is not that of verisimilitude or scientific observation; people, even in Italy, do not tend to sing through their lives accompanied by an orchestra. Its realism comes from its setting among the popular classes amid crime, violence or squalor, and its use of musical themes from popular and peasant traditional forms, giving it a less extravagant and rougher quality in its musical drama than previous forms of opera. Verismo opera provides a most obvious example of a more general point: that an artwork is realist only insofar as it can be argued that it displays a closer relationship to – not offer a mere replication of – extra-artistic reality than other comparable forms. Even at its most realist, Italian cinema in the neorealist period did not subscribe to the naturalist positivism which sees the camera as a dispassionate scientific tool. Realism presents the appearance of a real world through artistic means. Any claims for the scientific basis of realist works are limited by the fact that their situations have no independently measurable existence beyond their manifestation within the artworks themselves. To return to the relationship to melodrama, we are confronted with two protean forms often understood in relational rather than absolute terms – ‘in excess of . . .’ for melodrama and ‘more like life than . . .’ for realism. It may, in the abstract, solve a certain criti-

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cal conundrum to define melodrama and realism against each other. But there are real impulses at the very basis of the forms that blur the boundaries between them. In its anti-feudal concern with the moral condition of ordinary people, realism has a historically conditioned affinity with melodrama. The Russian formalist view of melodrama’s ‘one overriding aesthetic goal: the calling forth of “pure”, “vivid” emotions [. . .] [that bare] the passions’ (Balukhatyi, cited in Neale 2000: 198) seems assimilable with De Santis’ lauding of verist Verga’s writing as ‘a revolutionary art inspired by, and acting, in turn, as inspiration to a humanity which hopes and suffers’ (Alicata and De Santis 1978: 135). At its simplest, realism can be described as the intention to ‘show things as they really are’ (Lovell 1980: 8). To analyse, to rationalise and to psychologise each seem to take second place in neorealism to the performative realism denoted in the ‘showing’ aspect of the intention to ‘show things as they really are’. As the neorealist director Alberto Lattuada stated in 1945: So we’re in rags? Then let’s show everyone our rags. So we’re defeated? Then let’s look at our disasters [. . .] How much of this is due to the Mafia, to hypocrisy, to conformism, to irresponsibility, to bad ­education? [. . .] Let us pay our debts with a ferocious love of honesty and the world will be moved and join in this great settlement with the truth. This confession will illuminate our secret virtues, our belief in life, our superior Christian sense of fraternity. (cited in Ben-Ghiat 2005: 355) A vividness of address with an often didactic moral tone, a focus on questions of ordinariness and authenticity, the conflict of the personal life with social factors of the law, class, poverty, and an investment in the materiality of the world its characters inhabit, are common both to melodrama and realism. One can thus theorise a more fruitful relationship between realism and melodrama if one positions melodrama at the emotional and expressive centre of the authenticating dramatic function of realism. Giuliana Bruno makes the connection, after discussing Elvira Notari’s silent melodramas, that ‘A subsequent re-occurrence of realism in Italian cinema, in the aesthetic of neorealism, also has a melodramatic edge’, concluding with the invitation that ‘Neorealism compel[s] one to place and reread Italian cinematic realism within the mode of excess’ (Bruno 1993: 161–2). It is this rereading – of neorealism within the melodramatic mode, rather than more restrictedly that of excess – upon which we shall now embark. Neorealism and melodrama One way of defining neorealism has been to present it as a rejection of melodrama. Millicent Marcus states that realism is an ‘opposed tendency’ to

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melodrama in Riso amaro, the most commercially successful of all the principal neorealist films, and that it serves to throw the melodrama into ‘violent relief’ (Marcus 1989: 86). In this film, it is in part the heroine’s addiction to the superficial romance stories she reads in the photo-story fotoromanzi magazines that tempts her to betray class solidarity, for they give her dreams of luxury that lead her to take part in a plan to steal the workers’ rice harvest. In the Resistance dramas Roma città aperta and Il sole sorge ancora (Aldo Vergano, 1946), the German soldiers are part of a decadent and affected culture of outright villainy. They are also presented in a different manner from the other characters in the film, frequently ensconced in smoke and shadow in Roma città aperta, while in Il sole sorge ancora, the German soldiers in one scene race around on horseback shooting at the Partisans while sneering and cracking their whips, lit by flickering torches in the moonlight. Their cruelty is bestial and Satanic, their character irredeemably vicious. Placing vice in less metaphysical realms is the critical portrayal of a petty-bourgeois landlady in Umberto D., who gestures grandly as she and her friends play out their selfindulgent emotional dramas while disregarding the material plight they cause to others, who suffer humiliation and the prospect of homelessness. These particular actors perform with histrionics within elaborately furnished studio sets lit artificially, the landlady in Umberto D. played by a well-known character actress of the time (Lina Gennari), adding up to a rejection of melodramatic conventions made within the film itself. To consider this rejection of a certain conventional style of drama a rejection of any kind of melodrama would lead to some confusing conclusions, not least the judgement that neorealism continually let down these principles that have been ascribed to it. Such inconsistency in perceptions of neorealism’s melodrama occurs in Sitney’s discussion of Sciuscià (Sitney 1995: 83). He quotes approvingly of the campaigning thrust of the lawyer’s speech in the film, defending the two boys from being sent to jail: ‘Return these innocents to their homes, their families, their schools, and their jobs. This is not rhetoric, gentlemen. Because if you find them guilty, then we, all of us, are also guilty; for in pursuing our passions we have abandoned our children to themselves: they are always more and more alone.’ Sitney’s subsequent disappointment that the film ‘ends in melodrama’ (ibid.: 83) sits uncomfortably with the film’s politico-dramatic project, as indicated in the lawyer’s speech. Children in the film are emblematic of a suffering populace. Its world of financial uncertainty and corrupt adulthood, whose trickery or bourgeois insouciance denies childhood innocence or nurture, confirms their victimhood. The film emphasises these points with high expressivity: from its opening credits over a corridor with a pattern of an imprisoning grid across it, the fortissimo when Giuseppe prints his fingerprints, symbolising his eternal loss to the prison system, and ultimately, as pointed out by Sitney, but not at all out of keeping with the

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Figure 2.1  The melodramatic artificiality of the German occupiers in Roma città aperta and the landlady in Umberto D.

rest of the film, the killing of Giuseppe by his childhood friend, committed in violent anger and crucially due to a misunderstanding, leading to the final tearful physical breakdown as Pasquale screams his dead former friend’s name. This is an example of the kind of melodrama that permeates neorealism. In a sequence in Roma città aperta, a group of child Partisans daringly escape the blast of a bomb they have planted as the main theme on the orchestral soundtrack, used at points which indicate hope against despair,

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reaches its ­crescendo. Meanwhile the mother of one of the children, Pina, Anna Magnani’s character, clasps her hands to her face and walks anxiously towards the window clutching at herself in horror, lit strikingly by the effects of the explosions in the night (see Figure 2.2). This is more than an isolated moment of drama; the Resistance struggle as a whole is structured as a wealth of gathering, repressed energy and signifies virtue, innocence, and an inevitable force erupting from beneath: the very same elements that Peter Brooks deemed those of the ‘melodramatic imagination’ (see Brooks 1995). Later in the film Pina is shot by German soldiers on her wedding day, having broken screaming through their lines to save her captured fiancé. This is played as a violent and rapid climax, the music in strong as she is felled by bullets, her lifeless body then held by the Priest in a formation that resembles the ‘Pietà’, an image of nurtured martyrdom. The world of the film, its political struggle and the hope it suggests for the future, are understood through emotionalised energies lying just beneath the surface of its emphasised reality. Thus the aesthetic opposition in neorealism that has been seen as one between realism and melodrama could be read more usefully as one between artificiality and authenticity, which need not count out melodrama. Melodrama helps characterise the authentic wealth of emotion, the desperate circumstances, the pathos of social restrictions, and the important moral questions as fundamental aspects of the lives of the people, while artificiality is a property of oppressors, exploiters and the rich, and confronts that authenticity in what is itself a melodramatic confrontation of innocent virtue with dissimulating vice. Rather than equal a condemnation of unrepressed emotion and excess, these qualities are in characters such as Pina, the heroine of Roma città aperta, given a working-class foundation in contrast to bourgeois affectation. Natural authenticity fulfils for neorealism the function that innocence did in eighteenth-century melodrama. The struggle between authenticity and artificiality is at the heart of Riso amaro, and it is embodied in the character of the rice-picker Silvana, an agricultural worker lured, however, by the glamour of the fotoromanzi. The political drama lies in how her destination in the plot – she betrays her fellow workers for the promise of riches by her gangster boyfriend – contrasts with the way in which she exemplifies a neorealist ‘symbiosis of body and landscape’ (Gundle 2007: 180). Just as Pina in Roma città aperta had symbolised a nation felled by Nazi occupation, Silvana is used to symbolise ‘the embodiment of the true, deep Italy, a popular Italy that was to be drawn into the life of the nation by a revolution leading to the foundation of a democratic republic’ (Grignaffini 1988: 263), and one that must be drawn away from the lures of Americanised glamour. A different manifestation of the way melodrama and realism combine in natural authenticity occurs in the famed use of children in neorealism. Often underlining Martha Wolfenstein’s statement that ‘children are melodramatic’

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(1955: 277), their performative emphasis and emotional charge has the benefit of appearing (to adults, at least) both immediate and ever close to victimhood. In Ladri di biciclette, a father’s search for his livelihood, a stolen bike, is undertaken with the accompaniment of his young son Bruno. Bruno adds nothing to the plot but gives instead a sense of what emotionally and domestically is at stake. The pensioner Umberto in Umberto D. is, in his attempt to escape homelessness, accompanied by his dog Flaike, an even more defenceless and fully mute vehicle for the same strategy of redoubling the emotionality of the situation. Against their innocence the evils of society are more strongly felt, and in their impotence the malignity of contemporary society can be denounced. Realist techniques and social criticism thus exist alongside factors which, although not necessarily melodramatic in terms of being unconvincingly overdone, are certainly so in terms of heightening the emotionalised expressivity of suffering virtue. To modern ears this is probably most obvious in the neorealist use of music, which Alessandro Cicognini, the composer of Ladri di biciclette, explained as necessary to reveal human depths (Cicognini 1950: 168). Neorealist music also underlines dramatic emphasis and signals emotionality, particularly states of hope and despair, pathos and devastation. Even editing and lighting effects, although usually realistically motivated, can be employed in terms quite conventionally melodramatic. At the climax of Ladri di biciclette a final act of impotent desperation leads Ricci to attempt to steal a bike, and the rising tension of the orchestral score accompanies the increasingly rapid close-ups that intercut between the anxious Ricci and the open, shocked, then tearful face of young Bruno. Similarly, the pensioner Umberto contemplates homelessness in a final encounter with his destroyed room. The holes in the wall cast expressionistic shadows across his face, and he then goes to throw himself under a train; the steam from the whizzing locomotive envelops him, its screaming whistle seeming to speak his alarm as the wind gusts past and his dog yelps and screams. In Germania, anno zero, Edmund, who has killed his father in a mistaken perception of moral utility, wanders in lonely despair around a destroyed Berlin, finally to throw himself from a building. Melodrama is thus not simply the individual idiosyncrasy it is often described as being in each of the neorealist filmmakers – neither of De Santis’ ‘heterodoxy’ (Marcus 1989: 72), De Sica’s sentimentality, Rossellini’s Catholic elevators of feeling nor of Luchino Visconti’s operatic sensibility. It is one of neorealism’s most consistent traits. As well as aiding the dramatic, political and aesthetic aspects of neorealism, melodrama also works towards an analysis of historical dynamics. Paisà, Rossellini’s follow-up to Roma città aperta, dramatises the occupation of Italy by German and Allied troops in six self-contained dramatic episodes that follow their advance up Italy and across the two years of their battle with the occupying Germans. The third episode, set in Rome, begins with newsreel

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Figure 2.2  Melodrama as authenticity in Roma città aperta and Sciuscià

footage of the Germans leaving the city and the Allied soldiers arriving. Spring passes to autumn and the Allies are established as occupying forces, with Rome a place of crime and discord. An encounter in a crowded bar develops into a story as a woman, Francesca, takes home an American GI called Fred on the offer of selling him sex. Drunkenly he reminisces about how different things were when he arrived, and describes meeting a hopeful young woman, who, unbeknownst to him, is Francesca. This memory recalls the lost exuberance that greeted the Liberation,

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and Francesca’s prostitution represents a nation’s hope giving way to a desperate struggle to survive. Realising who he is, Francesca leaves her address and a meeting time as he sleeps. Billeted at a checkpoint later in the day, he throws the note away, telling his comrade it is ‘nothing, just the address of a whore’. The sentimental coincidences that mark this episode have led it to be rather dismissed in criticism,6 yet they show how personal dramas are determined by history. Wagstaff points out that the flashback in the Rome episode, which is the film’s only departure from chronological progression, serves to reveal what is behind Francesca’s ‘current state’ (2000: 46). Appearing among the crowds after the newsreel footage, Francesca is established as a representative of everyday life in the contemporary city and Fred’s reminiscences pose the question of whether it is as a hopeful young woman or as a prostitute that she really represents ‘a girl like all the others’. She is a different manifestation of representativeness to that embodied by Pina in Roma città aperta (or of Silvana in Riso amaro), the popolana (‘woman of the people’) whose martyrdom is emblematic of the momentary crushing of Italy, girded by hope in future victory. In each, female plight symbolises the nation through romantic relations played out through a melodramatic conjuncture of personal circumstance with decisive historical conditions. Although the literary theory of Georg Lukács was not to be applied to Italian realism until the following decade, when Aristarco chose Senso as exemplary of a development into Lukácsian realism, Paisà presents a sense of historical movement just as important as the much commented-upon northwards geographical advance of its episodes. Georg Lukács called for art to play a social role by going beyond the re-creation of solely surface details, to exist instead in relationships that illustrate the motive forces of history (Lukács 1971: 57, see also Lukács 1970). The integration in the Rome episode of historical events, newsreel footage, and everyday typicality achieves just such an incorporation of human dramas into the movement of history, the relationship with Fred one of occupied to occupier and its trajectory that of liberation to disillusion. The sense of historical progression is then fully stalled in the following episode, in which the flight of two people through a Florence gripped by Partisan activity against the Germans is continually halted. The melodrama here is of spatial rather than temporal movement, a stalled advance which comes to a complete stop for the next episode in the monastery, apparently outside of war and history. The film’s dramatisation of the dynamics of historical progress is achieved principally through the central position of the Rome episode, its meaning conveyed through the melodrama of its realism. The relationship between realism and melodrama does, however, bring us to a somewhat more problematic question, that is, that everydayness (which, it might be added, is not characteristic of all realism, nor all neorealism: how everyday are the events of Roma città aperta?) hardly sits well with the

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s­ensational events associated with melodrama. This point was considered at the time by André Bazin, who criticised the ‘demon of melodrama that Italian filmmakers seem incapable of exorcising’ for ‘imposing a dramatic necessity’ on events (Bazin 2005: 31). A principal contemporary champion of neorealism along with other writers in the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma (see Hillier 1985), Bazin distinguished neorealism by its development of an aesthetic that expressed a general outlook of humanism (see Bazin 2011), rather than the immediately political concerns of its contemporary Italian critics (see e.g. Chiarini 1978, Venturini 1978). This spiritual experience emerged because, for Bazin, location shooting, long takes, episodic narratives and the use of non-professional actors7 (although it has been questioned how often the innovations he praised are found in neorealism – see Wagstaff 2008) not only recorded what post-war Italy looked like, but replicated the experience of revelation, giving filmic reality a spontaneity and ambiguity – and not manipulating it so as to provide conventional dramatic thrills. What, then, becomes of melodrama in the neorealist films which most employ this aesthetic? A film to consider in this regard is La terra trema, made perhaps more than any other according to a neorealist paradigm, laid out in its opening statement: A story of man’s exploitation of man, set in Aci Trezza, Sicily. These are the houses, streets, boats and people of Aci Trezza. There are no actors; these are the inhabitants of Aci Trezza. They speak in their dialect to express their suffering and hopes. In Sicily, Italian is not the language spoken by the poor. La terra trema is a long but dramatically austere film that presents the foundering of a family’s attempt at rebellion owing to their inability to persuade the other fishermen to unite with them, thereby illustrating the atomisation of agricultural workers. Its shots linger long after the necessary narrative information has been given to show the details of the protagonists’ lives and work. And yet it is a curiously stylised presentation of the Valastro’s relationship to their environment and developing political consciousness. The film presents continual poetic metaphorisations of the family with the fish and the sea in a poeticised Catanese dialect which was all but impenetrable for mainland Italian audiences. Mamula has claimed in her study of linguistic displacement in Italian cinema, that this makes the film melodramatic by making verbal communication a lyrical spectacle (Mamula 2013: 132). Furthermore, NowellSmith (2003: 53) points out that the composition is operatic, because the entire staging, of characters and their environment, must be taken in for the film’s meaning to be conveyed. The suffering and hopes that the opening statement

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mentions are then expressed with a high degree of theatricality, relating to Visconti’s lifelong career as a director of theatre and opera. Such manifestations of melodrama are realised within an unconventional dramatic experimentalism. Sick of their exploitation by the wholesalers, the Valastro family mortgage everything to buy a boat, and set out into business on their own. After some success a storm brews during one expedition, and Mara, a daughter of the family, throws herself onto the bed at a local man’s house and collapses in tears. This distress is shown in a static one-take midshot, establishing a filmic distance from her expressivity in a way that is at odds with conventional melodrama. Long, slow shots then follow of the sea and the waves crashing against the shore, and then a series of shots of the still women standing on the rocks looking out to the waters that contain their distant men. What is denied is a classical use of mise-en-scène as simple backdrop to the action, as the sea becomes instead the focus of activity and the characters simply stop. Individual agency is reduced by their presentation as a group which is wholly dependent on the surrounding environment, the activity of which is instead the focus. The long-shots bring environmental determination to the foreground, emphasising the family’s precarious dependence on the clemency of the waves for their livelihood. Yet while this is certainly not conventionally melodramatic, it is not a capture of life unawares either. The absence of hysterical movement is a dislocating denial of histrionics, yet catastrophe is not deflated but displaced onto the whole environment. The sea thus becomes, through its elemental force, an instrument of mighty expressivity. The cut from Mara’s distress to the women at the shore does not distance the spectator from their predicament but communicates the significance of each crashing wave. Dramatic climax is transferred from Mara’s dramatics not to the rest of the family, whose stillness curtails the build-up of character action, but onto the sea, emphasising its significance to the lives of the characters. The staging both roots the characters within their environment and increases the grandeur of the stage on which their destiny unfolds. Typically for Italian melodrama the stillness of the women maintains attention on female helplessness rather than the male action which the fishermen are at that point engaged in. Typical also is the presentation of stasis in tableaux, a theatrical marker of melodramatic climax. Given the austerity of the long-shot construction of the film, the film increases the desperation of investment in materiality, renegotiating the terms of what constitutes excess away from sensual luxuriation or histrionics into an emotionalised dependence on circumstance. When the predatory agent of repression, the Maresciallo, offers the impoverished Valastro daughter Lucia a necklace, inspiring her hopes of romantic escape as conveyed in one of the film’s few close-ups, it has a symbolic weight of emotional significance increased by the general sparseness of the film’s surrounding editing design. Blurring the

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Figure 2.3  Realism’s excessive signification in La terra trema

boundaries between melodramatic cliché and Brechtian distanciation through caricatured social types, he leers in the manner of a fairytale predator, while later, the nameless man clad in a black overcoat who lures Cola to emigrate to America embodies the type of the ominous melodramatic stage villain. Still at the more unconventional end of neorealism, the work of De Sica/ Zavattini gives a somewhat different development of Italian cinema away from conventional dramatic eventfulness. Although I bambini ci guardano/ The Children Are Watching Us (Vittorio De Sica, 1944) and Sciuscià are both very obviously melodramatic films, the collaboration of the writer and director

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developed according to Zavattini’s aim to achieve pedinamento, of ‘shadowing’ the protagonists as they live out their daily lives, aiming to develop the exposition of the network of relationships that they are involved in rather than their individual drama. The protagonists’ problems remain unresolved, their relationships do not progress, but the narratives work towards episodes that elucidate the main aspects of society – Antonio and Bruno never find their bike, but in the journey they go to the pawn shop, a union hall, the market, church, through the city streets, and to the police. As Bazin described it: In the middle of the chase [for the bike] the little boy suddenly needs to piss. So he does. A downpour forces the father and son to shelter in a carriage way, so like them we have to forego the chase and wait till the storm is over. The events [. . .] all carry their own weight, their complete uniqueness, that ambiguity that characterises any fact. (Bazin, 2005: 52) As such, the episodism points the way towards a different kind of cinema, that is more uncertain, meandering and minimal than melodrama could ever be. In Umberto D., one scene shows us a four-minute-long sequence of a maid preparing a cup of coffee, not because it contributes to dramatic or psychological growth or offers the audience any insight into her emotionality, nor even because it deepens an analysis of the social position of housemaids or single mothers, but because it helps build a picture of everyday life which the filmmakers argued had value in and of itself. The maid is pregnant, facing unemployment and homelessness, and does not know which of her suitors is the father, but this is not of dramatic concern. It is as if, as their experiments progressed, the filmmakers sought situations which seem as melodramatic as possible so as to make clear the unmelodramatic nature of their presentation. ‘Storia di Caterina’, an episode of L’amore in città directed by Zavattini (1953), brings a Sicilian immigrant in Rome, who encounters the indifference of social institutions and leaves her baby in the park. It plays out in long-shots often of Caterina’s back, denying any access to emphatic presentation of her emotional life, while the final reunion of the mother with her baby and her subsequent trial and acquittal are communicated solely through a series of newspaper headlines, to create what we might call a kind of melodrama mancato or manqué. Is Italian art cinema melodramatic? The above analysis has discussed how melodrama is a versatile way to heighten drama, to express emotionality and achieve seriousness of tone. It may be used, modified, or ostentatiously rejected. Such cinema as that described immediately above rejected the assumption that entertainment was the prime purpose of cinema; by spurning narrative, spectacle, identification and fun, it ended up,

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despite itself, rejecting a popular audience. The committed realist innovation of La terra trema and Zavattinian pedinamento bring us, however, to a point of transformation in Italian cinema. The relationship of neorealism to the people it aimed to represent was a difficult one. Neorealism was born of a popular upsurge, of the mass democratic rejection of Fascism and of the progressive hopes of the Resistance for a ­reshaping of Italian society according to the requirements of unity, solidarity, and the welfare of the poor, the workers, and the peasants. Initially, with the anti-Fascist alliance, the era of mass action and demonstrations, and with the referendum in 1946 to abolish the monarchy and the establishment of a democratic, republican constitution, many of the hopes of the left in Italy could have been felt to be on the way to being realised. But quite quickly, the Communist Party, which was heading this progressive alliance in the official political sphere, was shut out of government, losing especially heavily in the landmark elections of 1948 (that saw the Christian Democrats remain, through various coalitions, the principal governing power until 1994). Italy joined NATO, America made threatening noises about any potential Communist victory and the Vatican announced the excommunication of anyone who voted Communist. A wave of victimisation affected worker militants in 1947–8 amid economic woes and unemployment, and when an assassination attempt was made on Communist party leader Palmiro Togliatti in 1948, the brief moment of crisis, in which many Communist militants thought the time for armed uprising might have come, was soon extinguished and the full restabilisation of society on an antiCommunist, Vatican-influenced and pro-capitalist basis was confirmed.8 Within this context, the more radical edge of neorealism became more pessimistic, and its experimentation diverged further from the more conventional impulses of entertainment. The death knell of the hopes for neorealism’s further transformation of popular culture has been felt to have been sounded with the commercial failure, in 1952, of Umberto D. Neorealism can thus be seen as a turning point not least in terms of the relationship of European art cinema to a mass public: it was the last of the national movements that include German Expressionism, Soviet Montage and French Poetic Realism which, however varied among themselves, sought as an intrinsic project to connect high-minded commitment to popular audiences. Out of this initial impulse, Italian neorealism mutated into a post-war art cinema based around interiority, the problematisation of art and meaning and the relationship of representation to referent, thus moving from realist to modernist concerns.9 The character of such post-war art cinema has been described by Steven Neale thus: Art films tend to be marked by a stress on visual style (an engagement of the look in terms of a marked individual point of view rather than in

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terms of institutionalised spectacle), by a suppression of action in the Hollywood sense, by a consequent stress on character rather than plot and by an interiorisation of dramatic conflict. (1981: 13) Melodrama also has a marked visual style, interiorisation and suppression of action, and deals with symbolisations of crisis which search (in Brooks’ 1995 analysis) for a rearticulation of meaning and faith. What role did melodrama play in this development of art cinema? The development of the career of Roberto Rossellini is illuminating here.10 Roma città aperta is credited with really starting neorealism, and with it postwar cinema. Moving from Rossellini’s concerns in the immediate post-war period of questions of war and reconstruction, his films shift their attention to more abstracted themes of life and death, of culture, civilisation, the earth’s elements, and human communication. Within a decade of Roma città aperta, Viaggio in Italia/Voyage to Italy (1954) was welcomed by Rivette in Cahiers du Cinéma with the augury that ‘if there is a modern cinema, this is it’ (cited in Bondanella 1993: 99). The film is still judged as ‘a new cinema of psychological introspection’ (ibid.: 98) that presented ‘the newly established protagonist of modernist cinema, the isolated and alienated individual’ (ibid.: 111). This development plays out through Rossellini’s developing relation to melodrama, which is embraced, transformed, and ultimately rejected as a vehicle for cinematic renderings of crisis, faith and meaning. Rossellini’s films starring Ingrid Bergman stage this development especially clearly, for in them melodrama is explored as a way of probing the access film has to the emotional and the spiritual life which material reality is only an imperfect gateway towards. In Stromboli, terra di Dio/Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1949), Bergman plays a northern European held in a displaced persons camp, which, after having been denied her request to be sent to Argentina, she leaves by marrying a Sicilian fisherman. A motif structuring the film is that of being simultaneously lost within a wide environment and entrapped by its strictures, a motif developed as her husband takes her to the still-active volcanic island of Stromboli and its unchanging peasant community. A long-shot of the couple on their way to their island home lingers on their small boat on the vast sea, while the final images of the film capture the magnificence of Stromboli and its huge crags and smoking mists, the place from which a screaming, solitary, but apparently reborn Karin looks repeatedly up to the stars. Rather than an analytical or detached understanding of her place in the world, the film forges a growing unity between the elemental, spiritual and emotional aspects of her place in the universe – a development conveyed in fundamentally melodramatic terms. The film’s melodrama lies in its incorporation of a sense of the explosive natural landscape into both the heavenly meaning that lies beyond and Karin’s

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performative emotionality. Karin, on first walking onto her volcano-side terrace, breathes in as the music swells, and although she hides her gaze this marks the first stirring of her emotional depths in relation to the expanse of the wider world. This contrasts to her husband’s matter-of-fact attitude, his realist authenticity enacting a direct but also unreflective and unchanging relationship to the environment. At one point she gets upset, and he only responds ‘Well, what’s up with you then?’; to her horror, he also gladly slaughters the wildlife, oblivious to its pain. It is Bergman who both feels and acts more, the camera finding in her struggle a theme in parallel with the eventual eruption of the volcano. The volcano’s eruption occurs as Karin reaches its summit, bringing a film that started with the aftermath of man-made disaster (World War II) to the regenerative properties of explosive nature. With a comprehensive sense of release, she escapes from the home where Antonio has locked her in and ascends the volcano, the dramatic staging of her collapsing, whimpering, groaning and stumbling upwards showing her first dwarfed by Stromboli’s immensity and then gazing at the blasts below until she reaches a sublime giddiness and screams repeatedly ‘Enough!’ Looking to the stars she pleads, ‘Oh God, if You exist, give me a bit of peace.’ As she awakens to the shining sun with the haze of smoke rising below, the lighting effects help connote the presence of godliness as Karin states ‘God, God it’s so beautiful’. The wind in her face completes the presentation of an expressive whole connecting nature, at a point of personal emotional crisis for the heroine, to a rapport with God. The film thus finally inverts the opening tension of entrapment within dispersal through its representation of the godly presence within elemental forces. What this achieves is a representation of the crisis of the individual and the presence of the divine, through the melodramatic (and female) expressivity of the conflict between restriction and grandeur. In so doing, the film situates the crisis of a post-war world as one aspect of the crisis of earthly existence among divine immensity. A similarly existential trajectory can be traced in Europa ’51/The Greatest Love (1951), a film that begins as a domestic melodrama put in motion by the suicide of a lonely child neglected by his bourgeois mother. Their darkened mansion home, the ringing of his mother’s dismissive words in his head, the dizzying extreme low-angle shot of the staircase after he throws himself down it, heighten the melodramatic aspect of the crisis of understanding that the film puts into play. ‘I don’t understand anything any more’ she says afterwards to the doctor, then in same scene, on hearing that he might have done it on purpose, ‘It’s absurd’. A tight close-up on the hugging mother and son, she remembering their proximity during the war, realises questions of a loss of values in a melodramatic representation of nostalgia and familial closeness. The consequent death of her son takes on the meaning of the sacrifice of an innocent for, as the doctor

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says to her, responsibility lies with ‘a society that allows so many horrors’. The extreme close-up, abstracting the characters from their settings, the face set out from the darkness by partial illumination from a keylight, is repeated for various different people in the film including Irene herself. Through the course of the film it becomes a conventionalised and emblematic figure of suffering and then compassion. Such suffering leads to the religious conviction that is born in Irene and expressed in long tearful whimpers heard during the last rites said for a dying female friend, with the female body a carrier both of physical and emotional suffering. The film’s final gaze is Irene’s, from a mental asylum, looking at the women and children outside from the bars of the window, holding back a tear as they proclaim her saintliness and the music comes in strong, confirming melodrama’s dialectic of spirit, entrapment and elevation. Rossellini’s shift in these films develops his concerns from contemporary politics into a consideration of the sacred, but it is an unorthodox sacred, one that has been described as a notion, shared by Pasolini and Bataille, that is not transcendental but immanent: not just what happens in exceptional circumstances, or to superior beings, but what lies before everyone every day and what they live within, the world in its totality, which manifests itself to each person differently yet is always the same and only a small part of which can be comprehended by the conscious mind. (Bernardi 2000: 50) This combination of everydayness with that which rationality cannot convey has a fundamental affinity with melodrama, which, in the films of Rossellini, has frequently been a method for the representation of the sacred. In Roma città aperta the captured Communist fighter is tortured to death, his lifeless, hanging body signifying a Christ-like martyrdom. The film’s famous ending occurs after the shooting of the Priest by a German officer as a group of Roman boys, watching, heads lowered, in front of the mesh that encircles the encampment then walk back towards the city, shown in panorama as the music swells and Saint Peter’s dome dominates the skyline. Melodramatic techniques are thus central through Rossellini’s work in presenting faith restored through a process of crisis. Differently, it is Francesco giullare di Dio/Francis, God’s Jester (1950) that avoids such melodrama, creating a sense of wonder but focusing on the abnegation of the private self and a renunciation of the pursuit of worldly happiness which is central to melodrama. The inelegance of the film style, the torrential rain too plainly physically uncomfortable and muddy rather than dramatic or floodingly lachrymose, indicates a cosmic design that leads away from, rather than connects, suffering within the earthly realm and leads to the heavenly. The decisive break which was to be made by Rossellini in Viaggio in Italia is,

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Figure 2.4  Bergman and Rossellini’s development through melodrama from Stromboli to Europa ’51 and Viaggio in Italia

then, a further break in terms of his employment of melodrama: it is precisely because the story of the breakdown and then surprise declaration of love of a bourgeois, English couple influenced by the open, instinctive emotionality of the Mediterranean should be melodramatic (Wood 2013) that the actual absence of any melodrama in the film is correspondingly much more keenly felt. Once again then, we seem to return to the prospect of a melodrama

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mancato similar to that found in ‘Storia di Caterina’: at each point at which the couple begins to discuss their relationship, the other responds cruelly, while the close-ups on the lead actress do not reveal melodramatic expressivity but maintain a sense of the uncertainty of contemplation, denying any apparent access to her interiority. It would be schematic, certainly, to draw such a comparison, but if one considers the development of artistic attitudes to emotionality from Leopardi’s ‘love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life’, to Pirandello’s somewhat more self-conscious ‘Drama is action, sir, action, and not confounded philosophy’, and then to the closing lines between the unhappy couple of Viaggio in Italia, ‘Tell me, I want to hear you say it’, ‘All right, I love you’, one does get a sense of a shift in historical attitudes from passionate drama towards an undetermined alienation. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the expressive elevation of suffering ordinariness, and questions of crisis, meaning and faith, are intrinsically part of both Catholicism’s popular appeal and of melodramatic signification, making distinction between the two often quite slight. Even a director generally as distant from melodrama as Pasolini employs strategies to portray the sacred which are very hard to disentangle from melodrama. In Mamma Roma (1962), a mother who seeks to go up the social scale moves with her teenage son from the countryside of Guidonia to Rome. Eventually incarcerated in a hellish prison, the son dies strapped to a table in a composition that mimics Mantegna’s representation of the Crucifixion (1457–9). Mamma Roma hears of his death, runs up to her kitchen window and looks across a panorama of her oppressively enclosing housing estate, but the film cuts back to the image of the dying son. These moments give a domestic and resolutely everyday image of the mater dolorosa but unite the mother and son through editing. The separation which is fatally instituted by diegetic space and social restriction is melodramatically transcended through filmic organisation (the editing), realising stylistically the spiritual and familial forces that at the narrative level are restricted. In his short film ‘La ricotta’ (1963), a starving tramp who takes part in a film shooting of the Crucifixion is humiliated by the cast and eventually nailed to the cross. Pop music plays as the crew ignore his plight, but at one point it quietens and the wind whirls as he says, unheard, ‘When you will be in the Kingdom of Heaven, remember me.’ Illuminated by a light shining from above, his body convulses and he looks haltingly upwards, as a thunderclap puts a full stop to his murmured words. Meanwhile a point-of-view shot glides to an extreme high angle on the assembled crowd and the panorama of the Roman periphery, indicating, as with Mamma Roma, the communion between the weakness of the dying, ignored man and a heavenly beyond, his weakness realised through the forceful stylistics of melodrama. As well as the spiritual, Italian cinema continues to employ melodrama into the radical and art cinema of the 1960s in the representation of the family. The

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privileged youth in the films of Maselli and of Visconti, or of I pugni in tasca/ Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio, 1965), present generational conflicts as teeming within the claustrophobic setting of the family. Elsaesser analysed 1950s Hollywood melodrama as the place where, beneath the conventional romantic plotlines, Freud ‘left his Marx in the American home’ (1987: 58). Here, both the Freudianism and the Marxism become explicit, drawing perhaps on Marx’s fairly melodramatic belief that the family is a haven and a nightmare. In I pugni in tasca, the isolated, mountainside family home is the setting for repressed energies and enervating decay, the father long dead, the mother disabled, and the young son a representation of seething incestuous and murderous tension. La strategia del ragno/The Spider’s Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) stages a similarly oedipally conflicted son, who discovers the treacherous cowardice of his father, a mythicised figure of antiFascist resistance. The loss of faith in parental and political authority prepares the way for the wave of anti-authoritarian and youthful radicalism of the late 1960s. Both films not only present their dramas as simultaneously social and psychological conflicts within the emblematic realms of the Italian family, but also include extracts from operas, in their awareness of the cultural legacy of grand expressivity which they are saturated by and critical of.11 Nor is it by chance that in La strategia del ragno the old mistress of the protagonist’s father is played by Alida Valli, the nation’s sweetheart of an earlier era of romantic dramas – nor that her regular Fascist-era co-star Fosco Giachetti plays the Fascist minister who gives Clerici his assignment to kill his old professor in Il conformista/The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), the film which also brought Yvonne Sanson, an actress exclusively associated with 1950s family melodrama, out of retirement to play the mother-in-law. The striking lighting techniques and canted angles of the oneiric worlds here represented stand on a cusp between avant-gardist experimentation, surrealist estrangement and melodramatic emotional emphasis. Where questions of loss and faith are staged, where the strength of protagonists’ desires conflict with their ability to act them out, where the extremities of emotion come up against the blockages placed in their way, one can in Italian cinema expect to find melodrama. This is not to suggest that all forceful expressivity nor, for that matter, all emotionality in Italian cinema is melodramatic, for melodrama is only one possibility among many. Bertolucci’s directorial career begins entirely unmelodramatically in La commare secca/The Grim Reaper (1962) with a shot of a face-down female body lying in a ditch, which then cuts away to focus on its real concern, the young, male Roman poor (its ending of Natalino being apprehended for the murder, screaming, shown in confused and rapid close-ups is the nearest the film gets to melodramatic attachment before it swiftly ends). When, alternatively, The White Sheik aims to seduce Wanda on a rowing boat in Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik

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(Federico Fellini, 1951), no matter how much the protagonists may perceive themselves as existing within a romantic adventure, the film precludes melodrama: the provincial credulity of her wondrous delight, his fat spilling out of his tight leggings and open-necked shirt, the seduction’s culmination as he is knocked over by the swing of the sail’s pole, place the film firmly outwith the realms of melodrama. In many ways Antonioni could seem to inhabit the areas of melodrama, and he is included within the canon of post-war melodrama by both Morreale (2011) and by Cardone (2012). This could be justified in particular through reference to his concern with interior states, often in crisis, Cardone describing his ‘fascination for romantic storylines and their existential value’ and ‘the uncertainties that mark’ his central female characters (2012: 30–1). In fact, Le infedeli, a melodrama discussed among the commercial, generic melodramas in Chapter 1, which treats a private investigator’s presence among the idle rich of cheating and self-serving females, has been felt to anticipate the following year’s Le amiche, a central film in Antonioni’s development. But in the comparison some important differences are revealed also. The story treats Clelia, newly arrived in Turin to work in a fashion salon, whose neighbour Rosetta has just made a failed suicide attempt. She becomes friends with Rosetta and gets involved in the interlocking intrigues of her female friends. Rosetta has fallen for the artist Lorenzo, but he is unable to remain faithful to her. As the tensions in the film culminate, all the friends are together in a bar, and Lorenzo gets involved in a fight with Carlo, a working class assistant to the fashion salon for whom Clelia has a fondness. Lorenzo walks out into the night street after the fight and Rosetta goes after him; in the ensuing discussion she tells him he needs her, a pregnant pause follows, and Lorenzo tells Rosetta ‘I don’t need anyone’, walking off. The following day it is revealed that she has killed herself. Yet this plays out in a way that is anything but melodramatic, and instead an important moment in the development of Antonioni’s filmmaking project, revealing ultimately that there is less, not more, than the outward appearances of relationships would suggest, and seeming to adopt Lorenzo’s, not Rosetta’s, standpoint, of not needing anyone. When Lorenzo tells her this, Rosetta moves away, one might suppose distraught. The camera, however, stays in place, while the sound level of the repetitive bar-room waltz on the piano remains constant, the theme continuing blithely despite her distress. Unlike the suicide that occurs in Le infedeli, which is of an innocent maid accused of theft whose self-immolation is a dramatic high-point of the film, the suicide here occurs with discretion: it barely changes the narrative and is shown only in its brief wordless aftermath, after she is fished out of the water, in long-shot. What appears instead in Antonioni’s cinema are the blockages, separations, repression, without the emotional compassion of melodrama. An earlier film

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is called La signora senza camelie/The Lady without Camelias (1953), indicating that what occurs in the cinema of Antonioni is an inhabiting of some of the outlines of the melodramatic tradition but for the purpose of removing the bond between emotion and expressivity on which melodrama thrives. Kovács has for this very reason theorised Antonioni’s films as examples of ‘modern melodrama’. Stating that ‘melodrama is basically fatalistic’ (2009: 85), he sees modernism as a continuation of this fatalism within a tradition of Sartrean existentialist philosophy that builds on Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for which ‘this invincible power [that dominates the films’ protagonists] is called Nothingness’. Melodrama places its protagonists at the centre of wider forces that they cannot control to illustrate, as Kovács puts it, ‘the negative power of lost humanistic values’ (ibid.: 85). Loss and fatalism are central to any understanding of melodrama. There is also no doubt that Antonioni’s films are deeply concerned with negation and nothingness (as well as with Nothingness). As Antonioni himself said of L’eclisse, his film deals with the drama of ‘the actual emptiness of the individual. Honesty and beauty tend to disappear’ (1962, cited in ibid.: 98). This emptiness encourages a distance which it is very hard to consider melodramatic, as well as a difficulty even in knowing what the film’s subject is, thus very far from the clarification and strong subjecthood found in melodrama. As Rohdie has put it: The films pose a subject (only to compromise it), constitute objects (only to dissolve them), propose stories (only to lose them) [. . .] a wandering away from narrative to the surface into which it was dissolved, but in such a way that the surface takes on a fascination, becomes a ‘subject’ all its own [. . .] [for as Antonioni stated] ‘any explanation would be less interesting than the mystery itself’. (1990: 3) L’avventura (1960) takes this perhaps to its greatest degree. When Sandro and Anna go for a trip out to sea, they decide to take Anna’s friend Claudia. A third of the way through the film Anna goes missing and the two search for her around the rocks, and then back on mainland Sicily. In the meantime, they strike up a relationship with each other, the film’s interest meandering ever further away from the search. The film ends with Sandro apparently having met another woman and some uncertainty as to how Claudia feels in response; she moves to run her fingers through his hair and hold his head. The film ends. We do not know where their relationship might go and are certainly never given any further clue as to what might have happened to Anna nor what the two main remaining characters may think of this, if they think anything much at all. Thus what the films of Antonioni bring us to is once again the sense of a melodrama mancato, of the melodrama that one might have expected given

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Figure 2.5  Melodrama mancato in L’avventura

the themes and situations acting as a structuring absence, that is, a strategy of making evident that the melodrama has been denied. His striking imagery does not exist for the clarification of emotional or spiritual matters. Forgacs has mentioned Antonioni’s exploiting of the ability of Monica Vitti, who plays Claudia in L’avventura, to express blankness (2011: 173), the carefully staged performances of his lead actresses in general revealing ‘the opacity of performance’ (ibid.: 179). Antonioni’s cinema works to deny the emotionally ­signifying function of film form, his lead characters either not having emotional lives or not ones to which we as spectators have access, and the common spectatorial responses would be not ones of emotional excitation, nor a clarification of vice and virtue, but of confusion, detachment, and a deliberately provoked boredom. His works thus inhabit the realms of psychology and metaphysics, which are more intellectually felt than those of emotion and spirit. Categories, as stated earlier in this book, can if one likes be given any name, and ‘melodrama’ is a term particularly subject to differences of interpretation as well as historical and cultural change. But if one removes meaning, the clarification of interior emotion, emotional engagement itself and the value both of human relations and of the capacity of the artwork to express them, it seems that we are left with something very different from – one could in fact say opposed to – the factors that unite all other forms of what tends to be understood as ‘melodrama’, leaving only the most basic theme of people wondering about their personal emotions no matter what the artwork’s attitude to and way of expressing those emotions are. Where such distinctions matter is in defining artistic forms as particular cultural responses to, and conceptions of, the world. With this in mind we can conclude that realism, melodrama and modernism each stage a relationship

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between representation and experiences of crisis and faith, with realism starting out from the belief that socio-historic crisis can be understood through a direct relationship between representation and reality, and melodrama from a sense of the potential loss and ultimate regaining of faith through the expression of something beyond and stronger than that reality; while modernism holds on to crisis and maintains it, being thus particularly suited to the new historic juncture of the 1960s (see Restivo 2002 for discussion of 1960s art cinema and the changed historical moment into ‘late capitalism’). The history of Italian cinema shows in its variety how these forms need not be maintained in separation, but also, that they are not reducible to each other either. Modernism in melodrama Alternatively, melodrama of the more conventional kind discussed in the last chapter was also a place where popular audiences had direct exposure to modernist techniques. Giovanni Fusco, a composer who was ‘one of the fathers of modern film music’ (Calabretto 2007: 61) and wrote for Antonioni and Alain Resnais, also provided the music for Traviata ’53. Petrassi composed for Riso amaro, while in Anna Nino Rota’s scoring contrasts church music, symphonic music, the popular music that Anna performs as a nightclub singer, and jarring, atonal and often discordant modern music for the hospital. This music accompanies montage sequences that replicate the rhythms of the grand mechanical workings of her city hospital, its lighting contrasts also giving an unreal and alienating aspect that add up to a disorienting and inhuman representation which contrasts with the countryside barn and church where Anna’s failed engagement unfolded. Fofi points out that ‘auteur cinema was however born from a social, industrial and theoretical context common to “low” cinema’ (Fofi 1978: 3). Using similar personnel across art and genre cinema, popular melodrama employs modernist and avant-gardist techniques, most especially in its musical scores, editing and lighting. It does so to create feelings of alienation, rhythm, imprisonment, dépaysement, shock and inhumanity through striking patterns of design. Thematically, the films broach crises of meaning and signification also. In Una donna libera, the plight of the heroine is even placed within an explicit discourse on existentialism: amid her full disengagement with bourgeois domesticity, she is invited to attend an ‘inexistentialism’ party, decorated with a banner that proclaims ‘we do not exist’. Her continual questioning of the meaning of words like ‘happiness’ and ‘freedom’ occurs alongside a recognition of the artifice of dramatic construction; at the point at which she shoots the film’s villainous seducer, he even taunts her with the phrase ‘we are in full melodrama now, the scene of climax’, as he sits down sarcastically at his piano to offer musical accompaniment.

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Modernist techniques appear in generic melodramas, but the distinction from art cinema is the degree to which they are given specific and identifiable meanings with clear emotional functions which contribute towards an accessibility of narrative and character construction. Yet this draws our attention also to the differences between the experiences offered in modernist and genre cinema. In Una donna libera, the villain draws our attention to the scene’s climactic nature, but that is still what the scene offers us, a thrilling and coherent culmination of the plot rather than a rejection of dramatic narrative. In Traviata ’53 artistic modernism conveys a sense of feminine threat and the inhumanity of the Milanese bourgeoisie: the apartment of an initially apparently untrustworthy woman contains a grotesque portrait meant to resemble her, indicating a narcissism to her character and ugliness behind her beauty, while even her bedroom is covered in modern art, reiterating the sense of her separation from domesticity and sincerity. In Anna the presentation of the hospital is of an unfeeling and even imprisoning place, and its meaning in the life of Anna only becomes clear through the course of her retelling the events that brought her to sacrifice her hopes of romantic fulfilment or domesticity. In each, the formal strategies that give a sense of weird estrangement or disorientation, separation from nature or feeling, or awareness of the formal plot mechanics, themselves serve an ultimate goal of narrative progress brought about through the coherent clarification of emotional and moral meaning. These experiences of alienation or estrangement are counterbalanced by alternative sense-making experiences of family, love, or God. II  Popular neorealism One of the most prevalent, and in its own way most striking, forms of realism in Italian cinema is neorealismo popolare. All of the films from the opening chapter would in Italian scholarship be considered to be one section of this far greater group, that encompasses all post-war contemporary-set romance, crime and comedy genres.12 I have separated the domestic and romance-centred films of the last chapter from those discussed here, which are more concerned with the working-class nature of their protagonists, and have a greater preponderance on public space and the natural environment. I have done so for the purposes of considering their relationship to realism and their more direct politics of social reference. Post-war critical culture The argument that neorealism was a total rejection of the cinema that preceded it is useful to the perception that Italian cinema made a fundamental

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break with the culture of Fascism (see Forgacs 1989). Such historicisation allows for several precursors set up as far-sighted premonitions that, isolated from their context, were heralds of a film culture yet to arrive: namely, I bambini ci guardano, Quattro passi fra le nuvole/Four Steps in the Clouds (Alessandro Blasetti, 1942) and Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943). I bambini ci guardano, an early collaboration between Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, concerns the effects on a young boy of his mother’s affair and father’s ultimate suicide. The abandonment of parental responsibility and investment in infant weakness is portrayed within a realist canvas of a wide social environment, and a heavily emotionalised moralism. Although less emphatic in its representation of pathos, Quattro passi fra le nuvole, about a travelling salesman’s chance meeting with an unmarried pregnant woman during her homecoming to her traditional rural family, contains scenes of high sentimentalisation. Ossessione, the film that allowed those critics most vociferously calling for a new realism in the pages of the journal Cinema – Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis and Luchino Visconti – to put their ideas into effect (see Overbey 1978a), has been described as melodramatic for employing an oppressively enclosed domestic space (Landy 1991a: 575, see also Restivo 2002: 32–6). In the film, the wife of a petrol station owner starts an affair with a drifter and together they plot to murder the owner. Desire in the film builds from a frank realism of bodily intimacy between the cheating couple, their sweaty corporeality expressing both the heat and physical yearning with a cloyingly sensual materiality. It is thus notable that in each of these precursors, the realism emerges from the melodrama of the films. With a bit of historical distance, and especially after the reappraisal of neorealism’s relationship to late Fascist cinema undertaken at the 1974 Pesaro conference (collected in Micciché 1999), a series of continuities between preand post-war cinema has come into view. The above three films could now be seen as part of a temporally and generically broader shift occurring in Italian film culture across the 1940s.13 After the War this shift was to result in both neorealism and the heyday of melodrama described in the previous section. From this perspective, one could broaden the panorama of proto-neorealist films into the popular cinema of the early 1940s. One can consider La donna della montagna/The Mountain Woman (Renato Castellani, 1944) alongside I bambini ci guardano for their common presentations of domestic entrapment, Avanti c’è posto (Mario Bonnard 1942) or Campo de’ fiori (Mario Bonnard, 1943) with Quattro passi fra le nuvole for their common portrayals of disappointment and entangled gender relations among a comedic representation of local popular life, Ossessione alongside Fari nella nebbia (Gianni Franciolini, 1942) for their bleak and cynical debt to poetic realism and retrospective appearance as noirish. Diachronically, one can further broaden the

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parameters to see neorealism as a stage in the development of popular genre cinema from Mattoli’s ‘films that speak to your heart’ up to the melodramas of Matarazzo and the comedies of the 1950s (a point made by Casadio 1990: 29). After the War’s end the Resistance found its way into cinema, not only in Roma città aperta, but in the footage of the Neapolitan uprising in ’O sole mio (Giacomo Gentilomo, 1946), the plot of cineopera Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma/Before Him All Rome Trembled (Carmine Gallone, 1947), and as the basis of Camerini’s spy drama Due lettere anonime/Two Anonymous Letters (Mario Camerini, 1945). What else may those films have in common artistically, philosophically, dramatically? To consider Umberto D. or La terra trema within their wider culture is not to deny their radical originality, but to define them in relation to the assumptions, conclusions and common artistic wellsprings that give life to them. Such questions allow an opening up of the somewhat subjective and by definition exclusive canon that views Italian cinema according to a pantheon of isolated works of artistic greatness, a canonisation which hampers attempts to understand the cultural changes of post-war Italy at their fullest. The basis of this enterprise is thus opposed to the assertion that neorealismo popolare necessarily represents a degeneration of Italian film culture because it ‘signal[s] the phase of neorealism’s “popularisation”, inserting more or less garish novelistic and melodramatic elements into the sincerity of the investigation’ (Castello 1956: 19), a line of thought that institutes a dichotomy between radical and genre cinema, insofar as popular neorealism ‘lives off the defeat of the tendency for renewal developed in our cinema after 1945; it feeds, so to speak, off its cadaver’ (Spinazzola 1985: 77). To consider the alternative historiography of neorealism illuminates an alternative path for Italian cinema, one not invested in conceiving of neorealism as a radical break betrayed by a wholly alien populism, a populism which anyway cannot legitimately be criticised from a progressive standpoint simply for the fact that it is popular. In his collection of contemporary criticism of neorealismo popolare, Gianfranco Casadio remarks: I am sorry if the balance leans decisively in favour of those critics who are against ‘popular neorealism’ rather than those in favour, but it has been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find any. (1990: 9) These films were made in a period of particularly energetic critical engagement with film culture, as if making up for quietism under Fascism. Culture, and popular film in particular, was used as part of a battle over the political future of the country. The conventional pleasures of genre cinema, it was believed, would lead to the reinstitution of a cinema di regime, since:

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The seething of rough passions in such dramas finds deep roots in the situations of life of the popular classes [. . .] These films are the documents of real human conditions not yet refined by a conscious critical process. (Renzo Renzi [1951], cited in Casadio 1990: 39–40) The end of Fascism was, then, a chance to remake not only society but also culture; or, to put it another way, to remake society through the efforts of creating a new popular culture. A debate staged in 1955 to 1956 – one might point out, after the passing of the heyday of neorealismo popolare which was its subject – in the Communist daily L’Unità pitted filmmakers, critics and members of the public into battle. The filmmakers stressed their desire to avoid the aloofness of artistic purity and maintain their audience; Alberto Lattuada defended his popular neorealist crime film Il bandito from being liked too much by the public ‘in the names of [Alessandro] Blasetti, [Giuseppe] De Santis, [Pietro] Germi and many other colleagues who seek a lively contact with the public’ as not wanting to be ‘in an ivory tower abandoned in the desert’ (Lattuada 1999: 103). As far as this audience goes, the opinion of one critic in 1956 was that ‘the audience is more made up of pensioners, the under sixteens, housewives, the petty bourgoisie and subproletariat than it is of workers and peasants’ (cited in O’Rawe 2008: 188); according to Catherine O’Rawe, ‘[i]n short, it is the wrong public’ (ibid.: 188), a disapproval which expresses what Forgacs has called the party’s ‘moralistic, utilitarian and prescriptive notion of what a valid popular culture ought to be like’ (cited in ibid.: 185). It is worth remembering that the debate in L’Unità shows a real engagement of critics and filmmakers in a discussion and justification of their roles in public life. It is also worth remembering that critical debate lamented not only the state of popular cinema, but all actually existing Italian cinema – Rossellini was excoriated within Italy throughout the 1950s, neorealism was felt to have involuted or been betrayed, Fellini was subject to a sharp polemic over the relative merit of his film La strada in relation to Visconti’s Senso – a polemic which led to fisticuffs between the rival camps when the latter was ignored for an award at the Venice Film Festival, while Senso itself was considered to be a betrayal of the neorealist impulse for contemporary, impoverished settings for an operatic, aristocratic historical subject matter. What critical engagement argued for in these years was a cinema that had never existed. In the enlistment of culture against the conservative forces of 1950s Italy (Forgacs 1989), neorealism became more an ideal of what cinema could be, the ‘mythical reference point for most critics who confer on the auteur the halo of a socio-pedagogical mission outside of which are only base commercial ventures and crass corruptions of taste’ (Caldiron 1999: 29). This history can be contextualised by mentioning that public culture is charged with a particular importance in Italy. Ideas of ancient Rome, Tuscan

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literature or the Renaissance have played their role in creating the notion of what the country is, or what it should be. Very often this charge confers particular ideals upon culture: of ‘making Italians’ (attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio) by imparting to them a shared sense of national belonging, of instituting an improving relationship between intellectual and national life (according to the liberal philosophies of Benedetto Croce and the Fascist educationalist Giovanni Gentile), by performing Catholic moral and spiritual education, or by fostering an oppositional culture to advance a critical view of social reality. Each of these positions has influenced film culture, with the latter uniting the radical mood of neorealist social engagement already under way in post-war cinema with the critical adoption of Gramsci’s ideas. It would be inconsistent, after praising the involvement of cinema critics in anti-Fascist debate and in progressive reconstruction, to criticise the left for waging a politicised polemic against the Christian Democrat right. This polemic becomes problematic, however, when it justifies disengagement with popular forms, and in particular when it does so through the fact of their being popular in the first place. It may have been true in reference to Riso amaro that ‘the workers cannot be educated with the bare legs of Silvana’ (Aristarco, cited in Vitti 1996: 36), but rather than a criticism of an image of sexual objectification, such sentiment expresses the fear that eroticism constitutes a pleasure too direct, uncritical and commodified to be politically progressive (see Silverman 1984: 43 and Torriglia 2002: 94 for more modern examples of such an opinion). In this instance it is not artificiality but the immediacy of the reaction of tears or laughter that is seen to count out the critical detachment sought by realists. This then leads to the dilemma that if one removes pleasure from the cinema, one removes oneself from the popular audience whose education was the aim in the first place. What ought to be borne in mind alongside critical engagement is some attempt to understand what makes genre cinema popularly attractive. It is no longer controversial to state that popular culture can repay such analysis, as it was for Umberto Eco when he began writing on television and comics in the 1960s. Eco pointed out, in response to those critics proclaiming modern equivalents of Saint Bernard’s belief that ‘To win Christ we have reckoned bodily enjoyments as dung’ (cited in Eco 1994 [1964]: 29), that such ‘apocalyptic’ arguments against mass culture are to ‘be reproached for never really attempting a concrete study’ (ibid.: 25). It is such a study that I aim to provide here. The collectivised melodrama of Neorealismo popolare The debate on neorealismo popolare also traces the development of Italian film studies: from the 1954 conference in Pesaro, a turn to achieve some theoretical clarity over the phenomenon of neorealism and an unsuccessful attempt to

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halt its apparent involution and betrayal of artistic endeavour by commercial bastardisation, then in 1974 in Pesaro, to reassess the relation of neorealism to Fascist-era cinema. In Savona in 1976 a conference was given over to the ‘ultrapopolare’ Matarazzo, and the battle had commenced between those who continued to uphold a belief in the negative effects of genre cinema against the suggestion that in its obsession with neorealist austerity Italian cinema studies had forgotten ‘the fair in the name of the museum’ (Aprà 1976: 10). Finally, some synthesis was achieved through the argument advanced at the Pesaro conference on neorealism in 1989 that, rather than being an isolated and beaten phenomenon, neorealism simply was Italian cinema in the immediate post-war era (Farassino 1989), encompassing both generic and radical cinema. A good example of a more three-dimensional view of post-war cinema than that offered by the opposition of realism and entertainment can be provided by Il bandito, a star vehicle for Fascist-era action hero Amedeo Nazzari and Anna Magnani immediately after her success in Roma città aperta. The film tells the story of POW Ernesto, played by Nazzari as a much reduced figure compared to his dashing heroic pre-war parts, who returns to Turin only to find his home has been bombed to rubble and to hear from a neighbour of his mother’s death and sister’s disappearance. A common sentiment about the film is that the initial realist intention of the director can only be found in the broad conception of the initial scenes; [Ernesto] alone in the world, confronted by an image of ghostly ruins, while the reflection of a dazzling light and the rasping notes of some jazz render his pain almost concrete, material, and tangible. (Guido Gerosa, cited in Villa 2002a: 113) The scene described here was used by Bazin as exemplary of neorealism. The camera follows Ernesto past a street fire and to his old housing block. The rubble that it has become is revealed to him and the audience in a pan that seems initially to be a point-of-view shot, slowing to linger on the devastated block, but completes a 360-degree turn to realight on Ernesto’s disappointed face. Bazin’s praise for this moment was for its maintenance of the ambiguous wholeness of reality; for how it allows the spectator to share Ernesto’s viewpoint and then, in the continuous pan, moves with spontaneity and ‘tact’ (Bazin 2005: 32) to an objective view of his horrified expression. For Bazin’s understanding of the phenomenology of neorealism, the camera passing across the environment gives the experience of revelation by replicating the movement of the human eye, maintaining the integral continuousness of reality as the subject apprehends it. Formally this sequence is echoed later. Having searched in vain for work, Ernesto is once again on the streets. He steals money from a card sharper, who reminds us that ‘fortune is blind’, and he spots a streetwalker whom he

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follows to her brothel. Close-ups of her legs alternate with Ernesto walking past another fire (fire having since the homecoming scene been associated with sexuality and avarice through a series of intense close-ups of Ernesto lighting the cigarette of gangster’s moll Lidia, played by Magnani). Ernesto waits for several anxious minutes inside the brothel. He enters her boudoir, and the prostitute comes out from behind a curtain, exclaims ‘Well?’, and lifts her dress to expose her leg. The slow pan of the earlier scene is repeated in a much faster whip pan for Ernesto’s gaze to alight on the woman whom he realises is his sister. In an overtly melodramatic outburst, Ernesto flies into a rage, kills her pimp and becomes a fugitive. While the first 360-degree pan reveals the world as one continuous and ambiguous whole, the close-ups of the brothel scene exploit dramatic manipulation and break the integrity of the pro-filmic world. But the two scenes are structured with deliberate similarity, and the realism lays the basis of the intolerable tensions that break out in melodrama. The realism of the first scene is key to understanding the melodramatic morality of the film, while the melodrama of the second scene is underpinned by rooting the drama in the social reality and the lived environment. The revelation of the sister as a prostitute is experienced as a wrenching moment of melodramatic excess formed by the fleshy realism of the intense conflicts and corrupting aspect of material privation. This is a different notion of the everyday from that of the de-dramatised daily chores of the maid in Umberto D., as it reveals the crime and violence that could occur each day somewhere in the modern city, rather than the everyday of anybody’s daily life that neorealism itself helped introduce as a main strand of twentieth-century realism. The critical stance in Il bandito towards the contemporary social environment testifies to crucial changes in popular culture, ones which had quickly become typical of genre filmmaking in post-war Italy. Fatalità (Giorgio Bianchi, 1947), a generic example of a crime film of the time, begins by establishing the everyday lives of a poor couple, Vincenzo and Paola, and the workings of the barges that pass by their canalside apartment. Vincenzo wanders the city streets, is visited in his cramped home by a policeman checking their papers are in order, and discusses with his wife the high price of groceries and that they have no wine. This realist setting establishes the contemporary nature of their problems, as well as the bases of Paola’s desire to escape when it is offered by bargeman Renato, the situation developing into a fatal and melodramatic desperation that explains the cuckolded Vincenzo’s ultimate move to take her life. This cinema takes clear advantage of new freedoms from censorship but makes connections to a wider heritage: the silent Neapolitan films Assunta Spina (Mario Mattoli, 1948) and the lost realist landmark Sperduti nel buio (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1947) were both remade in the same year as Il bandito. These films place their events within the violent vitality of daily life;

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Assunta Spina’s wedding scene at the start of the film serves to show the ritual aspects of popular festivity and the dialect expressions of popular wisdom among the female fabric workers – ‘jealousy and love are the same thing’, ‘my boyfriend doesn’t have any money but trusts me’ – and to establish a sensibility that lays the basis for the dramatic events of murderous jealousy to follow. This is a populist, passionate and dramatic realism. In dramas of rural romance – such as Il brigante Musolino (Mario Camerini, 1950), La lupa/ The Vixen (Alberto Lattuada, 1953), Il lupo della Sila/The Wolf of the Sila (Duilio Coletti, 1949), Patto col diavolo/Pact with the Devil (Luigi Chiarini, 1949), Sensualità (Clemente Fracassi, 1952), Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (Giuseppe De Santis, 1956) – starkness of character and decisiveness of action contribute to a portrayal of the authenticity of physical, rustic labour and an elemental violence and passion. Urban films – exemplified in Il bandito, Persiane chiuse (Luigi Comencini, 1951), La tratta delle bianche/The White Slave Trade (Luigi Comencini, 1952), Il mondo le condanna/The World Condemns Them (Gianni Franciolini, 1953) – present scenarios of crime, prostitution and marginalisation to place themes of suffering innocence within nightmarish environments, making pleas variously to popular solidarity and conservative moralism. Material sensuousness becomes thematic as the protagonists’ dependence on circumstance increases the desperation with which poverty is felt. Such spectacular realism is in tune with the influences of the American novelists of the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway and the crime writers Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain,14 and creates a direct, newsworthy vividness that fleshes out a wider social picture. In considering one of the main ways of understanding the change that neorealism brought to post-war art cinema, Gilles Deleuze described a break occurring around 1948 that he called a ‘great crisis of the action image’. Borrowing Pascal Augé’s term, Deleuze refers to the characters inhabiting a space ‘which is no longer a particular determined space [. . .] [but an] any-space-whatever [espace quelconque]’ (Deleuze 1986: 109). Deleuze uses this to talk of the ‘indefinite’, of a ‘break with spatial co-ordinates’ (ibid.: 121) creating a cinematic subjectivity which is ‘elliptical and unorganised’ (ibid.: 211) in accordance with the mood of a country that had experienced destruction and defeat, and which he understands in relation to the kinds of episodism, pedinamento and modernism laid out above. Deleuze exemplifies the any-space with Edmund’s walk through Berlin before suicide in Germania anno zero, and Mamula (2013) applies the analysis to Stromboli, as emblematic of the need for a reconstruction of motor-sensory activity. In these films, the characters’ wanderings denote a displacement which gives the protagonists an altered relation to their environment. Such wanderings also occur throughout neorealismo popolare: in Il bandito Ernesto wanders through Turin to find his home; in Senza pietà/Without Pity

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Figure 2.6  Alienated wanderings in Senza pietà, Il cammino della speranza and La città si difende

(Alberto Lattuada, 1948) a displaced young woman and criminal runaway, Angela, wanders miserably through the wasteland of the beach landscape of Livorno after her friend has departed onto the treacherous seas; in Il cammino della speranza/The Road to Hope (Pietro Germi, 1950) one of a group of Sicilian immigrants in search of work, Lorenza, wanders bemused in the capital city streets after her husband has been wrongfully arrested at Rome’s Termini Station. A series of dissolves positions her strange and estranged among the gawping, anonymous multitudes in new streets with no sense of

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beginning or end (only to be served not justice but immigration papers at the police station). Two such scenes of wandering occur in another Germi film, La città si difende/Four Ways Out (Pietro Germi, 1951), in which four criminals each go separately on the run after a heist. Luigi, who took part to provide for his young family, walks down the city street with his daughter. A long take follows their journey past a railway line, the strong geometric patterning of the line cutting across the frame behind them to create a sense of ongoing urban dislocation. A train passes blasting steam behind him, giving a realist but infernal aspect to the city street, and this scene as a whole presages his jump into a lonely trackside field to shoot himself. The film then culminates with the failed escape of the youngest of the four, Alberto. Alone and without the money they stole, he looks out over a swampy expanse with industrial works prominent in the background. He walks slowly dwarfed by the high-rises, his directionlessness conveyed by a series of dissolves as it was for Lorenza in Il cammino della speranza. Several low-angle shots disorient the spectator as Alberto approaches his apartment, the looming staircase emphasising the dominance of environment and his entrapment. He goes to jump out of the window, but is talked down after the sudden arrival of his mother. The alienated wandering leads to the melodramatic confirmation of familial or emotional bonds, which can compensate for social impotence or loss, here as in Germania (their absence leading to Edmund’s suicide), Senza pietà, or Il cammino. Both in the canonical and in the generic examples mentioned above, these wanderings take place within a melodramatically rendered experience of post-war destruction and only partially achieved reconstruction. Post-war life is both a social and moral breakdown, and a continuation of the repressive dehumanisation of Fascism in the commercial-industrial society of the American occupation. This social background provides rich material for the crime melodramas of the period. Tombolo, paradiso nero/Tombolo (Giorgio Ferroni, 1947) details the settlement of black American soldiers in Livorno during the occupation, beginning with a montage of docks, then bombed ruins and an American flag. A tracking shot moves past miles of military vehicles, encampments, building materials and other paraphernalia of post-war blight with a thrice-repeated close-up on the sign ‘ANYONE TRESPASSING WILL BE SHOT DEAD’, written in English, Italian and German, before the film introduces its protagonists. Moving from the melodrama of militarised ­repression to that of commodification, in La tratta delle bianche, a participant in a dance marathon, Ninuccia, walks down a boulevard and onto an ugly city beach, the long shot and long take privileging the giant Coca Cola billboard before she gets to the beach and holds her head in her hands. The billboard on the beach represents not a consumerism in which the characters of neorealism can partake, but one they are shut out of, as they are themselves subject to commodification – in La tratta delle bianche, the dance marathon is her only

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route out of poverty; in Senza pietà, Angela travels in an empty livestock carriage in a freight train because she has no money for a passenger ticket. In both films women are subject to people trafficking or prostitution, their lives traded on the black market. Such melodramatisation of the alienated landscape is in accord with the desire of neorealist filmmakers to make the environment an actual actor in the situation (see Antonioni 1978, De Santis 1978), to create what Visconti called an ‘anthropomorphic cinema’, that is, of ‘stories of living men, of living men among things, not of things per se’ (Visconti 1978: 84).15 Therefore, while neorealism is by no means naturalist in the most commonly accepted sense of being a reproduction of the surface details of reality, its dramatised intensity involves a naturalism defined by Raymond Williams as the use of the environment as a subject that is part of the dramatic development (Williams 1980). Neorealismo popolare includes the environment in socially meaningful and dramatically eventful ways. In many of these films the environment is more than a simple backdrop to the action: Senza pietà concerns immigration from the imprisoning city that constricts its inhabitants to a life on the criminal margins, La città si difende is about the failure of a gang of criminals to successfully hide, Il cammino della speranza about the emigration of a group of peasants through the peninsula in search of work, Tombolo, paradiso nero about the social formation that grows in a zone where black American GIs escape army duties. De Santis completed a ‘trilogy of the earth’ with Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, about the goatherds of the Ciociaria in southern Italy, which deals specifically with the question of legal ownership. The film’s villain, Bonfiglio, personifies capitalism, having used the war as an excuse to steal Dominici’s sheep, and then manipulating his local power (and willingness to use violence) to have Dominici imprisoned for taking them back. At the end of the film, with Bonfiglio on the run, it is the sheep themselves that give him away, raising enough dust in a stampede to alert the peasants to his whereabouts. In the rural historical drama Il mulino del Po/The Mill on the Po (Alberto Lattuada, 1949) (unusual for being one of the only period-set neorealist films), struggle over the land is at the centre of the lives of the protagonists and of the film’s narrative interest. The film charts the growth of trade union consciousness as the workers turn to an agricultural labour league to defend their conditions. Their struggle becomes physical when the labourers strike and soldiers start a pitched battle to complete the harvest. The opening shots of Senza pietà pass through a characteristically Italian landscape of fields and pine trees, then past farmland and country dwellers, until the train reaches a military camp of soldiers shooting at bandits from speeding vehicles. The drama of the contemporary historic moment is placed within a context of the potentially renewing basis of the natural national

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landscape. Later, an escaped felon, Marcella, emigrates (with the soundtrack playing the spiritual ‘You Have to Row, Row, Row to Get to Heaven’), incorporating the crime drama into a social concern with emigration. Primarily an anti-racist film, it concludes with protagonist Angela speeding in a car chase with her lover, a black GI called Jerry, until the lorry crashes down the mountain. The lorry wheel spins as the black and white arms of the two lovers entwine in death, achieving unity among the elemental forces of the natural environment that frame the film rather than the man-made environment in which the rest of its drama occurs. The blight in which the film’s narrative occurs remains in proximity to nature’s elements – mountain and sea – which are the scene for transcendence to a heavenly afterlife at the film’s close. Nature has an augmented aliveness to the characters’ dramas in neorealismo popolare. The rocky shore that the waves lash in Senza pietà is the site of the consecration of the protagonists’ relationship. In Il mulino del Po the environment is an expressive participant in the drama when the wind ominously whips up, causing the bells to ring after the League leader’s speech, creating a more conventionally dramatic realism of character action than the similarly central storm sequence in La terra trema described above. Riso amaro, similarly interested in the people’s working relationship with the land, also melodramatises nature in a dramatically central storm section. As rain clouds gather on the rice fields of the Po Delta, the worsening weather accompanies the worsening predicament of rice-picker Silvana, who encounters the fugitive gangster Walter there. Following her through the fields, Walter looms over her, whipping her, the music climaxes and she begins to scream. Dramatic intercutting then begins between the open fields of the mondine who have been working through the storm, among whom one begins to miscarry, and Silvana walking isolated through the field. This dramatic use of storm is not pathetic fallacy but works to show the protagonists’ dependence on nature, whose stormy rage achieves an intensification of the dramatic plot. When the emigrants finally reach the Alps in Il cammino della speranza, the last confrontation of hero Saro and villain Vanni occurs during a blizzard. The snow creates a denser visual texture, whipping up as they continue their journey and dying down as the opening voice-over returns to say there are no confines on this earth. Nature’s disorienting fury gives a sense of the mountains as a stage for the transcendence of society, and acts as a stylistic element of elevation and intensification. The material bounty of nature offers hopes for a renewal despite immediate social circumstances, employing a dehistoricising use of the land. Written over the final shot of the water in Il mulino del Po is the comment that ‘so passes and returns the good and evil of mankind, and time is similar to the river’s flow’. Ernesto is shot on a mountaintop while escaping in Il bandito, while

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the lorry crashes off coastal cliffs in Senza pietà and the Alps are the site for the eponymous Fuga in Francia/Flight into France (Mario Soldati, 1948). In a more successful escape, the desolate landscape of the Piedmontese Alps in Il cammino della speranza is the final obstacle facing the Sicilian immigrants on their arduous journey out of Italy, and an absolute physical contrast from their land of origin. Concluding Il bandito, and throughout Fuga in Francia, mountains recall the imagery of the Partisan struggle whose activity took place in particular in the hills and mountains (see Ben-Ghiat 2005). Mountains feature as a third type of environment after city and then arable land, as places of sublime separation from social relationships rather than of urban alienation or pastoral renewal. The integration of personal dramas with the land has been considered neorealism’s ‘real innovation’ (Aprà 1976: 24), and part of a politicised representation of space. In neorealism the communal nature of peasant life combines with questions of the reorganisation of proletarian living conditions in a context of bombardment and homelessness, subjects of continuing topical importance given mass internal migration away from southern and rural areas and into northern industrial centres, and the urban planning which moved urban working-class housing from the centre of the city into the periphery (see Forgacs 1990: 15 and Nerenberg 2006: 186). In neorealism it is collectivity, not seclusion to hearth and home, that provides stability – such seclusion often not even an option for neorealism’s impoverished protagonists. Neorealist locations thus disrupt the boundaries of public and private which nineteenth-century stage melodrama has been described as instituting dramatically (described by Mulvey 1986). In rural-set films like Riso amaro, Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, Il mulino del Po and Il cammino della speranza, faith is placed in the vitality of the very conditions of enforced publicness and mutual dependence that are brought on by the poverty of folk life. They describe different domestic situations from that of the private home: in Il cammino della speranza the immigrants live, when they have work, in a dormitory shared with Bergamasc peasants who will be their co-workers. The dormitory of the rice-pickers in Riso amaro and the train that transported them to the fields are open spaces of song and graffiti through which the tracking camera takes in the sense of public (although studio interior) space in which social formations develop just as they do in the open rice fields. Thus, while neorealism on the one hand presents an image of the autonomy and liveliness of working-class community, such hopes for the shape of popular reconstruction offer a somewhat nostalgic vision compared to the nuclear domesticity of the more bourgeois domestic melodramas, which were quick in picking up on the ideology of the ideal nuclear family home which dominated as a popular aspiration over more social housing solutions (as described by Sparke 1990). In fact, enclosed spaces in neorealismo popolare are frequently places of

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negativity. In Riso amaro the fugitive bandits of whom Walter is the head take over a barn as a hide-out, and it is a space fully isolated and separate from nature and from collectivity. As Walter says in the barn to Silvana after he has been injured, ‘we’re shut in, we can’t get out.’ The barn in Riso amaro resembles the house in Caccia tragica, the first in De Santis’ trilogy of the earth, which is similarly inhabited by right-wing criminals who have stolen from a people’s collective. The fireplace nightmarishly casts shadows across faces, its walls are always in shot, and personal arguments take over. In Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, thief Bonfiglio’s house is also a place of highly artificial studio melodrama. This is evident from the shadows, canted frames, tight close-ups, and classically melodramatic trope of positioning a mirror to reflect back the characters in compositions of restriction and disorienting angles that become more striking as the film reaches its climax. In each case, criminals are entrapped in a private space that is visually disconnected from the collectivity of workingclass life and rendered with the artifice of studio melodrama. As can be seen in the lonely disorientation of characters such as Angela in Senza pietà, the criminals of La città si difende, or Edmund in Germania anno zero, isolation is the melodramatic alternative to the shelter offered by collective solidarity. In Riso amaro, Silvana is raped by gangster Walter in a clearing away from the rice-pickers. Meanwhile the rice-pickers work to reap the harvest through the rainstorm, and one of them miscarries a baby. The miscarrying worker requires the help of her comrades, and asks them to sing. The aspect of peasant ritual in the help they collectively offer, singing while ­gesturing to the sky, is intercut with Silvana’s lonely wander through the rice field before she breaks down screaming. Silvana’s private distress is contrasted with the public actions of the women in a scene that draws from the Soviet montagist Pudovkin. Silvana’s breakdown parallels the miscarriage of the ricepicker, but the source of the worker’s distress is physical and at the depths of pain she continues to act in harmony with land, life, death, and the working collective, while Silvana is removed from this context (to be returned in the peasant ritual of sprinkling rice on her that accompanies her burial). In discussing the Hollywood domestic melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser points out how ‘the world is closed’ (1987: 55), the home a place of trapped energy owing to the intersection of social tensions therein. In neorealismo popolare, physical entrapment creates a negative and isolating melodrama within the realist exteriors. In Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, Bonfiglio’s separation from open collectivity occurs to the extent that he exports the melodrama of isolated entrapment that surrounds him into the wider environment. Bonfiglio rapes Dominici’s sister, Maria-Grazia, upon whom he advances, filling the frame in a repetition of the darkened entrapment felt in his hut. At the end of the film, in flight from the approaching Dominici, Maria-Grazia halts in an enclosed wooded area away from the sunny, open land that the shepherds

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Figure 2.7  Dramatic isolation and collectivity in Riso amaro

travel through. As the music builds Bonfiglio advances on her again, which spatially recalls the rape scene, and he kills her in between two boulders so she will not draw the attention of the search party to him. When Bonfiglio finally dashes himself on the rocks, he looms into the camera in extreme close-up. In Il cammino della speranza it is outside of the dormitory that one of the Sicilians, Luca, sees his girlfriend in the bushes and privately kisses her as a guitarist in the background plays the aria ‘Casta Diva’ (from the opera Norma by the Sicilian composer Bellini). In the ensuing dance near the dorms, a private space is constructed between Saro and Barbara as they walk away from the public dance area to the fences by the darkened field. There is, then, no simplistic symbolic equation in neorealism of studio,

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interior, and private space with the melodramatic and therefore condemned, nor of location, outside, and public space with realism and thus positivity. Melodramatic entrapment can be created in various ways, which, as the above examples show, include the realism of location shooting, thus underlining the point that the location of intense conflicts in the family home in domestic melodramas is only one way of melodramatising emotion, fulfilment and restriction. The popular worldview of a politicised genre The classic opinion about the way ideas operate in neorealism holds that Riso amaro is ‘really’ about a necklace rather than social critique (Overbey 1978b: 13), neorealism’s veristic objectivity an excuse for ‘shop-girl fantasies’ (ibid.: 18). Genre cinema of the post-war period is permeated by class feeling, and celebrates popular collective life by finding innovative ways of integrating personal dramas into public spaces to explicitly address both contemporary and historical political issues. In neorealismo popolare a protagonist’s poverty is proof of their innocence. Giovanna pleads for sympathy from bandits in Caccia tragica, expressing the melodramatic view of life and love by saying that ‘we don’t have anything, all we have is the ability to love each other’. In La città si difende, the two members of the gang whom the film regards positively, juvenile Alberto and family man Luigi, live in working-class apartment blocks in which laundry hangs and paint peels from the walls. Alberto’s poverty excuses his crime as being the crime of a corrupt world that offers no hope to its innocent children. In contrast, ex-footballer Leandri visits his girlfriend in a lavish apartment of luxury and decadence to the soundtrack of swing, indicating (although still blaming femininity) the corrupting temptations of the high life (Figure 2.8). The exploitation of labour is at the centre of the narratives of Il mulino del Po, Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, Il cammino della speranza and Il ferroviere. The films express a range of possibilities with regard to class position: Non c’è pace links questions of ownership to theft (rapacious capitalist Bonfiglio has the law on his side when Dominici steals back the sheep he sees as rightfully his); in Il cammino della speranza, the friendship of the Sicilians with a group of Bergamasc workers ends when they are attacked as scabs for the casual labour they have undertaken to survive. The attack splits the group into two halves, and the strikers throw a stone that fatally injures one of the Sicilian children. Workers are shown as having legitimate grievances against greedy bosses in Il mulino del Po and Il ferroviere/Man of Iron (Pietro Germi, 1956), but the union heads either share the bosses’ intransigence in Il mulino del Po, provoking the starving of the animals and fatal violence, or announce their d ­ ecisions as a pronunciamento over the heads of the workers in Il ferroviere (not espe-

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Figure 2.8  Habitations marking poverty and luxury in La città si difende

cially differently from the scene in the workers’ hall in Ladri di biciclette, whose protagonist Ricci encounters a union leader full of rhetoric about plans to help the working man but unconcerned with an actual individual worker in distress). The class rage of the Peasants’ League in Il mulino del Po is stated to be a lack of Christian charity, while the Church is a righteous but powerless force advising ruefully on events. Neorealism, popolare or otherwise, does tend to focus on the pathos of suffering rather than on the achievement of social change (in this it is the resolutely popolare director De Santis who is an exception). Bertetto points out that in Germi and Matarazzo, the tragedy of popular life offers ‘suffering as a “theatrical” response of the subaltern classes to the presumed metahistoricity and ineliminability of pain’ (Bertetto 1979: 142). One wonders if

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such ­metahistoricity and ineliminability could apply also to the beaten fishing family in La terra trema, left only to dream of a future salvation. If, then, it can be said that there is a morality uniting neorealism, it is one that understands the problems of ordinary people through a victimhood which can be solved principally by faith, whether Senza pietà’s faith in pity, Roma città aperta’s Catholic exhortation to sacrifice in the hope of a better future, or La terra trema’s plea for progress over the horizon on the distant mainland to liberate the Sicilian peasantry. The post-war star system was affected by anti-Fascist reckonings after the war, and Luisa Ferida and Osvaldo Valenti were executed for alleged Fascist sympathies owing to their shared status as the faces of regime cinema. More common, however, was the reinvention of Fascist-era stars through roles that in some way make up for a past. Nazzari’s performance in Il bandito marks the alteration of his persona into ‘the man who has been around’ (Sorlin 1996: 108). Clara Calamai stars in Due lettere anonime, set during the occupation, and she is fought over by a Partisan and a collaborator; the plot hinges on whether she will betray the Partisan. La vita ricomincia/Life Begins Anew (Mario Mattoli, 1945) works on the star personae of both Fosco Giachetti and Alida Valli (the two stars used in Bertolucci’s Il conformista and La strategia del ragno respectively), back under the direction of Mario Mattoli, who in the early 1940s made ‘the films that speak to your heart’ (see Mosconi 2006). These romances combined light comedy and melodrama, and La vita ricomincia refers in particular to Luce nelle tenebre (Mario Mattoli, 1941) (which starred Calamai too). In this film Giachetti is a model of bourgeois responsibility and also imperialist manhood (he falls victim to wicked North African saboteurs in a mine he runs and encounters a dim, slave-mentality black African). Although they are not direct propaganda films, their sense of self-satisfaction exemplifies that which neorealism has been thought to react against. La vita ricomincia opens over bombed buildings in long handheld shots in the busy public streets of Naples. Paolo was a prisoner in Africa then India, rather than a black-marketeer, like the father of a friend of his son’s whom he meets in his return home, his victimhood making him a less vigorous figure than either of his roles in the previous Mattoli films, or than his role as political leader in the two-part adaption of Ayn Rand’s Noi Vivi!/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), an epic pairing with Valli (see Ambrosino 1989). The effects of the war are felt – as they are in Due lettere anonime, Il bandito, Il cristo proibito (see below) and others – in how it has thrown homely stability into crisis. Paolo’s wife Patrizia is jailed for murder and in her prison cell confesses to Paolo that she prostituted herself to pay for their son’s treatment when he fell ill during the war. After her client popped up one evening when she was out with Paolo she felt impelled to shoot him, the violent

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crime a sublimated reminder of the violence of war and a displacing of war guilt onto the woman. It is through Patrizia, however, that the film enables a reinscription of family values after crisis. Patrizia’s constriction to prostitution shows that she, not Paolo, was the one who faced the true moral difficulties brought about by the hardships of war, because of her motherly duties towards her son. Paolo tries to frame himself for her murder and makes a classic statement of popular neorealist morality, that ‘justice is unjust’. Generalisations of guilt and victimhood are furthered as Paolo accepts his responsibility for having left the family on their own. There is no suggestion he was personally responsible for Fascism, for war or for the Italian army’s military catastrophes. It is instead an assumption of an emblematic position with regard to national trauma and crisis, through the melodramatisation of emotion, domesticity and victimhood. It is an example of the participation of popular culture in a process of coming to terms with the past. Nevertheless, in La vita ricomincia, this process involves a rather disturbing occlusion of recent history. The sage advice Paolo is given by his neighbour, played by renowned dialect theatre performer Eduardo, on asking at the film’s end what he should do is: ‘nothing. It’s life that will begin again like before. Nothing’s happened at all, it wasn’t anything. She’ll come home, you’ll both sit at the table like before, and there’ll be no scenes, no harangues, no pardons. Nothing’s happened at all.’ La vita ricomincia employs three of the most emblematic figures of post-war cinema, the prostitute, the returned prisoner of war and the child. Through the prostitute, an emblem of blame is created, but not one who is blamed for Fascism or war. Instead the blame lies with a collective condition that allowed the take-over and corruption that Fascism was now seen to be. From Machiavelli, Italy has been gendered in female terms; the emblematic nature then of the repeated figure of the prostitute represents an important dramatic take on national identity (see Marcus 2000). As Danielle Hipkins maintains in her analysis of Il bandito, Paisà and La vita ricomincia, the prostitute reflects a crisis in gender relations, common to most countries involved in the Second World War, during which women had shown themselves to be able to cope in roles outside those traditionally allocated them by patriarchal society [. . .] [which is in Italy] a pointed attempt to reinscribe women as sexually and morally weak, in order to displace a sense of collective political guilt. (Hipkins 2007: 85) She thus acts both as a vehicle for expressing a sense of collective shame, and of removing that from the public and historical sphere and re-imagining it in terms of sexual relations. Ben-Ghiat has described popular culture in Italy at the end of the war in

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terms of the way in which it realises, through particular gendered figures, epochal social problems, including the erosion of trust in private and public life; the need for new ethical and civic codes; the difficulties of rebuilding affective ties within families; and the necessity of models of manhood that would replace the militarized masculinities embraced by the fascist regime. As in postwar West Germany, concerns about redeeming damaged males for the project of ‘making citizens’ and building democracy surround these portraits of males in turmoil [. . .] And as in postwar France, anxiety about female emancipation and fidelity is manifested in representations of men victimized by women collaborators, profiteers and wives gone astray from the pressures of war [. . .] (Ben-Ghiat 2005: 338) Ben-Ghiat’s analysis of the war veteran is of a figure cut adrift in a new society to which he cannot be reconciled. This is the case with Ernesto in Il bandito and ‘Ntoni in La terra trema (although here the army is mentioned as a place of radical ferment that ‘Ntoni brings back south – national serviceman Marco in Riso amaro expresses similar hopes for the army’s potential to become a people’s militia). It is also the case with heroes in films as different as the crime drama Il bivio (Fernando Cerchio, 1950) and the Christian morality drama Il cristo proibito/The Forbidden Christ (Curzio Malaparte, 1951), from the Communist agrarian propaganda piece Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, to the domestic, bourgeois star vehicle La vita ricomincia. Ernesto in Il bandito becomes a social bandit redistributing wealth to the poor, and is shot in the hills by the forces of the new order in a manner that actively recalls not only the real social fact of politicised banditry in the postUnification south of Italy but more specifically Partisan imagery from the anti-fascist struggle that had only recently occurred (see Ben-Ghiat 1999). In Il bivio, lead character Aldo, reminded by a criminal gang that life isn’t as it was straight after the War ‘when a rifle was enough’, must decide between the gangsters and the forces of order. It opens with Aldo chased by the criminals, a decorated soldier become a vested, hunted man. The veteran’s dislocation from society employs melodrama to suggest the victimhood of those for whom post-war malaise is a continuation of wartime struggle, while also suggesting a heroic independence from the new peacetime (im)morality that repudiates the past and is caught up instead in the short termism of getting rich quick. Aldo in Il bivio finally chooses to side with the law, but this becomes a sacrificial act that leads to his violent death. In Il cristo proibito the violence of the past is a metaphysical moral breakdown. Bruno finds on his return home that his brother has been murdered, rendering wartime violence, as in Il bandito and Senza pietà, through a disruption of the

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domestic sphere; unashamed to have fought for his country and embittered at the lack of respect for returning soldiers, he ends up killing a man innocent of the crime in his search both for revenge and for a Godly morality. The film’s final words are his repeated cries, to the sky, of ‘Why?’. The veteran is somewhat like a child and the child something of a veteran in neorealism. As mentioned earlier, the child embodies scarred innocence and suffering, and is prey to crime and corruption, for example in the Naples episode of Paisà, in La città si difende and as suggested in the title of juvenile crime film Gioventù perduta/Lost Youth (Pietro Germi, 1947), or is denied childhood by a society that offers no nurture but conspires towards the incarceration of the young protagonists in Sciuscià and Il cielo è rosso/The Sky Is Red (Claudio Gora, 1950), a story about a commune built by four orphaned youngsters in the abandoned rubble of a home. This is a big change from the cult of youth’s vigour that was found in Fascism, for lost youth, a ‘metaphor of change’ (Capussotti 2004: 45), is inscribed with the ‘memory of the tragedy that had just been gone through and the collective hopes of a present and future redemption’ (ibid.: 46). In Cuori senza frontiere/The White Line (Luigi Zampa, 1950), the inhabitants of a town on the confines of Italy and Yugoslavia find themselves on either side of the Cold War as the town becomes a military border cut in half by a literal dividing line. The young boys who populate the town initially enthusiastically take sides in the rivalries that emerge among their parents between the capitalist West and communist East, and a fight at the border ends up with young lad Pasqualino, played by Enzo Stajola (Bruno from Ladri di biciclette), hit by a former pal on the Italian side. The tears this causes lead to a détente between the boys, who decide instead to burn the border post, but Pasqualino is eventually shot in the back while carrying it away. This heavily symbolic sacrifice, as Pasqualino dies with the post on his back, leads Communist Domenico (played by Raf Vallone, one-time journalist for L’Unità) to assert that they are all guilty of killing the boy: another example of the generalisation and yet partial absolution of guilt common to cinema of this era.  As charted by Patriarca in Italian Vices (2010), Fascism had sought to build a new national character, one with a potential for masculine virility, rather than the feminine corruption which had served as a description of the indolence, effeminacy and passivity perceived as a national condition from the writings of Machiavelli and the commentaries of foreign observers from the Renaissance onwards. After the war a new narrative was written of Italy as a tricked and victim nation. Both traditional Catholic ideas of essential peasant goodness (Patriarca 2010: 121), and the Communist expiation of a popolo who apparently spent twenty years of Fascism ‘led astray by a corrupt ruling class’ (ibid.: 197), provided repositories of faith and continuity to draw upon for the reconstruction of a non-Fascist national character. Narratives of

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t­rickery and victimhood lend themselves more to a melodramatic recounting of events than anything else, staging confrontations of corruption with innocence to clarify questions of culpability and absolution. In the work it does to rebuild an account of national character after Fascism, melodrama serves to value the innocence ascribed to the qualities of femininity and passivity previously abjured by Fascist ideology; meanwhile, the work ethic, morality and solidarity are strong in the films of neorealismo popolare, as if to counter the attribution of laziness and individualist cunning otherwise associated with Italians. Melodrama has historically formed the ‘macrogenre through which cinema institutionally began a strategy to win back the public and call to a shared cultural identity’ (Grignaffini 1996: 367). The ‘mode of defeat’ which David Forgacs (2004) states operates in Roma città aperta exists more generally in neorealism, and it is here that melodrama is useful, for it makes culpability and innocence clear within a corrupted social environment. Thus the poor or helpless are understood across neorealism as victims and in their victimhood they confront a world that is melodramatically set up against them. In discussing the role of melodrama in modern times, Elsaesser has argued that not only do we need individuals to understand history, rather, we seem to need to understand history’s protagonists as victims [. . .] we want to experience victims and survivors who triumphed either in death through sacrifice or who survived disaster and adversity through extremes of suffering and victimisation. Melodrama has here replaced the epic of the classical age, and the romance of Marxist historiography (of struggle, test and ultimate victory) to become, in their stead, the seemingly natural narrative of conflict and antagonism for our post-Enlightenment age that no longer believes in the grand narrative of progress. (Elsaesser 2007: 38) In this case post-war Italian cinema anticipates modern melodramatic constructions of history. Its social democratic, and Catholic, combination of realism and melodrama creates a worldview in which the poor are victims of a moment in history that is at odds with the fundamental human spirit of solidarity. Conclusion Although neorealism was initially considered to be a revolutionary political vanguard, the changed appraisals of its previously idealised status led to revisions of this view. Cannella has stated that neorealist politics were born of the defeat of class politics within the Resistance and thus ‘the non-class terminol-

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ogy of the broad anti-Fascist movement took [Marxism’s] ideological place’ (Cannella 1973: 22). Cannella uses In nome della legge/In the Name of the Law (Pietro Germi, 1949), which explicitly addresses the relationship of the individual to the collective, as an example of the reformist limits of neorealism. Guido Schiavi comes as the new praetore to Mafia-dominated rural Sicily with an idealistic determination to rid the area of organised crime. Mafia activity is responsible for keeping a sulphur mine closed and for consequent problems of unemployment. After an attempt on his life the situation appears hopeless, but on leaving town news comes to Schiavi that Paolino, a 17-year-old about to be married, has been shot dead. Schiavi impulsively returns, ringing the bells to summon the town en masse into the public square. He scolds the crowd that they are all to blame for this killing, animating their collective spirit – including that of the town’s previously immovable Mafia boss – through reference to their moral sense. According to Cannella, the dramatic focus of neorealism takes place on the general level of feelings rather than the analysis and altering of social structures (ibid.: 34) and its politics are consequently those of brotherhood and humanity over revolutionary confrontation. Is it the melodrama itself, a mode of popular morality built on the pathos of an inability to overcome social obstacles, that keeps neorealism in the area of humanist feelings of sympathy and defeat? Is Cannella right in stating that the social democracy of In nome della legge means that it ‘necessarily slides into sentimentalism and melodrama’ (ibid.: 38)? Quaresima concludes an article on De Santis by saying that his use of melodrama betrays his communist politics (Quaresima 1982: 53). It would be better, however, to say that melodrama has been used in a variety of political ways and that neorealism is one radicalisation of it. One of the reasons for the prominent use of gesture is the need of a popular, non-official theatre to avoid censorship (Mazzoni 1973: 90–1). Melodrama, as the drama of the popular masses, has been used repeatedly for political radicalism.16 Cawelti identifies ‘social melodramas’ that develop from stock archetypes to suit more complex tastes, with the ‘basic structure of a melodramatic inner plot embodied in a more or less complex and critical treatment of society’ (Cawelti 1991: 36), and Reich (2002) discusses melodrama as being a subversive force in Fascistera cinema for its capacity to render states of dissatisfaction and uncertainty. Melodrama is thus usefully understood as able to function ‘either subversively or as escapism’ (Elsaesser 1987: 47), or to be ‘at the same time subversive and reactionary’ (Goimard 1999: 57). Neorealismo popolare aims for an address which is public, both in terms of reaching a popular audience and of constituting a political entity. In neorealism (unlike the realist novel which addressed personal questions to a bourgeois audience: see Habermas 1999), this public social formation is lower-class,

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c­ollective and oppositional. Melodrama helps neorealism locate authentic passion and pressing social questions in this sphere. Social questions are often understood through their individual effects, but this is incorporated into visions of the determining nature of collectivity and material environment, while the family and domesticity, from Il mulino del Po to La terra trema, do not exist apart from the working and communal relationships that pervade them. The question of whether melodrama is necessarily conservative should not be posed as an abstract one of the fundamental essences of artistic form – the de-dramatisation of a film like Umberto D. would seem at least as born of defeat as any of the more melodramatic neorealist films. It is true that neorealismo popolare tends not to go beyond questions of defeat, pity and sympathy, but it is not as if other forms of cinema in this period – pedinamento, comedy, Antonioni’s modernism – suggested anything radically different from this. Neorealismo popolare thus does represent a social-democratic celebration of the people whose troubles it seeks to document. As such it is part of the general culture in which it participates. What neorealismo popolare shows is that melodrama is adaptable to aesthetic innovation and changing political needs. It can incorporate realist denunciation of social issues and interest in the social and natural environment. It was not primarily through the use of a different form from melodrama, but in a different historical period (in particular, the late 1960s) that Italian cinema was further to radicalise. Notes   1. That is, of the harmonic representation of an illusorily real world of fantastical resolution achieved by the agency of psychologically consistent and goal-driven characters.   2. The amount of scholarship on Italian neorealism is immense. See, for a selection, Farassino 1989, Haaland 2012, Marcus 1989, Micciché 1999, Overbey 1978a, Schoonover 2012, Shiel 2006, Tinazzi and Zancan 1983, Wagstaff 2008.   3. On De Santis, see Toffetti 1996, Vitti 1996.  4. And their social address was too keenly felt by the authoritarian state, with the Fascists effectively closing down the regionalist, class-conscious Neapolitan cinema.   5. See Aristarco 1974 and Aitken 2006 for an account of Senso as Lukácsian realism.   6. A ‘storia ridicola’ (Francesco Callari, cited in Aprà 1987: 152), ‘forced and false in tone and undeserving of critical comment’ (Rondi, cited in Hipkins 2006a: 155), a view echoed by Bondanella 1993: 76.   7. See Ayfré 1985, Bazin 2005, Rivette 1985.   8. For accounts of Italy in the post-war era, see Baranski and Lumley 1990, Clark 1996, Duggan and Wagstaff 1995, Ginsborg 1990a, McCarthy 2000a.   9. On Italian art cinema in the post-war period see Baldelli 1971, Barattoni 2012, Restivo 2002, Sitney 1995, Testa 2002.

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10. On Rossellini, see Aprà 1987, Forgacs, Lutton and Nowell-Smith 2000, Bondanella 1993, Brunette 1987, Gottlieb 2004. 11. See Sesti 1999 for an account of opera in Bertolucci’s films. 12. For Italian accounts of genre cinema in this period see Carpi 1958, Lizzani 1982, 1989, Micciché 1979, Pellizzari 1978, Tinazzi 1979, Villa 1995. 13. See Savio 1975 for an account of cinema during Fascism, and Argentieri 1996 for an account of cinema in wartime. 14. Overbey 1978b: 14 cites American literature and Cain as determining the ‘look’ of neorealist films. 15. See also Agnew 2002, Bernardi 2002. 16. See Daniel Gerould 1994, who discusses the revolutionary political use of melodrama from the French Revolution and then to Communard Louise Michel and Bolshevik revolutionary Lunacharsky.

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We have been concerned up to now with the significance of melodrama in the context of Italian cinema. The significance of melodramma, at least in the context of the Italian dictionary, takes us further back and to other artistic realms, for the word is synonymous with ‘opera’ and ‘melodrama’. Melos is Greek for ‘melody’, and the term was devised for the combination of music and drama found in the first mélodrames (Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762/70) is credited as the first full version). These dramas belonged to the late eighteenthcentury French stage and alternated spoken and musical performance in a modern imagination of what Ancient Greek theatre was like. The accompaniment of music to drama confers various cultural associations, in particular the linkage of music with emotional emphasis and elevation. In the historical account given by Jay Grout (1965), in Greek drama, music was used intermittently to increase the magnitude of the drama, and, implying a heavier emotional function belonging to the music, was present more often in tragedy than comedy. In liturgies and mystery plays the musicians were held on a higher level representing paradise, in another linkage of music with elevation. The prominence of music, or a sense of a stylistic musicality (see Elsaesser 1987, to be discussed further below), is central to conceptions of melodrama. Italy offers a special case because of the historical prevalence of opera in its stage drama, and the consequent belief that the operatic indicates a deeply Italianate expressivity.

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I  Opera and cinema Film in Italy has been a lead instrument for the mass diffusion of opera, as cineopera, films arising from opera, twice saved the industry from crisis, at the onset of sound in the 1930s and after the destruction wrought on the industry by World War II. In straitened times, these costume dramas enabled a nation fresh from the ‘nightmare of the war’ to be taken into a higher realm and fascinated with the magniloquent image of a sublime and blinding passion, whose picture of humanity is always grandiose, for good and evil. Accordingly, the first stars of the post-war cinema were two singers, Tito Gobbi and Gino Bechi. (Spinazzola 1985: 57) Thanks to cineopera, such major stage performers became popular film stars; on the other hand, future popular film stars including Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano and Sofia Loren1 made breakthrough screen appearances in cineopere. Cineopera headed Fascist-era efforts to promote a markedly Italian product internationally (Brunetta 1995: 18) and after Fascism’s downfall provided a fount of national cultural pride2 (thereby avoiding the fate of Wagner after his posthumous appropriation by the Nazis). The following will not present a discussion of intermediality in the filming of opera (for which see Bachelor 1984), nor say much about the added meanings given by the respective films’ intertextual references to individual operas. It seeks instead to question how opera is used in cineopera to comprehend romance, life and musical performance itself in melodramatic terms. The hybridity of cineopera, a composite form made up of two composite forms – opera and cinema, each of which combines music and drama – makes it one of the truly significant ‘homegrown genres of Italian cinema’ (Pescatore 2001: 9), providing an important instance of how opera can be conceived by and as mass culture.3 The inclusion of well-known, pre-existing works in filmed dramas, and the combination of the conventionally more extravagant and less realist world of the opera stage with that of cinematic narration, change the experience of watching them and in particular the assumptions the spectator must make about the narrative world. To analyse cineopera then as an example of melodrama means to contemplate a core problematic of melodrama – the relation of melos to drama – in films in which this very relation is often an overt narrative factor. In the 154 cineopere made in Italy between 1931 and 1991, the canon of popularly recognised operas (principally bel canto and verismo works) could be heard in filmed operas and also as opere in prosa, as Comuzio (1984: 13) calls them (narrative films based on opera libretti and featuring operatic

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themes on the musical soundtrack), biopics of composers and performers (including Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni) and, in the largest part of cineopera (81 films), new dramas featuring contemporary opera stars and designed around as many stage performances as the narrative could justify (Casadio 1995: 7–11). Cineopera was popular internationally, with Non ti scordar di me/Forget Me Not (Zoltan Korda, 1936) filmed in dual-language versions with its British co-producers, Ave Maria (Johannes Riemann, 1936), a German/ Italian co-production and, after the war, Follie per l’opera/Mad About Opera (Mario Costa, 1949) setting its Italian cast against the backdrop of London. Mario Costa and Carmine Gallone were important directors in the field, but it is worth noting that when Luchino Visconti invited Jean Renoir to Italy in 1940 to help direct his first feature film, the planned production was to be Tosca. Cineopere appeared in the top twelve grossing Italian films each year from 1946 to 1955, its success peaking simultaneously with the domestic melodramas discussed in Chapter 1, when in 1953 the biopics Giuseppe Verdi (Raffaello Matarazzo) and Puccini (Carmine Gallone) and the film version of Aïda (Clemente Fracassi) took second, fourth, and sixth place at the national box office.4 Musical strains Any form of popular cinema has to strike a balance between the illusion it offers of a real, inhabited world of plausible events and dramatic development against the opportunity for spectacle, fantasy and heightened affect. The presence of opera, with its theatrical, fantastical and musical aspects, places cineopera on the more stylised side of the balance. This can be seen most obviously in the strain of filmed operas, famous examples of which include Il barbiere di Siviglia/The Barber of Seville (Mario Costa, 1946), L’elisir d’amore (Mario Costa, 1946), Pagliacci (Mario Costa, 1948), Lucia di Lammermoor (Piero Ballerini, 1946), Rigoletto (Carmine Gallone, 1946), La signora delle camelie (the name of the play on which La traviata is based) (Raymond Bernard, 1953), and Aïda, a particularly spectacular colour production. Rather than recordings of live performances, filmed operas are shot on studio sets and retain a strong sense of staginess. They take the vantage point of an albeit often changing position in the stalls and dwell on long-shots that emphasise the overall shape of the staging. These films are proof not solely that cineopera responded to a demand for cheaper opera at the expense of liveness, which the long-shots and long takes help suggest but cannot replace; the emphasis on staging, costumes and decor suggests that an experience governed by theatricality and expressive stylisation – and which, moreover, delights in drawing attention to itself as such – would seem to form a principal appeal. More important for the frameworks through which to understand melo-

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drama are the films that combine a non-operatic cinematic narrative with sections of operatic music, and so it will be these films, the biopics and parallel dramas that combine filmic – or one could say ‘prose’ – narratives with moments of opera, that I will have in mind when referring to cineopera for the rest of this chapter. The very qualities of expressivity, theatricality and passion occupy an overt and distinct role in the representation of an often imperfect, but mutually implicated, relation between everyday and operatic life. In these films, properties of music, expressivity, stylisation, performance, exaltation, fantasy – and success – belong to opera, while narration, conflict, everydayness, disappointment, the private sphere, obligation and structure belong to the prose world. This is one of the innovations of biopic and parallel cineopere, for in stage opera properties such as narration, conflict, and so on are each very present. Instead, in these cineopere it is the prose world that contains them, for they remove drama and narrative conflict from the operas it shows to give isolated fragments of the most famous arias or overtures abstracted from their original contexts. Although filmed operas were often the highest grossing cineopere, more numerous are those featuring a stage performer or composer for whom musical success is offset by personal difficulties. In everyday settings, the characters inhabit a fictional world that frequently skirts close to those of nineteenth-century melodramatic theatre and opera. Near the beginning of the biopic Giuseppe Verdi, on first hearing that their young child is ill, the composer leaves his wife alone in their drawing room and she sweeps towards the window to gaze at the (offscreen) street below into which her husband has descended. Without dramatic valence in itself, this action has the affective force of an important moment when the overture to Verdi’s opera La forza del destino begins on the soundtrack. A short while later the overture returns, thus becoming a leitmotif for her suffering, while in desperation she pawns her jewellery. Played for longer, it reaches a crescendo and she faints on the rainswept street as the scene ends, her child having already died while she is fatally ill. A similar operatic moment within the prose world occurs in Casa Ricordi (Carmine Gallone, 1954), a biopic of the musical publishing house. In the film’s dramatic midway point, the curtain falls to rapturous applause on the end of the premiere of Bellini’s I puritani. The scene cuts to a closeup of the composer himself at home alone suffering a fatal illness which has at least in part been caused by a now-repentant jealous lover, Luisa, who is simultaneously racing back to the house to seek reconciliation. The overture to Norma starts on the soundtrack as the solitary composer struggles to his feet in his death throes. In both examples the drama happens not within the operas, which are only partially if at all shown and whose success does not concern the troubled protagonists. Instead, opera structures the private lives of those involved with producing it, who are ever liable to gesture towards a domain of

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Figure 3.1  The operatic theatricality of Casa Ricordi

sudden, heightened and extended emotional expressivity: a domain governed by precisely those characteristics that cineopera proposes as essential to opera itself. In accordance, then, with an operatic aesthetic, operatic music is used alongside theatricalised expressivity and emotional emphasis. In Casa Ricordi, for example, the strong yet delicate modulations of Bellini’s repetitive punctuation in his cry of the name ‘Luisa’ as he falls against the hearth display the fatal turn of his illness, simultaneous with the strength of the emotion that appears to be its cause. The sounds and his movements are timed with the musical soundtrack as a peal of thunder claps and the storm worsens; a gust of wind blows open his window, casting the drapes into the room while the composer dies before his beloved reaches him, in an iconic, tableau formation common to operatic and melodramatic theatre (see Figure 3.1). Such operatics (a term I will define further below) establish the presence of a more vivid and fantastical sphere of expressivity through which to make emotional sense of the prose world. It has been noted by Richard Dyer that in Italian film scoring, the appearance of songs on the soundtracks typically occurs without the music being ‘disciplined’ by ‘being clearly rooted in conventional narrative space and time’ (Dyer 2013: 79). The pieces of opera heard in cineopera, which come from the extra-filmic world of the classical canon, indicate a place apart from the narrative unfolding of the protagonists’ private lives. The sequences mentioned above presume popular recognition of the operas that they use: that it is the overture from his greatest success that plays during Bellini’s death, or Verdi’s

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La forza del destino, with its fatalistic associations, that accompanies his wife’s sorrow. Such musical narration differs from the classical film soundtrack which, although it also takes its cue from late nineteenth-century opera, underlines the moods and actions it accompanies through underscoring, that is, unobtrusively (the foundational text on classical scoring, Gorbman 1987, being called Unheard Melodies). In the examples given above, the loud, sudden and obtrusive nature of the overtures’ entries and the very fact of their being already known places the music not under nor as unheard but as noticed and heard. Cineopera represented one of a variety of attempts to incorporate musical forms into cinema after the coming of sound, attempts which saw Broadway theatre develop into the Hollywood musical, Brazilian carnival into the chanchada, light opera into the Austrian operetta film and opera into Italian cineopera. Each of these conceives of different relationships between music and drama and follows different evolutionary patterns regarding the relationship between narrative and performance. If scholarship agrees on one thing it is that Italy has no ‘real’ musicals, as defined by those in which ‘the narrative development is based on musical numbers in which dance, song, sets and costumes are all directed towards a single aesthetic goal’ (Tessarolo 1996: 237, repeated by Arcagni 2006: 11 and cited in Marlow-Mann 2012: 80). This succinct distinction is useful insofar as it classifies the separation in cineopera of the opera performance from narrative development. The cineopere being discussed here do not feature dance or develop into a profusion of spectacular onstage fantasy. The examples in cineopera of a love intrigue, a career ambition or a financial need hinging on a successful stage performance (a definitional example of which would be Golddiggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)) are rare, for stage performance tends more often to represent a place apart from narrative problems. The restriction of musical performance to a theatre stage or salon also means that cineopera cannot offer a fantastical integration of the world of musical performance into the characters’ everyday lives (as occurs in what is known as the integrated musical, perfected by MGM). But these separations notwithstanding, and beyond a failure to achieve a ‘single aesthetic goal’, which is surely not characteristic of the Hollywood musical either, cineopera, as manifested in the films discussed here, does offer a coherent generic take on the interrelationship of music and narrative through the composite relationship it presents of prose and opera. It was mentioned above in reference to Giuseppe Verdi and Casa Ricordi that opera seems to govern and express the private lives of the protagonists beyond the opera theatre. Yet alongside such expressive intermingling, cineopera maintains a separation between performance and dramatic space. Not only do the narratives take place beyond the stage show, the private lives of the characters are, as distinct from the exalted successes of the stage performances,

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marked by failure, disappointment, a falling short of legendary heroism and exoticism, and domesticity, everydayness, or even squalor. Thus in cineopera, opera occurs in an elevated sphere which the characters hear, which they may perform, and towards which they gesture, but which they are blocked from really inhabiting – the very same kind of suggested but denied transcendence that marks melodrama (Elsaesser 1987; Rohdie 1992; Goimard 1999). Drama as music Whether or not we decide to enlarge definition of the musical beyond better known (and theorised) versions of the form,5 cineopera, however, offers a coherent and distinctive generic iteration of the music/drama relationship: of opera stage and real life as separate from but expressive of each other.6 Cineopera’s take on this relationship is to set up a series of ‘parallel’ dramas between public/private and art/life, interacting in a ‘circular double structure’ (Pescatore 2001: 22). Firstly, cineopera establishes the theatrical space as one of pure artistic endeavour and emotional expressivity. An example of how this occurs can be found in Solo per te (Carmine Gallone, 1938), which begins with tenor Vanni (played by Beniamino Gigli) in a performance of Mephistopheles. An extremely slow shot moves from the orchestra and across the audience, and at the end of the duet a tilt mimics the swell of the music and posits the spectator (onscreen and actual) in a position of silently enthralled appreciation (Figure 3.2). The public reception of the performance confers an aura of collective consecration on the music and the ponderous manner of its filming adds gravitas to the performance of opera. Such establishment of artistic grandeur serves eventually to emphasise the disruptive nature of the inevitable intrusion of dramatic conflict which gets the narrative under way. At the opening of Solo per te a nervous stage manager distracts the enraptured listener Maria from her husband Vanni’s performance as Faust, presaging how a seducer, a baritone named Doret, later tries to distract her from her husband. This pattern of enchanted spectatorship interrupted by the narrative world is a recurrent one in the genre: in Casta diva (Carmine Gallone, 1956), a biopic of Vincenzo Bellini, the first scene of dialogue after the opening performance occurs as an outraged Paganini stops his performance and summons Bellini backstage to explain why he laughed through the show; in Torna a Sorrento (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1945) an argument in the opera box interrupts the stage performance; while during a rendition of the eponymous popular song in ’O sole mio (Giacomo Gentilomo, 1946) World War II breaks into the sealed radio studio as a bullet shatters the glass of the sound booth. The enthralled rapture that is presented as the correct attitude towards opera is thus upset by the profane distractions of the narrative world. In

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Figure 3.2  Awed spectatorship and narrative disruption in Solo per te

Solo per te, seducer Doret argues backstage with his wife during an offstage costume change in the middle of a performance of Un ballo in maschera. Their dialogue is accompanied by the audible onstage (but offscreen) opera and their private emotional situation is positioned literally underneath the music. Doret tells his wife ‘we’re in the middle of the drama now’ and criticises her ‘ridiculous scenes’. Real life begins to live up to opera at the same time as the opera provides a musical accompaniment to their drama, the dialogue recognising this appropriateness whilst also deflating the wife’s pretension to operatic status. After their argument, the duet of the onstage lovers is then intercut with the stage manager’s discovery of Doret’s dead body. The climax of the musical performance occurs simultaneously with his shocking backstage discovery.

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The sense of sympathy between the performance and dramatic worlds sees ironies and mismatches redouble upon themselves as motors to the creation of pathos. The dramatic climax of Solo per te occurs around a performance of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. The courtly political aspects of Un ballo in maschera do not fit with the domestic drama of Solo per te, which in keeping with its twentieth-century and melodramatic aspects concerns the troubles of ordinary people rather than the tragic aspects of regal life. However, the filmic narrative traces the dramatic arc of the opera, at times chiming with it and at times diverging from it. The plot of Verdi’s opera regards Riccardo’s love for Amelia, wife of Renato. Misapprehending adultery, Renato kills Riccardo, who testifies to Amelia’s innocence. In Solo per te, Doret is killed by his wife for suspected (and unsuccessfully attempted) infidelity. Maria, the object of his renewed seductions (and mother of his child), is suspected of the crime. She is doubly wrongly suspected, of murder and adultery, although Doret’s wife – called Riccarda, a reversal of the hero’s name Riccardo in Un ballo in maschera – finally admits guilt. Between Un ballo in maschera and Solo per te the identities of the murderers and lovers shift, but the motivations of the characters reverberate between the two – to the point where Vanni plays the virtuous Riccardo, and Doret Renato. In Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma/Before Him All Rome Trembled (Carmine Gallone, 1947), a Roman opera troupe put on a performance of Tosca, which is set during the occupation of Rome by Napoleonic troops, for the occupying Germans of World War II. In Mamma/ Mother (Guido Brignone, 1941), lead character Sarni (Beniamino Gigli) sings ‘La donna è mobile’ without realising his unfaithful wife’s contemporaneous fickleness. He plays Otello in Verdi’s eponymous opera, but his problem is that he is too trusting, not unnecessarily jealous, while those around him aim to show their goodness by alerting him to the truth. A free-floating quality to the music, which transcends its spatial and temporal point of origin to create a ‘sonorous envelope’ (Gorbman 1987: 62, using Didier Anzieu’s phrase), is an essential attribute of the extra-diegetic score. Here such a free-floating nature gives the suggestion of transcendence through music, while the characters remain fatally bounded in place. The stage entertainers in Solo per te are blissfully unaware of the murder that their performance fits and climactically accompanies, as the hidden personal battles exist beneath the public performance that gives the private sphere its dramatic weight. Cineopera creates a melodramatic interplay of what Michel Chion calls empathetic effect, where the music reinforces the emotions of the onscreen characters, and anempathetic, the music giving a sense of cosmic indifference (Chion 1994, see also Gorbman 1987: 24). The music in Solo per te that accompanies the argument and then the discovery of Doret’s dead body is emotionally appropriate to the situation whilst occurring in a separate space

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and with no diegetic knowledge of the predicament it filmically accompanies, blithely continuing after the death is discovered. Thus, to reformulate the earlier points about the status of prosaic and operatic in cineopera, the relationship of stage to narrative life creates pathos through a complex process: the onstage music is already emotive and provides expressive elevation to the dramatic climaxes which occur offstage, while the offstage life fails, however, to live up to the qualities of purity or transcendence that the films establish as intrinsic to opera. In this accompaniment the use of music is very much distinct from that of the Hollywood musical, and far closer to melodrama. Because it occupies the more naturalistic realms of cinematic drama as well as those of opera, cineopera must work harder to validate faith in the truthfulness of performative emotionality. Thus cineopera incorporates the ideal of music being expressive of a greater truth into quite a literal narrative function of opera in uncovering truth. In Solo per te, Riccarda hears Vanni’s impassioned performance on the radio and is moved to admit that she is the one who killed her husband. A conductor who has committed a murder out of sexual jealousy admits the truth while conducting a performance of Tosca in La donna più bella del mondo/The World’s Most Beautiful Woman (Robert Z. Leonard, 1955). Pagliacci begins when Leoncavallo, upset at the lack of success of his I Medici, asks desperately ‘Shouldn’t drama be based on real life?’ as he begins to play impassioned music, the musical score takes over, and we are transported to a theatre performance that starts the narrative. Replicating the deliberate confusion of the boundaries between art and life present in the original opera, the film ends after the stabbing of Nedda by Canio when her real-life lover rushes from the audience onto the stage, Canio singing ‘la commedia è finita’ (‘the play is over’). In Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, the two leads (Gobbi and Anna Magnani) repeat the declamations and poses that they had struck during the opera performance when they are actually on the run. All the way through, the prose world gestures towards the operatic and the opera stage is threatened by the intrusion of the narrative world, always stopping just before the two ever fully integrate. The ideology of operatic passion The elevated, separate position of musical performance is one aspect of the construction of the ‘operatic’ as a category. In her discussion of the ‘self-­reflective musical’, that is, those about putting on a show, Jane Feuer talks of how, in such films, entertainment is ‘mythified’, that is, ‘shown as having greater value than it really does’ (Feuer 1981: 161). Furthering the connection of genre to myth, she discusses the Hollywood musical in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terms in that ‘the seemingly random surface structure of a myth masks ­contradictions

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that are real and therefore unresolvable’ (ibid.: 162). This mythification is present in cineopera in the contradiction between art and reality that presents opera as both a primary and a refined sensibility, its access to an interior truth occurring through exaggerated expressivity, and in intimacy through public performance. The mythified value that cineopera places on opera is then further conferred not only on music but on romance, nation and religion. Music in cineopera is represented not only as an accompaniment to love but as the same thing – in Musica proibita (Carlo Campogalliani, 1942) it is not the ‘musica’ that the narrative shows as ‘proibita’ (forbidden), but the protagonists’ romance. The few characters in the cineopera who state that they cannot appreciate music are also ones who cannot appreciate love. Maddalena’s fiancé in Casta Diva departs before the opera he has accompanied her to begins, as, in a sign of the hopelessness of their marriage, he dismisses staying out of hand because he has no interest in an activity that might make him emotional. Music and emotion in cineopera are separated at the characters’ peril: Claretta’s new piano teacher tells her to play with her hands, not her heart, in Musica proibita as cold rationality conquers emotional fulfilment after she is separated from her boyfriend. Such romance is often endowed with spiritual weight in the tradition of courtly love: in Melodie immortali/Immortal Melodies (Giacomo Gentilomo, 1953) Mascagni turns down the advances of a woman who propositions him by saying that he only loves his art. But then he spots a woman at the station and the extra-diegetic operatic music strikes up powerfully, linking Lina – the woman who is to become his wife and muse – with his art. The idea of elevation is furthered by associations of music and love with holiness. In the Bellini biopic Casta diva, Bellini describes Maddalena as a ‘supernatural apparition’, and says he is drawing her ‘portrait’ as he writes the notes of ‘Casta Diva’, which begin to play on the film’s soundtrack. Maintaining the chasteness of their love, Maddalena dies before they consummate their passion. Cineopera often focuses on the illness or death of its protagonists, as if the affective properties of music and love have a power which the body is too weak to endure. The spiritual aspect of opera is furthered in many other associations: in Casa Ricordi it is described as a ‘sacrilege’ for a worker painting in the opera house to make a hat out of printed music. In Melodie immortali Mascagni gets inspiration after his visit to Milan Cathedral, and when he is composing in his garret the camera moves out over the rooftops and leads back to the Cathedral spires. Bellini in Casta diva, Mascagni in Melodie immortali, and Verdi in Giuseppe Verdi show the artist as difficult and headstrong, working from inspiration and disregarding social convention, linking natural genius to the aesthetic experience and divine realms. Although consecrating music which transports the listener to a spiritual

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realm, the cinematic spectacle includes the sexual objectification of its female performers. Aïda’s more elaborate aesthetic is justified in part by the desire to show off the then new star Sophia Loren, who, not trained as an operatic soprano, is dubbed by Renata Tebaldi. The physically unprepossessing baritone star Tito Gobbi plays alongside Gina Lollobrigida (who although trained as a soprano was dubbed by Onelia Fineschi) in Pagliacci, with Lollobrigida’s body the object of the camera’s at times explicitly voyeuristic and male (she is spied upon desiringly) gaze. In the biopic of Lina Cavalieri La donna più bella del mondo, Gina Lollobrigida incites a more lascivious gaze than the enraptured spectatorship shown as the correct audience response in male-starred cineopere. Even in a film such as La donna più bella del mondo, starring Gina Lollobrigida as the singer Lina Cavalieri, when the film culminates with a dramatic discovery of a murderer during her performance in Tosca, it concentrates on the conductor Silvani rather than Lina, maintaining a gendering of operatic drama in cineopera as male. Cineopera is notable in that male performers are principal sources of emotional intensification rather than of action. Expressive skill is shown to feminise the male performer, particularly in the case of the star persona of Beniamino Gigli. Gigli, a performer whose voice was frequently claimed to contain sweetness, is emasculated and domesticated in his films: he dresses in a woman’s headscarf while playing with his son in Solo per te and, as a single parent in Non ti scordar di me, he is introduced by his young son with the line ‘my father is my mother’. This has some bearing on the presentation of masculine heroism that cineopera creates. Ave Maria (Johannes Riemann, 1936) opens its credits with a dedication to its star Gigli (who, although he repudiated Fascism after the war, was known as ‘Hitler’s tenor’ for the audience he gave to the Führer), for ‘raising ever higher the uncontested supremacy of Italian art’. The industry was keen to vaunt cineopera as an example of national culture. In his starring role in Mamma, Gigli sings from his mansion balcony to the local peasantry in a scene unambiguously reminiscent of Mussolini’s addresses to the people, with a subsequent montage sequence of cheerful peasant activity that recalls Fascist propaganda pieces. But although cineopera was vaunted by Fascism, the genre’s focus on emotionality leads to a form of male stardom whose emotional openness makes him emphatically not the Mussolinian superman. This is not Wagnerian totalitarianism nor the kind of operatic bombast linked to Fascism by Tambling’s study of opera and Fascism (1996, which includes discussion of gender; see Spackman 1996 for an account of virility and fascism), but smaller and humbler, indicating that the popular cultural models of film stardom and of Italian masculinity during the period of Fascism did not coincide with the images the regime was keen to impose. Instead, cineopera employs opera within a more malleable form of national identity which escapes association with fascism and asserts the operatic

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a­ udience as an essentially popular one. This assertion of its own popularity is important both for the commercial ambitions of cineopera and the employment of opera as a non-Fascist aspect of national cultural heritage in the postwar period. In the aforementioned fictionalised account of the music house Casa Ricordi, Verdi is the vehicle for nationalist messages smuggled around by the Italians, and a little later in the film his music is able to unite striking peasants with the soldiers who were ready to fire on them (also solving a creative crisis brought on by competition from German opera in the form of Wagner) because the people of Italy need his music. Cineopera was employed in films of anti-Nazi resistance: contemporaneously with the filming of the neorealist Roma città aperta, Tito Gobbi starred in ’O sole mio as Giovanni, a Neapolitan performer whose radio broadcasts contain hidden messages to the Resistance, and its denouement occurs with Giovanni’s broadcast inspiring the anti-Fascist popular uprising the quattro giornate that threw the occupying Nazis out of Naples. There is no need to establish Giovanni’s reasons for resisting the Germans in ’O sole mio, and when he does discuss class – divided into ‘the bosses, the bourgeoisie, the people’ – his untutored conversation takes place with his girlfriend on the rocks of the Bay of Naples. It is part of being authentically Neapolitan, as is the Catholic religiosity that brings them into church in the film. Just as the ability to sing springs naturally from Giovanni, unschooled and unpractised, both the appreciation of his music and the mass popular uprising that ends the film spring as if naturally across the people of the land. Although opera is in historical cineopere clearly patronised by a metropolitan aristocratic milieu, films of verismo operas like Ridi pagliaccio! (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1941) and Cavalleria rusticana (Carmine Gallone, 1955), and even Giuseppe Verdi, forge a nationally unifying link of operatic music and the intellectual cultural elite to folk traditions. Such a unifying cultural pursuit is an idealisation; one criticised by Marxists as maintaining an aristocratic backwardness regarding national culture. On the other hand, and as part of a continued reappraisal of the values of realism and melodrama, Catherine O’Rawe has discussed the 1946 cineopera and resistance drama Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma for how its melodrama creates an affective charge that makes it better able to convey the nightmare of war than would be available to realism (O’Rawe 2012). The enthusiastic reception of cineopera by a mass, mid-twentieth-century popular audience was in Gramscian thought a sign of a popular inability to countenance a realist analysis of society, although it is also worthwhile remembering that Gramsci remarked how opera provided an extraordinarily fascinating way of feeling and acting, a means of escaping what [the people] consider low, mean and contemptible in their

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lives and education in order to enter into a more select sphere of great feelings and noble passions. (Gramsci 1985: 378) From its place as mass entertainment cinema, cineopera in this period locates opera in the category of great art and presents it as capable of offering experiences which transcend a prosaic reality. Yet the inability of the characters to realise this separate realm within the profane and disappointing everyday is in cineopera the source of dramatic development and pathos to which operatic emotionality then gives further expression. Cineopera thus sets up a productive hybridity marked by tensions that are part of its own understanding and mythologisation of the operatic itself: the tensions between performance and narrative, opera and prose, artifice and reality, immediate and refined, popular and exalted. Cineopera posits an affinity between opera and cinematic melodrama. However, in biopic and parallel cineopere the melodramatic employment of the operatic and of musicality is literalised in extracts and performances from operas which maintain some independence from the world of the dramatic narrative. Not only is cineopera melodrama of a special type, being composed of opera and cinema. Music, as well as staging, orchestration, performance and emotional emphasis, are already given added prominence in melodrama; but what biopic and parallel cineopere do is pertain these properties to a distinct, overlapping and separable world of the operatic, which interacts, overlaps with and runs parallel to the narrative dramas it accompanies. In this separability of operatic and narrative worlds, cineopera represents an especially overt manifestation of the melos/drama relation definitional of melodrama. The operatic Opera has in Italy a specific inclusion in the melodramatic heritage. While Ancient Rome and the Renaissance may be supreme rhetorical reference points on which to build an Italian self-image, it is opera that recurs when constituting Italian drama. But what does it mean to say also that the heritage is operatic, beyond the presence of operatic music? Aiming to give a more specific definition beyond the immediate common-sense response that the operatic indicates some kind of emotional grandeur, Menarini states that there emerge in Italy common impulses which result in: stylistic intensity and self-reflexive tendencies in search of the sublime [. . .]; emphasis on the relationship between music and sound in scenes of climax [. . .]; intermedial functions in relation to opera [. . .]; recourse to anti-realist elements that can forge a generic imaginary even in Italy, where in strict terms a genre system has never existed. (2007: 91–2)

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Added to musicality, to a sense of harmony, repetition, rhythm and orchestration, is theatricality. According to Brooks, ‘melodrama at heart represents the theatrical impulse itself: the impulse towards dramatisation, heightening, expression, acting out’ (Brooks 1995: xv). Italian melodrama relies for emotional elevation on theatricality, brought out as moves, entrances, exits, violations of more or less ritual limits and taboos, end up acquiring the same weight in the ‘perimeter of the scene’ and on the luminous rectangle of the screen [. . .] it is always, with variations, about ‘dramatic geometry’. (Fink 1987: 51–2) This theatricality is particularly operatic in Italian melodrama because of the tendency of confrontation between principal leads to occur with a choreography punctuated by sharp vocal outbursts that could be described as arias of primal emotional expressivity. Actors recite their lines like lyrics and the plots and characterisations can be like a libretto (Brunetta 1995: 135). As emotion intensifies, movement becomes restricted until resembling a theatrical tableau. Italian melodrama thus freezes the moment of hysteria into catatonia, whilst opening out the diegetic world in a melodramatic expansion of emotion. For the weight of emotion to be thus placed on vocal expressivity, rather than verbal articulation, it is not what the character says but how she (for, in the tradition of the suffering diva, it is most frequently she) says it. As a betrayed lover describes it when telling his partner in La via delle cinque lune (Luigi Chiarini, 1942): ‘Do not go quiet – you have heard the words but it is the tone that makes the music!’ The vocal outburst can be considered in the light of an operatic aria, in that it is emotionally expressive primarily for how rather than for what is said, performed statically, although unlike aria it is an unmusical and cruder (despite the actor’s deliberate, necessary vocal control) cry of despair or horror. Structured around theatrically operatic confrontations, Patto col diavolo/ Pact with the Devil (Luigi Chiarini, 1949) exhibits high-points that employ such operatics. The wanderings of a woodcutter Giacomo with his forbidden lover Marta through the Calabrian landscape are accompanied by the extradiegetic orchestral music that speaks for them, before they confront each other in apparent duets. After the funeral of her murdered father in Patto col diavolo, Marta and the shepherd slowly approach each other in a rising drama of shot reverse-shot with the musical score announcing their embrace as a dramatic climax. He swears his innocence of her father’s murder, but she truncates the situation by running off as he calls out ‘Marta!’. The combination of physical advance and halting culminates in a vocal outburst that follows between him and his father, a chief suspect, as they seize each other’s lapels and then regain

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composure. In the concluding climax it is the son who confronts his father, at a wedding feast, his repeated exclamation ‘Speak! Say you’re innocent!’ a rise in verbal expressivity that leads to his physical reduction in mobility. A cut to Marta walking precedes her throwing herself with a scream from the mountainside, death occurring, as repeatedly in operas (Clément 1988: 49), during a public celebration. While there is a sense of the actor’s operatic performance upon a stage set, the operatic is found also in an extension of emotional expressivity which in confrontation with physical restrictions spreads across time and across various spaces. Francesco Maselli’s early work La donna del giorno (Francesco Maselli, 1956) illustrates this in the story of a fame-hungry fashion model, Liliana. The film’s melodramatic high-points are confrontations occurring in enclosed rooms, the first buffeted by mirrors that reflect the action back to the audience to effect the restriction of wide space so as to foreground the superficiality of the image. Liliana repeatedly responds to distress with catatonia, until the final extended climax in which the wife of a man she has falsely accused of attacking her slowly advances on her asking how she could have done it, the pair halting as Liliana sheds a single tear. She exits into the greater space of a fashion show, but becomes immobile and silent in front of the reporters. In a third part to the denouement, Liliana screams that she invented everything, runs into the crowd that encloses her, and cries and collapses into the wife’s lap. Halting, a single tear, and the repetition of the series of actions through different and wider spaces each give a melodramatic sense of overwhelming emotion within constrained circumstances alongside an operatic sense of emotion’s expansion. Similarly, in Verginità (Leonardo de Mitri, 1951), a young model is chased by sex traffickers hoping to capture her, but a shooting brings this movement climax to an abrupt halt and the woman who fired the shot is next seen in the police office, resigned and immobile. Thus, emotions in melodrama are channelled and constricted into immobility, only then to reappear in new settings, giving a sense of expansion simultaneous with the constriction. This stowing and flowing between restriction and expansion is punctuated by the bodily expressivity of a cry or the inexpressivity of stasis. The operatic theatricality of movement, set restriction and stasis works not so much through a classical development of naturalistic cause-and-effect narrative but to announce, not incrementally integrate, moments of dramatic grandeur. The emotional investment in situations marked as theatrical (in La donna del giorno, Liliana’s breakdown occurs physically onstage) brings the personal, intimate realm into play with the structures that inhibit it. To this, many have added that there is a particular treatment of time found in opera. Conductor Fernando Lunghi points out that the continued singing of someone about to die is a suspension of emotion (Lunghi 1959: 39). Film

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c­ omposer Alessandro Cicognini says that music ‘slows down to express feelings that have become immobile (stasis=lyricism)’ (Cicognini 1950: 61), and on discussing the relationship of music to dramatic action, Chion notes that in many operas ‘emotional pitch was so high that it froze characters into inaction, provoking a sort of psychotic regression’ (Chion 1994: 8). In Italian melodrama a slowing down towards immobility and a use of stasis can be tensely cinematic, with examples, as we shall see below, of melodrama moving between different spaces to extend an ultimate sense of emotive character immobility. The use of bodily expressivity as a source of emotional elevation, rather than a performance styled on naturalistic mimesis, is central.7 Brewster and Jacobs (1997) discuss the development of early cinema out of theatre, noting the prevalence of tableaux and of gestures in silent cinema which express conflict with a vividly ‘pictorial’ non-naturalism. This pictorialism focuses dramatic intensification on a particular moment, known among European dramatists as the ‘situation’ (ibid.: 18–33), that forms an external expression of a dramatic situation, and thus does not offer the drama of internalised psychological absorption. The lack of movement in climactic scenes in Italian melodrama suggests that the ‘situation’ lingered on in its melodramatic cinema, and also that an immobility of character, or of cinematic apparatus, is not a denial of drama but a creation of tension unbearable because of its communication of the emotional force that ruins but cannot fulfil the characters’ lives. These are not violent climaxes of movement, neither of cinematic movement nor character action. They are climaxes of confrontation, stasis, and vocal outburst. Rather than being reinforced by violent editing, camera movement or complex mise-en-scène, pressure is built through the restriction until immobility of the main character(s) occurs, an immobility echoed in the cinematic construction while excess is found in the tableau composition, dramatic situation and vocal expressivity. Michael Walker (1982) splits melodrama into two kinds, melodramas of passion and of action, to which movement and stasis could be seen as alternative and often combined ways of achieving these two different aspects of heightened drama that often occur together in Italian cinema. In L’ultimo incontro (Gianni Franciolini, 1951), a film of a wife’s infidelity, the dramatic centre point begins with the speedy, violent movement and editing of the fatal crash of the lover’s car on a racecourse as the unaware cuckold Piero watches. The scene cuts to wife Lina and Piero at home, and Lina on hearing the devastating news has to hold in her emotion until Piero leaves. When he does she collapses onto a chair in tears, and then is next seen on a bed talking in an emotionless monotone with apparent difficulty moving. Her catatonia contrasts to but is induced by the violent speed of the horrific car crash, an eruption of energy which is in contrast with the secrecy of the affair that preceded it. The violent movement of the crash leads to a physical embodi-

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ment of the held-in emotion in a catatonia which lasts for Lina for the rest of the film, including when she walks in front of a van (although it avoids hitting her). Violent action and static emotionality thus underpin and interact with each other in such examples of the interplay between expansion and restriction. These uses of space and time to extend and expand constricted emotion can be seen beyond domestic dramas in action and crime films that employ the melodramatic. In crime melodrama Il bivio (Fernando Cerchio, 1950) (note the theme of doubles, both of choices and of aesthetic tensions, giving a harmonic sense to the structure), Aldo’s mixed allegiances between the role of police informer and gang member lead him from a botched train heist to a police sting, but his physical approach accompanying the police is achingly deliberate and slow, matching the almost catatonia of his movements when he switched allegiances. When a criminal shoots him, he falls out of frame but the camera remains static, before the film then quickly ends on the movement of the police swoop running up to surround the hideout and force the bandits’ exit. Il passatore (Duilio Coletti, 1947) is about social bandit Stefano, whose first great act of revenge is staged within an opera theatre, presaging the levels of the operatic that the narrative itself will reach. When the Don of the village is killed, a tableau forms around his body and Stefano’s old abandoned village love screams ‘assassino’ at him three times, utilising an immobility of staging and eruption of vocal performance for climactic effect. This however then feeds into the movement climax of the people’s revolt, who form en masse an expedition into the hills to capture the bandit. In a third section of the extended climax, Barbara finds Stefano secluded in a clearing. Their passion for each other is reawakened, and in an embrace she is mistakenly shot dead, the preceding movement and noise having ceased as the rays shine through and their lives slowly fade away. II  Cultural hybridity Cinema and opera have in Italian scholarship often been linked, considered twin ‘dream factories’ that have taught Italians how to feel and how to express their feelings (Galluzzi 2001: 195). Discussion of the operatic opens the investigation out onto traditions that reach far from the contemporary-set narrative films that open this study. The diva-led star system, the elaborate settings, the primacy of emotion, alongside the continuation of melodrama implied in these factors, show the influence of opera on silent cinema, even if by the middle of the century the typical themes of popular Italian cinema tend towards a more intimate, personal and domestic or everyday setting than had typically been the case in opera.

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Mass culture This brings the investigation to a consideration of cinematic melodrama’s position within the wider cultural industries of post-war Italy.8 Forgacs and Gundle’s recent study has found that the cultural industries in Italy were themselves crucial in creating a sense of the Italian nation by organising consumption of leisure and entertainment on national lines, and so were important to senses of belonging and identity (Forgacs and Gundle 2008).9 The SIAE found that cinema amounted to around 70 per cent of all expenditure on paid entertainments in 1951 (Forgacs and Gundle 2008: 5), and by 1955 there was one cinema seat per nine inhabitants of the country (Villa 2002b: 191). As such, cinema increases its dominance over other leisure pursuits and public expenditure nearly tenfold, from 13,930 billion lire in 1946 to 105,170 in 1954 (compared to 1,960 and 9,380 on theatre in the same years) (Gundle 1990: 201), changing the culture of the people from oral and regional (ibid.: 202). Cinematic melodrama reached its greatest success at the high-point, and last moment, of cinema’s capacity to be the principal medium in popular life before a new dawn heralded by the beginning of television transmission in January 1954 and the world of mass consumerism (Morreale 2011: 53), teenage identity, satirical cynicism and modish anomie that each played a part in changing the cultural landscape on which melodrama operated. The context of post-war melodrama is one in which storytelling and dramatic entertainments intermingle with an almost dizzying complexity of reference and borrowings. The continual change and recombination of cultural forms is characteristic of entertainment under capitalism, one which is itself part of life and production in the epoch of capitalist relations: One of the defining aspects of modern culture, one that sets it apart from earlier epochs, is the abundance and intricacy of textual intersections and interactions. Just as the rise of the metropolis involved an infinitely busier and more varied arena of human interaction, so too did the rise of modernity involve a much more active and complex network of interconnections among texts [. . .] The phenomenon is an outgrowth of, among other things, the expansion of media technology, communications networks, and the commercialization of amusement. (Singer 2001: 263) Thus, at least in part, the success of cinema in this period can be understood through its having a greater capacity than any other form to satisfy demands of hybridity and interaction: cinema is the medium able to speak across the public as a whole [. . .] the popularity of cinema being expressed through its ability to incorporate [inglobare]

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narrative structures, textual forms, discursive and spectacular genres coming from other fields, not just exhibiting or mystifying its debt to an ‘external popularity’, but acting through its own nature as a lever to make them immediately available, on a large scale and serially. (Fanchi and Mosconi 2002: 10) While it is cinema that is most able to do this, melodrama, with its musicality, its operatics, and its foregrounded performativity and stylisation, adds further degrees of intertextuality and hybridity into the equation. As the discussion of cineopera and the operatic seeks to show, this hybridity is not simply a combination of various forms each kept whole but placed next to or within another. The incorporation of musical, pictorial, literary and stage forms into cinematic melodrama is itself a crucial determinant of its very form. Sceneggiata Cineopera is not simply a combination of opera with film, but also acts as an instance of the connection of film to the recording industry. A song such as ‘Mamma son tanto felice’, written by Cesare Bixio especially for the 1941 Beniamino Gigli film vehicle Mamma, offers an example of the successful crossover between these realms, while ’O sole mio places the famous Neapolitan song, a huge international hit for Enrico Caruso during the early days of the recording industry, at the centre of its Tito Gobbi-starred drama.10 Neapolitan song, with its boldly sketched sentimental outlines and ­condensed method of storytelling, engendered a particular theatrical entertainment, the sceneggiata. Performed in Neapolitan dialect, these plays turn their title songs into three-act dramas which incorporate a series of songs and culminate in the third act with that of the title. These plays are an amphibious form of popular theatre, necessarily derived from some components of variety theatre and also taken from the Neapolitan cinema. This experience quickly transforms into a specific instrument to transmit and conserve interwoven systems of traditional values, brimming over with emotion and personal and social conflicts. (Scialò 2002: 5) The dramas are highly conventionalised, invariably revolving around a triangular narrative matrix often referred to as ‘isso, essa e ’o malamente’ (‘him, her and the bad-guy’) [. . .] ­dependent

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on stock character types: ’o guappo [respectable man], ’a malafemmena [the straying woman], ’a mamma [the protagonist’s mother], ’o nennillo [the child] and i comici [the comic relief] with typical plots including revenge through the guappo scarring the treacherous woman’s face or a duel with ’o malamente, and/or his emigration, as well as the mother or child’s death. (Marlow-Mann 2011: 43)11 The accordance of the characters of the sceneggiata to destinies marked out by dramatic convention has a self-awareness that would not be alien to Calvino, Pirandello or Fellini. Performed especially in the area around Naples, and adapted into films with a predominantly southern distribution, these dramas are then a more directly popular, rather than mass, rendition of a similar impulse to that of opera. Usually credited as beginning in 1919, that is, after cinema had already become a mass phenomenon, the sceneggiata moves musical theatre towards a quasi-cinematic experience, differentiated from drawing-room drama by being largely set in city street corners and squares – albeit with reportedly more audience interruption and interaction than with the recorded drama of the cinema screen. Sceneggiate feature intermezzi and lots of diegetic reasons for songs (such as musicians performing in the public square and café chantant). Popular in the silent heyday of cinematic melodrama, they had a second heyday in the post-war period, beginning with Malaspina (whose star Vera Roll had to wear a wig as she had been shaved by the Partisans for supporting the RSI). Sceneggiate include the films Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori/See Naples and Die (Riccardo Freda, 1951), Il monastero di Santa Chiara (Mario Sequi, 1949), Disonorata senza colpa (Giorgio Walter Chili, 1953), Lacrime d’amore (Pino Mercanti, 1954), Marechiaro (Giorgio Ferroni, 1949), Torna a Sorrento (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1945). They will be discussed in greater length in film in the discussion of Matarazzo, the filmmaker to most cohesively build his entire filmic world around the feel and structure of Neapolitan song. Fotoromanzo and Letteratura d’appendice What are now called melodramas were on their release greeted as film d’appendice. This was not meant to be a compliment, but it does link the popular cinema of the post-war period to the dramatic storytelling of the serialised novels of the nineteenth century. Among some of the direct adaptations of this literature were L’ebreo errante (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1947, from the novel by Eugène Sue) and La sepolta viva (Guido Brignone, 1949, from the novel by Francesco Mastriani). The source material offers plots of highly convoluted and extremely dramatic nature with Italian exemplars including Carolina Invernizio, whose La mano della morta (Carlo Campogalliani,

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1949), Il bacio di una morta (Guido Brignone, 1949), La figlia del mendicante (Carlo Campogalliani, 1950), La vendetta di una pazza/Revenge of a Crazy Girl (Pino Mercanti, 1951) and L’orfana del Ghetto/Orphan of the Ghetto (Carlo Campogalliani, 1954) were all adapted in this period.12 The hybridity of cinema not only incorporates other forms but also points outwards to produce its own paratexts (De Berti 2000), notably in the case of the fotoromanzo, a publishing format which rendered stories through a series of photographs, ‘almost photographs of ideal films.’13 (Morreale 2011: 153) Existing from the 1930s up until a decline that took place by the 1970s, the form offered a completely new product [. . .] What is important however is its ­popularity, immediate, resounding, and big enough to produce the greatest post-war publishing boom. Young, more female than male, more proletarian, rural or on the lower rungs of the petite-bourgeoisie than in the middle class, its public is amongst the least reachable by other means of communication, and indeed is largely a new public [. . .] In an extremely brief period, fotoromanzi established themselves in the cultural topography of Italians. (Bravo 2003: 7) Like the sceneggiata, this phenomenon showed the continual movement of mass culture towards the popular, with Grand Hôtel marking a shift from the respectability of the pre-war fotoromanzo, which luxuriated in images of wealth and glamour, into a more conscious appeal to a lower-class public. A Milanese publication, its reach was more fully national than the predominantly southern sceneggiata, and also more marked in gender terms as a moment ‘when the female became popular’, as Cardone names the first chapter of her book-length study of the form (Cardone 2004). They offer what Italian authors refer to in soi-disant English as a ‘loveworld’, a word which one must assume is supposed to suggest a diegesis suffused with amorous sentiment and governed by romantic desire. The fotoromanzi include melodramatisations of art cinema such as La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) and Il deserto rosso/Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) being made into cineromanzi, that is, fotoromanzi taken directly from films. Although the influence between films and fotoromanzi was certainly reciprocal, the fotoromanzi developing a melodramatic style based of strong visual representation of emotional drama, the films of the period frequently make critical reference to the cultural condition of characters who read them, Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) and Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (Federico Fellini, 1952) most famously (while Antonioni devoted the documentary L’amorosa menzogna, 1949 to them). Added to this, however, they point also to the range of mass publishing, of film posters, publicity stills, the ‘carta rosa’

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Figure 3.3  The spoof of a world awash with mass culture in Lo sceicco bianco

of cards and postcards, calendars, and, ever present in the iconography of everyday life, religious imagery (Morreale 2011: 156, see also Campari 1994). Connections also stretch into melodramatic painting of the nineteenth century, its employment of dramatic tableaux and operatic references (see Godi and Sisi 2001). These two-dimensional, iconographic images cannot but bring one to mention the prevalence of murals and frescoes, which in Italy hardly needs emphasising. The imagery in churches of representations, intensified for maximum storytelling effect, and giving a sense of unfolding in time, is a very important heritage for communication to a popular (and obviously historically largely illiterate) public. Spinazzola stated that Matarazzo’s cinema displayed ‘religiosity of a counter-reformation type’ (1995: 71) and Visconti, as quoted in the introduction, in 1958 linked melodrama to the Baroque (cited in Bacon 1998: 62). This connection would be something that pre-dates the French Revolution, the moment of rupture that Brooks has argued brings the melodramatic imagination into being. John Champagne has questioned whether the origin of this imagination might be situated in the Counter-Reformation, an earlier moment of crisis which gave rise to the employment of religious imagery as a means to bring the believer into contact with the sacred on an individual basis. He has argued this in relation to work on the melodramatic in Caravaggio, noting the importance in the painter’s work of theatricality and tableau, of interiority, luminosity and martyrdom (Champagne n.d.).

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Melodrama as intertextual In what ways does this whirl of intertextuality make itself felt on the aesthetic of Italian film melodrama? Melodrama often outwardly recognises and plays upon the role of artistic construction. The first episode in portmanteau film Amori di mezzo secolo, ‘L’amore romantico’ (Mario Chiari, 1954), exemplifies this in its condensation of the tropes of melodramatic artifice. It opens on an aristocratic family’s New Year’s party for 1900, with struggling pianist Mario coming to tell his lover Elena, the daughter of the house, of his departure for a European tour. However, Elena’s father is determined to put a stop to things and, with her aunt intercepting and burning his love-letters to her, she gets engaged to the rich and boring suitor her father approves of. Elena hears of her aunt’s treachery on her wedding day, attended by Mario, and faints when during her walk down the aisle she claps eyes upon him. The film uses romantic clichés throughout: the struggling passionate artist, the bars of the garden gate to which Elena clings on hearing of Mario’s tour that will separate them, the wicked upholders of social barriers that keep young love apart, misunderstandings caused by intercepted letters, the dramatic contrivance of Mario’s return and the discovery of the truth at the wedding. The Romantic score is played by a quintet, creating a tension between moments of diegetic motivation as the music of Mario’s own quintet and its extra-diegetic blatancy as melodramatic and deliberately obvious accompaniment to character emotion and action. This use of cliché extends to open acknowledgement: ‘it always goes like this’ says the aunt when Elena hears about the extension of Mario’s tour to America, and the aunt tells Mario when he believes that Elena has forgotten him that ‘a lost love lies behind every artist’. But this statement also directly connects romantic emotion to its expression in artistic construction. The love-letters (‘My eternal, only love [. . .] I cannot live but in the wait to return to you’, writes Mario) are, like Mario’s status as a musician, acknowledgement of the role of artistic construction in a heightened expressivity which acts as a vehicle for romantic emotion, achieving perfect consonance with the film which thus establishes itself as just such a vehicle of emotion. Artists, artworks, performers, and particularly musicians appear prominently in the world of melodrama while music and love-letters proliferate. Yet recognition of artifice is played upon continually in popular melodramas from the opening credits, which roll so frequently over framing devices such as a proscenium arch (as in La nemica/The Enemy, Giorgio Bianchi, 1952), musical staves (L’altra, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1947), pages from a book, or opening with a physically present narrator (Il monastero di Santa Chiara, Mario Sequi, 1947). La portatrice di pane (Maurice Cloche, 1950) starts before the credits with a man who plays a music box walking past an advert for La porteuse de pain with the name of the author and main players. Characters

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seem especially aware of their adherence to particular dramatic types – when Carlo is about to leave to undertake medical training at the beginning of Appassionatamente (Giacomo Gentilomo, 1954) he tells the sweetheart he is leaving behind that he is the ‘young doctor rich only in ambition’. Such elements constitute a recognition that the construction of romantic emotionality both expresses real feeling and gives pathos through the contrast of real life with artistic expressivity. At the end of Una donna libera/A Free Woman (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1954), Gerardo, the concert pianist, mocks Liana with the lines ‘now we’re in full melodrama, at the grand finale’. The villain of Gli innocenti pagano (Luigi Capuano, 1951) says his antagonist is being ‘turned into a heroine from a novel’, and in Tre storie proibite (Augusto Genina, 1952) the betrayed heroine is told that she is acting like she is ‘in a melodrama’, and later that she is like a ‘heroine from a dime novel’, directly before her treacherous lover takes her in his arms and clasps her in the doorway as romantic music begins on the soundtrack. The villainous character Giacomo in Torna! (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1954) states to the arguing central couple that ‘you two are made to understand each other, you like melodramatic and generous statements. I however am more realistic’, while a wife confronts her straying husband in Bufere (Guido Brignone, 1953) by saying that their situation ‘seems like a melodrama to me’. Characters are often also shown going to see cultural pursuits: in Appassionatamente they go to see Lucia di Lamermoor, the plot of a young woman forced to marry for money contrasting with operatic idealism, but also showing another example of an entertainment drawn from a woman on display, about intrigues, about putting on a show publicly. In Ti ho sempre amato!/I Have Always Loved You! (Mario Costa, 1954), the impoverished, persecuted heroine gets a job brushing seats at a cinema. In one shot a neon light displays the bottom of a poster for Perdonami!, which on the one hand highlights the difference of her life from the bright neon of the cinematic world, but on the other hand, the title Perdonami! is relevant to a woman seeking to be allowed back into the life of the lover who has been deceived into thinking she has wronged him (as well as being a reference to director Mario Costa’s own film from the previous year). In Un marito per Anna Zaccheo/A Husband for Anna (Giuseppe De Santis, 1953), Anna and Andrea’s first date is to the theatre to see a sceneggiata. Amusement at the cheap backdrop of the Bay of Naples and the overacting characters leads Andrea to ignore the play and just stare at Anna. The spectator would seem to be encouraged to share this viewpoint of the falseness of the drama, since we see the prompt woman in her box from the position of the camera at the back of the stage. Anna and Andrea are about to kiss when a shot fired onstage leads Andrea to laugh but Anna to respond ‘Don’t you know these things really happen?’. The play in Un marito per Anna Zaccheo ends

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with a wedding, and Anna is susceptible to the illusions of theatrical artifice – and importantly, her story does not end in marriage – but this susceptibility is a sign also of the greater emotional sensitivity that makes her romantic trajectory melodramatic. Such susceptibility is common to romantic heroines and allows not only a critique of their illusions but a reinforcement of the characters’ sensitivity: the opening shot of La bella addormentata/Sleeping Beauty (Luigi Chiarini, 1942) is of the heroine walking accompanied by the prominent extra-diegetic music into a stage-like public square to be particularly affected by a Punch and Judy show. A similar effect is had on heroine Rosaria while watching a puppet show in Il lupo della Sila/The Wolf of the Sila (Duilio Coletti, 1949). The inclusion of such moments is a way both of asserting the drama’s own superior sincerity and of recognising an artistic lineage whose methods are those of artifice but whose emotional engagement is real. III  Matarazzo and Visconti When, in 1978, the editor of a collection of Italian film stills provocatively chose to place on its cover an image from Matarazzo’s Giuseppe Verdi next to Visconti’s Senso, he explained his decision as one of contrast, in that ‘the difference [between the two] is between vulgarity and refinement, arte povera and arte ricca and – naturally – between acceptance into the history of tradition and election to the history of cinema’ (cited in Pellizzari 1999: 51). One presumes that the latter series of characteristics describes Visconti, recipient as he was of the tutelage of Jean Renoir for his cinematic apprenticeship in the 1930s and the garlands of international praise for the rest of his career, and born – a fact of more than biographical relevance – into the aristocratic lineage of the Milanese upper class. That his appurtenance to the prestige end would go without saying tells us something about the political designations on cultural capital in post-war Italian film culture, because it is the refined, ricco, elect, and Communist Visconti whose employment of the cinematic arts aimed at the advancement of oppositional class consciousness.14 Matarazzo, on the other hand, seemed to articulate his own position in the Italian film industry most clearly through the voice of the emblematic Italian patriot in the eponymous biopic he directed of Giuseppe Verdi, who at one point in the film states ‘I come from the people [il popolo], a peasant who makes music’ (Aprà 1976: 36).15 Vantage points on a domestic heritage Il popolo and la musica provide interpretive keys to the works of both filmmakers, in ways that offer coherent – and with both directors very particular – artistic renderings of the relationship between culture, emotion and what

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their audience might recognise as everyday life, however much the comparison between Visconti and Matarazzo is one that Brunetta recently stated ‘may still be blasphemous’, adding that they ‘both drew from the same sources and inspiration, even though the stylistic results were different for each: the former aimed for the cheap seats in the balcony, while the latter set his sights on the stage and box seats’ (2003: 152). One could add that this difference is not primarily stylistic but a comment on the varying social destinations of artistic form. Matarazzo was a genre director, for whom ‘the art of making people cry [. . .] was only an occasional occupation’ (Della Casa 1999: 46): the comedies he directed in the decade before the War, and the crime and adventure stories that alternated with the melodramas after it, are united principally by their common search for a mass audience. Visconti’s oeuvre, while varied, represents a developing critique of romance and of Italian society and makes continual reference to prestige, international cultural reference points. Neither director worked solely in melodrama; but the period of their melodramas was the most commercially successful for both, as well as coinciding with some important landmarks in the study of popular life within Italy. The first was the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s notebooks after the War. Gramsci was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party and an antiFascist, imprisoned in 1926. Although he was eventually released from jail the experience broke his health and he died in 1937, having, however, left behind a legacy to the Communist Party organisation which was to dominate oppositional politics from the Resistance onwards with his copious Prison Notebooks (1971, and 1985) that investigate a very wide range of ideas relating to Italian and international politics, culture and society. Of particular interest here is the notion of a national-popular culture. To put this idea (extremely) briefly, Gramsci argued for left-wing political advancement through the formation of a progressive culture which was not aloof, but could identify and harness what was progressive or oppositional in popular culture. This is a nebulous proposal, but one which aimed to promote a critical viewpoint that emerged from the conditions and experiences of the working class and peasants, and advanced their interests (thus staging a challenge to alternative cultural requirements of, e.g., tradition, Church, imperialism, bourgeois society or consumer capitalism).16 This is worthy of mention not simply because of Visconti’s own adherence to Gramsci’s thought, but to state how culture and everyday life was itself an object of some concern, partly for filmmakers, and more especially for film criticism in this period (see the debates mentioned in Chapter 2 of this book). Connected to this is the emergence of work on folklore and on religious belief, itself influenced by Gramsci but undertaken with particular comprehensiveness by De Martino, who, in analysing the south of Italy, found the maintenance of a wealth of pre-Christian practices, of ritual, veneration and

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fatalism which official Catholicism had historically adapted itself to but which also glimpsed other cosmologies that define the popular worldview (1980, 2000). I mention the developments in the study of popular culture by way of stating that among other things the melodramas of both Matarazzo and Visconti appeared in a climate in which formalisations of the understanding of cultural traditions in Italy, in particular of Church, family or of popular culture itself, were receiving particular attention. Senso, Visconti’s film of 1954, presents a Marxist criticism of Italy’s nineteenth-century national movement the Risorgimento, and caused scandal (and the requirement of fifteen separate cuts) by claiming that far from being a heroic war of popular emancipation, it was an aristocratic sell out and a failure. Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and his Brothers (1960) takes Gramscian class analysis into contemporary Italy, dealing with what was called the Southern Question: the historic underdevelopment of the south of Italy, whose agricultural society was a pool of poverty that provided cheap labour migrating from the poverty of the south to fill the industrial plants of the north. The subaltern status of the south as a region is a long-term problem that regards the cohesion of the Italian nation and is one of the enduring legacies of the failures of the Risorgimento. Within this context, Rocco and his brother Simone cannot survive, attached, as Visconti’s film presents it, to archaic and peasant conceptions of family and morality which see Rocco ultimately – and, in terms of the film’s critical standpoint, unnecessarily – sacrifice his independence to his brother, the murderer Simone.17 Matarazzo’s films have none of these analytical aims, sharing instead his protagonists’ faith in family and God, their dynamics constituted principally by dramatic contrivance and persecution of innocence by the wicked. In the L’Unità debate over neorealismo popolare, Matarazzo described his films’ preoccupations in the following way: The story of characters who suffer because they are victims of social injustice, or crushed by a blind and cruel destiny; plots which hinge on the truth of everyday life, a truth not sought in external factors but in the very concreteness of anybody’s existence, the sudden, fatal dissolving of a happiness that seemed to have been achieved and that, instead, suddenly, chance, fate takes away from under our very noses with a terrible inexorability, aren’t these the subjects that really interest the majority? [. . .] What [the public] loves most is to see how [. . .] one can arrive at a happy ending, a more human and tolerable condition of life. That is, hope, hope in a better world. (Matarazzo [1955] 1999: 97) Thus his films might serve as objects for the analysis of those sociological phenomena mentioned in the paragraph above while those of Visconti on the

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other hand would themselves be further proponents of a critical analysis of them as prosecuted through film. Visconti’s trio of melodramas Senso, Le notti bianche/The White Nights (1957), and Rocco e i suoi fratelli, appearing 1954–9,18 are a conscious reflection on the tradition in the years just after its heyday, and Matarazzo an expression of the genre at its height (1949–55). Matarazzo boasted in 1955 in the L’Unità debate that ‘37 million spectators have seen my films’ (1999: 96), while Rocco e i suoi fratelli was both the highest-grossing film of its era, and a film that has ever since ‘pressed itself into the popular consciousness’ as the image of the Economic Miracle (Foot 1999: 211). And yet if the two may be confronted as opposites, it is because they exist at either end of a domestic tradition marked by the characteristics of melodrama discussed through the preceding pages of this book. The vantage points that they give are then positions at the summit, and ones from which to perform a summation of the cultural and artistic bases of Italian melodrama. Realism The success of the melodramas of Raffaello Matarazzo confirmed the ascendancy of the Italian film industry after the War when in 1949 Catene/Chains set new domestic box office records and was followed by Tormento (1950), I figli di nessuno/Nobody’s Children (1951), and L’angelo bianco/The White Angel (1955). Catene was the fruit of a keen commercial initiative to draw together various of the most popular cultural trends of the post-war moment, and a point of origin for the particular phase of cinematic melodrama which this volume traces. The film was conceived by the founder of the Titanus production company Gustavo Lombardo, veteran of the Neapolitan cinema of filmed sceneggiate of the early 1920s, whose evident aim was the development of a commercially successful Italian melodrama based on the heritage of popular national forms. He engaged one of his experienced genre directors, that is, Raffaello Matarazzo, with son Goffredo Lombardo as producer, with the hope of translating the recent success of the fotoromanzi onto the screen. The resulting film, Catene, took its title from one of the first Bolero fotoromanzi from 1947 (itself alluding to the previous year’s first Grand Hôtel story, Anime incatenate), and its story is a film sceneggiata of the 1925 song ‘Lacreme napulitane’ by Libero Bovio, which is performed in the film by Neapolitan canzonista Roberto Murolo. The film is also notable, however, for its clear derivation from neorealism, and, while certainly not the beginning of neorealismo popolare (as described in Chapter 2, the relationship between neorealism and the popular was an intricate one from the outset), it marks the establishment of a particularly viable generic model (that of the filone of domestic melodramas discussed in the

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first chapter). Its realism is evident from the opening scene when a car hurtles towards a garage whose owner, the film’s protagonist, Guglielmo, appears, greasy, unkempt and in mechanic’s overalls. The startling aspect of this revelation is the decision to cast Amedeo Nazzari in the role, confirming the updating of his pre-war (or Fascist, depending on one’s focus) image of adventurous and assured masculinity. The setting is contemporary, the petty-bourgeois family situation modest; the plot emerges out of such everyday concerns as keeping the garage ticking over, wife Rosa taking young daughter Angelina to school and older sibling Tonino working in his father’s garage.19 From Catene’s opening moments, of an image of the Bay of Naples taken straight from post-card images and popular stage and film representations of the city (see Bruno 2002), boys shout down towards the speeding car looking from a hilly incline to the sides and from above, establishing as Matarazzo often does a sense of a theatrical stage (a quarry in I figli and L’angelo bianco offer something similar) within which the energetic speed of the images unfolds. A consideration of the narrative of Catene (I will consider style further below) indicates ‘the effective combination of the exceptional and the quotidian’ (Cardone 2007: 206) that I discussed as characteristic of melodrama in the first chapter. The car that hurtles to Guglielmo’s garage is in fact being driven by a gangster in need of a repair; his boss, Emilio, turns out to be the old flame of Guglielmo’s wife’s, Rosa, who was separated from her by unspecified military service. Aiming to win her back, he poses as a business contact to help Guglielmo’s garage and Rosa keeps the truth of their past secret. Emilio comes to Guglielmo’s birthday dinner, and takes Rosa’s hand under the table. She rejects it but not before young son Tonino spots their clasped hands and assumes the worst. Later, Emilio sends Rosa a letter demanding to see her and she goes to tell him once and for all to desist, but when Guglielmo returns home he forces a reluctant Tonino to tell him what he believes to be the truth; interrupting what Guglielmo takes to be an amorous encounter in Emilio’s hotel room, he shoots Emilio dead and escapes to America, forbidding Rosa ever to return to the family. Guglielmo is captured and put on trial back in Naples; Rosa falsely testifies that she was having an affair so that it will be considered a crime of passion and Guglielmo will be treated leniently. On his acquittal her lawyer informs Guglielmo of her sacrifice and he rushes to her at the moment when she is about to throw herself from her window. The film includes documentary-style footage of the town festival the Piedigrotta, emphasising the communal traditions of spectacle and display of which the film itself is a further example. I figli di nessuno and Angelo bianco include footage of quarry activity and industry, the former broaching labour discontent and the latter issues of financial management. Rather than work towards either social or psychological analysis, or a national-popular critique of conditions, this realism aids melodramatic tensions. The Piedigrotta in

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Catene is an opportunity for a tight rendering of the dramatic issues as Rosa is clandestinely courted by Emilio in front of her family and the townsfolk, and the sequence ends in a montage of firework explosions, ambiguous as to whether they may suggest impending calamity or Rosa’s repressed desires. In I figli di nessuno the activities of the quarry foreshadow the fatal accident of the owner’s son in an explosion laid by the exploitative overseer, and in L’angelo bianco the mechanical productivity of the mine-works provides a distraction and sublimation of the owner’s emotional turbulence and sexual frustration. Family The family unit is the site of stability in Matarazzo’s films. It provides a relief from the opening action of the speeding car, conveyed in the high degree of formalisation of the images, the characters organised into tableaux of everyday domestic contentment. In contrast, Emilio lives in a hotel, a public, transitory domestic arrangement whose discomfort is emphasised; when Rosa visits him the chairs have to be taken off one of the tables stacked in a back room, and when she goes to his room, the fellow guests quickly crowd the corridor. Matarazzo’s world is concerned with the centrality of the family, while loneliness, calamity, violence and vice lie in its absence. Dramatic disruption occurs through a visible representation of private family stability. The initial threat that Emilio poses to the family is marked by the arrival of his sidekick to bring a message to their home, causing the family members in answering the door to move in different directions away from the table, the film not regaining the sense of visual stability until its resolution. He pushes insistently at the door while Rosa continually tries to shut him out, which gives, however, a sense of something being repressed within the family. She meets Emilio later in the garage, dark, below, a transgression into the husband’s space and an entry simultaneously into illegality and desire. Emilio asks if she’s happy and she replies ‘felicissima’, but angrily, the cue to the beginnings of a solo violin lyrically suggesting hidden emotion on the background of the soundtrack before the car revs up, representations, along with her simultaneous fidgeting and offscreen gaze, of the possibility of her desire. The narrative catastrophes are caused by female sexuality prior to marriage and unnaturally dominant females, in a context of either absent or dead fathers. In Tormento, the next film in the series, a wicked stepmother keeps Anna (Sanson’s character) in subjugation in the home, then after she is cast out, keeps her letters from her father and refuses his dying request for her upkeep, sending her instead to a reformatory. I figli di nessuno features a widowed countess who owns a quarry and forbids her son from marrying the

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woman he loves (and impregnates). These are certainly signs of conservative gender relations, but what is more interesting to note is how the family acts largely as a structuring absence: the only film of the four to show more than one scene of family contentment is Catene, with fatality and separation being instead at the centre of the narratives and domestic bliss an idealised but unrealised hope. Thus through its very absence the family becomes the place to which desire, whether sexual or for order, leads back. If one were to view gender through the question of narrative agency, one could agree with Spinazzola that even when they made the female protagonist the real motor of the plot they would place her in a subordinate position, almost like a sidekick with respect to the male protagonist. As has already been said, the man had to take the initiative, the role of dynamic agent; his companion could expect the half-light of noble renunciation, sublime sacrifice, determined but above all seen in its effects and reflection on the behaviour of her husband or fiancé or lover. Female vicissitudes were then considered as occasions for the unfolding of the virile drama. (1985: 82) But action is not the main purpose of the narrative or focus of the spectacle in melodrama. The films concentrate instead on a sacrifice of the active capacities of the woman, whose position then, however, colonises the film’s emotional interest. The films do value masculine hierarchy, but the position that dominates in emotional and expressive terms is that of the suffering, sacrificing heroine. This subject position allows a passivity and emotionality from which adult masculinity is conventionally debarred. The adolescent boys in the family show how such a position can cross the gender separations which the films apparently reinforce. The family in Catene is introduced as two pairs, with Angelina and Rosa on the one hand and Tonino and Guglielmo on the other. Angelina doesn’t want the male mechanics to get her dirty, while Tonino helps in the business and eagerly sits with his father to read the paper over coffee. In I figli di nessuno the illegitimate son of Guido and Luisa has his parentage kept secret from him and is sent away to grow up in a boarding school. He escapes and manages to work his way back to Carrara where he finds work in what is, unbeknownst to him, his father’s quarry. He displays an exemplary masculine morality: he impulsively stops the evil overseer Anselmo hitting a boy onsite and returns a lost, valuable necklace to the mine-owner’s daughter (unbeknownst to him, his sister), who he also saves from drowning. He refuses payment from the Count for saving her life, and fights him instead – unwittingly realising both an oedipal relation and a rejection of a financial substitution for what rightfully should be familial (but which they don’t know should be).

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Similarly oedipal is Catene, when Tonino, believing he has witnessed his mother’s infidelity but feeling unable to say so to his father, becomes frustrated and tearful. So far, so male. But this leads us to another point. In both films, the eager emulation of masculine positions ends up placing the boy in the position of suffering emotionality, precisely the position which his mother expresses most fluently. In I figli di nessuno Bruno even traces the same life experience as his mother: he is first seen after having grown to adolescence in his boarding school while his mother is contemporaneously locked away in a nunnery. He ends up fatally injured in an explosion at the quarry, a similar propulsion to sacrifice as that of his mother who has renounced her old self ‘Luisa’ to live in the service of God. Religion Religion reaches over the characters in Matarazzo’s films as the sky does over the earth. The films present a popular morality which holds that ‘in the universe of the humble and offended there is perhaps a tragic “destiny”, but not a redemptive metaphysical presence’ (Aprà 1976: 23), who wittily adds that ‘the only god that interests a perfect metteur-en-scène like [Matarazzo] is a deus ex machina’ (ibid.). As such, the employment of religion describes both a dramatic tendency to fatalistic and contrived plots and, more importantly for the production of pathos, the limit on transcendence: Their lives and its events are entrusted to the blindness of fate, which strikes its blows and raises up again, fells and consoles: a religiosity of a counter-reformation type that enables popular life to be seen in its everyday drama but mystifies its problems, eluding every civil and social implication and bringing it back to strictly individual circumstances outside of the intervention of historically determined factors. (Spinazzola 1985: 71) One ought to pause before describing Matarazzo simply as a Catholic ideologue, especially given the degree to which the Vatican’s official judgements on Matarazzo’s films were suspicious or directly negative. Catene was labelled escluso, that is, excluded from vision by the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (CCC), because Rosa has to pretend to a court that she has committed adultery, with the added note that there is ‘a certain tendency to fatalism’ in the film (Aprà 1976: 22), Tormento was thought not suitable for children, and I figli di nessuno was critically judged by the CCC for its ‘inverisimilitude’ (Carabba 1976: 49). As such they seem more to give evidence for De Martino’s thesis about the folkloric fatalism of peasant mysticism (see De Martino 2000)

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living alongside official Catholic religiosity. Each film combines themes of destiny and sacrifice with personal rather than institutional or hierarchical ways of understanding moral rectitude. Rosa in Catene lies to the court, claiming adultery so as to reunite the family. In Tormento, Anna wants to be let out of the reformatory to go to see her daughter. In an act whose extreme emotional manipulation goes unmentioned, Anna hears that the stern Mother of the convent had a daughter who died, and makes the Mother relent by praying desperately in front for her for her dead ‘angeletto’ to instruct her to break the rules, making the Mother cry with regret and relent. There would seem to be some material for suggesting that the deeply moral appearance of family life in Matarazzo’s world is a cover for the kind of individualism described by Banfield in his study of the southern family in Italy, according to an amoral familism that marks ‘the moral basis of a backward society’ (1958). It is difficult to ascribe to this combination of faith, mysticism and familism a simple designation as pre-modern, pre-Christian or, alternatively, bourgeois individualist, for instead it is all three. Heaven is seen in terms of familial gain, and the relationship of the protagonists to the icons that surround them is intimate indeed. In Catene, Guglielmo makes his mother swear to the Virgin Mary never to let Rosa back in the house. Rosa does return to the house against her mother-in-law’s oath, and when she does she is shown tearfully in extreme close-up in headdress, physically resembling the Virgin, an innocent mother put on earth to suffer for the family, this reference to iconography adding to the meaning of the film. Like melodrama itself, icons encourage emotional investment in a generalised typicality, and enable strong but unarticulated associations. These associations draw from the full range of popularly recognised material in an amalgam of all available reference points. Not only does Rosa in her return resemble the Madonna but the wordless tune of the song ‘Mamma son tanto felice’, a hugely popular song from the cineopera Mamma released in 1941, plays on the score. These cues to audience recognition work all the better to mobilise half-remembered thoughts at a more emotional level than might be achieved through direct articulation. The iconographical references suffuse the presentation of the drama. Matarazzo’s compositions are especially redolent of Marian imagery and that of the Sacra Familia (Cardone 2003a: 218), a visual organisation that Roberta Lietti has called a lay form of the sacred in particular pregnant moments (Lietti 1995: 212). Lietti states how this recalls the system of reference of religious iconography, of the little images of the saints and of the martyrs, the heritage of a popular culture handed down, passed down by the eye that is, and across the social strata [. . .] [They signal] the moment of greatest significance [. . .] [representing] the

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story of the sentiments of a family fragmented, of a love destroyed, of a life sacrificed. (ibid.: 207) Typically for Matarazzo’s combination of popularly recognised forms, these combine with the fotoromanzo aesthetic, and the striking images of lovers or antagonists also draw on the ‘carta rosa’, the greetings and postcard imagery prevalent from the start of the century, producing ‘a kind of cinematic collage’ (Cardone 2003a: 215). This dense repertory of popular meanings supports the point made by Bachman and Calder Williams that, in Matarazzo’s cinema, il popolare is less a social quality or demographic category than a discourse: a set of shared and commonly known texts, materials, styles, gestures, and habits that constitute the obstinate texture of a social world undergoing drastic change. (2012: 59) This can be seen in part in how popular cultural artefacts – among which Matarazzo, along with any cultural studies theorist, would include religious icons as well as fotoromanzi – are themselves what console the protagonists for the catastrophes that occur within the films. In Catene, Guglielmo’s fellow emigrants on ship at Christmas talk about the wine and cake they have back home, and the shot dissolves on Guglielmo’s thoughtful face to his infant daughter Angelina talking to her nativity scene back home and asking her grandmother if Jesus will bring her mother back, and why he had a mother and a father but she does not. Another dissolve returns to Guglielmo, almost as if Angelina’s questions had occurred in his imagination, and a guitarist (played by Roberto Murolo) starts to play the song ‘Lacreme napulitane’, the song on which Catene is based and which sings the story of an emigrant to America wishing he were in Naples for Christmas, a range of associations increased by the fact that ‘this particular protagonist would have already known this tune quite well’ (ibid.: 61). This redoubled remembrance occurs at the point at which ‘Guglielmo’s suffering, strictly tied to the melodramatic plot, participates in the suffering of all the others: those Neapolitan tears become the sign of a collective condition’ (Cardone 2012: 94). The song ends on the line ‘if the children want mother let her come back’, the scene exemplifying an accord between the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, the community of emigrants around him, and his distant family – a point at which it is worth registering that Catene, and melodramatic cinema in general, are also popular cultural artefacts, that take their place alongside the others and carve out their own role as consoling and familiar. The films hinge on returns and repetitions of situations, characters and memories within and among themselves. This is perhaps most evident in the

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way that they rely on the repetition of the two principal actors as the ill-fated couple in each of the four films. This question comes to its fullest elaboration in L’angelo bianco, the only film of the four to be an explicit sequel, to I figli di nessuno, occurring after the departure of Luisa to a nunnery and the death of Bruno. The film represents the maximum point of the dispersal of the family unit, as Guido and his current wife divorce and she kidnaps their daughter, with whom she dies in a reckless high-speed boating accident. But the film is also a conception of how romantic feeling can act as a unifying and regenerating force – Guido still loves Luisa, they both think still of Bruno, and, most strangely of all, the contours of their initial relationship are retraced through Guido’s uncanny meeting with a nightclub dancer who is Luisa’s double, played by the same actress, Yvonne Sanson. That such a level of coincidence stretches plausibility seems to be recognised. Lina is imprisoned while pregnant with Guido’s baby and then mortally injured by her fellow inmates, and the prison doctor states in confusion when he sees her that he recognises her face from another circumstance. This plays on the real factor of the repetition of Sanson’s appearance in the different films in the series, a feeling that the audience probably has too, and that protagonist Guido certainly does. Lina’s hospital death replicates that of Bruno in the previous film, even to the point of her requesting Luisa to come to her bed, as she had done in the penultimate scene of I figli di nessuno. After Lina dies, amid a break-out of the inmates who have taken her new-born son hostage, Suor Addolorata – the reincarnation as a nun of Luisa, the mother of Guido’s first, dead, child Bruno – implores them to give up the baby. The escapees relent in wondrous awe at what is stated as the ‘miracle’ of ‘Lina’s’ reappearance. This acts as a confusion of filmic and actual realities, because in narrative terms Lina hasn’t ‘reappeared’ and is instead simply a different character, Luisa/Suor Addolorata, but in actuality she has, through the miraculous properties of cinematic reproduction, since in extra-filmic reality both characters are the actress Yvonne Sanson. The final gesture of the film is again that of reanimation and doubling as she hands the boy to Guido with the injunction ‘call it Bruno, like him’. What this supports is the argument of Bachman and Calder Williams that Matarazzo’s cinema engages in a range of repetitions and recognitions that act to present popular culture itself as a point of stability and consolation. That such repetition relies on contrivance almost goes without saying. The point in Tormento at which Anna faints, lonely and clutching her shawl around her in the windswept street, or in I figli di nessuno when she wakes up in the hut of a shepherd couple while villagers search for her by torchlight, replicates the recognisable conventions of the nineteenth-century feuilleton, serialised novel, the letteratura d’appendice. To the suggestion that his cinema was related to letteratura d’appendice Matarazzo objected that

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serialised novels exploit emotional surprises, coups de théâtre knowingly effected at the opportune moment, in short calculated mechanics that do not exist in my films. (Matarazzo 1999: 96–7) The suggestion that these events do not occur in the films directed by Matarazzo does not stand up well against some of the evidence: the plot of Catene would resemble little of consequence if it were not for the coincidence that Rosa’s exlover happened at that particular moment to need a mechanic, if Tonino had not glimpsed Emilio take his mother’s hand but turned away before seeing her spurn it, if Guglielmo had not surprised the two at the very moment that Rosa was readjusting her clothes after resisting Emilio’s redoubled advances, and if Guglielmo had not realised her fidelity at the point at which Rosa was making the decision to commit suicide. But the motifs of repetition and recognition, of timing and formal organisation within the universal government of emotion, betray the closest affinity of all to be with song and sceneggiata. Song, drama, sceneggiata The films themselves contain performances (as do many films of the period) of songs that relate to the plot, including the songs that inspire the sceneggiata source material, played by well-known canzonisti. The function of song suggests that melodrama acts to provide a consolatory power which lies in the act of expression itself, and inspires some sense of mute collectivity in the audience – which does not join in, unlike the participatory aspect of folk song but closer to the relationship of the cinema audience to the events projected onscreen. We see the way in which song provides an artistic template for the dramatic strategies of Matarazzo’s cinema in a central scene in Catene. The family are sitting in a restaurant for Guglielmo’s birthday and Rosa’s ex-lover insinuates his way in on a pretext of offering Guglielmo a business deal. The action is enclosed within the restaurant terrace, but the panorama gives out onto the distant bay and the sea. The restaurant’s musicians ask for a request and Emilio suggests the song ‘Torna!’. The position of the song within the group’s collective memory is mentioned by the characters, who state ‘It’s an old one, a nice song’. Similarly, the scene begins with a return of the postcard-style shot of the Bay of Naples this time from the restaurant in Posillipo, that occurred at the opening of the film’s action, while the main theme of ‘Torna!’ has itself already played over the credits (alternating with that of ‘Lacreme napulitane’, the song the film is based on), then diegetically, and with dramatic meaning, at the Piedigrotta (added to which the eventual remake of Catene was even called Torna!). The first line of the song, ‘I want you in my arms again’, is sung over a mid-shot of both Rosa and Emilio, making it unclear to which of the two, or if to both, those words

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Figure 3.4  ‘Torna!’ in Catene

may relate but also, importantly, suggesting its generalised applicability. The ability of song to effect a combined collective and personal experience occurs simultaneously with its prompting in Luisa a series of memories of scenes from their relationship, which are shown in flashback. The lines ‘We’ll never part again’ are sung just as Rosa remembers saying goodbye to Emilio. As the images cut to iron train wheels, the relevance, but disjuncture, of the words indicate that the music is in harmony with the characters’ desires, but not the reality of the events. Thus, in its connection to Rosa’s thoughts, the song enacts the very process by which popular culture, and romantic art, themselves

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become personally meaningful. Adding a further dimension to the pathosladen turn of the music, her son Tonino sees their hands clasp under the table and misperceives adultery on his mother’s part as the singer states the closing line ‘what I need to do to get you back’. Patterns and harmonies play a prominent role in the design of the scene too, and not only between the themes of two different men, of past and present, of memory and reality. The bright sunshine is filtered by the wooden structure that surrounds the terrace, casting imprisoning shadows of hatches as Emilio enters (Figure 3.4), within the panorama of the Bay and Vesuvius, suggesting both the restrictions of the present day and the expanse represented by memory and emotion. Tonino’s misreading of the situation sees him wander from the table during a more melancholy turn to the music and look out to sea. In an instant the isolation of the boy’s enforced entrance into manhood is conveyed as a lonely gaze upon the vast sea after the sudden shattering of the illusions of family proximity. The songs offer condensed moments of the films’ principal dynamics, and, in the ethereal quality of their near-choral function in relation to the characters, give the whole world that the characters inhabit a sense of being organised according to musical properties. As stated above, this influence is more than that of a repository for plots and songs, and is an entire method of realising the dramatic world: Catene ‘skilfully synthesises the themes and ways of Neapolitan melodrama – or rather its mixture of theatrical, musical and figurative traditions and its tragic and resigned way of confronting reality’ (Franco 2002: 159). Song also works, however, to give an extra-rational sense to the drama and seems to predetermine the trajectories of the characters’ destinies in a way whose spiritual properties can also be emphasised. At the centre of I figli di nessuno, the son Bruno, who was snatched as a baby, escapes from the boarding school where he has been kept by an unknown benefactor (actually the person who at Guido’s mother’s request snatched the infant Bruno and separated his parents). Bruno hitches a ride and in the back another hitcher (played by singer Giorgio Consolini) happens to be singing ‘Mamma son tanto felice’ (the Cesare Bixio song from the eponymous film, also played (without words) in Catene), about a son’s joy at returning to his mother. After getting out the boy goes to a fountain, where he is approached by a nun. Unbeknownst to either party, the nun, whom he tells he is searching for his mother, is his mother. The slow unfolding of their meeting, almost wordless as they gaze at each other, gives a sense of cosmic order to the events beyond the control – or the awareness – of the characters involved. The unexplained wonder of their meeting directly after hearing the song is given a further aspect of unspoken mystery as the pair turn back to gaze at each other two times, indicating a strange attractive force that proves their

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emotional harmony at the same time as it emphasises their divergent paths (‘path’ in its full metaphorical significance as life destiny). The song includes the lines ‘Mamma I’m so happy, because I’m coming back to you’ – lines which the film immediately confirms by staging their encounter, a greater truth than that perceived by Bruno’s own conscious awareness, since so far as he knows these lines sing the opposite of his situation, and articulate instead his unrealised desires. The song continues ‘and all my life, I’ll never leave you again’ – but instead they see each other for just one instant, unaware even of this, and then at one other too-late moment at the film’s end at Bruno’s deathbed. Despite what the characters know the words of the song are true so long as truth is understood according to different factors from those of narrative, reality or consciousness, but in terms of feeling, music, desires and spirit. Luisa is ultimately to walk back to Bruno with similar slow determination in the penultimate scene when she enters the room of his deathbed, offering a harmony and repetition which is concluded in the very final scene as, confined to the convent corridor, she watches immobile in tears as his coffin is carried off in the direction that she had taken in the post-song scene. This choral dimension of song, which is prescient and predictive, disrupts verisimilitude since it is eerily yet accidentally apt, governing the narrative, instead of with logic, with emotion and a kind of harmonic structure. Aside from the common comments about excess and energy, structure is informed by the centrality of restriction to the design motifs of the films. Restriction is present from the opening credits of Catene as the name of the film appears over a bright expanse of summer sky. In Tormento, the marriage between the characters, the ceremony a profusion of feeling and theatrical properties, occurs in prison, the wedding in L’angelo bianco as Lina’s illness prevents her from making it to chapel doubling the melodramatic motifs by staging it both in prison and hospital. In this film, designs of circularity and rigidity express through geometry the theme of trying to get away from the imprisoning factors of life and fate that continually pull the characters back. Operatics The intensity of the aesthetic of restriction occurs as a key step towards scenes of climax and is central to the operatic construction of the drama. This can be seen in an important scene in Catene, when Rosa finally goes to Emilio’s hotel room. Son Tonino has been forced to tell Guglielmo what he mistakenly thinks he knows of his mother’s infidelity. Within Emilio’s room Rosa repeats her desire never to see him again. Rosa’s voice indicates the increase in the scene’s emotionality, rising in pitch, intensity and breathiness, until he grabs her and she squirms repeating ‘lasciami! Vigliacco!’ (‘leave me! Coward!’).

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The focus on vocal expressivity is to be recognised later in the film when Rosa states that ‘tears have consumed my voice’ and then by the defence lawyer once Guglielmo is brought to trial: ‘don’t be fooled by her tired eyes, her trembling voice, her fainting spells.’ Back in this scene, the pair circle around each other within the small room in stable two-shots without much camera movement until Guglielmo throws open the door, centre frame, with a loud musical stinger as he mistakes the situation for a tryst and forces Rosa out into the hall. The fight is offscreen and the spectator shares Rosa’s constriction to the hall. She screams ‘si ammazzano!’ (‘they’re killing each other!’) as the boarders come out of their doors. The aural punctuation of a gunshot brings everything to a halt and incredibly slowly the door opens to effect Emilio’s egress. With the drawn-out realisation that Emilio has been shot dead having dawned upon her as he falls to the floor Rosa faints away, and Guglielmo has escaped from the open window across which a curtain flutters. The dramatic intensity of this scene forms the centrepiece of the film, but not through violent action. The vocal delivery and the drama of confrontation are joined by an emphasis on the stage space – the room, the door opening (two times), the restriction to the hall, the open window – while Rosa’s fainting away recalls the operatic diva. It is in this aesthetic, that of the operatic rendering of the tense dynamism between emotional energy and restriction, that the link between the melodrama of Matarazzo and of Visconti becomes most evident. Consider the scene described above, the murder in Catene, and compare it to the murder in Rocco e i suoi fratelli, a film produced, incidentally, by Goffredo Lombardo, who began his career as a producer on Matarazzo’s melodramas, and which represents a popularly successful crime melodrama on the topic of emigration from Italy’s poor south to the industrial heartlands of the north. In a crime of passion, Simone, now drunk and unemployed, stabs his ex-girlfriend, a prostitute called Nadia, to death. The scene begins in long-shot showing Nadia getting out of the car of a client in an area darkened by trees, while a reverse shot shows Simone’s approach. The two have entered the Idroscalo, presented here as a semi-enclosed stage set on which the drama of their carefully timed confrontation is to occur. This set has a realism to it, having been the site of five murders of prostitutes since 1945 (Foot 1999: 222), while the medium shots of the two characters conversing keep in sight the wider environment of jutting, muddy promontories and expanses of water. But the realism of the setting also contributes to the melodramatic tension, suggesting a wide expanse (of the water) while Nadia is tantalisingly and fatally trapped onto the narrow grassland. The restricted space gives an impetuousness to the physical force of the characters’ interactions as Simone tears Nadia’s coat from her, symbolic of her defeat as she screams and falls to the ground. What happens next is operatic in another sense. Opera extends emotional expressivity across the length of time it takes to sing, slowing down the devel-

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Figure 3.5  Confrontations and climax in Catene

opment of the action. This extension of emotionality occurs in Catene when Rosa is pushed into the hall as the men fight, and in the near unbearable extension of the revelation of the death. It happens in this scene through intercutting to the boxing match in which Rocco is participating to win money for Simone to depart with – thus combining the melodramatic opposites of good and bad brother, and of mistiming and the too-late. The intercutting brings in questions of time and loss as does the equivalent scene in Catene, but rather than through misunderstanding, as in Catene, it confirms the doom of the southern

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immigrant uprooted to a modern, urban social system and corresponding set of values that conflict with Simone’s masculine codes of behaviour and Rocco’s self-sacrificial obligation to him. Rocco’s fighting comeback adds climactic texture to a scene in which Simone’s contemporaneous actions make it futile. In this particular instance Rocco is unwittingly fighting at a time just too late to save his brother, a melodramatic sharpening of the more general futility of the two brothers’ anachronistic dedication to southern codes of behaviour in the industrial north (see Rohdie 1992: 38). In a strategy that I have argued is central to melodramatic style, the intercutting emphasises the fatal nature of the physical separations of characters at the same time as stylistic aspects give a metaphysical sense of their unity and create the sense of a realm beyond that of bounded reality but constituted by feeling, pathos, desire and expressivity. It is also a borrowing from the opera Carmen, in the finale of which Escamillo’s bullfight occurs as José kills Carmen (Rohdie 1992: 29). It is, further, a moment of repetition from within the film itself, when Simone had discovered Rocco was in a relationship with Nadia, raped her and beaten Rocco, the theatrical aspects of this horrific scene emphasised by the audience of Simone’s friends watching amid the back of a housing estate. This later scene is both a variation and a repetition of saintly, delicate Rocco’s passive acceptance of being battered for Simone’s sake, with both he, and in a more directly physical sense Nadia, being sacrificed. (I have argued above in relation to male children in Matarazzo’s cinema and in the melodramas discussed in Chapter 1 that a generalisation of the position of suffering is common to melodrama, and its sacrificial aspect cannot but recall at least a trace of Christ imagery.) Vocalisation is prominent, as it is in the scene from Catene, and connects the intercut places: Simone repeatedly shouts to Nadia to ‘cover yourself!’, the repetition, and the guttural, violent desperation communicated in the delivery bringing attention to rhythmic aspects and to the qualities of what is said. It gains the function of a motif as this phrase is repeated by Rocco’s coach shouting at him also to ‘cover yourself!’ within the ring, highlighting the patterns uniting the settings. It is accompanied by a graphic match between the tree in front of which Nadia has stopped, and the pole of the ring in front of which Rocco boxes. Cutting back to the Idroscalo, Nadia makes a final confession of hatred towards Simone as she goes to lean against another tree. Simone approaches her incredibly slowly and flicks a knife, to which Nadia responds as if accepting crucifixion, holding her arms out to either side, the music swelling during this profane iconography, and then the scene cuts again to the boxing ring, further extending the dread. On the cut back again to the couple, Simone viciously stabs Nadia, her cries reaching blood-curdling pitch, and then she is lifeless. The elemental nature of this grimly operatic expressivity is incorporated into Visconti’s social critique, as the scene enacts how working-

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class bodies (in forms such as prostitute and boxer) are sacrificed for the needs of capitalist society. Using the talents of the same editor (Mario Serandrei, who worked regularly for both directors), the equivalent scenes in Catene and Rocco e i suoi fratelli are built through confrontations and the boundedness to two particular stages of action. Both scenes employ the properties of the body and of theatrical means to give primacy to non-verbal communication in the expression of the passions. The melodrama is simultaneously based in an authenticity conferred through the characters’ social positions and the force of the emotionality of their experiences. The realism of setting and character combines into an aesthetic of restriction; restricted to verbal outcry, stage setting, and bodily expressivity just as the characters are themselves restricted to the melodramatic destinies that dramatic convention dictates. This restriction gives force to the drama in cries and gestures whose melodramatic stylisation is based in an announcement of theatricality in the artistic process rather than its effacement. Intertextuality, reality, feeling Visconti spent the bulk of his creative career directing and producing theatre and opera productions, and a similar sensibility is brought to his filmmaking. Visconti makes continual references to opera, whether of Bragana singing from Carmen in Ossessione, the moments of Bellini on the soundtrack in La terra trema, the RAI orchestra playing L’elisir d’amore by Donizetti at the opening of Bellissima (1951), or the performance of Il trovatore in La Fenice that opens Senso, up to the presence of Wagner as a character in Ludwig (1972). These add intricate meanings to the images they accompany.20 The films display a general sense of the operatic in the prominence of music, the best-known examples being the use of the Adagio from Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in Senso (discussed further below) and excerpts from Mahler’s music in Morte a Venezia/Death in Venice (1971). Such symphonic music appears operatic because of the role it plays in the unfolding drama, and his films’ original soundtracks, particularly those scored by Nino Rota, use leitmotifs in the manner of Wagnerian opera (especially Rocco, Dyer 2010: 47). The films often have a kind of overture that sums up the central dramatic themes (the performance in La Fenice opera house that leads to a nationalist revolt at the opening of Senso, the Parondi family’s shivery disorientation in the cavernous railway station on their arrival in Milan in Rocco e i suoi fratelli), and are structured into acts, overtly with the five brothers who each give their name to the successive parts of Rocco e i suoi fratelli or, less obviously, with Le notti bianche unfolding over three subsequent nights, and in Senso the three successive locations of Venice, Aldeno and Verona. The films also have the kind

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Figure 3.6  Operatic and real life in Senso

of ­extravagance and the broad staging and extended running time that bring them closer to a night at the opera than one at a conventional feature film. Opera suffuses the world of the drama most especially in Senso, which begins in La Fenice opera house in Venice during a performance of Il trovatore. The credits play over a duet between Manrico and his love Leonore from Act 3 Scene 2, the curtains of the grand stage framing the cinematic image. The camera moves to the audience, showing the Austrian soldiers in the stalls and the local Venetian aristocracy in the boxes, with the popular audience crushed into the tiers at the top of the theatre, a spatial separation of the social classes. At Manrico’s exhortation ‘to arms!’ during the aria ‘Di quella pira’, a protest begins among the audience against the Austrian troops, whose army occupies

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the Veneto. During the commotion, revolutionary nationalist Roberto Ussoni challenges Austrian soldier Franz Mahler to a duel. Ussoni’s cousin Countess Livia Serpieri meets Franz to talk him out of the duel, and their meeting becomes a flirtation and then an affair. Livia ultimately offers nationalist funds to Franz so he can buy his way out of the war, only for Franz to betray her and Livia to deliver him to the firing squad. Franz and Livia have fallen as short as possible of the operatic ideals espoused in Il trovatore: of Leonora’s chaste love and her self-sacrifice to save the life of Manrico. Senso ‘differs from the opera in that the reduction to essentials is less complete. It is less “pure”. The drama that is to be played out between Livia and Franz is a degenerate melodrama’ (Nowell-Smith 2003: 83). The film rejects any notion of virtue in its main characters’ actions to suggest that the nobility of aristocratic behaviour masks decadent self-interest, a sellout of the ideals of Italy’s national revolution that kept the popular classes in a state of subjugation. Livia is a representative of this grave national betrayal. The words of ‘Di quella pira’ are ‘the dreadful flames of this pyre/are burning all the fibres of my being!’, but Livia chooses the opposite of the noble route of self-sacrifice. Instead, the all-encompassing passion expressed in the opera remains relevant insofar as it expresses a romantic passion to which, despite their own self-interest, both characters are ultimately sacrificed (Franz physically, Livia in terms of her social position). Stylisation in Senso is part of the lives of the characters, even in the circumlocutions of their speech, and their behaviour is as elaborate as the luxurious costumes and sets they inhabit. Their operatics, however, are according to Visconti’s outlook part of a national condition, a refusal of critical and progressive engagement in life for the indulgent pleasures of emotional fantasy. The plot begins as Franz responds to the protest saying that Italians prefer a war made up of ‘a shower of confetti to the accompaniment of mandolins’. Livia’s cousin, the revolutionary patriot Ussoni, challenges him, yet the film confirms Franz’s cynicism. At their initial opera-house meeting Livia tells Franz that she does not like opera ‘when it happens offstage. I dislike it when people act melodramatically, without considering the serious consequences of an impulsive action’, but the protagonists – and by implication, Italy’s rulers – are unable to behave otherwise. When, after giving him the money, Livia seeks Franz out (contrary to his instructions), she finds him drunk and dissolute with a prostitute. Franz’s historical insights appear again in his closing bitter remarks that his and Livia’s social positions are that they stand as part of a defeated world, showing a critical analysis that eludes the other characters, overtaken by passions either idealistically revolutionary (Ussoni) or romantic (Livia). Livia’s response is to scream bloodcurdlingly ‘No! No!’, and he screams back for her to go, a resumption in duet form of their debased operatics and a refusal of the prior

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analytical lucidity. Franz’s mocking laughter appears to turn to cries (although he is now offscreen), his luxuriation in sensuality, the ‘senso’ that is brought to a culmination point in his drunken stupor with a prostitute, separated from any vital substance but linked to the historic decadence of a social class and the order that they command. Boundedness Significantly, Manrico, the protagonist of the opera, is bound to the confines of the stage – he moves forwards to make the repeated call ‘to arms!’, but cannot go beyond theatrical posture. While boundedness sees Matarazzo’s protagonists seek refuge in the enclosing structures of the nunnery or the family, the limitations in Visconti’s films are historical and class-based. Il gattopardo, again on the topic of the aristocracy’s role in Italy’s national unification, begins with a long musical introduction that moves towards the court palace, a building which bespeaks a solidity of tradition that will soon be disrupted – the film’s opening scenes end as the energetic youth Tancredi gallops away from it to fight the revolution, but the rest, like Manrico on stage at the beginning of Senso, remain in place. The grandeur of the staging in Visconti’s films thus does not give a sense of the Bazinian realism of a spontaneous unending reality (exemplified in canonical neorealism) as the locations reiterate a sense of confining the dramatic action. This is as true for the shore of Aci Trezza in La terra trema, bounded by the wings of the jagged island rocks of the Faraglioni that emerge from the sea, as it is for the canalside alleys of Senso and Le notti bianche or even the housing estates in the Milan of Rocco e i suoi fratelli, their staginess enhanced by lighting choices. The combination of melodramatic and social boundedness can be seen in the central scene of Senso. The war of liberation has begun and Livia has taken refuge in the countryside. Franz returns to her, and hiding out in the mansion, discusses the possibility of bribing a doctor to get him out of the war. Crying at the thought of him going to the front line Livia expresses her distress through her relation to the stage space, grasping at the wall, the table and the curtain. Her vocal expressivity gives three syllables to each of her repeated shouts of ‘no!’ and then repeats three times, even more forcefully, ‘oh, Franz!’ at the thought of losing him. She then stops, turns her head in medium close-up to camera and repeats, in varying expressivity from desperate to determined, for Franz to ‘wait’. The soundtrack then begins on the fortissimo from the Adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, and she leads Franz through three successive doors through the upstairs of the house, turning at each door to check she is not watched. This is a disconcertingly stylised sequence which reaches towards selfreflexivity as she looks to the camera to cue the incredibly loud crescendo, the repetitive surge of its climactic phrase occurring in time with her movements

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Figure 3.7  Staging in Senso, Le notti bianche and Rocco e i suoi fratelli

through the doors. The exaggerated use of the sets for its entrances and exits, continually expanding out into new spaces and being restricted by further doors, gives a melodramatic sense of stowing and flowing, while it is evident that the emotion is for nothing but the insincere self-interest of Franz, whose declarations of ‘my greatest love, my treasure’ are directed at the coins he grasps rather than the lover who caresses him. Adding a sense of rhythm and of predestiny to the characters’ fates, the choreography of the action and editing to the climax of the extra-diegetic musical score replicate a scene from earlier

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Figure 3.8  Staging in Senso

in the film, before Livia leaves Venice. She goes to get a message which she thinks is from Franz but is actually from Ussoni to announce the beginning of the war – again, she clings to the side of the doorway, first of her own palace and then of the lodgings where Ussoni gives her the money she will betray to Franz. Her husband follows her through the alleyways and, in a premonition of this greater betrayal to her passion over revolutionary duty, she is visibly distraught to see that it is her cousin and not Franz. Reference and reality As with Matarazzo, the operatics are part of an intricate design of intertextual references organising the drama. Among the literary source materials for the stories, Senso is based on an 1882 novella by Camillo Boito, Le notti bianche,

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on the story of the same name by Dostoevsky (1848), and Rocco e i suoi fratelli, inspired by a segment of the 1958 novel by Giovanni Testori Il ponte della Ghisolfa. Furthering the range of references, the lovers kissing in Senso overtly recalls the composition of ‘Il bacio’, the painting by Hayez, and could perhaps be marking its distance from the use of the same image which appears in more straightforwardly heroic fashion in the 1954 ‘Garibaldina’ episode of Cento anni di amore (Lionello de Felice) (Dyer 2010: 51). Franz quotes from the poet Heine in the same film, while Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (unfortunately renamed Sandra of a Thousand Delights for its English-language release) takes its title from the opening line of Giacomo Leopardi’s poem Le ricordanze (1829). As with Matarazzo’s films, Visconti’s work makes allusion and reference to, but also provides an experience similar to, the range of pictures, novels, operas and other cultural artefacts that make up its artistic heritage. However much the work either of Matarazzo or Visconti may include performance of opera, theatre or song, it can never actually be any of these things, substituting the unique, folk, live, proximal aspects of these forms with the mechanical technology of cinematic record. In discussing Il gattopardo Richard Dyer makes the point that the film aims to approach something ultimately impossible, that is, an appearance of what feature films might have been like had they existed in the nineteenth century. Thus, much of the melancholy of the film resides [. . .] in the fact that the film itself, including its score, cannot be what it wants to be, cannot achieve the imagined fullness and presence of nineteenth-century cinema. (Dyer 2010: 11) This gives a deep sense of longing, which itself is highly apt for melodrama; however much the emotions they bring forth may achieve a sense of common feeling with distant lovers, abandoned children, imprisoned innocents, who exist, however, only on the world of the screen – or achieve through fantasy some recompense for lost moments – this commonality is fundamentally impossible, and this creates pathos. Such longing may, then, help explain why melodrama, as exemplified in the films of Matarazzo and Visconti, incorporates reference to, and the sensibilities of, other artistic forms to such a degree – it conjures the feel of them in a form that can never make them actual, just as the desires of the characters are themselves felt all the more strongly for the impossibility they have of actualising them. To return to the questions of expressivity brought up in the first chapter, the operatic originates not from within a character’s psychological situation, but from without. In one quite extraordinary sequence from Le notti bianche, the lead protagonist Mario is left alone on a bridge over a misty canal, with a letter from the elusive woman he has fallen in love with to the man for whom she,

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on the other hand, has lost her heart (and probably her mind). He sits in the middle ground while a streetwalker, who throughout the film has looked suggestively but silently at him, passes with deliberation behind him (see Fig. 3.7) and whistles for a lighter. These pre-ordained moves of seduction proceed as she lights her cigarette and breathes in, cueing the musical theme, a Romantic orchestral score, to start. She remains in the background looking at him as the music reaches a tremulous crescendo and he rips up the letter, his moment of abandon marked by a change in the music to its principal theme, and he steps off the bridge in time to it. The first theme seems to be associated with the prostitute and sexual abandon, and the second, with Mario and resignation. The interaction of these themes with the near wordless characters is, unlike conventional musical scores, overt, seeming to determine the characters’ actions, a fact emphasised as the camera lingers on the bridge after the two protagonists have left it, the set pre-existing and circumscribing the ultimately transient human actions. The extra-diegetic musicality seems more to govern them than respond to them, as would have been the case in classical cinema. Yet rather than opera, such expressive elevation melodramatically entraps its protagonists to gestures that do not confer a similar operatic grandeur of character. When Sandra, heroine of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, disturbs the detached chatter of the cocktail party of the film’s opening scene, she enigmatically and strikingly replies that what is wrong is ‘this music’. The pianist reaches the jagged, climactic moment of César Franck’s ‘Prelude, Choral and Fugue’ in a connection of her psychological disturbance to the musical performance, which we find out through the course of the film brings up memories of both incest and her family’s experience of the Holocaust. ‘This music’ is emblematic in Visconti’s cinema of a more critical, historicised and troubling relation to the dramatic action than is found in the cinema of Matarazzo. The difference, then, between the two directors’ references to other forms is that Visconti’s films make less reference to the shared culture of ‘the people’, however they may be defined. For Visconti, a culture that really works in their interests is yet to be achieved, while in Matarazzo’s cinema it is a shared repository of value and is to be conserved. Visconti’s period films Senso and Il gattopardo are about a betrayal of il popolo by the lack of progress of the native aristocracy more interested, in the 1860s period of the Risorgimento, in maintaining their class privileges in a cynical and narrowly successful manoeuvre which sold out the possibility of more radical revolutionary progress. The contemporary films show il popolo to be betrayed instead by modern consumer culture. Bars in Rocco e i suoi fratelli glow with the unnatural lure of neon lights, offering American jazz and the promise of alcohol; in Le notti bianche the modern city landscape stages the disappointment of spurned hero Mario’s dreams of romance. Visconti’s films show the missed opportunity for the construction of a national-popular culture, a context in which the poor suffer their

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restricted opportunities and the rich maintain a decadent aristocratic hold. In such circumstances the only alternative is a luxuriation in the illusory but alluring delights of the senses, of romance, sex, alcohol and art itself. Meanwhile religious faith, a repository of meaning in Matarazzo, is unimportant in Senso and Le notti bianche, part of the archaic worldview of the brothers in Rocco e i suoi fratelli, and an ineffectual tool justifying the dominance of a hypocritical aristocracy in Il gattopardo. Romance and family are not indissoluble, as in Matarazzo’s world, but exist in conflict; marriage, as the Prince of Salina states in Il gattopardo, offers ‘a year of flames and thirty of ashes’. Rather, families are important for their function within a social formation, from the agricultural labouring family business of the Valastros in La terra trema or the high-bourgeois family firm in ‘Il lavoro’, to the aristocratic/bourgeois alliance effected via marriage in Il gattopardo. Romance leads to ruination (Senso, Le notti bianche), with Rocco e i suoi fratelli combining the two themes of the family as social unit with that of the perils of romance. In both Matarazzo’s and Visconti’s films the realism moves away from and develops the neorealist legacy. Even Rocco e i suoi fratelli, the film which marks in some ways Visconti’s last indulgence of the neorealist impulses of La terra trema, demonstrates its social point through operatic exaggeration, one which is part of its southern Italian protagonists’ repertoire of behaviour in a different way from that of the northern aristocracy of Senso. As traced by Sam Rohdie, the operatic reference points are many: the confrontations in the films were compared on its release to arias, duets and choruses (Aristarco, in Rohdie 1992: 32), with Nadia and the brothers’ hysterical mother Rosa appearing as two instances of the stage diva and the inarticulacy of the characters overridden by the signalling of an ‘excess of feeling’ through ‘gesture, or by grunts, screams, gnashing of teeth’ (ibid.: 25). This expressivity exists in a melodramatic confrontation with the indifferent, modern industrial society in which they appear, as the ‘enormity [sic] of their passion, the depth of their feelings – is no match for the socially and emotionally alienated world which they have entered and which defeats them’ (ibid.: 53). And so, while Visconti engages at points with various kinds of realism, including historical and Lukácsian realism, the realism of lingering details, of social denunciation, of anthropomorphic cinema, of vividness and squalor, it is ultimately a realism which questions the very relationship between reality and what would in the films be grouped together as imagination, stylisation, art, sensation, romance – a relationship whose prominence is itself melodramatic because the two realms are incompatible. Conclusion The questions of loss, betrayal, the difficulties in and limitations on the struggle to realise what we would like life to become, have simultaneously clear

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melodramatic and Marxist relevance, making Visconti perhaps the cinematic realisation of Brooks’ comment that Marx, like Freud, employed a concept of conflict which can be traced in a relationship to the melodramatic imagination (Brooks 1995: 201). Matarazzo, on the other hand, combines the twin heritage of realism and opera as filtered through popular domestic forms, through fotoromanticised iconography and the general humus of popular cultural production. Rephrasing a question of Gramsci’s, Maurizio Targhetta asks why in Italy there was no literature in a position relative to letteratura d’appendice ‘as Dostoyevsky was to Sue’ (Targhetta 1977: 75). In terms of the bridge the two directors make between neorealismo popolare and auteurism one can state that Visconti stands to Matarazzo in just such a relationship, or alternatively, stands in the same relationship as opera does to sceneggiata. Notes   1. Loren in Aïda (Clemente Fracassi, 1953) and La favorita (Cesare Barlacchi, 1953), Mangano in L’elisir d’amore (Mario Costa, 1948) and the operatically trained Lollobrigida in a number of films.   2. See Crisp and Hillman, 2002.  3. For scholarship on cineopera see Arcagni 2006, Bono 2004, Bragaglia and Di Giammatteo 1991, Brunetta 1995 and 2004, Callegari and Lodato 1984, Casadio 1995, Comuzio 1984, Kezich 1984, Landy 1996, Lunghi 1959, Menarini and Pescatore 2002, Pescatore 2001, Pistagnesi et al. 1977, Spinazzola 1985, Toffetti and Della Casa 1977, Venturelli 1998.   4. Before cineopera declined at the end of the decade as Italian cinema moved towards more youth-oriented genres.   5. Principally those of MGM, which have perhaps unfortunately functioned as a kind of Platonic ideal (Dyer 2012: 177) of the musical.   6. The importance of this relationship carries some echoes of longer-standing debates about the relation of score to libretto in opera.   7. See Balázs 1952, Bernardini 1994, Bianchi 1969, Bono 2004, Brunetta 1993, Dalle Vacche 2000 and 2002, Grignaffini 1981, Martinelli 1999, Redi 1998, Renzi 1991, Schroeder 2003.   8. On mass culture in Italian society, see Baldelli 1968, Eco 1994 [1964], Fanchi and Mosconi 2002, Forgacs 1990, Forgacs and Lumley 1996, Forgacs and Gundle 2008, Giuducci 1981, Mosconi 2006, Valentini 2003.   9. See also Forgacs 1996. 10. See Ambrogi 2007 for a fuller account of the contexts to this song. 11. The degree of conventionalisation is affirmed, in terms stark enough to indicate the intersection of genre, commerce, ideology, and auto-referentiality which one might take for sarcasm, by the producer of Romana Film, the major Neapolitan production company of the 1950s: ‘What’s important is giving the story a moral ending. I always get the two goodies married. I get the bad guy to die, or end up in jail. Lifer, you know. The bad guy’s never Italian. I usually make him Albanian. Anyway, I’m not going to go to Albania. The lying woman, though, will be Parisian if the film’s not made for France. Otherwise I’ll make her English, since I’m never going to go there. In the background there’s almost always Vesuvius. The emigrants to Brooklyn really want to see Vesuvius. The dialogue is often replaced with

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songs. The best thing is, while they’re arguing, I’ll give you a song’ ([1958] cited in Morreale 2011: 114). 12. For works on letteratura d’appendice see Lepschy 2003, Mazzoni 1973, Rak 1999, Romano 1977, Veronese 1977, Zaccaria 1977. 13. On the fotoromanzo, see Abruzzese 1989, Bravo 2003, Cardone 2004, De Berti 2000 and 2003. 14. On Visconti, see Bacon 1998, Baldelli 1965, Chiarelli 1997, Düttmann 2009, Micciché 1996, Nochimson 2003, Nowell-Smith 2003, Pravadelli 2000, Rondolini 1981. 15. On Matarazzo see Aprà and Carabba 1976, Aprà et al. 1976, Bachman and Calder Williams 2012, Lietti 1995, Masoni and Vecchi 2003, Mora 1999, Prudenzi 1990, and the special edition of Cinegrafie, No. 20 (2007). 16. See also Forgacs 1993. 17. Le notti bianche is something of a pause between these works of historical ambition, its romance narrative primarily concerned with the relationship of reality to fantasy. 18. Other films directed by Visconti, most notably Ossessione (1943), La terra trema (1948), Il gattopardo/The Leopard (1963) and Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa/Sandra of a Thousand Delights (1965), each display a great deal of melodrama and are mentioned throughout this book. However, they do not have the self-consciousness of a reflection on the genre itself that Visconti’s three films from the mid-to-late 1950s do, and so these form the focus here. 19. It is an index of the absorption of neorealism into popular Italian cinema to consider that in the 1946–7 season the top three films were the filmed opera Rigoletto, the medieval romance Genoveffa di Bramante (Primo Zeglio) and then La figlia del capitano/The Captain’s Daughter (Mario Camerini), set in Tsarist Russia. In 1948–9 the ancient world film Fabiola (Alessandro Blasetti) was top, then the adaptation of the nineteenth-century feuilleton La sepolta viva (Guido Brignone), and then the neorealist anti-Mafia film In nome della legge/In the Name of the Law (Pietro Germi) among a range of other neorealist works in the top fifteen, while the following year the top grossers were Catene and the neorealist parody Totò cerca casa (Mario Monicelli and Steno) (Carabba 1976: 47–8). 20. See Chiarelli 1997, Pastina 2002, Dyer 2010, Medioli 2001 for relevant intertextual analyses.

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CONCLUSION

‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.’ Petrarch ‘But can’t you see these things really happen? These events are more real than the facts of life!’ Thus Anna, in Un marito per Anna Zaccheo, describes the melodramatic play to which Andrea takes her on their date, at which his cynicism contrasts with her easy susceptibility to the mythologies of romance. In the direct terms of the plot, her faith in melodrama is proved wrong and Andrea’s masculine disavowal right. The play they see includes a shooting and ends with a marriage, while her life for the duration of the film contains neither such drama nor such a happy ending. And yet something more remains, for after the curtain falls Anna does then undergo the full emotional turbulence of a melodramatic narrative. More real, yet not life itself: melodramas channel their formal properties towards elevating, emphasising and intensifying the emotional expressivity that transforms the prose world they emerge from. Such elevation makes prominent the act of dramatic presentation in eliciting an undeniable reality whose proof, if melodrama has done its job most successfully, is found in tears. As with any other form, melodrama creates its own generic terms through which to reshape reality, through which its situations require themselves to be seen melodramatically. In discussing Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Sam Rohdie puts the melodramatic relationship thus:

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Melodrama, by theatricalising reality, reveals it while at the same time revealing the impossibility, the unlivability, of the emotions it calls up, except within melodrama – that is, not in life but in art. The overheated fiction of melodrama becomes simultaneously revelation of the real, protest against it, and salvation from it. (Rohdie 1992: 23) Thus the gap between expressive elevation and prosaic reality is itself melodramatic. Melodrama heightens the gaps between expression, emotion and reality precisely so as to reinforce their mutual dependence and so as to call for their ever more emphatic manifestation, increasing the gap via the very method through which it tries to close it. The more expression is melodramatised, and the wider the disjuncture between melos (melody or musicality) and drama, the closer it is to the truth of the problem – of the unlivability in real life of the emotions called up by melodrama – which the generic terms of melodrama create. Because of this core problematic, melodrama can offer special ways of rendering realism, or of considering tensions surrounding such ideologically charged subjects as the family, the conditions of the oppressed, and female experience, and can also offer a stimulating framework through which to highlight its relation to music and to the other arts. On taking his sentimental journey over the channel, Laurence Sterne mentions that knowledge is ‘like music in an Italian street, whereof those may partake, who pay nothing’ (Sterne 2003: 11). A musicality that determines everyday life, music as part of an urban, street existence – at a deeper level of implication, music and musicality as forms of knowledge of the everyday street – characterise a range of Italian culture: verismo opera, Neapolitan canzone, the regional films and the divas of the silent period, cineopera, melodrama. These place musical lyricism together with realism, repressing neither emotionality nor an unidealised lament of the circumstances of life. I have analysed melodrama as an aspect of popular life in post-war Italy. Popular culture is marked by an ease of apprehension, by the offer of an unambiguous emotional appeal, and by a need to undertake no learning other than that already imparted by a knowledge of popular culture itself – of an absorption of the meanings behind religious icons and the repeated gestures of generic production. That is not to say that the processes it puts into motion are straightforwardly simple – melodrama is based in emotions of pathos and poignancy that rest on the ambivalences implied by loss and sacrifice. Such emotional ambivalence both denies the fulfilment of the melodramatic protagonist and makes his/her emotions central, simultaneously allowing protest against and acceptance of circumstances. The family is the haven and hope for the melodramatic heroine just as it is for children whose innocence melodrama insists upon; and yet the family exists under constant threat of dissolution. Women in post-war Italian melodrama

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have only the convent outside of domesticity, which any suggestion of their sexual inconstancy threatens to shatter. But the family is a constant struggle, a site over which dissatisfaction is felt, not in a direct denunciation of nuclear domesticity but expressed on the contrary as a wish for an ideal of domestic bliss that life, at least for the duration of the drama, denies. That such an emotional experience is an ambivalent one allows it to form the basis of the extraordinary pitch to which melodrama raises its tensions. This sublime pitch overwhelms the protagonist to the point which mind and body can no longer stand (and brings the audience to the bodily reaction of tears). The driving dramatic principle to increase the intensity of a situation, to contrive situations for their potential to heighten emotionality, has given melodrama a historical association with vulgarity: as being, in Zola’s words, ‘false sentimentality’ (cited in Bentley 1965: 210). But although melodrama is intimately concerned with the affective properties of style, it has a historic proximity to realism. Melodrama and realism are each products of the modern era that seek an intimacy with people marked as ordinary, and they both incorporate an interest in authenticity with the vivid presentation of elemental forces. In discussing his inclusion of Balzac and James in the melodramatic imagination, Brooks writes that within an apparent context of ‘realism’ and the ordinary, they seemed in fact to be staging a heightened and hyperbolic drama [. . .] [and to] place their characters at the point of intersection of primal ethical forces. (1995: xiii) But why is it then ‘in fact’ melodrama despite realist appearances, rather than the sharing of common ground? What can realism and melodrama confer upon each other? In terms of film history, not only is melodrama a central reference point for Italian neorealism, it is also, in its ability to take on questions of interiority, crisis, and the relation of style to representation, a concern for post-war modernism and art cinema. Melodrama aids the revelation of where emotion and meaning lie, expressing the effect of social and historical forces and providing a basis of everydayness and mundanity out of which the elevated is more keenly felt. In post-war Italy this combination is manifested in a popular neorealism whose sensational crime and romance narratives are determined by the social and public bases of poverty, post-war destruction, violence and labour, and gives an expansion and a density to the ensuing heightened dramatics. Melodrama shapes the attitudes of sympathy and pity, of moral polarity and collective good, which form the politics of neorealism’s representation of Italy after the war. Such melodramatisation of political outlooks has been understood to blunt critical capacities, but pathos emerges from the disappointment of desires that have

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been elicited, and its role in the fostering of a political consciousness leaves much which is still to be explored (see Linda Williams 2009). It would cut critical commentary off from popular experience if one were to forget Don Quixote’s warning to Sancho Panza, that ‘too much sanity may be madness; and maddest of all, is to see life as it is, and not as it should be’. This becomes important once more when discussing those melodramas that form cineopera, the Italian genre that places the world of opera into that of filmed drama. The relationship between performance and narrative in cineopera is a particular instance of the dramatic relationship between melos and drama, the two existing interdependently: the performance expresses the personal emotions of the drama and the performance is explained by the drama even as its melodrama fails to live up to operatic ideals. Opera thus becomes equated with emotional and melodramatic expression, whether of romantic, national, religious or artistic feeling. The narratives therefore heighten emotion into the realms of the operatic, despite – even more, because of – their provenance in the prose of life. The proximity of opera to prose life brings to mind the question of the operatic, and of what it means when no stage performance or music is actually present. It employs an aesthetic that combines a sense of natural, unmediated expressivity of gesture, cries, expressive lighting designs, into the symbolic language of tableaux, emblematic figures and iconography. On the one hand, character action recalls opera performance. Climax occurs in confrontations between principal leads whose declamatory vocal expressivity is punctuated by sharp outbursts and whose bodily expressivity is found in stasis, tableaux, and an emphasis of the diegetic set. Characters, and cinematic technique, appear bounded to that set, and yet within this boundedness is a sense of action expanding outwards into new spaces with, often, another boundedness effected by the protagonist’s immobility. Such compositional design contributes to the operatic, in which emotional expressivity serves to extend outwards in time and space while being dramatically structured and centred upon the individual’s being. Within the extension of emotion, the world that the characters inhabit is built according to the geometry and rhythms of patterns of order and disorder, expressing, eliciting and constricting the emotions of the protagonists. The closing comparison of Luchino Visconti and Raffaello Matarazzo acts as a way of summarising the operatic aesthetic, and more generally of the principal points of post-war Italian melodrama. These also offer material for consideration of how melodramatic cinema constructs ways of understanding people, family, religion, feeling, society, popular culture itself. They do so from different ends of the high/low divide, and with significantly different political purposes. Their respective worlds are consistent realisations of the musical logic of the increase of emotion through stylistic elevation, of operatic

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grandeur as the only fit expression of emotions which nevertheless belong to a world that falls short of such grandeur – but in falling short reinforces the applicability of just such expressivity. Thus, melodrama is comprehensively, and not only at the level of plot and dramatic construction, a form that embodies tensions: of acceptance and protest, of unmediated and symbolic, of feeling, nature, authenticity against performance and stylisation, of melos and drama. Melodramatic intensity is drama strengthened, a consistent heightening of conflict which is felt always and only through the concurrent deepening of oppositions which strain against each other. A Catholic hope in transcendence through the expression of the suffering of the meek, the proliferation of a social realism, and the place of operatic theatre in popular drama are elements that are particularly Italian. The perfection of their combination occurred in the heyday of melodrama found in post-war Italian cinema, a heyday which furthermore formed the basis for the cinema’s pre-eminence in post-war Italy. But their combination is one enactment of a process common to melodrama universally. Melodrama exists in the confrontation of prosaic and elevated, of excess and restriction, of style and reality, and overall in the importance of each to understanding the other in the tension of their embattled relationship. Here lie its dynamics.

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FILMOGRAPHY

All the films listed below are mentioned in the text. Synopses are provided for films mentioned in detail repeatedly. Aïda (Clemente Fracassi, Italy, 1953) L’altra (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Italy, 1947) Le amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1955) In amore si pecca in due (Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy, 1954) ‘L’amore romantico’ episode from Amori di mezzo secolo (Mario Chiari, Italy, 1954) L’angelo bianco/The White Angel (Raffaello Matarazzo, Italy, 1954) Synopsis A chance encounter on a train brings Guido (Amedeo Nazzari) to meet Lina (Yvonne Sanson), a stage performer with a striking resemblance to the mother of his dead son, who renounced worldly relationships to live in a convent as Suor Addolorata (also played by Yvonne Sanson). Lina is imprisoned for her connection to a gang of counterfeiters, but is already pregnant after one night spent with Guido. They marry in her prison, but Lina, having been bullied by the other inmates, dies after giving birth. The other inmates steal the baby in an escape attempt and the prison is set on fire. The film closes on Guido, Suor Addolorata, and the rescued son, whom she imprecates be called Bruno after his dead half-brother. Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. Germany, 1974) Anna (Alberto Lattuada, Italy/France, 1951) Synopsis Anna (Silvana Mangano), about to take the veil, works diligently in a hospital. The entry of one patient among the injured in an accident causes Anna to remember (told in

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flashback) life before the hospital, when she was a singer in a nightclub. She got engaged to her suitor Andrea (Raf Vallone), but continues an affair with barman Vittorio (Vittorio Gassman). As they prepare for the wedding Andrea encounters Vittorio and accidentally shoots him dead in the ensuing fracas. Anna enters the sisterhood. Back in the present day, Andrea, the injured patient, seeks to restart their relationship. Anna considers it, but decides to remain at the hospital tending to the sick and serving God. Appassionatamente (Giacomo Gentilomo, Italy, 1954) Synopsis The aristocratic family of Elena (Silvana Pampanini) is in financial crisis and her father attempts suicide. She loves Carlo, a poor doctor, but is constrained to marry Amedeo (Amedeo Nazzari), a rich industrialist. Unbeknownst to her, he had already bought her family’s mansion, solving her family’s worst money problems. After the wedding Amedeo discovers that she does not love him, but instructs her to act like a loving wife. She comes to love him, but Andrea’s jealous servants stand in the way of Andrea realising her sincerity. Assunta Spina (Francesca Bertini/Gustavo Serena, Italy, 1915) Assunta Spina (Mario Mattoli, Italy, 1948) Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma/Before Him All Rome Trembled (Carmine Gallone, Italy, 1947) Avanti, c’è posto! (Mario Bonnard, Italy, 1942) Ave Maria (Johannes Riemann, Germany/Italy, 1936) L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1960) I bambini ci guardano/The Children Are Watching Us (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1944) Il bandito/The Bandit (Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1946) Synopsis Ernesto (Amedeo Nazzari) returns from a POW camp to his native Turin only to find his home bombed to rubble and the news that his mother has died and his sister disappeared. He finds no work, but meets a woman (Lidia, Anna Magnani) who is involved in a criminal gang. He goes to a prostitute, whom he discovers is his lost sister (Carla del Poggio), flies into a rage, and kills her pimp. He hides out with the gang and becomes their head. Lidia falls out with Ernesto, and leads the police to him. Ernesto goes on the run having accidentally kidnapped the young daughter of an old comrade. He gets her safely to her mountain home and is then shot by police. Il barbiere di Siviglia/The Barber of Seville (Mario Costa, Italy, 1946) La bella addormentata/Sleeping Beauty (Luigi Chiarini, Italy, 1942) Bellissima/The Most Beautiful (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1951) Il bivio (Fernando Cerchio, Italy, 1950) Il brigante Musolino (Mario Camerini, Italy, 1950) Bufere (Guido Brignone, Italy/France, 1953) Caccia tragica/Tragic Pursuit (Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 1947) Il cammino della speranza/The Road to Hope (Pietro Germi, Italy, 1950) Synopsis A group of Sicilian labourers and their families emigrate to France in search of work.

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Vanni (Franco Navarro), a criminal, hitches a ride with them. Their poverty and marginalisation increases through episodes as they move northwards. Finally in the Alps, Saro (Raf Vallone), another of the emigrants, and Vanni fight and Saro gets the better of him. After a snowstorm, they reach France. Campo de’ fiori (Mario Bonnard, Italy, 1943) Casa Ricordi (Carmine Gallone, Italy/France, 1954) Casta diva (Carmine Gallone, Italy/France 1956) Synopsis Bellini (Maurice Ronet) is a young and brilliant composer studying in Naples. He meets the beautiful Maddalena (Antonella Lualdi), who inspires his greatest work, ‘Casta diva’. Bellini begins to achieve great success, but Maddalena is espoused to another, for she does not want to interrupt his work. His friendship with her continues to inspire him to greater achievements. She dies of consumption, thinking of Bellini in her last moments even though he is late getting to her. Catene/Chains (Raffaelo Matarazzo, Italy, 1949) Synopsis Guglielmo (Amedeo Nazzari) runs a garage and is happily married, with two young children, to Rosa (Yvonne Sanson). The film begins as one day the car of Emilio (Aldo Nicodemi), secretly escaping a crime, is brought in to be fixed. He is an old lover of Rosa’s, and he insinuates himself into their family on the pretext of a business deal. She goes to tell him she wants nothing to do with him, but not before their young son has mistakenly believed he has seen evidence that they are having an affair. Guglielmo forces this wrong information out of the son, and shoots Emilio dead. He stows away to America, but is brought back to trial. Meanwhile Rosa is cast out of the family home. To ensure Guglielmo is let off she testifies falsely that she was having an affair with Emilio. Guglielmo’s lawyer persuades him that Rosa is sincere and they are reunited. Cavalleria rusticana (Carmine Gallone, Italy, 1955) Chi è senza peccato . . . (Raffaello Matarazzo, Italy, 1953) Il cielo è rosso/The Sky is Red (Claudio Gora, Italy, 1950) Cielo sulla palude/Heaven over the Marshes (Augusto Genina, Italy, 1949) La città si difende/Four Ways Out (Pietro Germi, Italy, 1951) La commare secca/The Grim Reaper (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1962) Il conformista/The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/W. Germany, 1970) Core ’ngrato (Guido Brignone, Italy, 1951) Il cristo proibito/The Forbidden Christ (Curzio Malaparte, Italy, 1951) Cuori senza frontieri/The White Line (Luigi Zampa, Italy, 1950) Il deserto rosso/Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1964) Desiderio (Marcello Pagliero/Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1946) Disonorata senza colpa (Giorgio Walter Chili, Italy, 1953) Domani è troppo tardi/Tomorrow Is Too Late (Léonid Moguy, Italy, 1950) La donna del giorno (Francesco Maselli, Italy, 1956) La donna della montagna/The Mountain Woman (Renato Castellani, Italy, 1944)

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Una donna ha ucciso (Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy, 1952) Una donna libera/A Free Woman (Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy/France, 1954) Synopsis A man is shot and a woman flees his apartment. In flashback, the woman, Liana (Françoise Christophe), remembers when she first decided to abandon her budding career as an architect to get engaged. At an exhibition she meets musician Gerardo (Pierre Cressoy), who seduces her. She ends her engagement for an affair with Gerardo, which he abruptly breaks off, leaving her to be ‘free’ again. She moves to Paris to get over it, and meets and marries a kindly old businessman, Massimo (Gino Cervi). One day she meets Gerardo by chance, and turns down his renewed advances. On finding out that he has embarked upon seducing her sister, she goes to his apartment and shoots him. La donna più bella del mondo/The World’s Most Beautiful Woman (Robert Z. Leonard, Italy/France, 1955) Due lettere anonime/Two Anonymous Letters (Mario Camerini, Italy, 1945) Le due verità (Antonio Leonviola, Italy/France, 1952) L’eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1962) L’elisir d’amore (Mario Costa, Italy, 1946) Europa ’51/No Greater Love (Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1952) Fabiola (Alessandro Blasetti, Italy/France, 1949) Fari nella nebbia (Gianni Franciolini, Italy, 1942) Fatalità (Giorgio Bianchi, Italy, 1947) Le fatiche di Ercole/Hercules (Pietro Francisci, Italy/Spain 1958) La favorita (Cesare Barlacchi, Italy, 1953) Il ferroviere/Man of Iron (Pietro Germi, Italy, 1956) La figlia del capitano/The Captain’s Daughter (Mario Camerini, Italy, 1947) I figli di nessuno/Nobody’s Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, France/Italy, 1951) Synopsis Guido (Amedeo Nazzari), son of a countess who owns a quarry, is in love with Luisa (Yvonne Sanson). Guido is sent away on business by his mother, who does not approve of their relationship. Luisa is pregnant, but the Countess thwarts Guido’s attempts to communicate with her. Her assistant, Anselmo (Folco Lulli), steals the baby after it is born, making it look like the baby has died in a fire. Luisa joins a convent. Anselmo sends the boy to be brought up in a boarding school, but on reaching adolescence he heads home to find out who his father is. He begins working in Guido’s quarry, although the two are unaware that they are related. After being injured in an incident of sabotage in the quarry, the dying Bruno sees his family reunited around his deathbed. As his hearse passes by Luisa’s convent window she scatters flowers and collapses in tears. Follie per l’opera/Mad About Opera (Mario Costa, Italy, 1949) Francesco, giullare di Dio/Francis, God’s Jester (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1950) Fuga in Francia/Flight Into France (Mario Soldati, Italy, 1948) ‘Garibaldina’ episode from Cento anni d’amore/100 Years of Love (Lionello De Felice, Italy, 1954)

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Il gattopardo/The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1963) Gelosia/Jealousy (Pietro Germi, Italy, 1953) Synopsis A Sicilian marchese (Erno Crisa) falls in love with Agrippina (Marisa Belli), a woman below his station. She marries another and in jealousy the marchese kills her husband, then testifies against an innocent man. He confesses to a priest, but refuses to turn himself in. The guilt drives him to delirium, and finally to death. Genoveffa di Brabante (Primo Zeglio, Italy, 1947) Germania, anno zero/Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1948) Gioventù perduta/Lost Youth (Pietro Germi, Italy, 1947) Giuseppe Verdi (Raffaello Matarazzo, Italy, 1953) In nome della legge/In the Name of the Law (Pietro Germi, France/Italy 1949) Le infedeli/The Unfaithfuls (Mario Monicelli and Steno, France/Italy, 1953) Synopsis A group of rich upper-class women engage in romantic intrigue. When a private investigator (Pierre Cressoy), who belongs to a lower social station, is hired by the husband of one of them, his activities lead to theft and blackmail and the suicide of an innocent maid accused of the crimes he has put in motion. Gli innocenti pagano (Luigi Capuano, Italy, 1951) Lacrime d’amore (Pino Mercanti, Italy, 1954) Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1948) Synopsis An unemployed man, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), is given a job, for which he needs a bike. On his first day of work the bike is stolen. He spends the weekend travelling around Rome with his sun Bruno (Enzo Staiola), looking for the bike, which he fails to get back. He attempts to steal a bike but is caught. ‘Il lavoro’ episode from Boccaccio ’70 (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1962) Luce nelle tenebre (Mario Mattoli, Italy, 1941) Lucia di Lammermoor (Piero Ballerini, Italy, 1946) Ludwig (Luchino Visconti, Italy, France, West Germany, 1972) La lupa/The Vixen (Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1953) Il lupo della Sila/The Wolf of the Sila (Duilio Coletti, Italy, 1949) Maddalena (Augusto Genina, Italy/France, 1954) Synopsis Maddalena (Märta Torén), a prostitute, arrives in a village where she pretends to be a virgin so as to take part in the town’s Venerdì Santo procession as the Virgin Mary. She confesses to the Priest (Gino Cervi) that she is acting out of revenge for the death of her daughter, incinerated in church when her dress caught fire while performing in an act of ritual devotion. The villagers discover her deceit and she is hit with a fatal blow by town-dweller Domenico (Folco Lulli) while being stoned out of town. Malaspina (Armando Fizzarotti, Italy, 1947) Mambo (Roberto Rossen, Italy/USA, 1954)

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Mamma/Mother (Guido Brignone, Italy/Germany, 1941) Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1962) La mano della morta/Hand of Death (Carlo Campogalliani, Italy, 1949) Marechiaro (Giorgio Ferroni, Italy, 1949) Un marito per Anna Zaccheo/A Husband for Anna (Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 1953) Synopsis Anna (Silvana Pampanini) is a beautiful young Neapolitan who lives at home and dreams of finding a nice husband. She meets a sailor, Andrea (Massimo Girotti), with whom she falls in love. When he goes away on a voyage, she gets a job as a model to pay for their future life together. She is tricked into exposing her legs for a stockings advert, and her boss, Dr Illuminato (Amedeo Nazzari), rapes her. On his return Andrea decides that because she is not a virgin he does not want to see her any more. She gets engaged to an old, unattractive fish wholesaler, Don Antonio (Umberto Spadaro). She breaks off the engagement and has another go with Andrea, but after a final fit of jealousy on his part they break it off for good. She returns home, insisting that hope shall remain. Melodie immortali/Immortal Melodies (Giacomo Gentilomo, Italy/France, 1953) Menzogna/Falsehood (Maria Ubaldo del Colle, Italy, 1952) Synopsis A single, society woman Luisa (Yvonne Sanson) moves to a little fishing village, getting away from her housekeeper and lover. She starts an affair with a local fisherman, Gianni (Alberto Farnese), stealing him from the local young ‘angel of the fishermen’ Mariella (Irene Galter). Mariella’s family is poor and her overbearing father promises her to Rocco (Folco Lulli), who uses his economic power to lord it over the fishermen. Mariella moves Luisa to break things off with Gianni and she relents, but straight after she has finished with him her old lover returns and shoots her dead in a fit of jealousy. Gianni receives the blame and Rocco withholds the evidence of his housemaid, a crucial witness to Gianni’s innocence Mariella pretends they spent the night together to provide him with an alibi and is ostracised from the community. Rocco tries to take advantage of Mariella and in flight she falls and injures herself on the rocks. The witness ends up coming forward and Gianni is released; meanwhile Rocco ends up injuring Mariella’s young brother in a fight, and she begins her life with Gianni. Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1951) Il monastero di Santa Chiara (Mario Sequi, Italy, 1949) Synopsis A Jewish nightclub singer, Esther (Edda Albertini), flees the Nazis who are occupying Naples. Her lover Rudolf (Massimo Serato), a Nazi officer, shoots himself after taking her to refuge in the Santa Chiara monastery. The monastery is destroyed in a bombing raid. After a period imprisoned in a camp she survives the War, but ends up shot by gangsters after being lured back to the ruins of the convent in a trap laid by Rudolf’s jealous ex-lover in search of vengeance. Esther still hears Rudolf’s voice calling her and dies on top of the rubble. Il mondo le condanna/The World Condemns Them (Gianni Franciolini, France/Italy, 1953) Il mulino del Po/The Mill On The Po (Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1949) Synopsis In the 1890s, the Scacerni family own a mill on the river Po. Berta (Carla Del Poggio) is in love with Orbino (Jack Sernas), who is from a family of day-labourers. A labour

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league is set up to agitate against the exploitation of the workers. They strike, but Berta’s brother Princivalle (Giacomo Giuradei) continues working. The strike wins, but Princivalle is told a rumour that Orbino has dishonoured the family. He beats Orbino, accidentally causing his death. The Scacerni family participate in a burial for Orbino in the waters of the Po. Morte a Venezia/Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1971) Musica proibita (Carlo Campogalliani, Italy, 1942) Napoli, sole mio (Giorgio Simonelli, Italy, 1956) Nel gorgo del peccato (Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy/West Germany, 1954) Synopsis After years of absence, Alberto (Fausto Tozzi) returns to the home of his mother, Margherita (Elisa Cegani), with his girlfriend Germaine (Margot Hielscher). The two lead a dissolute life while Margherita works hard from home sewing to try to pay the household debts. Alberto gets a job as a petrol pump attendant and one day Filippo (Franco Fabrizi), an ex-lover of Germaine’s, encounters the couple. He is still in love with Germaine, and lures her away from the family home, leading Alberto to break off his relationship with his mother and work for the ne’er-do-well Filippo. Filippo, from jealousy, plants drugs on Alberto, who finds out and blames Germaine. Filippo injures Germaine, apparently gravely, and Alberto is arrested. Margherita goes to constrain Filippo to confess his guilt, but in a frenzy Filippo shoots her dead, as it turns out Germaine is coming out of her coma and able to testify to his guilt anyway. The film closes as Margherita finishes her voice-over narration from heaven, over a picture of the happy married domestic life of Germaine and Alberto. La nemica/The Enemy (Giorgio Bianchi, Italy, 1952) Noi peccatori (Guido Brignone, Italy, 1953) Synopsis A returned soldier Stefano (Steve Barclay) leaves his parents’ small farm, embittered and having lost his faith in God, to look for work in Naples and meets a nurse, Lucia (Yvonne Sanson), who is highly God-fearing and whose mother has spent years falsely imprisoned for murder. They get engaged but Stefano injures his sight saving a friend from a burning building. To pay for his treatment Lucia secretly gets a job as a nightclub performer, but Stefano, alerted by the jealous mistress of her nightclub boss, finds her and publicly shames her. She runs out of the club after him but is knocked down by a tram, losing the ability to walk. Back at home with his parents, Stefano is informed of her innocence of wrongdoing, repents, and finds her in church for the Our Lady of Pompeii service, and as they reunite he regains his faith in God and she the power of her legs. Noi vivi!/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, Italy, 1942) Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi/No Peace Under the Olives (Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 1950) Synopsis On returning from the War, shepherd Dominici (Raf Vallone) finds his sheep have been stolen by Bonfiglio (Folco Lulli). He vows to get them back but is jailed for stealing them. Bonfiglio rapes Dominici’s sister, Maria Grazia (Maria Grazia Dominici). Meanwhile, his sweetheart, Lucia (Lucia Bosé), has been constrained by Bonfiglio to testify against him in court. He escapes, Lucia finds him, and together they hunt Bonfiglio and the sheep. The local peasants, oppressed by the tyranny of Bonfiglio, lead them to him. Bonfiglio throws himself from a hilltop onto the rocks below.

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Non ti scordar di me/Forget Me Not (Zoltan Korda, UK, 1936) Le notti bianche/The White Nights (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1957) Synopsis Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) meets Natalia (Maria Schell) one night waiting by a bridge. They talk together, and he learns that she is waiting for a tenant (of her grandmother’s, whom she fell in love with and who departed a year earlier. Mario falls in love with Natalia, and she seems to respond, but on the return of the tenant (Jean Marais) she chooses him instead. Notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, Italy/France, 1957) ’O sole mio (Giacomo Gentilomo, Italy, 1946) Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1943) Pagliacci (Mario Costa, Italy, 1948) Paisà/Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1946) Synopsis Episode III: Rome. Francesca (Maria Michi), a prostitute in a bar, meets American GI Fred (Gar Moore). She takes him home, and as he falls into a drunken stupor he recounts the story of a hopeful young woman he met when the Allies first came to the city. She recognises herself as the woman, and leaves him a note. The following day she waits to meet him, but Fred, stationed at a checkpoint, throws away the note as ‘nothing, the address of a whore’. Il passatore (Duilio Coletti, Italy, 1947) Patto col diavolo/Pact With the Devil (Luigi Chiarini, Italy, 1949) Pentimento (Mario Costa, Spain/Italy, 1952) Perdonami! (Mario Costa, Italy, 1953) Persiane chiuse (Luigi Comencini, Italy, 1951) Piccolo mondo antico/Old Fashioned World (Mario Soldati, Italy, 1941) La portatrice di pane (Maurice Cloche, Italy/France, 1950) Puccini (Carmine Gallone, France/Italy, 1953) I pugni in tasca/Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 1965) Quattro passi fra le nuvole/Four Steps In The Clouds (Alessandro Blasetti, Italy, 1942) Quo vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, Italy, 1912) Respiro (Emanuele Crialese, Italy, 2002) ‘La ricotta’ episode from RoGoPaG (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France, 1963) Ridi pagliaccio! (Camillo Mastrocinque, Italy, 1941) Rigoletto (Carmine Gallone, Italy, 1946) Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, Italy, 1948) Synopsis Francesca (Doris Dowling) is a clandestine worker who goes to the rice fields to help work the harvest. Walter (Vittorio Gassman), a wanted criminal, stows away with her. Francesca becomes integrated with the other rice-pickers, and meets radical soldier

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Marco (Raf Vallone). Marco’s companion, Silvana (Silvana Mangano), strikes up a relationship with Walter. Walter rapes her and she becomes part of his criminal gang, who decide to flood the rice fields. The gang is found out, Walter is killed and Silvana kills herself during a beauty pageant. Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco And His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1960) Synopsis Five brothers and their mother move from Basilicata to industrial Milan. One of the brothers, Simone (Renato Salvatori), starts a relationship with a prostitute, Nadia (Annie Girardot). They end their relationship, and a little while later Nadia starts to date Rocco (Alain Delon). When Simone finds out, he brutally beats Rocco and rapes Nadia. They end their relationship. Rocco becomes a boxer to try to save his increasingly dissolute brother. During a match, Simone finds Nadia and impulsively stabs her to death. Another brother reports him to the police. Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945) Synopsis The Nazis are occupying Rome. Resistance fighter Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) hides out with Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet) and his fiancée Pina (Anna Magnani). On their wedding day, Francesco is captured by the Nazis, and Pina runs out towards the truck that carries him off, and is shot dead. Priest Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) helps Manfredi, and they are both seized by the Nazis and killed. A group of young boys who are part of the Resistance watch Don Pietro’s execution and walk back towards the city centre. Romanticismo (Clemente Fracassi, Italy, 1950) Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1952) Sciuscià/Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946) Senso (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1954) Synopsis In the final months of the Austrian occupation of Venice, Austrian soldier Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) insults Italian patriot Roberto Ussoni (Massimo Girotti). His cousin Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) implores Franz not to fight a duel with him. They begin an affair, but Franz, a notorious seducer, one day disappears. Livia and her family move to the countryside as the nationalist movement gains pace. Franz comes secretly to visit her, they re-start their affair, and she steals money from the patriots to bribe a doctor to exempt Franz from duty. This done, she finds Franz with a prostitute. She denounces him to the Austrian military authorities and he is shot by firing squad. Sensualità (Clemente Fracassi, Italy, 1952) Senza pietà/Without Pity (Alberto Lattuada, Italy, 1948) Synopsis In the immediate aftermath of the War, Angela (Carla Del Poggio) stows away to Livorno, where she fails to find her brother. She lives instead with prostitute Marcella (Giulietta Masina), and starts a relationship with a black American GI, Jerry (John Kitzmiller). Marcella emigrates, but Angela gets shot by the gangsters with whom Jerry has been forced to associate. He drives her down a cliff-top road, but loses control of the jeep, which crashes down to the sea. Their arms intertwine as the couple die. La sepolta viva (Guido Brignone, Italy, 1949) La signora delle camelie (Raymond Bernard, Italy/France, 1953)

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La signora senza camelie/The Lady Without Camelias (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/ France, 1953) Il sole sorge ancora (Aldo Vergano, Italy,1946) Solo per te/Only for Thee (Carmine Gallone, Germany/Italy, 1938) Synopsis Opera tenor Vanni (Beniamino Gigli) lives with his wife (Maria Cebotari), also a singer, and her son from a previous relationship. A performance of the opera Andrea Chénier brings the father of her child, baritone Cesare Doret (Michael Bohnen), back into her life. He tries to seduce her and she turns him down, but Doret’s wife Riccarda (Hilde Hildebrand) gets jealous and shoots him dead backstage during a performance of Faust. Maria is blamed and imprisoned while Riccarda convalesces in hospital. On hearing a particularly impassioned performance on the radio of Vanni singing in Maria’s prison, she admits her guilt. Sperduti nel buio (Nino Martoglio, Italy, 1914) Sperduti nel buio (Camillo Mastrocinque, Italy, 1947) Stella Dallas (King Vidor, USA, 1937) La strada (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1954) ‘Storia di Caterina’ episode from L’amore in città/Love in the City (Cesare Zavattini, Italy, 1953) La strategia del ragno/The Spider’s Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1970) Stromboli, terra di Dio/Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, Italy/USA, 1950) La terra trema (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1948) Synopsis The Valastro family decide to buy their own boat and go into business on their own in protest at the high rate of exploitation they suffer at the hands of the wholesalers. A storm ruins their boat and their chances for financial independence. The community turns their back on them, and they return to work for the wholesalers. Ti ho sempre amato!/I Have Always Loved You! (Mario Costa, France/Italy, 1953) Synopsis Maria (Miriam Bru) leaves the orphanage where she has grown up and goes to work as a maid, but escapes when the young master of the house (Jacques Sernas) attempts to force himself upon her. She meets the rich countrydweller Massimo (Amedeo Nazzari) and the two fall in love, but a young woman, Clara (Tamara Lees), is jealous, and pretends to Maria to be Massimo’s wife, causing Maria to flee. She meets Massimo again one day, who has, however, been given cause to doubt her character by Clara. A child is born from their afternoon together, and, destitute, Maria takes him to an orphanage, but Massimo realises Clara’s real motives and comes to take Maria and the daughter. Tombolo, paradiso nero/Tombolo (Giorgio Ferroni, Italy, 1947) Tormento (Raffaello Matarazzo, Italy, 1950) Synopsis Carlo (Amedeo Nazzari) and Anna (Yvonne Sanson) are in love but are kept apart by her family. Carlo is falsely imprisoned for murder. Anna brings up their son alone, and the upkeep pledged to her by her dying father is denied her by his wife. She takes a series of exploitative jobs. A new piece of evidence sees Carlo immediately released, and he rushes round to reunite the family.

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Torna! (Raffaello Matarazzo, Italy, 1954) Torna a Sorrento (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Italy, 1945) Totò cerca casa (Mario Monicelli and Steno, Italy, 1950) Il tradimento (Riccardo Freda, Italy, 1951) La tratta delle bianche/The White Slave Trade (Luigi Comencini, Italy, 1952) Traviata ’53 (Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy/France, 1953) Synopsis Soon after arriving in Milan, Carlo (Armando Francioli) meets and falls in love with society woman Rita (Barbara Laage). She leaves him and he despairs, without knowing that it was a sacrifice on her part because an ex-lover (Eduardo de Filippo) threatened to ruin Carlo’s family financially if she did not return to him. Some years later he receives a letter hearing she is ill. He arrives too late to say goodbye to her, discovering that she had lived ever since alone and impoverished. Tre storie proibite (Augusto Genina, Italy, 1952) Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii/The Last Days of Pompeii (Mario Caserini and Eleuterio Rodolfi, Italy, 1913) L’ultimo incontro (Gianni Franciolini, Italy, 1951) Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) Synopsis Umberto (Carlo Battisti) is a pensioner living with his dog and his landlady (Lina Gennari) wants him to leave. He has no money, falls ill, gets better, considers suicide and decides to continue living. Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (Giuseppe De Santis, Italy/France, 1956) L’uomo di paglia (Pietro Germi, Italy, 1958) Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa/Sandra of a Thousand Delights (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1965) Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori/See Naples . . . and Die (Riccardo Freda, Italy, 1951) Synopsis Marisa (Gianna Maria Canale) is mistakenly picked up by police as a prostitute after keeping an appointment with a blackmailer. Her husband Giacomo Marini (Renato Baldini) throws her out, and she becomes a nightclub singer, unable to see her children grow up. After three years cast out from the family, she is shot by the blackmailers who have kidnapped her child, Marini realises his mistake and welcomes her back into the home. Verginità (Leonardo de Mitri, Italy, 1951) La via delle cinque lune (Luigi Chiarini, Italy, 1942) Viaggio in Italia/Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, Italy/France, 1954) La vita ricomincia/Life Begins Anew (Mario Mattoli, Italy, 1945) Synopsis Paolo (Fosco Giachetti) returns from being a POW. He finds readjustment to post-war life difficult. His wife Patrizia (Alida Valli) is arrested for murder. In jail, she confesses that she was forced to prostitute herself to pay for their son’s medical bills during the war. Paolo accepts responsibility, because he left them alone during the war. Patrizia

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is released from prison, and during dinner with their widowed neighbour the Professor (Peppino de Filippo), they resolve that life will begin anew. Vortice (Raffaello Matarazzo, Italy, 1953) Synopsis The father of Elena (Silvana Pampanini) tries to gas himself after losing a fortune; Luigi (Gianni Santuccio) agrees to lend them money if she marries him, which she does, abandoning her true love Guido (Massimo Girotti). They have a daughter but do not live in happiness. One day Luigi has a car crash with his mistress Clara (Irene Papas); he is paralysed, and she is disfigured. The doctor who treats them is Guido. Clara blackmails Luigi for the money for cosmetic surgery, and also slips him sleeping pills, accidentally causing him to overdose and die. The daughter overheard the couple arguing before Luigi’s death but assumed the voice was that of Elena, who is subsequently imprisoned on her testimony and the daughter is taken into care. On an access visit Elena steals her daughter, escapes, and is intercepted by Guido at the point at which she was about to throw herself and her daughter over a staircase. Vulcano/Volcano (William Dieterle, Italy, 1950) Wanda la peccatrice/Wanda the Sinner (Duilio Coletti, Italy/France, 1952) Synopsis Stefano (Frank Villard) discovers his wife is having an affair; she shoots herself but he is accused, and sent to a labour camp. On his release he meets Wanda (Yvonne Sanson), who is a prostitute, and who lends him money and becomes his girlfriend. However, she chooses to leave him so as to avoid trouble for him and, especially, his now grown-up son.

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INDEX

N.b. films are listed in their original language titles absurdity, 53–4, 57–8, 94 Adorno, Theodor, 43 adventure, 13, 44, 53, 99, 154 Agnese va a morire, L’ (novel), 20 agony aunt columns, 20, 25–6 Ahmed, Sara, 35 Aïda (opera), 80, 130 Aïda (film), 130, 139, 180n Albertian perspective, 61 Alessandrini, Goffredo, 120, 148 Alicata, Mario, 104 Allied soldiers, 1, 78, 85–7 Almodóvar, Pedro, 5 Althusser, Louis, 43 Altra, L’, 151 Amiche, Le, 75n, 99 Amore in città, L’, 91 Amore romantico, L’, 151 Amori di mezzo secolo, 151 Amorosa menzogna, L’, 149 Ancient Rome, 106, 141 Andreotti, Giulio, 10, 58 Angelo bianco, L’, 12, 16, 156–8, 163, 167 Angst essen seele auf, 14 Anime incatenate, 156

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Anna, 10–12, 16–17, 28, 49, 51, 54–60, 66–7, 70, 73, 102–3 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 4, 26n, 99–102, 126, 149 Anzieu, Didier, 136 Appassionatamente (film), 6, 15, 16, 19–21, 24–5, 28, 32, 46, 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 65, 152 ‘Appassionatamente’ (song), 6 Aristarco, Guido, 80, 87 aristocracy 19, 33, 50–1, 58, 106, 140, 151, 153, 155, 172–6, 178–9 art cinema, ix, 4, 5, 76, 91–103, 110, 149–50, 184 arte povera, 153 Assunta Spina (1915), 4, 79 Assunta Spina (1948), 109–10 Augé, Pascal, 110 Augustine, 12 Austrian operetta film, 133 Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, 105, 136–7, 140 Avanti c’è posto, 104 ‘Ave Maria’, 63–4 Ave Maria (film), 130, 139 Avventura, L’, 100–1

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Bachman, Erik, 162–3 ‘Bacio, Il’ (painting), 177 Bacio di una morta, Il, 149 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 53 Baldelli, Pio, 43–4 Ballerini, Piero, 130 Ballo in maschera, Un (opera), 135, 136 Balzac, Honoré de, 184 Bambini ci guardano, I, 90, 104 Bandito, Il, 11, 106, 108–10, 114–15, 120–2 Banfield, Edward C., 161 Barbagli, Marzio, 18 Barbiere di Siviglia, Il (film), 130 Barlacchi, Cesare, 180n Baroque, 7, 11, 150 Bataille, Georges, 95 Baudelaire, Charles, 34 Bava, Mario, 11 Bazin, André, 2, 88, 91, 108, 174 Bechi, Gino, 129 bel canto, 129 Bella addormentata, La (film), 153 Bellini, Vincenzo, 117, 130, 131–2, 134, 138, 171 Bellocchio, Marco, 98 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 121–2 Bergman, Ingrid, 93–6 Bergson, Henri, 56–7 Bernard, Raymond, 130 Bertetto, Paolo, 119 Bertini, Francesca, 79 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 4, 98, 120 Bhaskar, Ira, 66, 69 Bianchi, Giorgio, 10, 109, 151 Biancoli, Oreste, 11 Bivio, Il, 122, 145 Bixio, Cesare, 147, 166 Blasetti, Alessandro, 104, 106, 157n Boito, Camillo, 176 Bolero (periodical), 156 Bolsheviks, 125n Bonnard, Mario, 104 Bottizoli, Giovanni, 63 bourgeoisie, 21–2, 33, 34, 43, 50–2, 58, 77, 82, 84, 94, 96, 102, 103, 106, 115, 120, 122, 125, 140, 149, 154, 157, 161, 179 Bovio, Libero, 156 Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico, 134, 148, 151 Brazilian carnival, 133

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Brecht, Berthold, 90 Brewster, Ben, 144 Brigante Musolino, Il, 110 Brignone, Guido, 10, 16, 38, 136, 148, 149, 152, 181n Brooks, Peter, 15, 31, 34, 40–1, 64, 69, 84, 142, 150, 180, 184 Bruckner, Anton, 171 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 72, 154 Bruno, Giordano, 61 Bruno, Giuliana, 81 Bufere, 16, 31, 38, 152 Burke, Edmund, 63 Caccia tragica, 78, 116, 118 café chantant, 148 Cahiers du Cinéma, 2, 88, 93 Cain, James M., 110 Calamai, Clara, 120 Calder Williams, Evan, 162–3 Calligraphism, 80 Calvino, Italo, 5, 148 Camerini, Mario, 105, 110, 181n Cammino della speranza, Il, 111, 113–18 Campo de’ fiori, 104 Campogalliani, Carlo, 138, 148–9 Cannella, Mario, 124–5 Cannes film festival, 77 Capuano, Luigi, 46, 152 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 150 Cardone, Lucia, 4, 40, 99, 149 Carmen (opera), 170, 171 carta rosa, 149–50, 162 Caruso, Enrico, 147 Casa Ricordi, 10, 131–3, 138, 140 Casadio, Gianfranco, 105 Caserini, Mario, 80 ‘Casta Diva’ (aria), 117, 138 Casta diva (film), 134, 138 Castellani, Renato, 104 Catene/Chains, 4, 10, 12, 16, 19, 156–80 Catharsis, 52 Catholicism see religion Cavalieri, Lina, 139 Cavalleria rusticana (film), 140 Cawelti, John G., 125 Cento anni di amore, 75n, 177 Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, 160 Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 9 Cerchio, Fernando, 122, 145 Champagne, John, 150 chanchada, 133

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Chi è senza peccato . . ., 10, 12, 16, 45 Chiari, Mario, 151 Chiarini, Luigi, 110, 142, 153 Chili, Giorgio Walter, 12, 148 Chion, Michel, 136, 144 Christian Democrats, 17, 20, 44, 66, 70, 78, 92 Cicognini, Alessandro, 85, 144 Cielo è rosso, Il, 123 Cielo sulla palude, 66 Cinecittà, 9 Cinema (journal), 80, 104 Cinema Nuovo, 80 cineopera, 6, 8, 11, 16, 105, 128–41, 147, 161, 183, 185 Cineromanzo, 149–50 Cirillo, Lidia, 1–2 Città si difende, La, 111–13, 116, 118–19, 123 Civilising Process, The, 33 Cixous, Hélène, 56 Cloche, Maurice, 151 co-production, 11, 130 Cold War, 123 Coletti, Duilio, 17, 110, 145, 153 comedy, 8, 13, 14, 44, 50, 53, 64, 74n, 76, 77, 103, 104, 105, 120, 126, 128, 148 Comencini, Luigi, 78, 110 comics, 107 Commare secca, La, 98 commedia all’italiana, 11, 13, 47 Communist Party, 2, 20, 21, 24, 44, 66, 77, 80, 92, 95, 106, 122, 123, 125, 153, 154 Comuzio, Ermanno, 129 Conformista, Il, 98, 120 Consolini, Giorgio, 166 Core ’ngrato, 10 Costa, Mario, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 130, 152, 180n Cottafavi, Vittorio, 1, 11, 12, 14, 20, 152 Cottino-Jones, Marga, 58 Counter-Reformation, 150, 160 Crialese, Emanuele, 4 Cristo proibito, Il, 120, 122 Croce, Benedetto, 79, 107 ‘Cult of Distraction’, 71 Cuori senza frontiere, 123 Dadaism, x Dalí, Salvador, 34

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Dante Alighieri, 14 d’Azeglio, Massimo, 107 de Beauvoir, Simone, 20 de Céspedes, Alba, 26 de Felice, Lionello, 75n, 177 de Filippo, Eduardo, 121 De Martino, Ernesto, 53, 71, 154–5, 160–1 de Mitri, Leonardo, 143 De Rougemont, Denis, 18 De Santis, Giuseppe, 14, 21, 78, 80–1, 85, 104, 106, 110, 113, 116, 119–20, 125, 149, 152 De Sica, Christian, 14 De Sica, Vittorio, 11, 78, 85, 90–1, 104 del Colle, Maria Ubaldo, 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 110–11 Democrazia Cristiana Italiana (DCI) see Christian Democrats Descartes, René, 31 Deserto rosso, Il, 149 Desiderio, 15 ‘Di quella pira’, 172–3 Diderot, Denis, 31, 62 Dieterle, William, 12 Discipline and Punish, 33 Disonorata senza colpa, 12, 16, 148 Domani è troppo tardi, 49 domestic melodrama, 4, 8–76, 94–6, 103, 115, 130, 156–71 Donna del giorno, La, 143 Donna della montagna, La, 104 ‘Donna è mobile, La’ (aria), 136 Donna ha ucciso, Una, 1–2 Donna libera, Una, 12, 22–5, 102–3, 152 Donna più bella del mondo, La, 137, 139 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 177, 180 Due lettere anonime, 105, 120 Due verità, Le, 12, 46 Dunham, Katherine, 16, 59 Dyer, Richard, 132, 177 Ebreo errante, L’, 148 Eclisse, L’, 100 Eco, Umberto, 107 Economic Miracle, 9, 102, 156 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 13 Elias, Norbert, 33 Elisir d’amore, L’ (film), 129, 130 Elisir d’amore, L’ (opera), 171

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Elsaesser, Thomas, 13, 14, 33, 41, 52, 53, 65, 98, 116, 124 Encyclopédie, 31 Engels, Friedrich, 18 ENIC (Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche), 9 enlightenment, 124 epic, 12, 13, 18, 79–80, 120, 124 Epoca, 26 escapism, 43, 50, 125, 140 Essai sur l’origine des langues, 31 Europa ’51, 94–6 existentialism, 24, 94, 99, 100, 102 Expressionism, 75n, 92 Fabiola, 181n Fabrizi, Aldo, 77 Famiglia Cristiana, 66 family, 1, 5, 14, 15, 16–24, 26–7, 35, 38, 39, 41, 43–7, 50, 51–2, 53, 54, 65, 66–7, 70, 85, 88–91, 97–8, 103, 104, 112, 115, 118, 121–2, 126, 155, 157–63, 166–7, 171, 174, 179, 183–5 family melodrama see domestic melodrama Fari nella nebbia, 104 Fascism, 9, 34, 44, 48, 50, 51, 71, 76, 77, 79n, 80, 92, 98, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 120–5, 129, 139, 140, 154, 157 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 14 Fatalità, 109 Fatiche di Ercole, Le, 13 Favorita, La (film), 180n Fellini, Federico, ix, 71, 80, 98–9, 106, 148, 149–50 feminism, 1, 22, 40, 58 Fenice, La (opera house), 171, 172 Ferida, Luisa, 120 Ferroni, Giorgio, 112, 148 Ferroviere, Il, 118–19 feudalism, 50–2, 81 Feuer, Jane, 137 feuilleton see letteratura d’appendice Figli di nessuno, I, 10, 12, 16, 156–67 Figlia del capitano, La, 181n Figlia del mendicante, La, 149 Filippucci, Paolo, 72 film industry, 4, 8–12, 13, 15, 20–1, 71–2, 76, 92, 104–6, 110, 129–30, 145, 156

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film noir, 104 filone system, 10–14, 16, 43, 156–7 Fineschi, Onelia, 139 Fofi, Goffredo, 102 folk, 6, 73, 115, 140, 154–5, 160–1, 164, 177 Follie per l’opera, 130 Forgacs, David, 11, 101, 106, 146 Forza del destino, La (opera), 131, 132–3 Fotoromanzo, 4, 7, 82, 84, 148–50, 156, 162, 180 Foucault, Michel, 33 Fracassi, Clemente, 10, 15, 110, 130, 180n France, 9, 11, 12, 13, 19, 33, 64, 79, 88, 92, 122, 128, 150 Francesco, giullare di Dio, 95 Franciolini, Gianni, 104, 110, 144 Francisci, Pietro, 13 Franck, César, 178 Freda, Riccardo, 12, 38, 148 French Revolution, 33, 64, 127n, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 98, 180 Fuga in Francia, 115 Fusco, Giovanni, 102 Gallone, Carmine, 10, 105, 130, 131, 134, 136, 140 gangster films, 12, 14, 122 Garibaldina, 177 Garofalo, Anna, 1–2, 5, 24 Gassman, Vittorio, 16, 59 Gattopardo, Il (film), 156n, 174, 177, 178–9 Gelosia, 15, 62–5, 70 gender, viii, 1, 5, 10, 11–12, 14, 19–24, 27, 33, 34–5, 38–40, 43, 44, 49, 51–2, 53, 56–7, 58–61, 66–9, 72–4, 87, 89, 94–5, 99–102, 103, 104, 118, 121–4, 129, 139, 142, 149, 157, 159–60, 166, 183–4 Genina, Augusto, 10, 66, 152 Gennari, Lina, 82 Genoveffa di Bramante, 181n Gentile, Emilio, 71 Gentile, Giovanni, 79, 107 Gentilomo, Giacomo, 6, 105, 134, 138, 152 Germania, anno zero, 78, 85, 110, 112, 116 Germi, Pietro, 15, 38, 78, 106, 111–20, 123, 125, 181n

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Giachetti, Fosco, 98, 120 giallo, 11 Giardina, Monsignor Salvatore, 66 Gigli, Beniamino, 134, 136, 139, 147 Gioventù perduta, 123 Girotti, Massimo, 11 Giuseppe Verdi (film), 130, 131, 133, 138, 140, 153 Gledhill, Christine, 48, 52 Gobbi, Tito, 129, 137, 139–40, 147 Goimard, Jacques, 65 Golddiggers of 1933, 133 Gonella, Guido, 17 Gora, Claudio, 123 Goretti, Maria, 66 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 107, 140–1, 154–5, 180 Grand Hôtel (periodical), 149, 156 Greece, 11, 53, 128 grotesque, 41, 103 Guazzoni, Enrico, 80 Gundle, Stephen, 11, 146 Gunning, Tom, 28 Günsberg, Maggie, 3, 45 Hamilton, Clayton, 54 Hammett, Dashiel, 110 Harding, Jennifer, 35 Harvey, David, 61 Hayez, Francesco, 177 Heilman, Robert, 14 Heine, Heinrich, 177 Hemingway, Ernest, 110 Hipkins, Danielle, 20, 35, 58, 121 Hitler, Adolf, 139 Hollywood, 9, 10n, 11, 12, 14, 18, 20, 28, 39, 55, 58, 59, 77, 93, 98, 116, 133, 137 horror, 11, 30, 31 humanism, 88, 100, 125 Hume, David, 3 icons, 6, 7, 13, 43, 58, 60–1, 63–9, 84, 95, 97–8 150, 161–2, 170, 180, 183, 185 In amore si pecca in due, 12 In nome della legge, 125, 181n India, 12, 66, 120 Infedeli, Le, 12, 16, 31, 37–8, 45, 50, 62, 65, 99 Innocenti pagano, Gli, 46, 66, 152

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Invernizio, Carolina, 148–9 Italiana in Italia, L’, 24 Jacobs, Lea, 144 James, Henry, 184 Jay Grout, Donald, 128 jazz, 50, 108, 178 Kant, Immanuel, 62 Kleinhans, Chuck, 18 Korda, Zoltan, 130 Kovács, András Bálint, 100 Kracauer, Siegfried, 71 Kristeva, Julia, 56 ‘Lacreme napulitane’, 156, 162, 164 Lacrime d’amore, 148 Ladri di biciclette, 11, 78, 85, 119, 123 Landy, Marcia, 44 Langer, Susanne, 28 Lattuada, Alberto, 10, 11, 78, 81, 106, 110, 111, 113 Lavoro, Il, 179 Leonard, Robert Z., 137 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 137 Leonviola, Antonio, 12, 46 Leopardi, Giacomo, 97, 177 LeRoy, Mervyn, 133 letteratura d’appendice, 4, 12–13, 148–50, 163–4, 180 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 137–8 liberation, 1, 63, 86–7, 92 Lietti, Roberta, 161–2 ‘Lili Marlene’, 59 literature, 2, 5, 12, 56, 64, 80, 87, 106–7, 147–50, 151–2, 176–7, 180 liturgies, 128 Lollobrigida, Gina, 129, 139 Lombardo, Goffredo, 156, 168 Lombardo, Gustavo, 156 Lombroso, Cesare, 34 Loren, Sofia, 129, 139 LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), 9 Luce nelle tenebre, 120 Lucia di Lammermoor (film), 130 Lucia di Lammermoor (opera), 152 Ludwig, 171 Lukács, Georg, 87, 179 Lulli, Folco, 11 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 127n Lunghi, Fernando, 143

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Lupa, La, 110 Lupo della Sila, Il, 110, 153 Lux Studios, 11 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 121, 123 Maddalena, 10, 12, 17, 28–30, 48–9, 60–1, 66, 67, 70, 73–4 Mafia, 81, 125 Magnani, Anna, 77, 84, 108, 109, 137 Mahler, Gustav, 171 Malaparte, Curzio, 122 Malaspina, 148 male gaze, 22, 58–61, 139 Mambo, 10, 16, 59 Mamma, 136, 139, 147, 161 Mamma Roma, 97 ‘Mamma son tanto felice’, 147, 161, 166–7 Mamula, Tijana, 88, 110 Man Ray, ix Mangano, Silvana, 11, 16, 59, 129 Mano della morta, La, 148–9 Mantegna, Andrea, 97 Marcus, Millicent, 81–2 Marechiaro, 148 Marito per Anna Zaccheo, Un, 21–2, 24, 152–3, 182 Marlow-Mann, Alex, 72 Martoglio, Nino, 79 Marx, Karl, 69, 79, 98, 180 Marxism, viii, 79, 80, 98, 124, 125, 140, 155, 179–80 Mascagni, Pietro, 130, 138 Maselli, Francesco, 98, 143 mass society, 2, 6, 10–11, 44, 71–4, 92, 104–7, 115, 128–9, 140–1, 145–51, 154, 178–9 Mastriani, Francesco, 148 Mastrocinque, Camillo, 109, 140 Matarazzo, Raffaello, ix, 3, 4, 6–7, 10–12, 16–17, 40, 105, 108, 119–20, 130, 148, 150, 152, 153–80, 185 Mattoli, Mario, 105, 109, 120 Medici, I (opera), 137 Mediterranean, 39, 96 Melodie immortali, 138 melodrama and action, 10, 53, 89, 93, 97, 108, 110, 139, 144, 145, 158, 159, 168–9, 174, 185

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and excess, 7, 15, 26, 40–3, 62–3, 70, 73, 81, 84, 167, 179, 186 and identification, 30, 38–40, 53, 56, 58–61, 91 and ideology, 13, 18, 20–1, 25, 26, 34–5, 43–5, 48–52, 71, 118, 124, 137–41, 159–62, 183 and intertextuality, 6, 128–80, 183 and Italian national character, 2, 37, 84, 121–4, 128, 139–41, 183, 185 and political radicalism, viii, 5, 21–2, 44, 82–4, 87–90, 92, 105–7, 115–20, 122, 124–6, 153, 168–80, 183–5 and time, 6, 12, 39, 53, 55–8, 61, 71, 142, 143–5, 164–7, 168–70, 185 definitions of, 3, 12–15, 16, 74n, 101–2, 128, 141 heritage of, 5–6, 13–14, 49, 79–80, 84, 128, 141–2, 145, 147–52, 176–7 Indian melodrama, 66 mélodrames, 128 Menarini, Roy, 141 Menzogna, 32, 36–7, 42, 45, 47, 49, 56, 59 Mephistopheles (opera), 134 Mercanti, Pino, 148, 149 Merritt, Russell, 14 ‘Metropolis and mental life, The’, 55 Mexico, 11, 13 MGM, 133, 180n Michel, Louise, 127n Michi, Maria, 77 Minelli, Vincente, 11 modernity, 4, 17–18, 28, 32–4, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55–8, 64, 66, 70–1, 76, 124, 146–51, 184 modernism, 5, 61, 66, 76–7, 92–103, 126, 184 Modleski, Tania, 56, 69 Moguy, Léonid, 49 Monastero di Santa Chiara, Il, 59, 63–4, 148, 151 Mondo le condanna, Il, 110 Monicelli, Mario, 11, 12, 181n Montesi, Wilma, 75n monumentalism, 41 Moretti, Franco, 56 Morreale, Enrico, 3–4, 11, 19–20, 44, 99 Morris, Penny, 20 Morte a Venezia, 171, 174–5

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Movimento per la Difesa del Cinema Italiano, 9 Mulino del Po, Il, 113–15, 118–19, 126 Mulvey, Laura, 18, 58–9 Murolo, Roberto, 156, 162 Musica proibita, 138 musical, 12, 30, 133–4, 137 Mussolini, Benito, 9, 139 Myth, 5, 7, 13, 18, 43, 64, 65, 71–2, 98, 106, 137–8, 141, 182 narrative, 6, 16–19, 27, 32, 36, 37, 41, 53–8, 69–70, 79, 88, 91, 97, 99–100, 103, 109, 124, 126, 129–38, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 158–9, 167, 185 national-popular, 154–5, 157–8, 178–9 NATO, 92 naturalism, 80, 113, 137, 143, 144 Nazis, 1, 59, 63, 77, 82, 84, 85, 95, 129, 136, 140 Nazzari, Amedeo, 11–12, 108, 120, 157 Neale, Steven, 92–3 Neapolitan cinema, 12, 16, 17, 35, 42, 51, 59, 63–4, 72, 79, 79n, 109, 140, 147, 148, 156–70 ‘Negro Zumbon, El’, 59 Nel gorgo del peccato, 11, 12, 31–5, 37, 42, 47, 55, 61, 67, 70 Nemica, La, 10, 12, 35, 41–2, 66–7, 151 neorealism, ix, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 44, 58, 76–91, 92, 103–26, 156–8, 174, 179, 184 neorealismo popolare, 5, 12–13, 103–27, 155–71, 180, 184 New Science, The, 31 Noi peccatori, 38, 42, 45, 51, 66–8, 70, 73 Noi vivi!, 120 Non c’è pace tra gli ulivi, 78 113, 115–16, 118, 122 Non ti scordar di me, 130, 139 Norma, 117, 131, 132–3 Notari, Elvira, 79–80, 81 Notti bianche, Le, 156, 171–2, 174–9 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 34, 88 ’O sole mio (film), 105, 134, 140, 147 Oliver Twist (novel), 14 opera, 2, 5, 6, 14, 89, 128–45, 148, 150, 152, 171–4, 177–8, 180, 185

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operatic, 2, 4, 6, 85, 88, 106, 128, 131–2, 137–45, 147, 167–79, 185–6 opera film see cineopera opera theatre see theatre verismo opera, 79–80, 129, 140, 183 O’Rawe, Catherine, 106, 140 Orfana del ghetto, La, 149 Ossessione, 104, 171, 181n Otello (opera), 136 Padre Baragli, 20 Paganini, Niccolò, 134 Pagliacci (film), 130, 137, 139 Pagliacci (opera), 137 Pagliero, Marcello, 15 painting, 23, 61, 69, 77, 103, 144, 147, 150, 177 Paisà, 78, 85–7, 121, 123 Palmer, Jerry, 53–4 Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, 49 Pampanini, Silvana, 11 Parca, Gabriella, 25–6 Paris Commune, 127n partisans see Resistance Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) see Communist Party Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ix, 26, 95, 97 Passatore, Il, 145 Passerini, Luisa, 27 pathos, 3, 14, 16, 28, 41, 45, 52, 84, 85, 104, 119, 125, 136, 137, 141, 152, 160, 166, 170, 177, 183, 184–5 Patriarca, Silvana, 123 Patto col diavolo, 110, 142–3 peasantry, 4, 17, 43–7, 50–3, 55, 72, 79, 80, 92, 93, 106, 110, 113, 115–16, 119, 120, 123, 139, 140, 149, 153–5, 160–1 Pentimento, 15 peplum, 13 Perdonami!, 10, 11, 12, 46, 47, 152 Persiane chiuse, 110 Pesaro conferences (1954, 1974, 1989), 104, 107–8 Petrarch, Francesco, 182 Petrassi, Goffredo, 102 piccola posta see agony aunt columns Piccolo mondo antico, 80 Piccone Stella, Simonetta, 24 Piedigrotta, 157–8, 164 Pirandello, Luigi, 97, 148 Pius XII, 44, 51, 66, 71

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poetic realism, 92, 104 policier, 30 Ponte della Ghisolfa, Il, 177 popular neorealism see neorealismo popolare pornography, 30–1 Portatrice di pane, La, 151 Portelli, Alessandro, 27 Porteuse de pain, La, 151 Powell, Helen, 56 ‘Prelude, Choral and Fugue’ (Franck), 178 Pribram, E. Deidre, 35 Prison Notebooks, The (Antonio Gramsci), 154 Proust, Marcel, 32 Psychological Warfare Branch, 9 Puccini (film), 130 Puccini, Giacomo, 130 Pugni in tasca, I, 98 Punch and Judy, 153 Puritani, I (opera), 131 Pygmalion (melodrama), 128 Quaresima, Leonardo, 125 quattro giornate, 140 Quattro passi fra le nuvole, 104 Quo vadis?, 80 Rand, Ayn, 120 realism, 5, 8, 76–81, 84–8, 92, 94, 101–2, 103–27, 129, 140, 141, 156–8, 168–71, 174, 179–80, 183, 184, 186 reconstruction, 1, 4, 5, 8–10, 17, 43–4, 48, 51–2, 53, 66, 77–8, 93, 107, 112, 115, 123–4, 184 Reich, Jacqueline, 125 religion, 2, 4, 5, 28–30, 34–5, 43–9, 51–2, 54, 58, 60–1, 63–74, 78, 81, 85, 93–8, 103, 107, 119–20, 123, 124, 128, 138–9, 140, 150, 154–5, 160–4, 166–7, 170, 174, 179, 183–6 Renaissance, 61, 77, 107, 123, 141 Renoir, Jean, 130, 153 Resistance, 5, 17, 20, 24, 77, 82–4, 87, 92, 95, 98, 105, 115, 120–5, 140, 148, 154 Resnais, Alain, 102 Respiro, 4 Ricordanze, Le, 177 Ricotta, La, 97

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Ridi pagliaccio!, 140 Riemann, Johannes, 130, 139 Rigoletto (film), 130, 181n Riso amaro, 14, 78, 82, 84, 87, 102, 107, 114–18, 122, 149 Risorgimento see Unification of Italy Rivette, Jacques, 93 Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 155–6, 168–71, 174–5, 177–9, 182–3 Rodolfi, Eleuterio, 80 Rohdie, Sam, 100, 179, 182–3 Roll, Vera, 148 Roma città aperta, 77–8, 82–7, 93, 95, 105, 108, 120, 124, 140 Roman mime, 30 Romana Film, 180n Romanticismo, 15 Rossellini, Roberto, 15, 77–8, 85–7, 93–6, 106 Rossen, Robert, 10, 16 Rota, Nino, 102, 171 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31, 33, 128 Russian formalism, 81 Rustichelli, Carlo, 11 sacred see religion Saint Bernard, 107 Sanson, Yvonne, 11–12, 98, 158, 163 Saraceno, Chiaro, 18 Savona conference (1976), 108 Sceicco bianco, Lo, 98, 149–50 sceneggiata, 4, 147–8, 149, 152–3, 156, 164–7, 180, 182 Sciuscià, 78, 82–3, 86, 90, 123 Screen, 13 Second Sex, The, 20 Senso (film), 10, 11, 12, 15, 80, 87, 106, 153–6, 171–9 Senso (novella), 176 Sensualità, 10, 12, 110 Senza pietà, 110–16, 120, 122–3 Sepolta viva, La, 148, 181n Sequi, Mario, 59, 148, 151 Serandrei, Mario, 171 Serena, Gustavo, 79 Signora delle camelie, La, 130 Signora senza camelie, La, 100 Simmel, Georg, 55 Sirk, Douglas, 11, 13, 18 Sitney, P. Adams, 82 slapstick, 41 Soldati, Mario, 80, 115

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Sole sorge ancora, Il, 82 Solo per te, 134–9 song, 6, 16, 115, 132, 133, 161, 164–7, 177 Neapolitan song, 7n, 22, 134, 147–8, 156, 162, 164–7, 183 Soviet montage, 92 Sperduti nel buio (1914), 79, 109 Sperduti nel buio (1947), 109 Spinazzola, Vittorio, 40, 150, 159 Spinoza, Baruch, viii Stajola, Enzo, 123 stardom, 11–12, 28, 34, 77, 93–6, 98, 100, 108, 120, 129, 139, 145, 157, 163 Stella Dallas, 11 Steno (Stefano Vanzina), 12, 181n Sterne, Laurence, 183 Storia di Caterina, 91, 97 Strada, La, 80, 106, 149 Strategia del ragno, La, 98, 120 Stromboli, terra di Dio, 93–4, 96, 110 Sue, Eugène, 148, 180 surrealism, 18, 98 swing, 16, 50, 118 ‘Symphony No. 7’ (Bruckner), 171, 174 ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 33 Tambling, Jeremy, 139 Targhetta, Maurizio, 180 Taviani brothers, 4 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 16, 23 Tebaldi, Renata, 139 telefoni bianchi, 50 television, 107, 146 Terra trema, La, 78, 88–90, 92, 105, 114, 120, 122, 126, 171, 174, 179, 181n Testori, Giovanni, 177 theatre, 6, 7, 30, 77, 89, 121, 125, 131, 142, 144, 146, 147–8, 171, 177 Ancient Greek theatre, 128 British theatre, 78 Broadway theatre, 133 dialect theatre, 121 French theatre, 128 opera theatre, 128, 130, 132, 133–4, 137, 145, 172, 174, 177, 186 Thompson, E. P., 56 Ti ho sempre amato!, 12, 16, 17, 24, 31, 35, 45–6, 50–1, 54–6, 58, 62, 70, 152

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‘time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, 56 Titanus, 11, 156 Togliatti, Palmiro, 92 Tombolo, paradiso nero, 112–13 Tormento, 10, 12, 16, 156, 156–67 Torna! (film), 152, 164 ‘Torna!’ (song), 164–6 Torna a Sorrento, 134, 148 Tosca, 130, 136, 137, 139 Totò cerca casa, 181n Tradimento, Il, 38, 55 tragedy, 3, 14–15, 41, 52, 64–5, 69, 119, 128, 136 Tratta delle bianche, La, 110, 112 Traviata, La, 49, 130 Traviata ’53, 12, 14, 17, 39, 40, 55, 102–3 Tre storie proibite, 152 Trovatore, Il, 171, 172–3 Ultimi giorni di Pompeii, Gli, 80 Ultimo incontro, L’, 144–5 Umberto D., 78, 82, 83, 85, 91–2, 105, 109, 126 Umeda, 27 Unheard Melodies, 133 Unification of Italy, 107, 122, 140, 155, 171–6, 178 Unità, L’, 106, 123, 155, 156 United Kingdom, 9, 12, 130 United States of America, 9, 13, 78, 84, 86, 90, 92, 98, 110, 112, 113, 151, 157, 162, 178 Uomini e lupi, 110 Uomo di paglia, L’, 38 Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, 177, 178, 181n Valenti, Osvaldo, 120 Valli, Alida, 98, 120 Vallone, Raf, 123 Vatican, 2, 20, 21, 44, 66, 92, 160–1 Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori, 12, 17, 35, 42, 51, 148 Vendetta di una pazza, La, 149 Venice Film Festival, 106 Verdi, Giuseppe, 130, 131, 132–3, 136, 138, 140, 153 Verga, Giovanni, 79, 81 Verginità, 143 verism, 79–80, 118 Via delle cinque lune, La, 142

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Viaggio in Italia, 93, 95–7 Vico, Giambattista, 31 Vidor, King, 11 Viganò, Renata, 20 Villa, Federica, 11 Visconti, Luchino, ix, 3, 6–7, 10, 12, 14, 78, 80, 85, 88–90, 98, 104, 106, 113, 130, 150, 153–6, 168–80, 185 Vita ricomincia, La, 120–2 Vitti, Monica, 101 Vittorini, Elio, 80 Viviani, Christian, 45 Vortice, 12, 16, 17, 31, 35, 46–7, 53–6, 61 Vulcano, 12, 16

White Nights, The (short story), 177 Williams, Linda, 30, 39, 40, 52 Williams, Raymond, 45, 78, 113 Williams, Simon, 73 women’s cinema, 39 working class, 21–2, 82–4, 88–91, 92, 99, 103, 106, 115–20, 126, 149, 154–5, 170–1 Wanda la peccatrice, 17, 38, 42–3, 45–6, 53–5 western, 13, 14, 30 Wolfenstein, Martha, 84–5 Wood, Mary, 44–5 World War II, 5, 8, 17, 26, 48–9, 55, 77–8, 82–7, 93–6, 104, 108–10, 120–5, 129, 134, 136, 154, 156

Wagner, Richard, 129, 139, 140, 171 Wagstaff, Christopher, 87 Walker, Michael, 144 waltz, 6, 99 Warner, Marina, 66

Zampa, Luigi, 78, 123 Zavattini, Cesare, 78, 90–2, 104 Zeglio, Primo, 181n Zola, Émile, 79, 184 Zurlini, Valerio, 4

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