Abstract
As urbanization gathered pace in 1950s Italy, mass waves of internal migration took a growing number of citizens away from rural life towards the cities. Cinema-going of this period has typically been analysed in the context of its burgeoning urban centres, although in 1951 over 40% of the working population in Italy was still agricultural. In this chapter, we are using data drawn from over 1000 questionnaires gathered across Italy to consider how cinema-going might have functioned differently in rural and urban areas. The line between the definition of rural and urban was blurred by the advent of cinema itself, since it presented the ideal pretext for a journey into the nearest town or city, thereby offering an insight into other possible worlds in more ways than one. Rural respondents are accordingly often self-conscious about their ‘rural’ status, particularly in the geographically outlying areas of Italy. These respondents emphasize the importance of cinema as an educational source, both constructing a sense of national identity and revealing possible alternative worlds. We suggest that distinctive models of spectatorship emerged in this context, particularly in relation to stars, to whom rural audiences generally attribute less importance, as models towards which they aspire, rather than with whom they can identify.
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Notes
- 1.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (AHRC), 2013–2016, it was led by Daniela Treveri Gennari (Oxford Brookes University), Catherine O’Rawe (University of Bristol), and Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter); the research assistant was Silvia Dibeltulo, and Sarah Culhane was the project’s PhD student.
- 2.
- 3.
The interviews were carried out by Memoro, an organization dedicated to the collection of the memories, experiences, and life stories of people born before 1950. See http://www.memoro.org.
- 4.
Translation our own.
- 5.
Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka (1995: 130) claim that one of the fundamental aspects of cultural memory is ‘its capacity to reconstruct’. They argue that ‘no memory can preserve the past. […]. Cultural memory works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation’ (emphasis in original).
- 6.
See also Richard Terdiman (1993: 109) on the Baudelairean conceptualization of the palimpsest, which is intimately linked to urban modernity.
- 7.
See also Pinna (1958: 14).
- 8.
See also ibid.
- 9.
These findings are summarized in Hipkins et al. (2016).
- 10.
SIAE (1956) Annuario statistico dello spettacolo, 1935–1956, Tab. 35—Cinema—Abitanti per cinematografi ne-gli anni 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956 e 1957 secondo le regioni (https://www.siae.it/it/chi-siamo/lo-spettacolo-cifre/losservatorio-dello-spettacolo, accessed on 16th May 2017).
- 11.
See Lynne Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright (2014).
- 12.
The elasticity of place allows individuals to maximize economic or social opportunities distant from the place to which one is attached while at the same time perpetuating engagement with that place. Elasticity is possible today because of the extensive transportation and communication networks that facilitate greater interaction among people in distant places (Barcus and Brunn 2010).
- 13.
The letter was from reader Francesco Castriotta, from the town of Manfredonia (Puglia), in Cinema Nuovo, n. 130, 1 May 1958, p. 257. Castriotta complained that lack of education and an enforced diet of westerns and comedies prevent most of his fellow spectators from understanding serious cinema and compares their ‘primitiveness’ unfavourably to city audiences, who are more capable of appreciating high-brow films.
- 14.
In Emotion and Gender: Constructing Meaning from Memory, June Crawford et al. (1992: 189) stress that memories of female transgression in youth rarely include peers.
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Hipkins, D., Treveri Gennari, D., O’Rawe, C., Dibeltulo, S., Culhane, S. (2018). Oral Memories of Cinema-Going in Rural Italy of the 1950s. In: Treveri Gennari, D., Hipkins, D., O'Rawe, C. (eds) Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66344-9_7
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