From Neo-Realism to Luci Rosse: Cinema, Politics, Society, 1945–85

Abstract

There are four main reasons why the cinema merits particular attention in any attempt to analyse or reconstruct the great changes that have taken place in Italian society in the postwar years. First, over the whole of the period between the 1930s and the 1970s it occupied a central place in Italian culture; in the popular, lived culture of the nation that is. Following the decline of film-going in Britain and France in the late Forties and early Fifties Italian audiences were the largest in Europe. For a variety of reasons the cinema conserved an important social role for a wide range of social strata and age groups long after it had ceased to do so in most of the advanced industrial world. Secondly, for much of the period after 1945 film was the art form that was nearest society. The Italian cinema frequently depicted ordinary people and turned the trials and tribulations of their lives into the stuff of entertainment. The passion for social involvement was not limited to neorealism but extended to the wider cinema, where film makers demonstrated a commitment to inquiry and filmic treatments of real issues that, for consistency and variety, found no equal in any other national cinema. Thirdly, the cinema was also a decisive terrain of political and cultural conflict.