1 - Early Italian Cinema Attractions

Summary

The Italian cinema of the silent era, like other national cinemas, has undergone a reconsideration in the light of additional film texts and new scholarly studies that are shedding light on the cultural milieu and conditions of production and reception of early cinema. This cinema is important not as a way station to the development of the longer feature film but as an index to the massive changes attendant on modernity that films helped to create, changes that affected the social behavior of the population and their views of the world. A study of the silent cinema offers an unprecedented opportunity for assessing the particular directions open to entrepreneurs and artists in this new medium, involving such issues as projection venues, subjects to be filmed, and its political and moral effects. It also allows an examination of the uses of narrative, both with regard to spectacle and in the context of early cinema's relationship to the other arts and especially to the popular culture of its time. Italian cinema does not suffer from being described as “primitive” in its early phases, having been successful and highly profitable in the pre-World War I years; but it does suffer, like other national cinemas, from being too rigidly assessed as a narrative medium. For instance, in relation to the initiating moments of cinema, Tom Gunning writes:

The history of early cinema, like the history of cinema generally, has been written and theorized under the hegemony of narrative films. … A few observations will indicate that the sway of early cinema was not dominated by the narrative impulse that later asserted its narrative sway over the medium.