Introduction

Summary

From its inception, the Italian cinema has never been a purely national enterprise. In its technological, commercial, and political concerns, this cinema has been attentive and responsive to international developments, and the intersecting strands of the national and international are part of the nation's cinematic form. The Italian cinema reveals itself as engaged in a social fiction but a necessary one, relying on a narrative that perpetuates itself in terms of the “people.” The national community is forged through the assumed common bonds of unitary language, the nation as a family, conceptions of gender and ethnicity that rely on an identity of “origins, culture, and interests,” and geographical (and sacrosanct) borders. However, the cinema does not reside solely in familiar narratives or in political polemic but also in the images, sounds, and motifs that animate the imaginary community.

Christopher Wagstaff describes how:

The social history of the development of the popular mass-cultural medium, and of the way it integrated itself into the general growth of other forms of popular culture throughout the 1930s and 1940s, requires attention to a multitude of manifestations that are not strictly cinematic: the way people spent their leisure time, the publishing of fan periodicals, the cult of pin-ups, the star system, the relations between cinema and theatre, radio and sport … the building and location of cinemas, forms of transport, the penetration of foreign cultural forms into Italian society (from 1916 to 1965 Italians saw mostly American films).