The aim of this article is to illustrate some key points that will hopefully encourage further reflection on the cinematic representations and meanings of populism in both an Italian and international context. Firstly, we attempt a definition of populism as applied to cinema, drawing on both political science and the literature on film history. Secondly, we turn to film critics and directors, discussing the views some of them hold on populism and film in relation to the Italian cinema of recent years. Thirdly, we discuss how the star system provides a useful point of convergence for our analysis of cinema and populism, looking in particular at postwar commedia all'italiana and the role of Totò in this context. Finally, we draw some conclusions and suggest what directions future research on the issue of populism and Italian cinema could take.

Set in contemporary Palermo, Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) offers a powerful exploration of the South as a site of cultural contact, interaction and confrontation by focusing on a western-like showdown between two women whose lives are differently marked by mobility and migration. In Dante's film, the simultaneous articulation of queerness and southernness is a way to queer the traditional image of the frontier and to offer an evocative elaboration on how identities are constructed, mobilised and played off against each other in the neoliberal context.

This article explores the trajectory of the Italian comic archetype, ‘The Opportunist’, and how it illuminates, and allows us to draws connections between, numerous junctures of modern Italian history. The caricature ‘Arlecchino’, deriving from the masked ‘types’ of the commedia dell’arte of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is an historic exemplar of the Italian ‘everyman’ who simultaneously evades and exploits the established order in order to ‘get by’, ‘get ahead’ and survive. Filmmakers of la commedia all’italiana such as Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi and Lina Wertmuller, employed this caricature of the wily – yet ultimately harmless – petty crook in their work. They did so not in order to reinforce prejudices of Italians as self-serving and apathetic, but in order to examine what it meant to ‘survive’ 20 years of Fascism and the socio-political turmoil of post-war Italy. Examining how this caricature has historically evolved according to its ever-shifting social milieu illuminates not only certain defining moments of Italian history, but also how this archetype has contributed to popular understandings about Italy’s past and its people.

This article analyses three fantasy sequences in contemporary Italian cinema about political terrorism in the period known as the anni di piombo (‘years of lead’). It argues that, faced with divided memories, ideologically-charged narratives of the past, political interference and the so-called Italian anomalies, film-makers have reacted by making the absence of resolution a question in its own right. The article identifies and analyses three specific approaches, each linked to a sequence from each film.  The first sequence, ‘uno sfondo di verità’, focuses on Marco Tullio Giordana’s Romanzo di una strage, which navigates the absence of resolution, lamenting it but also exploiting it to force a particular version of events. The second sequence, ‘vado a dormire’, focuses on Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte, which uses a dream sequence to fabricate a different resolution, but simultaneously underscore reality. The third sequence, ‘mea culpa’, analyses the invented confession scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, arguing that it employs ambiguity to find closure in imagination itself, rather than in an imagined truth. Through the micro-analyses of these texts, this article seeks to highlight a broader question about cinema’s relationship with ambiguity and mystery in modern Italian history.

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy’s experience of the Second World War and the Resistance. However, this article argues that viewing this period of Italian cinema solely through the lens of neorealism has obscured the importance of the affective charge of melodrama in constituting an alternative ethics of representation in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Italy, one that worked via an appeal to the emotions. It posits that the traumas of Fascism, war, occupation, and Resistance were worked through by Italian cinema after the war in a range of genres and modes, principally melodrama.

By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier or reduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by the reduce to familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.

This essay analyses the evolution of the Holocaust film genre in Italy through the paradigm of sacrifice, understood both as a process of martyrisation and Christianisation of the Holocaust, and from the point of view of the instrumental use of the figure of the national hero. Using the examples of the opening sequence of the deicide and the metaphorical crucifixion of Matteo Blumenthal at the end of L’ebreo errante (The Wandering Jew, Goffredo Alessandrini, 1948); the sacrifice of Giulia in L’oro di Roma (The Gold of Rome, Carlo Lizzani, 1961), who follows her Jewish nature faced with the round-up of 16 October 1943 – the same fate suffered by Edith, the Parisian Jew in Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959); and the self-inflicted death of Guido, the narrative device used to justify the survival of the son in La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997), this contribution will focus on the definition of the Christianised topos of sacrifice, connected to the conception and general use of the term ‘Holocaust’. The overall thesis, running through the analysis of these four films, is that the paradigm has contributed significantly to the creation of a context of conflicting memories, influencing therefore the formation of the religious, cultural, political or national identities that have been involved historically in the public and private memory of the Holocaust.

This article seeks to reposition the popular cinematic genre commedia all'italiana within the context of the rapid expansion of the media industries which accompanied Italy's postwar economic miracle. The article looks at three distinct aspects of the relationship between commedia all'italiana and other media. First, it outlines the important role played by the media during the boom in disseminating images of consumer lifestyles, and highlights the way in which commedia all'italiana participated in this process. Second, through a discussion of media appearances by Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, the article emphasises the extent to which their commedia all'italiana star personas were constructed and circulated in a multimedia context. Finally, it examines how the genre represented other media, focusing in particular on the representation of gender in advertising scenes. Through close readings of commedia all'italiana advertising scenes, the article notes points of continuity with and difference from advertising imagery that was circulating at the time. The article argues that in order to further our understanding of commedia all'italiana and its relationship to Italian society, it is essential to understand the genre's relationship to other media production of the period, which both influenced the comedies' representations and was influenced by them in turn.