Abstract
Luigi Zampa’s 1950s analysis of the war and its aftermath was informed by a society on the cusp of radical change. Having already set aside 20 years of dictatorship and enthusiastically embraced their own kind of representative democracy, Italians set about the reconstruction with the help of American money, newly forged European ties, well-connected governments and an entrepreneurial private sector. Zampa and Brancati observed the early stages of that change and sensed its cardinal principles of consumption and wealth as a threat and, crucially, as an ideal new climate for old Italian vices: selfishness and clientelism above all. In other words, they saw socio-economic and political change as sharing a fundamental continuity with the past in an analysis that, while partial at best, was coherent with the moralist nature of their work, uninterested in economics or class.
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Notes
Perhaps the most public example of dissent from the party line was the Manifesto supporting the revolution signed on 29 October 1956 by a group of 101 left-wing intellectuals; see Fertilio Dario, ‘La rivolta dei 101 Invasione dell’ Ungheria: Lucio Colletti racconta come nacque il manifesto’, Il Corriere della Sera, 22 September 2006, p. 53. On 1956 as a watershed in the history of the PCI see Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal Dopoguerra a Oggi I (Turin: Einaudi, 1989) 275–81.
These data refer to the period 1946–92, from the first Republican cabinet (De Gasperi II) to Carlo Azeglio Ciampi’s 1992 government, the last before the formal dissolution of the DC. Source: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri,‘I governi italiani dal ’43 a oggi’, http://www.governo.it/governo/governi/governi.html (Accessed 24 January 2013)
Mino Argentieri, La Censura nel Cinema Italiano (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1974) 152–7. Argentieri quotes Giorgio Nelson Page, the American Fascist veteran we have encountered in Chapter 4: ‘if Italy were to become Communist, La dolce vita would figure in the new museum of the revolution’ (p. 153).
On the bloody days of the Tambroni government see Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal Dopoguerra a Oggi II (Turin: Einaudi, 1989) 344–9.
See also Guido Crainz, Il Paese Mancato: dal Miracolo Economico agli Anni Ottanta (Roma: Donzelli, 2005) 96–9.
Lino Miccichè, Cinema Italiano: gli Anni ’60 e Oltre (Venice: Marsilio, 1995) 47.
Zinni comes to 25: Maurizio Zinni, Fascisti di Celluloide (Venice: Marsilio, 2010) 102.
For a rare thematic analysis of the revival of the historical film in this period see Pasquale Iaccio, ‘Il cinema rilegge cent’anni di storia italiana’, in Giorgio De Vincenti (ed.), Storia del Cinema Italiano X, 1960–4 (Venice: Marsilio, 2001) 191–206. For useful commentaries on a vast number of individual films, including many not mentioned here, see Zinni, Fascisti (2010) 99–161.
Stephen Gundle, ‘The “Civic Religion” of the Resistance in postwar Italy’, Modern Italy, 5:2 (2000) 126–7.
See Giacomo Lichtner, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008) 47–56, for a comprehensive analysis of this film and its reception.
Stephen Gundle, ‘Television in Italy’, in James A. Coleman and Brigitte Rollet (eds), Television in Europe (Exeter: Intellect Books, 1997) 61–76; specifically on television and the Economic Miracle see also
Stephen Gundle, ‘L’americanizzazione del quotidiano: television e consumismo nell’Italia degli anni cinquanta’, Quaderni Storici, 21:62 (1986) 561–94 and
John Foot, ‘Television and the City: The Impact of Television in Milan, 1954–1960’, Contemporary European History, 8:3 (1999) 379–94.
Zinni, Fascisti (2010) 170–2.
Lichtner, Film and the Shoah (2008) 56–8.
Thomas Cragin, ‘Making Fascism into Anti-Fascism: The Political Transformation of Tiro al Piccione’, Film and History, 38:2 (2008) 11–20. This is a rare critical treatment of Montaldo’s film, which is also briefly but insightfully discussed in Zinni, Fascisti (2010) 121–4.
According to Poppi and Pecorari, Tiro al Piccione earned 342,000,000 Lire, although Zinni cites the slightly lower figure of 317,596,398. Either number ranked the film 50th among the season’s releases. See Roberto Poppi and Mario Pecorari, Dizionario del Cinema Italiano: I Film III**, M/Z (Rome: Gremese, 2007) 302, and Zinni, Fascisti (2010) 122.
Iaccio, ‘Il cinema rilegge’, in De Vincenti, (ed.), Storia del Cinema (2001) 197.
On the transition from a Fascist masculinity to a postwar one, with particular reference to Alberto Lattuada’s Il Bandito (The Bandit, 1946), see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Unmaking the Fascist Man: Masculinity, Film and the Transition from Dictatorship’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10:3 (2005) 336–65.
Luciano Quaglietti, ‘Il pericolo di prendere lucciole per lanterne’, Cinema60, 5 (1960) 15.
Sandro Scandolara, ‘La resistenza oggi: un rapporto morale con la storia’, Cineforum, 52 (1966) 146.
Marco Bongioanni, ‘Chiose a trenta film sulla Resistenza’, Rivista del Cinematografo, 1 (1966) 28.
Cesare DeMichelis, ‘La resistenza nel cinema degli anni facili’, Cinema, 60 23–6 (1962) 87.
Vito Attolini, ‘Fascismo, resistenza e impegno storicistico’, Cinema Nuovo, 164 (1963) 266.
De Michelis, ‘La resistenza’, (1962) 91.
Luciano Quaglietti, ‘Il pericolo di prendere lucciole per lanterne’, Cinema, 60 5 (1960) 13.
De Michelis, ‘La resistenza’ (1962) 89.
De Michelis, ‘La resistenza’ (1962) 87.
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Lichtner, G. (2013). Clueless Fascists and Accidental Anti-Fascists. In: Fascism in Italian Cinema since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316622_5
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