Luchino Visconti's Williams: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire in Italy, 1946-1951 (original) (raw)
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Modernity and consumer culture in Visconti's early films
Modern Italy
Luchino Visconti is widely recognised as a high-culture director. However, in his films of the period 1943–63 there was a firm engagement with consumer culture and modernity in terms of themes, characters and references. This article explores this often overlooked dimension in Visconti's films by analysing a number of key sequences and moments that relate directly to consumption, consumer culture, leisure, modernity, Americanisation and youth culture. The analysis shows how these representations related to the ongoing changes in Italian postwar society and to incoming Americanisation in particular. My research is informed by the work of Gary Cross, Victoria De Grazia and Emanuela Scarpellini on consumer culture and contextualises how Visconti's referencing of consumer culture and modernity was received by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano or Italian Communist Party).
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2020
This article explores the role of Alessandro Blasetti in arguing for, and promoting, the development of the Italian film industry before and after the Second World War. Though a prominent film director for more than thirty years, Blasetti was never considered an auteur: he had no distinct authorial style and not did he specialise in any particular genre. Unlike some postwar directors, he never positioned himself in opposition to producers but, on the contrary, worked closely with many of them, winning a reputation for reliability and professionalism. A supporter of Fascism until the later 1930s, he encouraged state involvement in the industry and was the first to use the Cinecitt a studios, inaugurated in 1937, to their full potential. After the war, he mediated between opposing political forces to defend the interests of the Italian cinema as an industry and a 'collective art'. He was responsible for creating several stars, including Gino Cervi and Sophia Loren. Drawing on the Blasetti archive, the article considers the range of the director's activities, political links and his way of conceiving his role, immersed in rather than against the industry. Alessandro Blasetti is paradoxically both one of the most significant and one of the least recognised of Italian film directors. Though he started out as a critic and intellectual and was the principal promoter of some key state cinema institutions, such as the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the national film school, he would never enjoy the high status of some postwar art directors. The main reasons for this are twofold. First, he did not have a recognisable personal style in the way that many directors did. While defending the prerogatives of the director, he championed an idea of cinema as a 'collective art' which granted more recognition,
Romeo Toninelli was a key figure in the organization of Twentieth-Century Italian Art, and given the official title of Executive Secretary for the Exhibition in Italy. An Italian art dealer, editor, and collector with an early career as a textile industrialist, Toninelli was not part of the artistic and cultural establishment during the Fascist ventennio. This was an asset in the eyes of the James Thrall Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who wanted the exhibition to signal the rebirth of Italian art after the presumed break represented by the Fascist regime. Whether Toninelli agreed with this approach we do not know, but he played a major part in the tortuous transatlantic organization of the show. He acted as the intermediary between MoMA curators and Italian dealers, collectors, and artists, securing loans and paying for the shipping of the artworks. He
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In a key scene from Robert Aldrich's 1955 American science-fiction drama Kiss Me Deadly, right before the grand finale, the private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) breaks into a commercial art gallery, the fictional Mist's Gallery of Modern Art in Los Angeles. He is looking for information about a complicated case involving multiple murders and an enigmatic box, the contents of which are said to be precious and dangerous. Hammer wants to interrogate the gallery owner, William Mist, whose apartment is located above the exhibition. It's night and Hammer walks furtively through the dimly lit galleries. His gaze (hence ours) focuses on the art on display, slowly moving through a room filled with works by Marino Marini, Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, Franco Gentilini, and Massimo Campigli (Figure 12.1). Hammer is so absorbed by the act of looking that he bumps into a coffee table, and the noise alerts the art dealer, Mr Mist, who frantically swallows a mouthful of sleeping pills to avoid the detective's interrogation. The plot of Kiss Me Deadly had nothing to do with contemporary Italian art, so why did Aldrich choose an exhibit of Italian modernism for his movie? How was modern Italian art perceived by the American public at the time? Did the Italians play an active role in this story? Aldrich's movie was part of a larger phenomenon involving the emerging interest in and market for contemporary Italian art in the United States, a cultural trend that helped change the perception of Italy in the 1950s. During the first decade after World War II, known as the Reconstruction period, Italy appeared to the world as an impoverished and devastated country. But starting in the mid-1950s, as the national economy expanded and a large portion of the country transformed into a consumer society, a new façade emerged-the so-called 'new Italy'-which signalled a modern glamour and international sophistication. Contemporary art, I will argue, played a crucial role in shaping and changing Italy's international image beyond the art world. During the first half of the 1950s, the fortunes of contemporary Italian artists improved significantly in the United States. In 1949, MoMA curators Alfred H. Barr, Jr and James Thrall Soby organised the first postwar show dedicated to twentieth-century Italian art. They regarded Italian modernism as unjustly overshadowed by contemporary French art on the one hand and Italian antiquity on the other. 1 12
The following thesis focuses on the Italian director, Luchino Visconti and his first feature film, Ossessione. It evaluates his film in relation not only to the director’s biography but also to its historical and cinematic context. It deals with the manner in which Ossessione was adapted from an American roman noir, refashioning it in its own distinctive way. In addition, it analyses the film’s relation to generic modes of representation, specifically realism and melodrama, and concludes by situating the work as a precursor of the Neorealist movement of the mid-20th century.
California Italian Studies, 2017
In this article, a Modernist and a Renaissance art historian collaborate to analyze the 1949 exhibition of Renaissance domestic painting at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Based on unpublished documents at the Ragghianti foundation in Lucca, we trace the genesis, development, and installation of the show, as well as responses to it on the part of the scholarly community and in the popular press. We look at a variety of interests that drove the planners, ranging from postwar politics, historic reconstruction, museology, local economy and tourism, to changing definitions of the family and women’s roles in the home. Finally, we uncover a link between the 1949 show and the establishment of the Palazzo Davanzati museum.