The 1930s to the 1950s in Italy witnessed large increases in film-going,
radio-listening, and the sale of music and weekly magazines. The industries that
made and sold commercial, cultural products were transformed by the new technologies
of reproduction and new approaches to marketing and
distribution.
Yet historians tend to place the "real" genesis of
mass culture in the 1960s, or to generalize about the harnessing of mass culture to
the Fascist political project, without considering what kind of mass culture existed
at the time and whether this harnessing was successful. This book draws on extensive
new evidence, including oral histories and archival material, to explore possible
continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War
II.
The 1930s to the 1950s in Italy witnessed large increases in film-going,
radio-listening, and the sale of music and weekly magazines. The industries that
made and sold commercial, cultural products were transformed by the new technologies
of reproduction and new approaches to marketing and
distribution.
Yet historians tend to place the "real" genesis of
mass culture in the 1960s, or to generalize about the harnessing of mass culture to
the Fascist political project, without considering what kind of mass culture existed
at the time and whether this harnessing was successful. This book draws on extensive
new evidence, including oral histories and archival material, to explore possible
continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War
II.
Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War
376
Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War
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Overview
The 1930s to the 1950s in Italy witnessed large increases in film-going,
radio-listening, and the sale of music and weekly magazines. The industries that
made and sold commercial, cultural products were transformed by the new technologies
of reproduction and new approaches to marketing and
distribution.
Yet historians tend to place the "real" genesis of
mass culture in the 1960s, or to generalize about the harnessing of mass culture to
the Fascist political project, without considering what kind of mass culture existed
at the time and whether this harnessing was successful. This book draws on extensive
new evidence, including oral histories and archival material, to explore possible
continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War
II.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253000408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
David Forgacs is Professor of Italian at University of London. His
research interests are in the cultural history of modern Italy and history of the
media. He is author of Rome Open City and L'industrializzazione della cultura
italiana (1800-2000) and editor with Robert Lumley of Italian Cultural Studies: An
Introduction and with Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith of Roberto Ruossellini:
Magician of the Real. He is currently Research Professor at the British School at
Rome working on a three-year project (2006-2009) on language, space, and power in
Italy since Unification.
Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and
Television Studies at Warwick University. His research interests are in modern
Italian cultural and poltiical history. He is author of Between Hollywood and
Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991 and
Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy, and editor with Simon Parker of
The New Italian Republic and, with Lucia Rinaldi, of Assassinations and Murder in
Modern Italy. He is currently directing a large-scale collaborative project on "The
Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italianns, 1918-2005."
Read an Excerpt
Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War
By David Forgacs, Stephen Gundle
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 David Forgacs and Stephen GundleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34981-1
CHAPTER 1
Patterns of Consumption
The prevailing historical view of cultural consumption in Italy from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s is that it was still to a large extent "traditional" and that the modification of most people's daily repertoires by mass culture would not begin until later. According to this view, the 1960s was the era of the "great transformation," a term used by Silvio Lanaro in 1993 as the title of part of his history of postwar Italy starting with the economic miracle years 1958–1963. We do not dispute that the period dating from the end of the 1950s was a time of particularly rapid change, but this retrospective account misrepresents the way the changes actually took place. The impression of a "great transformation" compressed into a decade or so is, we maintain, largely illusory, the result of looking at the end product and creating a kind of average out of many different individual and collective cultural repertories, which contained many contradictory processes. In reality, the changes were often slow and took several generations to work through. Above all, one needs to distinguish occasional contact with mass culture from regular exposure to it and habitual use. Much of the evidence we have seen suggests that many people had some experience of mass cultural products long before the communities they lived in were habitually and permanently exposed to them, even when they had little money and time to permit regular access to them. Among our own interviewees it was very difficult to find anyone who was not in some way in contact with, and aware of the existence of, modern mass culture in the period we were investigating, no matter how "remote" an area they lived in, how poor they were, and how much of their waking time was taken up by productive labor. Yet very often these people had little or no leisure or recreational time, or at any rate they had no consciousness that parts of their time belonged to these categories.
There are some exceptions to this rule, limit cases of people who had negligible or minimal contact with mass culture or indeed with any form of recreation. However, these are rare enough to suggest that their circumstances were unusual. Editta L., born in Turin in 1913, was a Jewish woman who worked first as a teacher in a nursery school and then later as a head teacher. She told a life story that was so full of privations and personal sufferings — her mother's chronic illness, her father's and brother's suicides, forced changes of residence, racial persecution — that she was unable, or did not allow herself, to recall any enjoyments or moments of distraction or relaxation. When we asked her about these she did then mention the occasional visit to the theater, and some excursions to the mountains, but she had not volunteered these recollections. Editta L.'s testimony shows, in this way, the important role played by subjectivity in accepting or rejecting a narrative agenda centered on recreation and leisure. In her case she resisted this agenda. This was not the life story she wanted to tell. She wanted to recount it as a sequence of hard experiences. Another, different kind of limit case was that of interviewees whose working lives did not leave time for anything except rest and sleep between work. Natalia, born in 1922, whom we interviewed in Turin, said that her husband used to work a twelve-hour shift at the Pirelli factory six days a week and an eight-hour shift (6 a.m. to 2 p.m.) on Sundays (4: 34, 41). However, for most people we interviewed there were moments of rest or respite: Sundays or Saturday evenings at least.
In order to build up a picture of the particular forms and types of cultural consumption in our period, we shall start this chapter with a brief survey of two of the regions in which we carried out our interviews, situated at different extremes of the peninsula: Calabria in the South and Piedmont in the North-West. Then, in the remainder of the chapter, we shall broaden out to other regions and examine, in turn, different types of cultural consumption: reading, cinemagoing, listening to the radio, and listening and dancing to live and recorded music.
Calabria and Piedmont
The life stories we collected in Celico show the sporadic way that mass culture and communications permeated an upland rural community in Calabria in the 1930s and 1940s. Celico, whose population at that time was about 2,500, had a social structure that one of the interviewees, Arturo M., born in 1917, described as between fifteen to twenty families of "americani" (returned emigrants) at the top, the service class (impiegati) in the middle, and the various categories of workers at the bottom. The latter were all badly off ("stavano tutti male") but there was a hierarchy within this category ranging from the artisans — cobbler, tailor, cooper — down to the poor peasants (74: 18, 28). There was no cinema in Celico until 1955; when it did open, as one resident recalled, "nobody went and it shut down, it went bust." There was, however, the Cinema Scrivano in nearby Spezzano. "They put up the first cinema in Spezzano in 1938 or 1939. But very few women went" (71/72: 16). "Since there was only one cinema you went to see what they showed. And I was lucky because when I was young I worked and scraped together some money. Not everyone could go to the cinema because they couldn't afford it" (71/72: 26). Rita L., born in 1916, used to walk the four kilometers from Celico to Spezzano to go to the cinema and she remembered how the films were publicized in 1949–1951: "They shouted through loudspeakers: 'Tomorrow at the Cinema Scrivano Domani è troppo tardi' [Tomorrow Is Too Late (Léonide Moguy, 1950)]; 'At the Cinema Scrivano I figli di nessuno Nobody's Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951], Catene [Chains (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1949)]. 'Lovely films those were" (76/77: 11). Carmela F. (born 1917) remembers going to see Core 'ngrato (The Ungrateful Heart) (Guido Brignone, 1951) at the cinema in Spezzano (71: 5) but apart from this she does not seem to have gone at all (72: 10–11). She and various other people interviewed in that area also remember the mobile cinema that came on the local saints' days and showed religious films (70: 15). Gustavo V., born in 1910, said these films were shown "on the festivals of San Michele or San Nicola who are the protectors of the village ... usually they were religious films, like the Via Crucis [Romolo Bacchini, 1919], you know, religious stuff, very moral stuff" (75: 17). He also recalled that already in the early 1930s "Celico ... was a holiday village, people came from Bologna, from Milan," even though it was "not comparable to what it is today" (75: 14).
Like Burcei in Sardinia (see the introduction), Celico was thus not completely "cut off." It was permeated by the flows of emigration and return, by movements to other regions and back (for instance, Gustavo V. went to Rome as a student; other people were conscripted or volunteered in the wars); trips within the region (Celico-Sila, Celico-Cosenza, and so on); as well as by flows of information, sounds, and images from outside (radio, cinema). There were also excursions to the surrounding area. Gustavo V. remembers that in Celico there was "a man who hired bicycles, so we went out on a bicycle" (75: 14). As for the penetration of political events, the testimonies also register the presence of Fascist associationism (see below, chapter 8), for instance, in Casole, where Rita De L. remembers going in the late 1920s with her sister dressed in the black skirt and white shirt of the Piccole Italiane while her brothers wore the yellow and pink handkerchief of the Balilla tied round their hats (76/77: 14). On the other hand, World War II seems to have impinged only in 1943–1944 with the Allied advance northward from Sicily and the retreat of the Germans across Calabria.
Maria I., born in 1932, is a good example of someone in Celico with a "traditional" cultural repertoire who was only marginally affected by modern mass culture. Until she got married in 1955, at age twenty-three, she lived in a peasant family of four, with her parents and sister. The family worked eight months a year, from March to November, on the Sila plateau, with the father's four brothers and their wives. They kept sheep and goats there and grew potatoes. They went back and forward by oxcart; her father also sometimes went on horseback to Camigliatello, about eight kilometers from where they were in Sila. Maria made ricotta, her mother also made and sold hard cheese, and every two weeks they spent one day together baking fifty kilos of bread. During the winters they were back in Celico, where they had a house with electric lighting and running water (the latter had arrived in Celico in 1922), and an inside lavatory, whereas in Sila they used petrol lamps and Maria's father made a lavatory over a running stream. During the winters in Celico work was a little less hard. Maria did sewing and embroidery work, put out by the nuns, on trousseaux (corredi). After she was married she and her husband opened a veal butcher's shop in Celico (he killed the calves, she sold the meat and handled the accounts), but this closed because business was poor. The preparation of girls for marriage continued to be central at least to her planning of the family's future. Maria described how, without telling her husband, she put aside money from the shop from her own earnings to pay for her two daughters' trousseaux when they were still little, because the women who made them were getting old and she thought they might not live till the daughters reached marriageable age.
Many of the recreations Maria I. described in her life story were traditional — the veglia (the communal evening gathering, typical of many peasant communities), with her mother reading aloud; carnival; her own wedding feast with eighty guests (her father killed three sheep to feed them all) — but there are others that show the impact of a wider world. When she was little, in about 1942, she and her friends found an abandoned, broken-down Fiat car. They would roll down a slope in it then get a friend to hitch it to a mule and pull it up again. There was also a man in Celico who had returned from America and who had a radio set: he put it on the balcony and turned it up loud so everyone could hear the war bulletins (70: 7). She heard the news of the fall of Mussolini by oral reports of broadcasts heard by others: "We were in the Sila, but we heard rumors, rumors from people who listened to the radio, these rumours arrived: Mussolini has been brought down" (70: 7).
In the decade after the war, Calabria as a whole had one of the fastest growth rates of all the Italian regions in expenditure on cinema, sport, and radio. This rate outstripped the rates of growth in income and expenditure on necessities. This was one of the findings in a survey commissioned by the Società Italiana Autori e Editori and carried out in November 1958. The growth was more rapid, the authors of the survey observed, when the source of income was temporary or short term (public works programs and special investments) and slower when the increases in income became permanent. This survey shows that the sporadic contacts with mass culture of the prewar period became more regular after the war. It also confirms the picture obtainable from other sources (for instance, the numbers of new cinemas built and private radio licenses issued) of accelerated cultural changes taking place in many rural regions in the postwar decade, particularly those areas where wage levels had been low and levels of consumption as a whole had been compressed in the Fascist period.
However, the picture of fast growth needs to be nuanced. The extent of cultural transformation in Calabria in the 1950s should not be exaggerated. In the case of cinema, although the increase in consumption in the region as a whole was certainly rapid (expenditure on cinema quadrupled between 1951 and 1958), 37 percent of comuni in Calabria still had no cinemas in 1958, so the growth was spatially very unbalanced. "Leisure" tended to be concentrated on Sundays, suggesting that the traditional pattern had not yet been much disturbed: 30 percent of those interviewed declared that that they had no "pastimes" on weekdays, but only 7 percent said they had no "pastimes" on Sundays. The results of this survey are not entirely reliable. Like the contemporary surveys carried out by the Istituto Doxa, several of the categories used in it, notably "free time" and "pastimes," were problematic, and one wonders what some of the interviewees made of them. The authors of the report were perspicacious enough to realize that not all the people they surveyed considered the stroll (passeggiata) a form of entertainment or enjoyment (divertimento). But they did not seem to follow this observation through and see that it cast doubt on the validity of the category divertimento itself and of their ranking of the passeggiata within a list of preferred divertimenti.
For all these limitations, several aspects of this survey are striking. For one thing, the generational differences detected are very marked, and they suggest that a significant gap had opened up between generations after the war in their patterns of cultural consumption. Conversation was more popular as a leisure activity among those over forty-five, classified as "elderly" (anziani) in the survey, than among the group aged sixteen through twenty-five; conversely, cinema and television were more popular with the latter than with the former. The statistical difference between generations was significant. On a Sunday, 26.4 percent of people aged sixteen through twenty-five said that they had been to the cinema and 29 percent said that they had watched television, whereas the figures for the over forty-five age group were respectively 8.6 percent and 14 percent. There are also some striking absolute figures: 55.1 percent of the total population sampled had never been to a cinema; "88.2% do not read, 72% do not read or listen to the radio, 58% do not read, listen to the radio or watch television and 57% do not read, listen to the radio, watch television or go to the cinema." The resulting picture, then, is of a region where patterns of cultural consumption were already changing before the war, and where they changed more rapidly afterward, but mainly for the young generations and not uniformly across the region.
In Piedmont the penetration of mass culture was similarly limited in the poor rural areas at the beginning of our period. The life stories recorded by Nuto Revelli between 1970 and 1973 in four of these areas — the Langhe, consisting of the Langa alta (hill) and Langa bassa (plain), and three others that he designated respectively pianura (plain), collina (hill), and montagna (mountain) — are a valuable source of information about attitudes, social behavior, and consumption in these parts of rural Piedmont during a period that stretches back in the memory of most of the interviewees (the majority of whom were born between 1885 and 1920) at least to the early 1930s. The title of Revelli's collection, Il mondo dei vinti (The World of the Defeated), containing transcribed extracts of some of the 270 testimonies he taped, embodies the sense, shared by Revelli and the peasants he interviewed, of a world hat was rapidly disappearing in the early 1970s due to processes that had been set in motion in the late 1950s — urbanization, new industrial plants, a labor exodus (particularly among the younger generation), and the transformation of rural Piedmont by motorways, tourism, and the new, rich, market-oriented agriculture.
The deruralization process was more rapid in Piedmont in the 1950s than in most other regions. Between the two censuses of 1951 and 1961 the number of people employed in agriculture in Piedmont fell by 30 percent, and the active population in the region as a whole fell from 33 to 23 percent. Yet, as the testimonies collected by Revelli suggest, up to the early 1950s in rural Piedmont, as in rural Calabria and other parts of peasant Italy, the veglia (evening gathering, often in a barn) remained central to the cultural life of the community: a focus of sociability and storytelling — oral, sung, or read aloud; a place for women's work, such as sewing and mending; and the usual place of courtship. One of Revelli's younger witnesses, Giuseppe Macario, born in 1929, recalled how in Robilante it was customary that, when a young man took an interest in a young woman, he would go to the veglia, taking two or three friends along for moral support, and then follow the girl's father as he left the stable to tell him, "If it was alright with you I should like to have a friendship with your daughter" ("Se füsi cuntent mi l'avría l'idea 'd manteni l'amicisia cun la fia"). The father would reply that they would talk about it at home and he would let the young man know. If the courtship was not approved the father would say nothing next time and it was understood that the matter would end there. Bartolomeo Spada, Revelli's oldest witness, born in 1878, remembered that boys would go in groups of eight or ten to visit a girl at a veglia and it was considered an honor to the girl if twenty or so boys regularly paid a visit. At carnival time those who had visited most frequently were given presents of eggs, walnuts, apples, or doughnuts. Spada saw the advent of television in the 1950s as having marked the end of the veglia.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of
Abbreviations
Introduction: Culture, Place, and
Nation
Part 1. Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life
1.
Patterns of Consumption
2. Practices of the Self: Intimacy, Sexuality,
Sport, Fashion
Part 2. Cultural Industries and Markets
3.
Publishing: Books, Magazines, and Comics
4. Film Production
5. The
Film Market: Distribution, Exhibition, and Stars
6. Radio and Recorded
Music
Part 3. The Politics of Mass Culture
7. State
Intervention in Cultural Activity
8. Civil Society and Organized
Leisure
Conclusion
Appendix 1. The Oral History
Project, by Marcella Filippa
Appendix 2. Table of
Interviewees
Appendix 3.
Questionnaire
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
A well-researched and well-written co-authored book which will be of maximum interest to scholars of Italian history, society, and culture alike.