Professor Daniela Treveri Gennari

This article investigates film popularity in post-war Italy. Our focus is the box-office data and discourses around national and foreign productions in the exhibitors’ trade press Bollettino/Giornale dello spettacolo. This will be read against exhibitors’ programming strategies and films’ circulation patterns, using Rome as a case study. This analysis provides a new understanding of what types of films were available to audiences, and the choices exhibitors made when compiling cinema programmes. We explore any correlation between the way in which film nationality is discussed in Bollettino/Giornale dello spettacolo and the circulation of films across the city. We question the exclusive financial dimension of film popularity in relation to nationality within the trade journal, in light of geographical distribution and accessibility to audiences

Recent academic debates within New Cinema History have highlighted a tendency to overlook the role played by the film in historical studies of cinema and its audiences (Aveyard, 2011; Biltereyst, 2018). This article aims to address this gap by moving towards a more film-centric analysis of the cinema-going experience and investigating the place of film in cinema memory. We draw from and expand previous work on cinema memory and focus on the intersection between individual and collective engagement with and reception of films. The focus of our analysis is the oral history (over 1000 questionnaires and 160 video-interviews) collected in the Italian Cinema Audiences (2013-2016) project, which provides the first study of cinema audiences in Italy in the 1950s by analysing film-goers’ memories and contextualizing them with box-office figures and film industry data. This project puts audiences at the centre of the cinema-going experience and aims to explore the importance of film in everyday life. In this article, we investigate what is remembered about films and how films are discussed by audiences who used to go to the cinema in post-war Italy, a time in which films were one of the most widely consumed and popular cultural products. By examining Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) ‒ our respondents’ most mentioned film ‒ as a case study, we aim to formulate a new taxonomy of film memory that reflects content, modality of recollection, and function of memories of films in order to re-examine the place of film in cinema memory.

Although there is an ageing population in Europe which acts as an increasingly influential social and economic force there remains limited scholarship concerning the involvement of older people in research. This paper responds to the question of how visual participatory research engages older people through three illustrative case studies,  set in England and Italy,  all of which incorporated different visual elements within their participatory design. These cases highlight; the value of the visual as a trigger  for memories as an entry point for research discussions,  that the sharing of experiences is facilitated by both the participatory and visual elements of the approach, and that greater engagement is forthcoming once trust is established through the socialisation of older research participants. Reflections  and good practice suggestions are offered to other  qualitative researchers on the practicalities of adopting this approach.  

This article presents a new typology of cinemas standardized across seven European cities Bari (Italy), Leicester (United Kingdom), Ghent (Belgium), Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Gothenburg (Sweden), Brno (Czechoslovakia) and Magdeburg (East Germany) and developed within the European Cinema Audiences (ECA) research project, through a crossanalysis of film exhibition and programming in the 1950s. Our contribution addresses the lack of a Europe-wide classification of cinema theatres in the period under scrutiny, which is necessary for any cross-national comparative analysis of the exhibition sector. The article is divided into three sections. In the first section it presents the methodology adopted by the project, aiming to replace missing ticket prices for cinema admission with a “price proxy”. This was used to determine cinema weightings and ranking. Our methodology expands on the limited criterion of seating capacity as the basis of classifying cinemas (Browning & Sorrell, 1952), by taking into account also exhibitors’ programming strategies. The second section illustrates a systematic classification of the types of cinemas across Europe according to the proposed new common characteristics. This section explains the different
categories (elite, major, intermediate and minor cinemas) and demonstrates how they apply
across our dataset, based on geography, the characteristics of the films screened (such as nationality, year, and genre), and the programming strategies for the Top 20 longest screening films in the respective case-study cities. The final section focuses on the discussion of case-study films emerging from the programming in the seven cities. On the one hand, it gives a better understanding of the hierarchy of the film exhibition structure in 1950s Europe, and, on the other hand, it explains how cinemas belonging to a specific category performed and operated in terms of programming not only within the local market in a given city, but also cross-nationally in the seven European cities. Hopefully the ECA cinema typology can be used and adapted to other geographical and cultural contexts.

This article reflects on the challenges of comparative oral history analysis by taking the BA/Leverhulme-funded project Mapping European Cinema: a comparative project on cinema-going experiences in the 1950s (2016-2017) as a case study. The aim of MEC was to test new methodologies in order to explore and compare programming patterns and cinema-going experiences in European cities that were similar in terms of population and film exhibition structure but substantially different in terms of film culture. MEC focused on three case studies: Bari (Italy), Leicester (United Kingdom) and Ghent (Belgium). This article uses three video interviews to reflect on the theoretical framework around comparative analysis and to discuss issues of cultural specificity. Attempts at substantial comparative analysis have proved to be a challenging task because of the difficulty of analysing different film cultures cross-nationally, the complexity of standardising data, and the lack of analytical frames that could be used to explain patterns and differences revealed during the analysis. Building on the work of cultural historians studying the reciprocal traffic of culture across borders, the article adopts a theoretical framework that addresses the complexity of working with memory across national borders and linguistic barriers and emphasizes contextualization as a defining component in cross-national comparative studies. The article argues that the national specific knowledge of individual researchers enabled the authors not to overlook local perspectives while at the same time generalising across the three national cultural contexts, identifying new perspectives, and finding a common ground that could be commensurable to ensure a systematic comparative process.

Is there a way to ensure older adults can bridge the digital divide and engage with online cultural heritage? How can cinema-going memories encourage cross-generational engagement? This article proposes to address these issues by using the Italian Cinema Audiences research project as a case study, and specifically cinema-going memories as intangible cultural heritage (Ercole et al., 2016, Cinema heritage in Europe: preserving and sharing culture by engaging with film exhibition and audiences. Editorial. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 11(Summer): 1–12. Web. ISSN: 2009-4078). It aims to tackle the difficulty of engaging the older generation with the digital world, by proposing and testing new ways to resolve it. Through a mixed-methods ethnographic approach, this article investigates different strategies: the use of social media platforms; a cross-generational activity involving Historypin, a digital, user-generated archive of crowdsourced historical material; an online dedicated archive built in collaboration with the older adults involved in the project. These different solutions aim not only at increasing digital engagement among older adults, but also at furthering younger generations’ involvement in shared cultural heritage in an online context. By focusing on the memories of cinema-going in 1950s Italy, the article explores the implications of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches. It also tests Anja K. Leist’s research findings (2013, Social media use of older adults: a mini-review. Gerontology, 59(4): 378–84) on the key role of moderators (the younger generation) to help novice users (the older generation) in the ‘continuous engagement’ in digital environments. We conclude that in order to bridge the digital divide two components are necessary simultaneously: the creation of digital platforms in which the older generations are both curators and users, and the support of and interaction with younger generations.

The new cinema history approach asserts the importance of investigating the historical reception of films. In the past two decades, empirical research on film audiences has significantly developed methodologies and questions related to film and memory. Some of these studies concentrate on a period of time in which cinema was an essential leisure activity for millions, before the arrival of television, multiplexes, videos and home cinema. Combining ethnographic audience study with cultural and cinema history has allowed new insights into the historical reception of films and confirmed the vital role of oral history for a better understanding of cinema audiences. Italian Cinema Audiences (2013–2016) – an AHRC-funded inter-institutional research project – sits precisely within this new body of research and responds to the urge of using a bottom-up approach to shed new light on the cultural history of a country in a particular historical moment. This article will make use of the findings of the Italian Cinema Audiences research project to explore the role of oral history in the process of understanding cinemagoing as a cultural practice and to better comprehend how this type of research can enrich our understanding of the cinemagoing experience in particular and film cultures more broadly. It will also reflect on the process of remembering what I will define as ‘memories of pleasure’.

Catholic film exhibition developed in Italy under the tight regulations of the CCC, which issued guidelines about films acceptable by the Vatican and therefore allowed to be screened in religious venues; and the ACEC, which intended to guarantee legal and administrative support to the Catholic exhibition circuit, as well as guidance in its relationship with the commercial sector and promotion of Catholic values through distribution of appropriate films. If, in theory, the network of religious cinemas was meant to function as an educational vehicle to spread Catholic moral values across the country through entertainment, the reality was significantly different. In practice, parish venues often operated as commercial enterprises, infringing several of the strict protocols instructed by the complex agreements between ACEC and AGIS. Triangulating the Cattolici e il Cinema database with the sources from the «Bollettino dello Spettacolo» – the National Exhibitors Association trade journal – and the geovisualization of the many violations denounced across the country, this article offers a multifaceted picture on the relationship between State and Church, and several other commercial and religious institutions.

This article, based on the AHRC-funded project (2013-16), ‘In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, Genre and National Identity’, explores the power of geo-visualization for capturing the affective geographies of cinema audiences.  This mapping technique, used in our project both to interrogate the Italian exhibition sector as well as to map film distribution, is used in this article to illustrate the affective and emotional dimensions of cartographic practices related to memory. The article will firstly examine the imbrication of memory and space, before moving on to a discussion of our mapping of the memories of one of our respondents, and the questions this mapping raises about geographical and remembered space, mobility, and the relation between mapping and life-cycles.

‘Italian Cinema Audiences’ è un progetto di ricerca collaborativo che indaga la memoria collettiva legata all’esperienza dell’andare al cinema in Italia negli anni Cinquanta.1 In particolare, il progetto si concentra sull’importanza del cinema nella vita quotidiana attraverso interviste con membri del pubblico, le cui risposte vengono elaborate e contestualizzate grazie ad ulteriori ricerche di archivio. Questo articolo offre una panoramica su alcuni dei risultati della prima fase di questo processo, basato su un’indagine a livello nazionale, condotta su più di 1000 italiani ultra sessantacinquenni, che ha raccolto sia dati statistici sulle loro esperienze di frequentazione cinematografica sia testimonianze dei loro ricordi. Con l’aiuto dell’Università delle Tre Età in Italia, abbiamo distribuito un questionario a un gruppo di partecipanti scelti fra otto province e otto città. Le città di Bari, Roma, Torino, Milano, Palermo, Napoli, Cagliari e Firenze sono state selezionate tra le 12 città capozona, scelte dall’AGIS per monitorare gli incassi al botteghino nel periodo in questione. Le realtà urbane sono state affiancate da località rurali in Toscana, Lombardia, Piemonte, Lazio, Sardegna, Campania, Sicilia e Puglia. I partecipanti ai questionari comprendono in maniera più o meno equa uomini e donne, abitanti di città e provincia, e rispecchiano un panorama completo di provenienza sociale.

During the 1950s, cinema in Italy blossomed, bringing film entertainment to Italians on an unprecedented scale. This study draws upon the testimony of 325 elderly Romans about their cinemagoing experiences during this period. Their memories are set in the particular context of the film programs that they (and fellow filmgoers) selected—information that is derived from daily newspapers and supplemented with trade listings of the most popular films screened in Rome. In producing a bottom-up account of cinemagoing, the paper contributes to the general debate about film culture in Italy in the postwar era.

Cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Italy in the 1950s. In particular, Rome not only boasted the highest number of movie theatres in the country, but was also the home of cinema studios, production and distribution companies as well as film industry offices. Building upon a survey of film-goers who lived in Rome between the years 1945 and 1960, this article analyses the experience of film consumption, choice and movie taste in the capital at the time. Moreover, it investigates how the memory of events related to cinema-going was woven into people’s personal narrative. The project not only adds new dimensions to our understanding of audiences in Rome during the 1950s, but also looks into the way people construct their memories of the social experience of cinema-going and reflect upon them after over 60 years.

This paper will be an introduction to a large-scale project, for which we are currently seeking funding, which aims to address the gap in knowledge about the Italian cinema-going public of the 1940s and 1950s, for whom cinema was by far the most popular pastime. Following the model of works that combine ethnographic audience study with analysis of the films, genres and stars that produced audiences’ dominant memories, this project will re-evaluate the popular reception of film by engaging with cinema-going memories. Through the triangulation of box office figures, the popular press and audience interviews, its aim is to provide the first detailed and wide-ranging analysis of cinema audiences in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s. In this paper we will showcase our initial work on 20 trial interviews that have been conducted with Romans over the age of 70. Analysing these interviews, we will offer a new view of cinema-going in the post-war period: one that focuses on the everyday nature of the experience, from the perspectives of gender, genre and national identity