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ARS06 The Italian Cinema Audiences Project: Approaches to Cinema-GoingMemories in the 1950s
D. Treveri Gennari1
1 Oxford Brookes University, School of Arts, Oxford, United Kingdom
The Italian Cinema Audiences project – funded by the AHRC - will provide the first comprehensive study of cinema audiences in Italy in the 1950s, when
Italians went to the cinema more than almost any other nation in Europe. The analysis of audiences in Italy remains neglected and very limited research is
available. The research extends the findings of a pilot project undertaken in 2011 in Rome, funded by the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. The pan‑
el will present a snapshot of the first results of the quantitative and qualitative data analysis, as well as a more detailed discussion on specific aspects
of the research: accounts of cinema-going in urban and rural areas; geo-visualization of film exhibition; distribution and oral history; memory of stars in
video-interviews; reception of female stars in press material and oral history; and gendered film consumption in post-war Italy.
PN 131 Mapping Cinema-Going Experiences in 1950s Italy
D. Treveri Gennari1
1 Oxford Brookes University, School of Arts, Oxford, United Kingdom
This paper will present the use of ‘cinematic cartography’ in the Italian Cinema Audiences project. Geo-visualization has been used in our project in several
different ways: to interrogate the vast exhibition sector developed by the 1950s in the main Italian cities; to map how distribution operated and what
films were available to audiences in different parts of the country. Key inspirations for this work have been the mappings undertaken by Karel Dibbets, in
his project on the Netherlands, ‘Cinema Context’ , and by Robert C. Allen in his work on North Carolina from 1896–1939,
‘Going to the Show’ ). Building on this preliminary activity, and bearing in mind the recent interest within audience and
reception studies and cultural geography in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and the ways in which ‘the use of GIS in historical research on film and
place [might] illuminate understandings of social and cultural memory’(Hallam and Roberts, 2014: 8), we are trying to investigate both the potential and
the limits of this kind of mapping technique for capturing both aspects of film culture and the affective geographies of respondents. In order to do so, I will
concentrate on Rome as a case study and will provide examples on how we have use geographical visualization in order to emphasize ‘meaningful places
emerged in a social context and through social relations’, places that are ‘geographically located and at the same time related to their social, economic,
cultural surroundings, and give individuals a sense of place, a“subjective territorial identity”’(Gustafson 2001: 6).
PN 132 ‘A World I Thought Was Impossible’: Memories of Cinema-Going in 1950s Italy
S. Dibeltulo1
1 Oxford Brookes University, School of Arts, Oxford, United Kingdom
We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema’s heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian
audiences that went to see their films? In its golden years, the 1940s and ’50s, Italian cinema produced the internationally influential Neorealist movement,
with figures like Visconti, De Sica and Fellini achieving world fame. At that time cinema-going was the most popular national pastime, bringing Italians
film entertainment on an unprecedented scale. However, little is known about how Italian audiences chose films, what genres and stars they preferred, and
how region, location, gender, and class influenced their choices. The Italian Cinema Audiences project explores the importance of films in everyday life in
Italy, and the social experience of cinema-going, by interviewing surviving audience members, and analyzing their responses. Based on an extensive series
of interviews conducted with a sample of Italian respondents, from eight different cities and provincial areas, this paper outlines a series of trends that are
useful in understanding both the country’s cultural dynamics and the diverse cinema-going habits of Italians in the 1950s. Contrasting and comparing
accounts of cinema-going in urban and rural areas, I will discuss some of the main recurring aspects of the relationship between cinema and its audience as
they emerge through the memories of cinema-goers of that period.
PN 133 Embodying Stardom: Memories of Stars in Audio-Visual Interviews
C. O’Rawe1
1 University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
This paper will present and discuss preliminary findings from our AHRC-funded research project Italian Cinema Audiences (2013–16). It will draw upon
160 video interviews we conducted with Italians aged 65–85. An earlier paper for our project (Treveri Gennari, 2013) suggested extrapolating three in‑
terconnected types of information from the video interviews: subject reality (findings on how events were experienced by the respondent), life reality
(findings on how ‘things’ were in the broader context), and text reality (ways in which events are narrated by the respondents) (Pavlenko, 2007). In this
paper I wish to consider briefly how interpreting both the ‘subject reality’and the ‘text reality’ is influenced specifically by the medium of video recording.
In particular, I will focus on using video interviews to do audience research, looking specifically at respondents’engagement with film stars. To what extent
do spectators identify with stars or discuss them in terms of proximity? How do we interpret body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, intonation,
linguistic choices, and how are these useful in coming to a critical analysis of audience memories of stardom in the period? How do we account for memory