ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

1 6 : 3 0 – 1 8 : 0 0

and its fragility in audio-visual terms, and what happens when we consider the ‘embodied interaction of interviewer and narrator’(Friedman, 2014) in oral

histories of film-going? Finally, the key ethical question for this project concerns how to enable the preservation and contextualization of these narratives

as videos via digital technology in a way that makes cinema history more accessible to the many who have made it. If ‘archival memory succeeds in sep‑

arating the source of knowledge from the knower’ (Taylor, 2003), can new developments in the digital humanities, user platforms such as Zooniverse, for

example, bridge the gap between ‘archive’and ‘repertoire’, by allowing the presence of participants to trouble the ‘supposedly stable objects in the archive’

and participate in their transmission?

PN 134

‘The Voices of Italian Cinema Audiences Past and Present: Using Archive Sources and Oral History Testimony to Explore the Reception

of Female Stars’

S. Culhane

University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

What can the historic audience teach us about the reception of female stars? In the context of Italian film studies, there is an absence of critical work that

considers stardom from an audience perspective.To date, the relationships between individual stars and their audiences have been described in very gener‑

al terms, which tend to reduce spectators to a homogenous entity. For instance, Pauline Small (2009) uses box office figures to‘suggest’that audiences were

reluctant to accept Sofia Loren in roles that did not conform to her image as the ‘simple Neapolitan girl’(p.35) while Stephen Gundle (1996) describes Anna

Magnani as an actress who was‘embraced largely by lower-class audiences’(p.316). Although these statements may reflect certain trends among post-war

audiences, in the case of the former the audience is represented by industry data, while in the case of the latter there is no proof or supporting data to

strengthen Gundle’s claim. In other words, the actual views and opinions of audiences are not represented. Drawing on a combination of archive sources and

audience testimony (questionnaires and video-interviews) this paper seeks to address this imbalance. Using the methodology of triangulation (Biltereyst

et al., 2012), this paper will explore the ways archive material can be used to ‘rediscover’ the voice of the historic audience. This discussion will focus on

the weekly magazine Hollywood (Vitigliano, 1945–1953) and more specifically, it will involve a detailed qualitative analysis of the readers’page‘Sottovoce’.

The aim here is to illustrate how the letters page of a popular film magazine can be used to identify patterns and trends in relation to the audience’s per‑

ception of the star’s physical appearance, performance style and regional/national identity. This is turn can inform our understanding of the influence that

female stars had on the formation of national and gender identity in post-war Italy.The audience discourses around these key themes will also be supported

by data and audio-visual testimony gathered as part of the Italian Cinema Audiences project.

PP 222

Becoming a Woman at the Pictures: Girls and Cinema-Going in 1950s Italy

D. Hipkins

University of Exeter, United Kingdom

It is generally agreed that in Italy of the 1950s cinema audiences were predominantly male, particularly in the South (Fanchi, 2007). However, our engage‑

ment with the memories of a particular generation, the over 65s, shows that younger women in their childhood and teens went to the cinema regularly.

In the burgeoning discipline of Girlhood Studies, there is a strong interest in the question of how girls consume, and have consumed mass media (Douglas,

1998; Kearney, 2009). To date studies on gendered media consumption of this period have tended to focus on textual evidence of women’s responses, in

particular women’s letters to magazines and women’s diaries (Cassamagnaghi, 2007; Cardone, 2009; Vitella, 2016), and less upon oral history. Understand‑

ing girlhood as a historically contingent notion (Dyhouse, 2014), this paper draws upon our analysis of over 1000 questionnaires and 160 video interviews

to reflect upon the ways in which the relationship between growing up and the cinema is gendered in our audience memories. In particular I will consider

how girls went to the cinema, particularly the collective nature of that experience, what kinds of strategies they developed to manage the potential risks

of the experience (molestation) and how they process and narrate those memories now. I will consider the role of cinema in memories of their life cycle,

for example, how frequently patterns of cinema-going were, and are still tied to key life stages, such as romance, and how their relational identities in‑

flect memories. I will show what role cinema played in their development of values and their imagined futures, from visions of new freedoms to models

of self-sacrifice. If we concentrate on girlhood, I argue, particular new stars, films and dimensions come to the fore, such as swimming star, Esther Williams

and an interest in sport, which take us outside the traditional canon associated with Italian audiences and revise our ideas about the role of cinema in Italian

life in this period.