UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the relationship between Italian cinema and the United States’ imagery and bodily practices in the years between the fascist regime and the Italian “economic miracle.” I analyze objects such as magazines, consumer goods and design furniture, the conditions of their consumption and production, and their presence in Italian films – from Mario Camerini’s What Scoundrels Men Are! (1932), to Alberto Lattuada’s Without Pity (1948), and Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim (1965). Across different historical contexts and cultural products I examine the arc from Italy’s infatuation with “America,” to disillusionment. These two extremes are epitomized by the emulation of Hollywood stars during the fascist ventennio, as embodied by women’s magazines, all the way to the rejection of serial design furniture on the part of students protesting against American designers at a Milan Triennale exhibition in 1968. In between these two periods, the end of World War II and the Allies’ “liberation” brought about the physical exchange and contact between Italian civilians and US soldiers and consumer goods, partly thanks to the Marshall Plan. I argue that seriality – a mode of production and consumption, as well as an aesthetics – binds together the periods under analysis, is the engine for this exchange, and acts upon the portrayal and interpellation of women (actresses, readers and spectators) according to a precise visual grammar and narrative, rooted in Hollywood’s spectacle.

Thanks to the exploration of films, magazines, and archival material, I observe the clear-cut break between fascist cinema (the so-called “telefoni bianchi”), and the “year zero” of neorealism under the lens of consumption and the presence of the United States. I then advance a hypothesis of continuity between the two periods, and between the aftermath of fascism and World War II, and the economic miracle. Framed by a new idea of continuity, the work of directors such as Camerini, Lattuada, and Petri, as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni, sustains my larger claim about Italian art and film’s historiography. These directors are joined, during the years of the economic miracle, by visual artists such as Ettore Sottsass and Giosetta Fioroni, mapping the birth of a specialized branch: industrial design. Following its heyday in the early and late 1960s, the new industry deflated on its own premises by the beginning of the next decade, carrying along, and away, the myth of America.