A Cinematic Nation: Representation, Regionalism, and the National Question in Postwar Italy

Abstract

This dissertation explores the inbetweenness of Italian identity since Unification in the mid-nineteenth century, with specific emphasis on regional dualism and the role that cinema has played in constructing and contesting representations of the North and South from World War II to the mid-1970s. Theorized during the immediate postunification period, the "Southern Question" has continued to define the problems associated with Italian nationalism. as the nation has struggled with the project of assimilating a "backward and agrarian" South with a "modern and progressive" North. The Italian "economic miracle" of the late 1950s and early 1960s instigated an accelerated period of modernization that transformed both the physical and cultural landscapes, albeit in vastly different ways for the country's two macroregions. The concentration of industrialization in the North consolidated the largest amount of economic prosperity in these areas, in turn fueling a massive wave of migration from the South. Through a contextual analysis of five predominant genres--neorealism, commedia all'italiana, interrogative auteur cinema, peplum, and spaghetti westerns--I illustrate the ways that cinema, as the most popular and pervasive medium during the postwar period, was at the forefront of social and political struggles over representing the "real" Italy. Underlying this inquiry is a reliance on Antonio Gramsci's concepts of language, hegemony, and revolution as applied to the widespread cultural and economic transformations instigated by the economic miracle and the uneven development between North and South, city and country. This case study of postwar Italy indicates the centrality of cinema to the construction of place identity and the power of the medium to subvert hegemonic representations of place.