The Visual Culture of the Italian Mezzogiorno: Cinema and Tourism Production Systems (1947–1962)

Malvina Giordana

Between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1960s, the representation of the urban, suburban, natural, and cultural landscapes of Southern Italy in Italian cinema changed significantly. My research examines the profound historical and political motivations that pushed many filmmakers, producers, state bureaucrats, and other stakeholders to revise their filmic representation. As visual culture studies suggest, films are objects at the center of dense cultural, industrial, and political dynamics through which their social value and forms of circulations are shaped, discussed, and adjusted. In a similar vein, this research aims to explore how the social meaning and the materiality of spaces and places are created through forms of representations that are clearly incorporated into the capitalist process of accumulation. The main research question is: how significant have these processes of negotiation been in shaping the national and international shared catalogue of localities and communities of Southern Italy? On the one hand, the project deals with complex entanglements between a film’s locations and the consolidating imaginary of the Italian Bel Paese (introduced through the tourist guidebooks produced for the nascent phenomenon of mass tourism). On the other, it explores how pre-censorship imposed on ‘outdoor’ cinematographic representations by the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia and other institutions affected the choice of places and the engagement with them. The proposal of comparing cinema and tourism production systems will identify a corpus of films whose consideration will enhance the study of tourism, landscape, and the tourist gaze (attention to which has skyrocketed in recent years) by mapping possible genealogical paths and reconstructing processes of negotiation.