Historians outline overlooked aspect of Italian cinema: exhibition

LAWRENCE — You could fill a library with books about the auteurs of Italian postwar cinema — Fellini, Antonioni and Rossellini, among others. But where are the books on those who brought their epoch-making films to the people of Italy, enabling these now iconic directors and their stars to make their names?

Edward Bowen, University of Kansas assistant professor of Italian, and Damien Pollard, a lecturer in film at Northumbria University in England, have co-edited the first book in English on the history of film exhibition in Italy.

“Film Exhibition: The Italian Context” (Legenda, the Modern Humanities Research Association) covers a variety of screening contexts in Italy, from fascist-era cine clubs through the modern commercial cinemas of the 1950s and ’60s (including drive-ins) to the suburban multiplexes of the early 2000s and finally the recent boom in online streaming platforms. In all, the book contains 15 chapters by 18 authors.

Bowen’s chapter is the first in any language to document Italy’s leading movie exhibitor in the postwar period, Giovanni Amati. Business records that Amati’s descendants and collaborators shared with Bowen helped him pin down and organize a previously incomplete and scattered history. 

At his company’s height, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Amati owned and/or managed roughly 45 cinemas in Rome, and he programmed a dozen more for other cinema owners. This meant that he controlled approximately one-third of the Roman commercial exhibition market – Italy’s largest.

“There is an annual yearbook of Italian cinema that lists who managed what cinema, which would seem like the first place to find out what Amati’s portfolio looked like over the years,” Bowen said. “But so many of his cinemas were listed under vague company names, and in some cases he was programming cinemas that were listed under other people's names, so you would never be able to know the scope of his business without these company documents. The tricky part of studying cinema chains is that they're constantly changing.“

Bowen said that during his heyday, Amati was mentioned almost weekly in Hollywood’s “show business bible” Variety, but he was largely left out of scholarly publications on the Italian film industry.

“One reason I was so dedicated to this chapter was that I realized that he was a central figure in Italian cinema for over 30 years, and it's hard to find even a sentence or two about him in academic books,” Bowen said.

Bowen’s chapter details how Amati dominated the circulation of films through his first-, second- and third-run screens scattered throughout the capital. It covers Amati’s reaction to the advent of television and his efforts to take first-run exhibition from the city center into the suburbs.

The book makes clear how important cinema has been in Italy’s national culture.

“Per capita, Italy had the highest number of cinema seats, at something like one for every nine residents,” Bowen said.

“What I really like about the book is the interdisciplinary focus of the chapters and the range of archival materials that different contributors were able to amass Many of our authors conducted extensive interviews with industry insiders, including exhibitors, distributors, producers and advertising executives.

“For instance, a chapter by Silvia Magistrali draws extensively from interviews with numerous administrative figures of the company Cineriz that distributed and ran the 1960 promotional campaigns for ‘La Dolce Vita.’ Meanwhile, a chapter by Francesco Di Chiara and Paolo Noto investigates the distribution of films at the regional level and how some regional distributors doubled as exhibitors. This type of research truly requires a multipronged approach and persistence in tracking down many documents not currently preserved in archives.

“It requires one to study urban politics, urban development, government policies, as well as business practices in different sectors of the film industry and how these all work together.”

Bowen added, “Many authors of the different chapters felt a sense of urgency in their work, given that the generation who lived and worked during the golden age of film exhibition in Italy is passing away, and their records have not all been preserved.”