Moralizing cinema while attracting audiences: Catholic film exhibition in post-war Rome

Because commercial film production was seen as a danger to the morality of the Church, Italian Catholics developed the idea of exerting a positive influence over producers by creating an extensive network of parish cinemas where films could be rigorously selected and screened. While from a religious point of view, parish cinemas were meant to be a way of spreading an evangelical message, from a purely commercial perspective, they were businesses like every other cinema. This system provided the Vatican with a means of exerting pressure on the Italian film industry. However, when one considers the programming, the marketing processes and the oral history, a new picture emerges. While parish cinemas could only show films approved by the Censorship Commission of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Catholic Cinema Center, hereafter CCC) to be screened in religious venues, in practice, films officially only considered suitable in a public venue ( For all and For all with appropriate changes ) were often still shown in parish cinemas. This was a consequence of the limited number of ‘suitable’ films available at the time. Therefore, if the process of both moralizing cinema and attracting audiences employed by the Vatican in conjunction with the government presented profuse compromises, oral history allows us for the first time to better comprehend how the educational role of a parish cinema network was perceived by its actual audiences. Rome is used here as a case study because it is the center of the Catholic world, housing the Vatican, the Catholic curia and all the main Catholic administration offices. In responding to Martin Barker’s questions “What spaces and traditions are available to people, and how do these shape and enable participation?” and “What information, comparisons, judgments, expectations, hopes and fears precede and then accompany encounters?” 1 this chapter analyzes 325 questionnaires followed by thirty-two video interviews. 2 Looking at the parish cinemas as spaces available to Roman audiences in the post-war period and analyzing the audience’s responses concerning this particular type of space allow us to understand how they shaped and enabled participation in the capital’s audiences. Moreover, the chapter attempts to discover whether the process of moralizing audiences was successful in Rome and how it was remembered by its protagonists

Moralizing cinema: film, Catholicism, and power

Edited volume with original contributions on the Catholics' attempts to influence cinema worldwid

“L’esercente industriale non scocci”: mapping the tensions between commercial and Catholic exhibition in post-war Italy

Catholic film exhibition developed in Italy under the tight regulations of the CCC, which issued guidelines about films acceptable by the Vatican and therefore allowed to be screened in religious venues; and the ACEC, which intended to guarantee legal and administrative support to the Catholic exhibition circuit, as well as guidance in its relationship with the commercial sector and promotion of Catholic values through distribution of appropriate films. If, in theory, the network of religious cinemas was meant to function as an educational vehicle to spread Catholic moral values across the country through entertainment, the reality was significantly different. In practice, parish venues often operated as commercial enterprises, infringing several of the strict protocols instructed by the complex agreements between ACEC and AGIS. Triangulating the Cattolici e il Cinema database with the sources from the «Bollettino dello Spettacolo» – the National Exhibitors Association trade journal – and the geovisualization of the many violations denounced across the country, this article offers a multifaceted picture on the relationship between State and Church, and several other commercial and religious institutions

Understanding cinema-going experience in cultural life: the role of oral history and the formation of “memories of pleasure”

The new cinema history approach asserts the importance of investigating the historical reception of films. In the past two decades, empirical research on film audiences has significantly developed methodologies and questions related to film and memory. Some of these studies concentrate on a period of time in which cinema was an essential leisure activity for millions, before the arrival of television, multiplexes, videos and home cinema. Combining ethnographic audience study with cultural and cinema history has allowed new insights into the historical reception of films and confirmed the vital role of oral history for a better understanding of cinema audiences. Italian Cinema Audiences (2013–2016) – an AHRC-funded inter-institutional research project – sits precisely within this new body of research and responds to the urge of using a bottom-up approach to shed new light on the cultural history of a country in a particular historical moment. This article will make use of the findings of the Italian Cinema Audiences research project to explore the role of oral history in the process of understanding cinemagoing as a cultural practice and to better comprehend how this type of research can enrich our understanding of the cinemagoing experience in particular and film cultures more broadly. It will also reflect on the process of remembering what I will define as ‘memories of pleasure’

America, the Vatican and the Catholic Church sphere of activity in Italian post war cinema (1945-1960)

The thesis examines the extent the means and the degree. to which the American and the Vatican's common cultural ideology was expressed in the film industry of post-war Italy (1945-1960). Through a comparative approach of current theories developed on ideology and an analysis of official documents from the Vatican and the United States Department of State, the thesis investigates the decisive role that American production companies played in the development of the Italian film industry and their links to the Vatican. This analysis evaluates how the Italian production and distribution industries satisfied the American political and economic interests. American political and cultural ideology of the post-1945 era, is compared with the Roman Catholic ideology in order to assess how close their cultural propaganda was. This is followed by studies of the roles played by key individuals, such as Giulio Andreotti and institutions such as ANICA and A.G.I.S. involved in formulating the policies and regulations that affected the production and distribution of American and Italian films in the post-1945 era, as well as the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in this process. The case studies, which make up the remaining part of the dissertation, illustrate the relationship with the theoretical issues raised in its first part and their ramifications in the relationship between the Catholics and Italian and America cinema. The operation of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico combined with box-office returns allows for the creation of a new analytical technique to be applied, one that has not been utilized in previous studies of Neorealist films and Italian popular cinema. It makes it possible to highlight the cross-currents that existed across different cinematic genres and styles of those American and Italian post-war movies, which were under the Catholic Church's sphere of activity

"It existed indeed…..it was all over the papers": memories of film censorship in 1950s Italy

Film censorship in post-war Italy has been widely researched by scholars from the perspective of governmental and religious interventions in the attempt to control the film industry and moralise its audiences. However, cinema audiences’ experiences of this practice have been virtually neglected. The Italian Cinema Audiences project – funded by the AHRC – has investigated how cinema figures in the memories of people’s daily lives throughout the 1950s, a time in which cinema-going was the most popular national pastime, representing at its peak 70% of leisure expenditure. The project unveiled how Italian audiences chose films, what genres and stars they preferred, and how region, location, gender, and class influenced their choices. One of the key questions explored in our study is how film spectators remember censorship. This article presents the findings of the analysis of video-interviews conducted across the country focussing on audiences’ memories and perceptions of film censorship in the period under scrutiny. Our analysis will investigate not only the actual recollections, but also how these individual narratives have been shaped by ‘inherited templates that individuals can use to interpret’ those experiences (Rigney, 2015: 67). Our oral history data will be presented against State and Catholic Church’s archival documents which will allow us to highlight the points of contacts and conflicts between official discourses and audience’s personal memories