The Prettiness of Italian Cinema

Abstract

Popular melodramas such as Cinema Paradiso (1988), Il Postino (1994) and Mediterraneo (1991) in many ways defined Italian cinema for international audiences in the 1990s: Cinema Paradiso and Mediterraneo won Oscars for best foreign language film and all the films found huge worldwide audiences. Il Postino , for instance, took over $21 million in the United States (Mojo, 2011) and over $80 million worldwide (Guru, 2011). In terms of the sheer volume of people who saw and enjoyed them, these films represent some of the most popular Italian films ever. Their generic location as melodramatic romances also places them textually as popular films and yet they don’t fit entirely comfortably into the rubric of popular cinema. The very fact of their international success ensured they were read by some as art film, connected by association with the modernist Italian films of the 1960s and 1970s, screened in urban arthouses and enjoyed by those audiences interested in foreign cinema. Their emphasis on visual style consolidates this generic location. Both textually and institutionally, the films hover between the arthouse and the popular. This tension, I will argue, opens up what I call the prettiness of Italian cinema. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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