New Wave Italian Style

Italian Studies
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New Wave Italian Style
Stefano Baschiera
To cite this article: Stefano Baschiera (2012) New Wave Italian Style, Italian Studies, 67:3,
360-374
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italian studies, Vol. 67 No. 3, November 2012, 360–74
New Wave Italian Style

Stefano Baschiera
Queen’s University Belfast
An investigation of the long controversy around the definition of an Italian

New Wave cinema of the 1960s, this essay engages (and takes issue) with
Downloaded by [Universität Osnabrueck] at 12:43 16 March 2016
the reasons behind the critics’ reluctance to recognise its existence. After
establishing a theoretical and historical framework for a transnational under-
standing of the phenomenon of the European and World New Waves, it
offers a reasoned analysis of the multiple industrial and artistic attempts at
a generational renewal of Italian cinema that were made in Italy during the
1960s. Ultimately, the essay suggests that it would not only be appropriate,
but also highly productive to reconsider the vibrant and heterogeneous
young Italian cinema of the 1960s under the generational and transnational
New Wave label, instead of continuing to approach the decade exclusively
in the light of Neorealism.
keywords New Wave cinema, Neorealism, nouvelle vague, film industry,

transnational cinema, Bertolucci, Bellocchio.
The broad and deep impact of the Parisian nouvelle vague on world cinema is widely
recognized; soon after its emergence in the late 1950s, and then throughout the 1960s
and beyond, its influence, in terms of values and principles, of aesthetics and of
system of production, spread across the globe. The label ‘New Wave’ was subse-
quently applied, though at different times, to film movements that emerged in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Brazil, Great Britain, Australia, Mexico, Romania,
Germany, Japan, Taiwan, India, and many more countries whose national cinemas
had undergone a significant generational change, thanks to a new approach to film
production which granted new directors easier access to filmmaking. However, the
same label was rarely applied to Italian cinema.
The purpose of this essay is to investigate the attempts at renovating Italian cinema
made during the 1960s, and to engage with the reasons for the critics’ reluctance to
recognize the existence of an Italian New Wave. Ultimately, the question that I ask
is whether it would not only be appropriate, but also highly productive to reconsider
the vibrant and heterogeneous young Italian cinema of the 1960s under the genera-
tional and transnational New Wave label, instead of continuing to approach those
years exclusively in the light of neorealism. Too often, in fact, scholars placed those
© The Society for Italian Studies 2012 DOI 10.1179/0075163412Z.00000000024

NEW WAVE ITALIAN STYLE 361
experiences solely within a national context, ignoring the new feeling towards a
shared European identity, which emerged with a new generation born after World
War II. Thus, I argue that it is important to go beyond questions of stylistic features
and cinematic influences, and consider these authors’ approach to the cinema as their
medium of choice to express social issues and a generational identity.
In particular, I would argue that some distinctive features were common among
the protagonists of the European New Waves of the 1960s: they were first-time
filmmakers; they mostly came from well-off, bourgeois families; they were outright
cinephiles, possessing a strong filmic culture; they aimed at effecting radical change,
first in art, and later also in society; and they considered themselves to be Europeans.1
Various world-wide cinematographic phenomena sharing similar characteristics came
to be accorded the ‘New Wave’ label and yet critics and scholars seldom consider the
presence of exactly the same features in the work of a group of new Italian directors
who debuted in the 1960s as being sufficient to legitimize an Italian New Wave.
On the rare occasions when this does happen, it does not go further than a bland
definition of ‘New Cinema’2 which seems to be characterized more by a novel form
of engagement with the ever-present neorealism than by an international involvement
with other new European realities.
This is even more surprising if one considers the commitment of Italian producers
to following in the footsteps of the new French cinema. In the early 1960s, studios
such as Goffredo Lombardo’s Titanus (which in 1961 organized a conference
significantly entitled ‘Per un nuovo corso del cinema italiano’), De Laurentiis, Carlo
Ponti’s Champion, Cineriz, Franco Cristaldi’s Vides, and Alfredo Bini’s Arco were
particularly active in investing in, and promoting Italian debuts, thus creating a het-
erogeneous landscape of films and of directors coming to the cinema from different
backgrounds (film industry, journalism, poetry, literature).3 The aim of this operation
could not have been clearer: the nouvelle vague showed not only that it was possible
to make low-budget art films but also that an audience for such products existed. The
direct effects of the operation are equally evident:
non c’è alcun paese al mondo in cui si registri — sia in senso quantitativo che qualitativo
— un’analoga fioritura di talenti in un periodo di tempo così concentrato. Ci si trova di
fronte a un tale eccesso di intelligenza cinematografica che per gli stessi contemporanei
diventa difficile orientarsi e stabilire rapidamente nuove gerarchie di valori4
This attempted renewal of Italian cinematic production was also welcomed and
encouraged by critics. La mostra internazionale del cinema libero di Porretta, first
held in 1960, soon became an interesting point of contact between Italian critics and
1
See for instance Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 1939–1990 (Routledge: London and New
York, 1991), and Peter Cowie, Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s (London: Faber&Faber,
2004).
2
See Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance. Film in Italy From 1942 to Present (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986), and Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum Press, 2009)
3
Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano. Dal miracolo economico agli anni novanta, (Editori Riuniti,
Rome, 2001), pp. 7–9.
4
Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, p. 190
362 STEFANO BASCHIERA
contemporary cinematic experiences such as the Eastern European new waves and
the New American Cinema. From 1965 to 1967, then, the Mostra internazionale
del nuovo cinema di Pesaro organized an annual conference at which directors,
producers, and critics were invited to engage with the critical and artistic definition
of New Cinema in Italy and abroad. Even a cursory reading of the proceedings of
these meetings, and of the critical production of the time, demonstrates the optimistic
approach towards the role that the young Italian cinema could have played in the
transnational cinematic renewal of the 1960s.5
Furthermore, in June 1963 a conference on ‘cinema libero’ was held in Livorno,
where critics and journalists gathered to discuss how a cinema di qualità could
develop outside of the traditional industry, how a generational change could be
fostered and what role the state should play in supporting culturally relevant film
production and its distribution. One of the participants, the journalist Claudio Zanchi,
had the chance to put the ideas that emerged at the Livorno conference into practice
when he joined Achille Corona’s staff at the Ministero del turismo e dello spettacolo
in 1963. In fact, as Barbara Corsi points out, the Legge Corona (1965) was originally
intended to deal with many of the themes that emerged during the conference, such
as:
la riforma del sistema dei ristorni, e di quello fiscale, la sostituzione dei premi di qualità
con un meccanismo di detassazione per i film più interessanti, un diverso meccanismo
di credito che privilegi le cooperative di autori e tecnici, la ricostruzione di una rete di
sale gestite dallo Stato o dagli enti locali e la concessione di crediti a basso costo per il
rinnovamento dell’esercizio.6
Therefore, along with the production companies and the critics, the government also
felt the need for a change in the quality of the film industry.
The desire for an Italian cinematic renewal emerged at various moments during the
1960s, in spite of the domestic and international success of directors such as Fellini,
Antonioni, and Visconti, and — inspired by the international praise of the French
New Wave — led to several attempts to join the generational revolution that was
being enacted in different countries around the world.
At a certain point, however, something went wrong. Fifty years on, Italian cinema
was completely absent from the celebration of the New Waves that took place in
2009, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreak-
ing À bout de souffle (1959). In recent international monographs and conferences
celebrating New Wave cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci is the only director who is
(occasionally) mentioned among a whole generation of new Italian filmmakers quickly
labelled as a mere extension of neorealist cinema. On the other hand, Italian scholars
and critics since the mid-80s began to apply the ‘New Wave’ and ‘young’ labels to
the directors of contemporary national cinema (from Giuseppe Tornatore to Matteo
Garrone), a clear sign of how, in the land of Rossellini and Fellini, the hopes and
5
See for instance the contributions collected in Poetiche delle nouvelles vagues, ed. by Patrizia Pistagnesi (Venice:
Marsilio, 1991).
6
Barbara Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno. Storia economica del cinema italiano (Rome: Editori Riuniti,
2001), p. 133.
expectations for a successful cinematic renewal have been constantly postponed, gen-
eration after generation, decade after decade, as though in a long wait for the ‘perfect
wave’.
Refutations of an Italian nouvelle vague: Micchichè’s legacy

In the present study, I will mainly take issue with the work of the late Lino Micciché
for two interconnected reasons. Firstly, he is one of the few scholars who has engaged
directly with the idea of an Italian nouvelle vague, most significantly in his study,
Cinema italiano gli anni ’60 e oltre, and in his contribution to volume X of the Storia
del cinema italiano –1960/1964, a recent, influential attempt at rethinking critically
the history of Italian cinema.7 Secondly, Micciché’s work on the Italian nouvelle
vague has been highly influential and has dictated a long-standing, consolidated
critical position on this phenomenon. On account of the force and authority of this
unchallenged and dominant critical trope which, ultimately, neglects the existence of
an Italian New Wave, it will be necessary to engage with it in some detail, in order
to challenge it and demonstrate its untenability.
A premise is required before engaging with Micciché’s argument; in ‘L’operazione
“nouvelle vague” italiana’, he focuses on the Italian studios’ attempt to mimic the
French New Wave, but in doing so, I believe that he wrongly limits his argumentation
in two ways.8 On the one hand, he localizes the occurrence of the ‘Italian nouvelle
vague’ only in the first years of the 1960s (specifically, from 1961 to 1963), when the
involvement of certain production companies was most evident. However, the signs
of both a generational and a stylistic renovation are visible during the entire decade.
From the institution of the famous Articolo 28 of the 1965 Legge Corona (which
clearly found inspiration in the French legislation) to the release of films such as
Amore e Rabbia (Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Godard, Lizzani, Tattoli, 1968), Partner
(Bertolucci, 1968) and Il gatto selvaggio (Frezza, 1969), the 1960s offered what could
be described as a series of waves, which brought Italian cinema closer to similar
international experiences.
On the other hand, Micciché refers almost exclusively to the French Nouvelle
vague in order to define the Italian experience, thus ignoring the heterogeneous ways
in which the New Wave manifested itself within different national contexts. In order
to engage with his argument, I too will refer mainly to the French nouvelle vague.
However, it is clear that the differences between Italian and French cinema cannot be
considered as a sufficient reason to dismiss the hypothesis of an Italian new wave
(the same argument, in fact, was never applied to the British New Wave, or to the
Czechoslovak New Wave or to any other one).
Micciché lists three main reasons for the failure of the Italian politique des
auteurs, of which, in Italy, ‘mancavano quasi tutti i presupposti’.9 The first is the lack
7
Lino Micciché, Il cinema italiano: gli anni ’60 e oltre (Venice: Marsilio, 1995); ‘La nuova ondata e la politica
dei debutti: percorsi cinematografici’, in Storia del cinema italiano — Volume X — 1960/1964, ed. by G. De
Vincenti (Venice: Marsilio, Edizioni Bianco & Nero, 2003), pp. 136–59.
8
Micciché, Il cinema italiano, pp. 58–75
9
Micciché, Il cinema italiano, p. 59.
of an Italian counterpart to the French Cahiers du cinéma, considered both as a

meeting point for intellectuals interested in the medium and as an important point of
reference from a critical perspective. The second relates to the fact that French direc-
tors found inspiration in a heterogeneous landscape of directors and styles, from
Renoir and Dreyer to Hawks and Bresson, excluding in this way ‘qualsiasi mitologia
realistica’, while in Italy ‘il punto di riferimento quasi esclusivo [. . .] continuava ad
essere il neorealismo’.10 The final reason is the provincialism of Italian cinematic
culture, ‘come poche disinformata e disattenta su quanto fermentava nelle altre
cinematografie’, and which ‘si inseriva in un generale clima culturale relativamente
smorto’.11
I will pay particular attention to the second and third aspects of Micciché’s argu-
ment but, before doing so, I should stress how his reservations disappear if we just
entertain the possibility that ideas move across national boundaries — as indeed they
did in the early 1960s. In the same way in which the French critics and directors read
Zavattini’s theories and acknowledged Rosselini’s work, their Italian counterparts
were familiar with the debates developed in the Cahiers du cinéma. For instance, in
the early 1960s, film festivals such as Pesaro, directors such as Bertolucci and
Pier Paolo Pasolini and, of course, scholars like Micciché himself, as I have already
demonstrated, were particularly attentive to what was happening abroad. Moreover,
the Italian industry was one of the key protagonists of the rooted system of
European co-productions; in 1960, 40% of the films produced in Italy were indeed
co-productions.12 It is important to remember, in fact, that the first co-production
agreement between France and Italy was initiated in 1946 and officially signed in 1949
supporting a range of complex and contradictory objectives: pooling resources,
opening the domestic markets of both countries to co-productions, determining
the eligibility of co-productions for national subsidies and other benefits such as
screen quotas, and encouraging the production of prestigious films appealing to both
domestic and international audiences.13
This allowed a cross-fertilization of the two cinemas involving every aspect of their
production and distribution. Consequently, Italian studios were directly involved in
the coproduction of several films of the nouvelle vague, from Claude Chabrol’s Les
bonnes femmes (1960) to Godard’s Une Femme est une femme (1961) — something
which implied a certain degree of information about what was happening beyond
national borders.
While the provincialism and disinformation mentioned by Micciché probably
belonged to the more mainstream sectors of Italian cinema, the new generation of
directors who debuted in this climate presented instead a proper knowledge of, and
interest in, international debates, and not only from a cinematic point of view. This
certainly becomes truer as we move further into the 1960s, towards the transnational
events of 1968, as I will discuss later. First, I shall engage with the most common
10
11
12
Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno, p. 91.
13
Anne Jåckel, European Film Industries (London: BFI, 2003), pp. 7–8.
charge imputed to the young Italian cinema: its supposed existence in the shadow of
neorealism.
According to Micciché, unlike in France, neorealism was almost the only point of
reference for young directors in Italy, to the extent that the impossibility of an Italian
cinematic renewal is believed to be due to the ‘assenza di un serio bilancio neorealis-
tico’.14 Rather than debating whether or not the French Nouvelle vague was truly
exempt from any realist mythology, or whether young Italian directors only had
Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini in their cinematic horizons, I wish to point
out that neorealism became a point of reference for the new cinema precisely because
of a significant series of attempts to deal with it. Films such as Pasolini’s Accattone
(1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), the Tavianis’ Un uomo da bruciare (1962) could
be defined exactly as the making of a ‘serio bilancio neorealistico’. On the other hand,
many of the new directors — Bertolucci, Lina Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani among
others — were utterly distant from a ‘realist mythology’.

Of course, unavoidably the directors of art cinema in Italy had to deal with the
national cinematic past; however, this does not mean that they did not want to update
it, go against it, or find inspiration and references in other cinemas too. Even among
the work of directors who — like Valerio Zurlini, Francesco Maselli, Carlo Lizzani
and Florestano Vancini — were close in those years to neorealism in aesthetic and
thematic terms, it is possible to see the influence of the new cinema; for instance
Vancini’s Le stagioni del nostro amore (1965) presents a filmic language not dissimi-
lar from Prima della rivoluzione (Bertolucci, 1964) and addresses the generational
struggle between a young left-wing intellectual and his father.15
Nevertheless, in Italy the desire to erase the dominant cinema seemed unthinkable
for three simple reasons: first, because neorealism, the national cinéma de papa, was
still highly influential and indeed untouchable; second, to quote Sorlin, ‘In Italy the
old generation was able to adapt to the fashion of the day’:16 neorealist authors them-
selves had managed to find ways out of neorealism; thirdly, neorealism was consid-
ered by many to be the starting point of modern cinema, and both the neorealist
aesthetic and the new films by the Italian masters (Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti,
Rossellini) represented an important point of reference for the European New Waves.
A fourth reason could also be found — the resistance, typical of the Italian establish-
ment, to the emergence of new generations at every level: from the political field to
the arts.
Some scholars even went as far as suggesting that neorealism itself could be con-
sidered to be the Italian New Wave and, consequently, as the first wave tout court.
Once again, Micciché was at the forefront of this critical position. In order to support
his argument he listed a number of features common to both neorealism and the
nouvelle vague, among which are the dominance of an ‘ethical aesthetic’, the central
14
15
It is also noteworthy that one of the masters of Italian cinema such as Alberto Lattuada tried with I dolci
inganni (1960) to deal with the nouvelle vague influence both in terms of style (the film is closer to Rohmer’s
style) and themes.
16
Sorlin, European Cinemas, p. 145.
position of a film journal — Cinema (1940–1943) in Italy, Cahiers du cinéma (1956–

1959) in France —, and the film critics who turned filmmakers. Other evidence cited
by Micicché is deeply questionable, such as the fact that both cinematic movements
are marked by a strong generational break. It is unclear, however, which pre-war
directors were swept away by neorealism, since Micciché himself affirms that during
the 1960s, the generation of the ‘grandfathers’ was still active, with directors
who were already popular during Fascism, such as Alessandro Blasetti and Mario
Camerini.17 It is now accepted that a strong continuity, rather than a radical
break, existed between fascist and post-war cinema, both in terms of practitioners
(Rossellini, De Sica, Zavattini, and Visconti are only some of the most famous exam-
ples), and of institutions (Il centro nazionale di cinematografia, the film journals).
Furthermore, the idea of realism that made its appearance in the immediate post-war
had already emerged during the fascist period, as testified by a number of essays and
articles, although it did not find its way into film fully because of the obstacles posed
by the dictatorship’s propaganda and censorship.
Thus, the first problem that one encounters when trying to prove the existence of
an Italian New Wave is the absence of a clear-cut generational struggle in the cinema
of the 1960s, and the consequential co-existence of different generations of directors,
a phenomenon which seems to preclude the possibility of a fresh start for national
cinematography. It is noteworthy that Nowell-Smith, engaging with the new cinema
of the 1960s, not only underlines that in Italy ‘the new cinema (or cinemas) emerged,
more or less organically, from the old’, but he also analyses Fellini, Antonioni,
and Visconti alongside Pasolini, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, and Taviani without any
generational differentiation.18
In the introductory essay written for Volume XI of the already quoted Storia del
cinema italiano, Canova reconfirms the same opinion when he writes that ‘non ci
sono “parricidi” nel cinema italiano del periodo in esame. Non ci sono né nel governo
dell’apparato cinematografico complessivo, né nelle storie che tanti film mettono in
scena’.19 While, as we have seen, it seems almost impossible to disagree with the first
part of this statement, the argument that there are no patricides in the plots of the
new Italian cinema is inaccurate and misleading. Surely, it is indisputable that the
young directors worked alongside the authors of the previous generation, and they
did not revolutionize the Italian production system (as instead it happened, for
instance, to the Brazilian Cinema Novo). However, a strong uneasiness is evident
among the representatives of the Italian New Wave, which is manifested both in the
plot lines of their films — which often portray characters coping with a cumbersome
legacy — and in their involvement in a series of initiatives aimed at changing the
cinema industry such as conferences, meetings, and alternative ways of production
and distribution. I would argue that if the young directors did not kill the Italian
‘cinematic fathers’, it is not for the lack of trying.
17
Micciché, ‘La nuova ondata’, p. 137.
18
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves (New York, London: Continuum), p. 152.
19
Gianni Canova ‘La perdita della trasparenza. Cinema e società nell’Italia della seconda metà degli anni ’60’, in
Storia del cinema italiano. Volume XI, 1965/1969, ed. by Gianni Canova (Venice: Marsilio, Edizioni di Bianco
& Nero, 2002), pp. 3–29 (p. 6).
According to Canova, the absence of the theme of patricide is explained by the fact
that ‘tanto nel cinema quanto nella società italiana del quinquennio [1965–1969], la
figura del padre risulta sottoposta ai due procedimenti opposti ma complementari
dell’eclisse (il padre c’è ma lo si “oscura”) o della fantasmatizzazione (il padre non
c’è ma si fa finta che ci sia)’.20
The statement itself that an eclipsed or phantasmic father figure is incompatible
with patricide is disputable. In any case, it can be argued that an absent father is a
precise feature of the whole of post-war Italian cinema, and not an exceptional
occurrence which proves the shortcomings of the Italian New Wave.21 In fact, the
condition whereby ‘[I]l padre è già morto e tanti film lavorano a partire dalla sua
assenza, dal suo lutto. O dalla messa a fuoco di figure di figli che si trovano a
dover gestire tout court una condizione — reale o simbolica, ideologica o emotiva,
patrimoniale o affettiva — di improvvisa “orfanità”’ is literally the core of the plot
of a key film such as Rocco e i suoi fratelli.22 Canova himself lists other films by
the old generation where this theme is evident (Visconti’s La caduta degli dei, 1969;
Lattuada’s Don Giovanni in Sicilia, 1969).
Secondly, it is questionable that patricide defines New Wave cinema, both in the
sense of a generational struggle and in a narrative sense. The new cinemas across
Europe and the world did not reject earlier cinema as a whole, nor did they start from
a blank sheet, but rather, they shared an important corpus of cinematic references:
from Hitchcock and Antonioni to direct cinema and neorealism. We can say indeed
with Douchet that ‘the New Wave was creative because it imitated Rossellini,
Dreyer, Bresson, Lang, Hitchcock, and Renoir’.23 And if we go to look at the plots
of the key New Wave films we do not find patricide among the narrative themes. It
does not appear, in fact, in Godard’s À bout de souffle, in Nagisa Oshima’s Seishun
zankoku monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth, 1960) or in the Czechoslovakian Slnko v
sieti (Sunshine in a Net, Štefan Uher, 1962).
Thirdly, the same desire for generational renewal that was present at the time in
Italian art (arte povera), literature (the gruppo 63), architecture and design can also
be found in the cinema, and is perfectly summarized by the following passage from
an article by Bellocchio, written for the Cahiers du cinéma in 1966:
L’atteggiamento del giovane cinema italiano rispetto ai ‘grandi maestri’: Rossellini,
Visconti, Antonioni e Fellini è di perplessità. Forse è venuto per loro il momento di cedere
il posto. È inevitabile per tutti. Voglio dire che per interpretare l’Italia di oggi abbiamo
forse bisogno di persone più giovani, più dinamiche, maggiormente intrise di spirito
dialettico.24
20
Canova, ‘La perdita della trasparenza’, p. 6.
21
On masculine trauma after the war in Italian cinema see Jaimey Fisher, ‘On the Ruins of Masculinity: The
Figure of the Child in Italian Neorealism and the German Rubble-Film’, in Italian Neorealism and Global
Cinema, ed. by Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007),
pp. 25–53 (esp. pp. 28–30).
22
Canova, ‘La perdita della trasparenza’, pp. 6–7.
23
Jean Douchet, The French New Wave (New York: Distributed Art Producers, 1999), p. 9.
24
Marco Bellocchio, ‘La Rivoluzione al cinema’, in Marco Bellocchio: Catalogo Ragionato, ed. by Paola
Malanga (Milan: Olivares, 1988), p. 28.
Bellocchio’s statement, and the plots of the films of the new directors easily disprove
Canova’s contention about the absence of antagonism in the Italian cinema of the
1960s.25
Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely the theme of antagonism that clearly dif-
ferentiates the filmmakers of the old and the new generations. It is an antagonism
that is directed against multiple targets: the neorealist tradition (think, for instance,
of how the Taviani brothers and Pasolini took issue with the neorealist aesthetic); the
state (most obviously in the films that uncover a relationship between the state and
the mafia); the centre-left coalition; the institution of the family; the old powers of
the Church and the traditional bourgeoisie; the artificial creation, after World
War Two, of an Italian identity and of the mythology of the Resistance. While the
generation of Antonioni, Rossellini, De Sica, Risi, Visconti, and Fellini in the 1960s
was highlighting and questioning the radical changes taking place in Italian society,
the generation of the Taviani Brothers, of Bertolucci and Bellocchio was saying that
not enough changes were underway, and was actually depicting the impossibility of
changing the status quo at all.26
Identification of an Italian New Wave: young, dynamic, and

international
All these long-standing and ultimately untenable reservations about the existence of
an Italian New Wave are easily and finally dismissed if we take into account the
transnational nature of the phenomenon of the New Waves. Clear evidence of
transnationalism can be found in the new cinema of the 1960s, as is evidenced by the
spread of the new aesthetics across Europe and beyond, by the system of interna-
tional co-productions, by the practice of using foreign actors, languages and loca-
tions, by the references to a shared, global filmic and cultural horizon, by the direct
attempts to develop a new idea of cinema unconstrained by national borders, thanks
to international film festivals, meetings and film journals and by the participation of
its protagonists in the transnational events of 1968. In fact, the European New Wave,
‘a differenza di precedenti movimenti, non nasce da un evento storico-politico, non è
il riflesso di un rivolgimento sociale; semmai lo preannuncia: il ‘68’.27
25
Among the debuts of the period 1961–1963 are the following plot lines: the son of a tailor has a nervous
breakdown and ends up in a lunatic asylum, while his family falls apart (Giorno per giorno, disperatamente,
Alfredo Giannetti, 1961); a political activist reacts against the mafia (Un uomo da bruciare Taviani, Orsini,
1962); a factory worker protests against the condition of the commuters (Pelle viva, Giuseppe Fina, 1962);
children of the high bourgeoisie go to Switzerland to have an abortion (Una storia milanese, Eriprando
Visconti, 1962); a young subproletarian who has just been released from jail finds his family completely torn
apart (Luciano, una vita bruciata, Gian Vittorio Baldi, 1962); a semi-documentary enquiry into the Italian youth
depicts the devastating legacy of the economic boom on the new generations (I nuovi angeli, Ugo Gregoretti,
1962); a young unemployed man wanders pointlessly around the streets of Venice, debating about the meaning
of life and anarchy (Chi lavora è perduto, Tinto Brass, 1963).
26
Nowell-Smith rightly underlines that during the 1960s the comedies Italian-style managed to satirize many of
the idiosyncrasies of Italian society, however, albeit with an ironic acceptance: Nowell-Smith, Making Waves,
p. 160.
27
Adriano Aprà, ‘Le Nouvelles Vagues’, in Enciclopedia Del Cinema Mondiale — Vol. 1 L’Europa, ed. by Gian
Piero Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 905.
For instance, the directors of the French nouvelle vague clearly attempted to
represent a generational identity, and thus trace a personal watershed between ‘old’
and ‘new’, as Richard Ivan Jobs argues: ‘According to Lefebvre, it was not the mass
of young people, but French society itself, that created the social group of youth
through the articulation of its existence. Through study and objectification, through
the conceptualization of the young as youth, adult France brought this social group
into being’.28 Through the autobiographical dimension, the nouvelle vague’s authors
claimed their right over the representation of their generation and of the dichotomy
past/future. The degree of subjectivity in their films can be seen to directly challenge
the supposedly objective portrayals of youth which appeared in the French press at
that time. The young filmmakers created an intense relationship between private and
public spaces, in a movement from the room to the urban streets. Chauvin argues
that:
From the room to the street and to the room again, the nouvelle vague made of this
movement an aesthetic trademark under the dual impetus of a finally revealed intimacy
of the youth, a youth filmed by young people themselves and not imagined by the older
generation, and a desire to go out and explore the mysteries of the city as Rossellini had
done among the burning ruins of Berlin.29
This self-representation depicts and identifies a new transnational community that

can be defined with the slogan adopted in those years by the cigarette maker Peter
Stuyvent: ‘Jeune, dynamique, et international’.30
The directors of the Italian campaign of debuts are no exception; like their French
counterparts, ‘they were descended from well-off families and had a strong cultural
background’ and, as such, they considered themselves to be cosmopolites and shared
the same possibilities and willingness to travel and learn foreign languages.31 Further-
more, during the so-called ‘second new wave’ of the second half of the 1960s, Italian
and French filmmakers operated in the same climate of politicisation, of diffusion of
Marxist ideology (which dictated their desire to promote the revolution through the
cinema), of strong criticism of consumerist society, which found expression in their
films, and of fascination with the suggestion of a cinema deeply influenced by
Artaud’s and Brecht’s theory and practice of theatre.32
From a technical point of view, then, Sorlin might well be referring to the Italian
New Wave directors when he writes of the protagonists of the nouvelle vague:
Most of these men had little, if any, technical training and they reacted precisely against
the idea that a long preparation in the shadow of admired directors was necessary to
become film-maker. Having bitterly commented upon the ordinary cinematic products,
28
Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding The New Wave: Youth and The Rejuvenation Of France After The Second World
War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 37.
29
Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, ‘Nouvelle Vague, in Encyclopédie: la ville au cinéma, ed. by Thierry Jousse and
Thierry Paquot (Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 2005) pp. 193–99 (p. 193) my translation.
30
See Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2007), p. 20.
31
Sorlin, European Cinemas, p. 144. It is sufficient to think that during the 1960s Bertolucci used to give
interviews only in French, because it is the ‘language of cinema’.
32
Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies. The Key Concepts (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 148.
they considered their critical work a sufficient background. They were keen on writing
their scripts themselves and claimed to be ‘authors’, not simply stage directors. They
were rather arrogant but eventually they proved that they could do as well as many
well-trained cinematographers.33
The difference, therefore, is not one of substance, but rests more simply upon the
perception of the ‘new generation’ in the national media and intellectual circles.
The impression is that only around 1968 did the generational fight of the young film-
makers became visible in Italy, and the youth movement start to be taken seriously
and not belittled as an updated form of vitellonismo. A film like the bitter comedy
La voglia matta by Luciano Salce brilliantly encapsulated the different approach of
Italian society and cinema towards the emergence of a new transnational youth. The
film tells the story of a middle-aged engineer (Ugo Tognazzi) who falls in love with
a seventeen-year old girl and follows her on a summer journey with her young friends.
In this sort of Italian answer to Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu. . . créa la femme (1956) the
youngsters are portrayed negatively as spoiled, vicious, hedonistic, only interested in
music, sex, and travel and, significantly, have no respect for tradition, their elders,
and the national past. At the beginning, the protagonist of the film is represented as
a fool for his impossible infatuation; however, he eventually turns into a sort of
tragic hero, the last defender of a disappearing system of values. In fact, in the course
of the narrative, he comes to understand that what separates him from the young
people it is not only his age, but rather a different perspective on the world. How-
ever, in Salce’s merciless portrayal of the ‘Italians of the future’, something interesting
does emerge: they speak foreign languages, have travelled abroad, and listen to
foreign music. Unlike in I vitelloni (Fellini, 1953), the horizon of youth does not stop
in a faraway Rome, but easily crosses national borders.
To summarise, if the phenomenon of the New Waves was principally a genera-
tional one, in Italy the new generation also debuted behind the camera at a relatively
young age (even though this happened later with respect to the nouvelle vague, and
as a result of direct interventions of the producers). Considering the lack of research
on the topic, I believe it is more interesting to discuss what the new filmmakers
contributed instead of what they failed to contribute to European cinema, also
because, as Micciché himself has admitted, ‘il “giovane” cinema italiano non
sfigurava poi troppo accanto al “giovane” cinema francese’.34 In particular, in the
following section I will devote some attention to the changes in the system of produc-
tion that facilitated the new debuts and thus the establishment of an Italian wave,
as a basis for future research into this understudied and misapprehended period of
Italian cinema.
33
Sorlin, European Cinemas, p. 144. On this topic the debate is also still open. I would argue that the scholars
who point out that the directors who debuted at the beginning of the 1960s were not complete beginners as
they had some technical experience (mostly limited to a short career as screenwriters, or as directors of a few
short films or one documentary) ignore that only a few years before, such a level of experience was considered
absolutely insufficient to direct a film.
34
A new production framework

The first challenge that the young Italian directors had to face was access to the
production and distribution systems, normally regulated on an apprenticeship basis.35
Owing to a series of circumstances, however, in the late 1950s and early 1960s many
doors suddenly opened, mainly because Italian films established their supremacy in
the national market, significantly overtaking the dominant American products. In the
same period, the financial success of films such as La dolce vita encouraged distribu-
tors to facilitate Italian productions and to keep art cinema in consideration.36 It is
noteworthy that often the distributors involved in the young cinema were the main
Italian studios themselves, which after the first unexpected signs of crisis in 1957 were
increasingly keen on leaving the productive responsibilities to small companies, thus
allowing the growth of a vibrant and heterogeneous production environment.37 This
is even more significant if we consider that the companies usually involved in the
production of the more remunerative genre films began to look with interest at auteur
cinema and to participate in courageous investments, often through co-production
agreements. It is sufficient to inspect the filmography of a production company such
as Galatea to grasp how, during the early 1960s, alongside peplums, comedies, and
horror movies, there is a significant increase in art films such as La viaccia (Mauro
Bolognini, 1962), I nuovi angeli (Gregoretti, 1962), Salvatore Giuliano (Rosi, 1962),
and Una storia milanese (Eriprando Visconti, 1963). These were all debut films, and
the result of co-productions.38
Another noteworthy aspect of this new panorama is that critics and directors
increasingly felt the need to be directly involved in the production process in order to
express a new personal vision of Italy through the cinema. It is sufficient to think of
Bellocchio’s pivotal debut, the groundbreaking I pugni in tasca (1965), a film almost
entirely self-produced and self-distributed by the twenty-six-year-old director himself,
who founded the Doria Cinematografica production company for the occasion. Of
course, Bellocchio’s was the most representative case, but by no means an isolated
35
Baxter, writing about Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (1952), indirectly describes the necessary steps to take in order
to debut behind the camera before the campaign: ‘“Somewhere along the line”, he [Lattuada] claimed, I said
to Fellini, an extraordinarily talented young man who was my assistant-director: ‘As our wives are working
side by side and you are working so close to me, and as we’ve written two or three films together, why don’t
you sign as co-director?’ And that was how his name appeared in the credits — after mine, of course. ‘In this
way you will have your name on the screen as a director, and this will open the way to your becoming one.
You will have your “degree”’, John Baxter, Fellini (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), pp. 86–87.
36
See Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno, p. 82.
37
In fact, while in the first half of the 1950s the few majors (Titanus, Lux, Minerva, Excelsa, Rizzoli, etc.) were
focusing mostly on their own productions or on ambitious projects in collaboration with independent produc-
ers such as De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, starting from the second half of the 1950s they acted mainly as
distributors of small companies’ products. I am thinking for instance of a film like I soliti ignoti (Monicelli,
1958) co-produced by Vides Cinematografica and Lux, shot in the studios of Cinecittà and distributed by
Lux.
38
The direct involvement of the studios, aimed at promoting a significant series of debuts in the first years of the
1960s, paradoxically offered another argument to those who wished to deny the existence of the Italian New
Wave. They argued, in fact, that it was created artificially by producers (‘politica dei produttori’, as Micciché
defined it), and not by a spontaneous movement, which is certainty true; but the same condition never cast
doubts on the existence, for instance, of the Japanese New Wave.
one.39 At the start of the decade, new small companies were created to pursue the
ambitious quest for a new authorial landscape. For instance, director Vittorio Baldi
(known for his short documentaries and for the controversial feature Luciano, 1962)
founded the production company IDI in 1962. The previous year, 22 Dicembre was
established, a company which counted among its founders Ermanno Olmi, and the
late Italian film critic Tullio Kezich, who was its artistic director. In its three
years of activity, 22 Dicembre produced films such as Eriprando Visconti’s Una storia
milanese, I basilischi (the debut film of Lina Wertmüller, 1963), and Il terrorista
(Gianfranco De Bosio, 1963).
While the studios’ attempt to create an Italian nouvelle vague at the start of the
1960s was ultimately a financial failure, this did not stop the promotion of a genera-
tional change in the authorial landscape of Italian cinema. Later in the decade, the
need to look for yet more alternatives to the existing system of production took the
form of independent cinema (C.I. Cinema Indipendente), which flourished thanks to

the work of Mario Schifano and Carmelo Bene — and the creation of cooperatives.
The latter in particular is a still understudied phenomenon, one that led to signifi-
cant developments, in particular towards the end of the decade. The cooperative 21
marzo cinematografica, for instance, created in 1968 by a group of young people with
the goal of producing new cinema, succeeded in making two of the most interesting
debut films of the period: Maurizio Ponzi’s I visionari (1968) and Andrea Frezza’s Il
gatto selvaggio (1969). This also happened thanks to the State support provided
through Articolo 28 which rewarded with financial aid those films considered to
contribute to Italian cinema with their artistic quality; a late institutional attempt
to follow into the French footsteps in order to encourage the production of art
cinema.
Many waves, no labels. What remains?

As was the case with other industrial aspects of the Italian cinema of the period, the
lack of long-term programming can be seen as the one of the reasons of the failure
of the Italian New Wave. The extemporary attempt of the studios aimed at a
renewal of the authorial landscape clearly failed from a financial perspective. Despite
the setting-up of the distribution companies and the involvement of the big Italian
studios as distributors of low budget art films, the lack of both a proper circuit of art
house cinemas, and of appreciation from a wider audience partially dictated the end
of the first wave of experimentation. Moreover, the films of the young Italian direc-
tors rarely managed to reach a foreign market that continued instead to follow with
interest the work of the neorealist ‘fathers’. If the economic failures of the attempts
at creating an Italian New Wave are incontrovertible, a breach was nevertheless
opened in the wall of the Italian film industry, which was often impenetrable without
years of training and experience in the field. The 1960s were consequently character-
ized by a series of experimentations, namely openings towards the experience of
other arts (mostly, radical theatre) and cinematographies, and attempts to establish
39
The establishment of small independent companies created ad hoc for the production of the films of the young
authors is also a key feature of the British New Wave, for instance Woodfall Film Productions.
the cinematic medium as a favourite device for the expression of the generational
struggle against the legacy of a dominant past.
In this regard, I agree with Rumble when he affirms that ‘[i]n a sense, what Jean-
Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle represented for the French Nouvelle vague, Accattone
represented for the Italian scene: it signalled a rupture with what had come before
— the neorealist cinema of Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti — and the opening of a
new chapter in the history of the art cinema’.40
Nevertheless, while directors such as Bellocchio, the Taviani brothers, Cavani,
Wertmüller, De Seta, and Olmi all found their place within scholarly frameworks,
many more faded from the pages of film history books. Many of those who made
their first film during the phase of the New Wave never had the chance to make a
second one, thus leaving their films in a grey area of Italian cinematography, where
authorial or genre approaches do not apply.41
In order to investigate the young Italian cinema of the 1960s, one has to challenge
the limitations of two of the dominant paradigms of Italian film studies: author
theory and the national cinema perspective. The former, in fact, led eventually to an
endless search for homogeneity and stylistic consistency in the films of the period, in
an attempt to apply the same authorship approach to a group of individuals rather
than to a single director. One of the central issues in many scholars’ analysis consists
of the consideration of whether or not the directors managed to found a school able
to perpetuate their vision and their cinematic style. The fact that the young directors
of the 1960s did not create such school has been considered as the clearest evidence
of the absence of a new wave, as it made more difficult to apply the auteur paradigm.
However, I agree with Catherine O’ Rawe, when she argues that we should consider
‘what is lost to film history when an auteurist approach fixated on a canonical
account of neorealism prevails’.42
I believe, in fact, that it is necessary to take into account the heterogeneity of the
new Italian cinema of the 1960s as one its strengths instead of as one of its main
weaknesses, and in order to do that new theoretical perspectives able to transcend
national borders and the auteur paradigm are necessary.
Therefore, questions of production and, in particular, transnationalism have to be
part of the discussion, in the same way as they have been central features in recent
studies of popular cinema. Important aspects of the Italian cinema industry, such as
co-production agreements, the foreign market, state aid, low-budget productions,
small production companies and foreign influences have been considered by analysing
genre cinema but have rarely being debated with reference to art-films, despite the
fact that they were increasingly common, particularly during the 1960s.43
40
Patrick Rumble, ‘Accattone’, in The Cinema of Italy, ed. by Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallflower Press,
2004), pp. 103–13 (p. 104).
41
I am thinking, for instance, of films like Edoardo Bruno’s La sua giornata di gloria (1968), which was screened
just once at the Berlin film festival in 1969, and which only recently emerged from oblivion with its distribution
on DVD in Italy and the US (in the latter case, as bonus on the 2005 No Shame edition of Bertolucci’s Partner),
advertised as ‘the hidden gem of the Italian New Wave’, see Richard T. James Partner — DVD No Shame
films.
42
Catherine, O’Rawe, ‘“I padri e i maestri”: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies’, Italian
Studies, 63.2 (2008), p. 189.
43
See for instance Stefano Baschiera and Francesco Di Chiara, ‘Once Upon a Time in Italy: Transnational
Features of Genre Production, 1960s–1970s’, in Film International, 8.6 (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), pp. 30–39.
Moreover, I would argue that thinking of an Italian new cinema in relation to the
generational struggles would help to engage with the limits of a national cinema
paradigm, allowing us to consider the young directors of the 1960s, not just as
the estranged children of neorealism, isolated from the rest of world, but as the
Italian members of a global entity, as brothers and sisters of the first generation of
‘Europeans’.
These experiences together could be named New Italian cinema, the Italian New
Wave, or ‘nouvelle vague all’italiana’. It is not important what label we choose to
apply to this series of experiences; what is important is to succeed where the critics
of the time failed — that is, to start to link all these attempts together and study them
also in the light of similar international experiences, in order to construct a more
faithful and useful picture of that lively and, unfortunately, unique period of Italian
cinema.

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Italian Studies

ISSN: 0075-1634 (Print) 1748-6181 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yits20

New Wave Italian Style

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0075163412Z.00000000024

Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

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Download by: [Universität Osnabrueck] Date: 16 March 2016, At: 12:43

New Wave Italian Style

An investigation of the long controversy around the definition of an Italian

keywords New Wave cinema, Neorealism, nouvelle vague, film industry,

© The Society for Italian Studies 2012 DOI 10.1179/0075163412Z.00000000024

Refutations of an Italian nouvelle vague: Micchichè’s legacy

of an Italian counterpart to the French Cahiers du cinéma, considered both as a

others — were utterly distant from a ‘realist mythology’.

position of a film journal — Cinema (1940–1943) in Italy, Cahiers du cinéma (1956–

Identification of an Italian New Wave: young, dynamic, and

This self-representation depicts and identifies a new transnational community that

A new production framework

form of independent cinema (C.I. Cinema Indipendente), which flourished thanks to

Many waves, no labels. What remains?

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