Film Glossary

Italian film has often lead the way in creating new and exciting film movements. From the moment Pope Leo XIII was filmed blessing the camera mere months after cinema had been invented, Italy welcomed the new medium and began to innovate. In the 1910s Italian film produced the first avant-garde works, heavily influenced by the Futurism movement. Although many of films have been lost, they would have a huge influence on Russian and German expressionist cinema, inspiring The Man With the Movie Camera and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

In the run up to WWII, Mussolini created the Cinecittà, a mini-Hollywood which made many propaganda films. It still exists today, and many notable directors used the studios in the post-war years, including Fellini, Rossellini and Antonioni.

Following the war Italian film produced neorealism, arguably Italy’s most famous cinematic legacy. In an attempt to comprehend the difficult and radically different economic and emotional realities of post-war Italy, directors took to the streets to capture everyday life, producing undisputed masterpieces such as Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Fellini’s La Strada and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves. De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952), a vitriolic attacks on Italy’s new immorality, was so devastating that it is said to have ended the movement, as there was nothing left to say. This lead to a number of much lighter, comic films featuring blockbuster stars such as Gina Lollobrigida and Claudia Cardinale.

Italian film auteurs cemented their reputations in the 1960s, when Antonioni’s L’Avventura pushed back the boundaries of cinema and Fellini’s iconic La Dolce Vita won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, as would Visconti’s The Leopard in 1963. Fellini’s instantly recognisable style, filled with fantastic symbolic imagery and baroque grotesques, would be most evident in arguably his greatest work – 8 ½.

In the 1960s Italian film received an international boost when Sophia Loren became the first actress to win an Oscar for a foreign language film (Two Women). Two new Italian film genres also enjoyed mass popularity towards the end of the decade - the spaghetti western (particularly Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy) and the giallo film (gory horror movies, of which Dario Argento is the best known). Another Italian film director would enjoy worldwide success through his joyful, sexually liberated Trilogy of Life - Pier Paolo Pasolini. His controversial swan song – the violent and sadistic Salò – was released a few months after his murder, a tragedy which is alleged to have been a political assassination.

After an unhappy 1980s slump, Italian film resurged on the international stage with Cinema Paradiso (1990), then the most successful film of all time and the winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, an award Gabriele Salvatore’s Mediterraneo would win two years later. Il Postino won huge audiences in the US, and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful won three academy awards, including Best Actor. In the last few years, Italian film has continued to prosper and innovate, with commercial and critical successes including Il Divo and Gomorra.