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This essay analyzes Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51 (1952), a film Gilles Deleuze made famous for its way of "seeing convicts" in a range of social institutions, including the factory, the bourgeois family, and the psychiatric hospital. Recent accounts of Rossellini's career have tended to emphasize his role in manufacturing narratives of postwar national innocence. By contrast, this essay reads Europa '51 as offering a critique of the carceral state, though one that knows itself to be contained, disempowered, and confined. Mindful of the limits of this critique, the essay brings Rossellini's film into conversation with ongoing debates about "reparative reading" and its alternatives. Noting that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick encounters, or rather avoids, a "deinstitutionalized person on the street" in "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," this essay highlights the film's very different understanding of institutionalization, which anticipates the demystifying and consistently anticarceral critique of official psychiatry that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the fantasies sustaining Italian neorealism were reparative, the essay argues, Rossellini's critical and self-critical turns in Europa '51 take viewers beyond repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culture of consumption of Italian products in the United States, built within a wide system of transatlantic exchanges started in the late 19th century, played a key role in the rearticulation of Italian and American identity after World War II. If the diffusion of modern goods and advertising worked as a significant "transcultural mediator", the promotion of Italian products encouraged the American middle class to experience the Italian lifestyle by consuming its exports. In this sense, the history of the American trades of the so-called "Italian aperitif" - product, brand and consumerist ritual at the same time - represents an exemplary case study. In fact, since the early 1910s, the alliance between Italian artists and liquor producers pioneered a modern "artistic sentiment of promotion" which reshaped the international cocktail culture with a peculiar blend of Italian drinks, made with vermouth and bitter, and Italian styles, flourished in the modern domain of "la dolce vita". Combining the production and promotional history of the Italian aperitif with the iconographic analysis of some historical printed ads, the article proposes a first genealogy of an "aperitif visual culture" stemmed in the United States since the early 20th century. Subsequently, the post-war American campaign "Out of this world" by Austin, Nichols & Co. for Campari bitter is examined as a "social iconic act", analysing the illustrated material found in the Galleria Campari archives. From this first observation, the promotional blending between Italian spirits and its cultural "spirit" seems to have a major role in the diffusion of a consumerist culture based on the cosmopolitan values of versatility, conviviality, pleasure, and sophistication which, together with other expressions of Made in Italy, have influenced the social and cultural customs of post-war America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present essay, I will take into account some Italian war films made in the 1950s, such as “Carica eroica” (“Heroic Charge”, 1952, Francesco De Robertis), “I sette dell’Orsa maggiore” (“Hell Raiders of the Deep”, 1953, Duilio Coletti), “Mizar - Sabotaggio in mare” (Mizar, 1954, Francesco De Robertis), “Divisione Folgore” (“Folgore Division“, 1954, Duilio Coletti), “La grande speranza” (“Submarine Attack”, 1954, Duilio Coletti) in order to reflect upon their role in building Italy’s memory of its past as well as the perception of Italian war crimes in public opinion. These productions extend a unifying narrative of the war, consolidating the myth of the “good Italian” (“italiani brava gente”). Through the inclusion of the soldier in collective memory by silencing his role as aggressor, Italian combat films participated and consolidated the process of collective amnesia about the fascist regime and how they influenced the way in which Italian viewers constructed a shared sense of the past.

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During the 1950s, cinema in Italy blossomed, bringing film entertainment to Italians on an unprecedented scale. This study draws upon the testimony of 325 elderly Romans about their cinemagoing experiences during this period. Their memories are set in the particular context of the film programs that they (and fellow filmgoers) selected-- information that is derived from daily newspapers and supplemented with trade listings of the most popular films screened in Rome. In producing a bottom-up account of cinemagoing, the paper contributes to the general debate about film culture in Italy in the postwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]