THE LOST ITALIAN CINEMA AUDIENCE

ROMA
MILANO
TORINO
VENEZIA
NAPOLI
PALERMO

Cinema Hall and Cinema Parish in 1954-1955 in Rome

This project addresses the gap in knowledge about the Italian cinema-going public of the 1940s and 1950s, for whom cinema was by far the most popular pastime. By engaging with cinema-going memories, Rome will be used as a case study and this project will provide the first detailed and wide-ranging analysis of cinema audiences in the capital in the 1950s. Through the analysis of box office figures, the popular press and audience interviews, this research will provide a new view of cinema-going in the post-war period: one that focuses on the everyday nature of the experience.

The Lost Italian Cinema Audience is a project that addresses the need to investigate the cinema-going audiences of the 40s and 50s. It aims to construct their profile: socio-demographic characteristics, values, tastes, and habits of cultural consumption in a period of great interest from the point of view of cinema's evolution in Italy. The universities of Oxford Brookes, Bristol and Exeter are collaborating in a systematic research project on the theme, which will be conducted in several stages using different modes of methodological inquiry. Memoro - the Memory Bank's role in the project involves the collection of 160 video with people who remember the cinema of the 40s and 50s. In addition to the filmed interviews, the information will be collected via a questionnaire and the incorporation of other materials such as cinema journals from the period, archival research into stars fro m the period (through diaries and general and specialist archive) and market research carried out by US production companies in Italy. The eight regions upon which the project will focus upon are Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Lazio, Sicily, Campania, the Veneto, and Basilicata. The research will be set in the context of the socio-economic characteristics of these areas, in particular in the relationship between the centre and the periphery, between industrial and agricultural areas, between North and South etc. Cinema, in its evolution from a marginalized form of entertainment for the lower classes to generator of star systems, is considered, from an historical and sociological point of view, to provide a unique opportunity for insights into social and cultural dynamics. With the arrival of mass modes of communication, in particular radio and television, scholars have developed research that regards individuals as 'targets of communication'. has been neglected in this approach has been research into the characteristics, above all qualitative, of the cinema-going public. Below is some information relating to the regions under consideration: Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Lazio, Sicily, Campania, the Veneto, and Basilicata, to which are added the cities of Bari, Rome, Turin, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Cagliari and Florence, selected from the twelve 'regional capitals' used by AGIS (a national body that collects data on the entertainment industry) to monitor box office intake