The contribution deals with the contemporary production of neorealist films and photo-romances, a kind of illustrated magazine deploying sentimental narratives through drawings, or mostly stills. Both products were genuinely Italian and marked the country’s post-war culture. Whereas the first was advocated as highbrow art and the most remarkable expression of the nation in times of hardship, the latter has been disregarded as cheap popular culture; just in recent times it received the attention that a mass phenomenon deserves. What has been overlooked or only briefly discussed are shared areas between the two. The article tackles three issues: how neorealism partook in and merged into post-war visual culture, to the point that some thresholds and boundaries between highbrow, politically conscious and aesthetically experimental films and formulaic cultural products are hard to detect; the role of intertextuality in this process; and what happened in the transformation that occurred along the passage from the screen to the magazine, by comparing the function narratives had in novelization and in films.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Distant Voices, Still Cinema? Around the Movies
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2014-10-01
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2014-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Francesco Pitassio
2014/10/01
Università degli Studi di Udine
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Distant Voices, Still Cinema? Around the Movies
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16347/17027
14
Distant Voices, Still Cinema? Around the Movies
Francesco Pitassio, Università degli Studi di Udine




Abstract

   The contribution deals with the contemporary production of neorealist films
   and photo-romances, a kind of illustrated magazine deploying sentimental narra-
   tives through drawings, or mostly stills. Both products were genuinely Italian and
   marked the country’s post-war culture. Whereas the first was advocated as high-
   brow art and the most remarkable expression of the nation in times of hardship,
   the latter has been disregarded as cheap popular culture; just in recent times it re-
   ceived the attention that a mass phenomenon deserves. What has been overlooked
   or only briefly discussed are shared areas between the two. The article tackles
   three issues: how neorealism partook in and merged into post-war visual culture,
   to the point that some thresholds and boundaries between highbrow, politically
   conscious and aesthetically experimental films and formulaic cultural products are
   hard to detect; the role of intertextuality in this process; and what happened in the
   transformation that occurred along the passage from the screen to the magazine,
   by comparing the function narratives had in novelization and in films.


   In the early post-war years, immediately following major shifts in the rules
concerning governance and citizenship with the turn from monarchy to repub-
lic and universal suffrage, a new medium appeared in Italy: the photo-romance
magazine. Photo-romance magazines have often been described as escapist and
regressive narratives, aimed at an illiterate readership. In fact, these magazines
addressed a broader audience than any previous popular magazine, and were
aimed at a female reader whom had been widely neglected during the Fascist era.
Moreover, the photo-romance’s stress on visuality was itself a novelty in a culture
that was mostly conceived of and conveyed through a literary language. On 29
June 1946, a minor publisher, Universo, run by the Del Duca brothers in Milan,
produced the first issue of what was to become a huge success: Grand Hotel.
Major publishing houses soon followed suit: Mondadori published Bolero Film
and Rizzoli Il Mio Sogno, later renamed simply Sogno.




                                          Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                                           Francesco Pitassio


   The focus of this discussion is not a reconstruction and thorough descrip-
tion of the medium’s genealogy,1 which can be traced back partly to category
romances and to popular literature broadly. Instead, my argument will focus
on national visual culture in the post-war era, with emphasis on two issues in
particular. First of all, photo-romance magazines should be read as a product
of the general transformation in the previous decade from a traditional to an
industrial culture in Italy.2 The shift in modes of cultural production created
the conditions for and profited from a newly visual culture. It is by no means
casual that the main publishing activity of the Del Duca brothers previously,
in the 1930s, had been a comic magazine named L’Intrepido: comic magazines
were a similar product of the new industrial culture insofar as they were serial-
ized and produced on a mass scale, foreshadowing the photo-romance. Even as
late as the 1950s, highbrow intellectuals still tended to conflate photo-romance
and comic magazines, indicating the continuity of their industrial roots. Sec-
ond, within this new industrialized culture, cinema, as a mechanical mode of
production, held a hegemonic and influential role as a representational and
social media model. Again, it is no coincidence that the name of the first, very
successful photo-romance magazine makes explicit reference to a famous Hol-
lywood movie: Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), starring Greta Garbo,
Joan Crawford, and John and Lionel Barrymore. On the front cover of the
first issue, a well-dressed bourgeois couple enters the Grand Hotel theatre; the
scheduled film shares the title of the issue: Anime Incatenate (Souls in Chains)
(fig. 1). Another lucrative magazine was named Bolero Film, even more directly
connecting cinema and the photo-romance (fig. 2).3




1
  For a discussion of photo-romance as a medium, see Jan Baetens, “The Photo-novel: A Minor
Medium?,” in Necsus, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-photo-novel-a-minor-
medium-by-jan-baetens, last visit 14 July 2013.
2
   See David Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880-1980, Manchester University
Press, Manchester 1990; Fausto Colombo, La cultura sottile. Media e industria culturale italiana
dall’Ottocento ad oggi, Bompiani, Milano 1998.
3
   Among the ancestors and heirs of photo-romance magazines are novelizations of films, i.e. the
adaptation of film narratives through the selection of individual frames, complete with written com-
mentary. The practice of film novelization in Italy has been widely studied recently, cf. in particular:
Raffaele De Berti, Dallo schermo alla carta. Romanzi, fotoromanzi, rotocalchi cinematografici: il film e
i suoi paratesti, Vita&Pensiero, Milano 2000; Id. (ed.), La novellizzazione in Italia. Cartoline, fumetto,
romanzo, rotocalco, radio, televisione, special issue of Bianco e Nero, no. 548, 2004; Emiliano Morreale
(ed.), Lo schermo di carta. Storia e storie dei cineromanzi, Il Castoro, Milano 2007. See also the PhD
dissertation of Stefania Giovenco, Il cineromanzo in Italia e in Francia negli anni cinquanta e sessanta,
Università degli Studi di Udine / Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2011. On novelization itself
see Alice Autelitano, Valentina Re (eds.), Il racconto del film. La novellizzazione: dal catalogo al trailer/
Narrating the film. Novelization: From the Catalogue to the Trailer, Forum, Udine 2006; Jan Baetens,
“Novelization: A Contaminated Genre?,” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 43-60.

162
                                   Distant Voices, Still Cinema?




              Fig. 1 – Grand Hotel, vol. 1, no. 1,   Fig. 2 – Bolero Film, vol. 1, no. 13,
                 26 June 1946. Front cover.            17 August 1947. Front cover.



   The Italian post-war mediascape was characterized by both a new freedom of
expression, in political terms, and by Hollywood cinema and American culture
more generally. The North-American influence is notable in photo-romance maga-
zines as well as cine-romances (the latter being the adaptation of films in a maga-
zine, selecting film frames and adding them written dialogues and commentary).
These publications became a vehicle for a deeper penetration of American mass
culture in Italy, and yet at the same time they managed to negotiate the moral values
implicit in mass culture, in culturally and socially acceptable terms. In this negotia-
tion, certain journals and individuals played a significant role. A key instance here
is the case of Adriano Baracco and the magazines he published: Hollywood, No-
velle Film, and Cineromanzo, which together dispersed a form of mass culture that
drew upon cinema, stardom and popular narratives.4 Originally, Italian cinema was
not an source for photo- or cine-romances; however, its progressive relevance grew
alongside a renewed industrial stability that emerged with the reinstatement of Ci-
necittà studios, the growth in film exports and co-productions, and the increase in
film attendance. Novelle Film, for example, did not adapt an Italian film until three
years after its first issue, in 1949. The majority of national film production were
popular genre vehicles, including farce, comedies, historical films and, of course,
melodramas. From the 1950s on, some of those studios that specialized in popular
film genres and intermedial tie-ins turned to cine-romances. This was the case of
the Neapolitan company Titanus, who was responsible for some of the most suc-
cessful melodramas between the 1940s and ’50s, and whose production was often


4
  An overall discussion of the postwar popular press in its relationship to cinema is to be found
in Giuliana Muscio, Tutto fa cinema. La stampa popolare del secondo dopoguerra, in Vito Zagarrio
(ed.), Dietro lo schermo. Ragionamento sui modi di produzione cinematografica in Italia, Marsilio,
Venezia 1988, pp. 105-133.

                                                                                              163
                                         Francesco Pitassio


novelized as cine-romances in Novelle Film.5 During this period, high-budget and
even neorealist film productions were often turned into cine-romances (figs. 3-5).




                                                   Fig. 3 – Cine-fotoromanzo Gigante, no. 21,
                                                   1 November 1956. Front cover portraying
                                                   the two main characters of Il cammino della
                                                   speranza (The Path of Hope, Pietro Germi,
                                                   1950).

                                                   Fig. 4 – Cineromanzo Gigante, no. 12,
                                                   October 1955. Front cover portraying Sofia
                                                   Loren in La donna del fiume (The River Girl,
                                                   Mario Soldati, 1954.

                                                   Fig. 5 – Supercinema, vol. 1, no. 1, 10
                                                   December 1950. Front cover displaying
                                                   Amedeo Nazzari and Silvana Mangano in
                                                   Il brigante Musolino (Outlaw Girl, Mario
                                                   Camerini, 1950).




5
  See, for instance, Catene, in Novelle Film, vol. 3, no. 103, 1949 and Chi è senza peccato, in Novelle
Film, vol. 7, no. 264, 1953, both drawn from very popular melodramas directed by Raffaello Mata-
razzo in 1949 and 1952 respectively. On Catene as an intermedial case, see Francesco Di Chiara, Lac-
rime italiane: Catene as the Canon of Post-World War II Italian Melodrama, in Pietro Bianchi, Giulio
Bursi, Simone Venturini (eds.), Il canone cinematografico/The Film Canon, Forum, Udine 2011, pp.
217-221. On Titanus film productions and the Italian film industry, see Francesco Di Chiara, Generi
e industria cinematografica in Italia. Il caso Titanus (1949-1964), Lindau, Torino 2013.

164
                                   Distant Voices, Still Cinema?


   In what follows, I would like to address three issues. First, how neorealism
partook in and merged into postwar visual culture, leading to a blurring of the
thresholds and boundaries between highbrow, politically-conscious and aesthet-
ically-experimental films, on the one hand, and on the other formulaic cultural
products. Within an iconic sphere, modern American visual culture, stereotypes
belonging to traditional popular culture, and newly forged realistic forms became
intertwined. I would suggest that cine-romances sometimes crystallized these un-
expected connections. In this respect, I agree with recent remarks from Stefania
Parigi, who singles out the contemporaneity of both neorealist film production
and popular magazines.6 Nevertheless, I believe that a deeper and more consist-
ent survey, beyond pinpointing shared themes and the links between different
parts of the media industry, might shed light on the dynamics at play within post-
war visual culture and on further overlooked consonances. Second, my intention
is to highlight the role of intertextuality in this process. As a matter of fact, an
intertextual methodology enables us to shift from an aesthetic and author-based
perspective on neorealism to a more inclusive and broad view on the phenom-
enon, revealing that neorealism often implied and exploited industrial cultural
production. Third, I seek to explain what happened in the transformation that
occurred during the passage from the screen to the magazine, by comparing the
function of narratives in novelizations and in films.
   Photo-romance and cine-romance magazines were part of a growing mass cul-
ture, mostly revolving around visual features. In a country that was highly unbal-
anced in terms of cultural literacy – in the postwar era some areas of Southern It-
aly exceeded an illiteracy rate of 20%, whereas North-Western Italy’s rates were
below 5% – this new visual culture to some extent negotiated highbrow models
and the needs of the middle and lower classes. Nevertheless, photo-romance
magazines were not sold primarily in rural, underprivileged areas, but were
aimed at an urban population, who could attend film screenings and experience
a recently mediatized cultural consumption.7 They seldom reached a highly cul-
tivated readership, as surveys have proved: though photo-romances did begin to
penetrate the upper class, the majority of readers belonged to the proletariat or
petty-bourgeoisie.8 This intermediate position between conservative-highbrow
and illiterate cultural models defines the specificity of the photo-romance and its

6
  See Stefania Parigi, Neorealismo. Il nuovo cinema del dopoguerra, Marsilio, Venezia 2014, and
specifically pp. 168-169. Some initial remarks concerning the relationship between neorealist cin-
ema and photo-romances are to be found in Paolo Noto and Francesco Pitassio, Il cinema neore-
alista, Archetipo, Bologna 2010, paragraphs 2.3, 2.6, 2.9 and 2.10. A seminal contribution, raising
(among many others) the issue of photo-romances, is Francesco Casetti, Alberto Farassino, Aldo
Grasso, Tatti Sanguineti, Neorealismo e cinema italiano degli anni ’30, in Lino Miccichè (ed.), Il
neorealismo cinematografico italiano, Marsilio, Venezia 1999 [1975], pp. 331-385.
7
  An
  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
      in-depth survey on cinema and media consumption in postwar Italy can be found in Franc-
esco Casetti, Mariagrazia Fanchi, Le funzioni sociali del cinema e dei media: dati statistici, ricerche
sull’audience e storie di consumo, in Mariagrazia Fanchi, Elena Mosconi (eds.), Spettatori. Forme di
consumo e pubblici del cinema in Italia. 1930-1960, Bianco e Nero, Roma 2002, pp. 135-171
8
  See Anna Bravo, Il fotoromanzo, Il Mulino, Bologna 2003, pp. 76-82.

                                                                                                  165
                                         Francesco Pitassio


adherence to a new media model that opposed traditional high culture, other-
wise still dominant as a national model following authoritarian political action
during the Fascist era. In this respect, photo-romances shared the same condi-
tion of popular cinema, dime novels, comics, category romances, and so forth.
For this reason, many of these genres and formats have for a long time been
called para-literature, meaning “a field that contrasts another field as literature.”9
   As mentioned, the main point of reference for Italy’s newly established mass
and visual production was American culture, as conveyed by mass media and
related products and goods. This influence took root between the 1920s and the
’30s, but greatly accelerated after the end of WWII. From the very start, photo-
romances looked at (supposedly) American social and moral habits, as the first
issue of Grand Hotel illustrates through the story of an Italo-American engineer
and his romantic affair (fig. 6).




              Fig. 6 – Anime incatenate, in Grand Hotel, vol. 1, no. 1, 26 June 1946.



   American cultural models were authoritative in three different respects: social
customs, iconography and visual syntax. “Social customs” here refer to the ways
of depicting relationships among individuals, and the associated moral values.
By “iconography” I intend a set of visual features concerning goods and objects,
environments and bodies. “Visual syntax” indicates a way to arrange a set of

9
  Michele Rak, Appunti sulla dinamica del sistema dell’informazione estetica: i generi della paraletter-
atura e la cultura di massa, in Noël Arnaud, Francis Lacassin, Jean Tortel (eds.), La paraletteratura,
Liguori, Napoli 1977, p. 17.

166
                                      Distant Voices, Still Cinema?


individual frames in order to build up a coherent discourse. It is not my inten-
tion here to inquire further into how the American way of life penetrated Italian
culture through media products before and after WWII. Instead, I would like to
sketch out briefly this influence in terms of iconography and visual arrangement.
Photo-romances and cine-romances picked from Hollywood cinema a set of
goods and objects that were often luxurious, or associated to specific film genres;
they also drew on certain melodramatic emotions, such as fear, desire and long-
ing. Stylistic citation appears to have been an effective model for novelized films
to downplay their affiliation with the neorealist movement, too, as in Ai margini
della metropoli (On the Outskirts of the Metropolis, Carlo Lizzani, 1953). The
selection of the visual score of this politically committed trial film, partly set in
the Roman suburbs, privileges dramatic exchanges among characters, tortured
facial expressions, guns, and almost entirely excludes outdoor scenes (figs. 7-8).10
Though the exclusion of outdoor scenes does not constitute a direct connection
to Hollywood iconography, it refers ironically to neorealist film culture, so de-
pendent on crucial outdoor sequences, by denying this link. Instead it conforms
to the studio-production standard of contemporary Hollywood film, which in
turn was often criticized for excluding the accidental casualties of reality as they
might emerge from location shooting.




                Figs. 7-8 – Inner passions over outdoor scenes. Ai margini della metropoli,
                              in Novelle Film, vol. 7, no. 265, 17 January 1953.




10
     See Ai margini della metropoli, in Novelle Film, vol. 7, no. 265, 1953.

                                                                                              167
                                          Francesco Pitassio


   What is most conspicuous in photo- and cine-romance magazines is bodily ex-
hibition, and specifically the female body, which had been almost entirely absent
from Italian visual culture until the end of the 1930s. The relevance of the body
as a means to express desire, eroticism and attraction was clear from the front
cover of photo-romances and cine-romances, and this was strictly connected to
stardom. Sentimental interaction was predominantly linked to couples, express-
ing their passion through the closeness of bodies and faces (fig. 9). However,
eroticism was exclusively an allegedly feminine “privilege,” disclosed through
a half-naked body displaying a lascivious attitude if not abandoned to its own
passion (fig. 10). In this respect, these covers mimic the layout of film posters,
as previously mentioned. With regard to visual syntax, photo-romance and cine-
romance magazines mostly favoured medium shots, thus privileging characters
and indoor scenes over outdoor ones capturing landscapes, despite this latter
feature having played such a meaningful role in neorealist culture. Furthermore,
the arrangement of shots often adopted classical Hollywood editing as a model,
irrelevant of where or how the source film was produced. This happened even
when adapted films clearly opposed the Hollywood mode of representation, as
per Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) and its novelization. Conceived as an
almost anti-narrative film, casting a non-trained actor as a main character, Um-
berto D. nevertheless stemmed a cine-romance based on a set of stills laid out
according to Hollywood editing (fig. 11).11




                                Fig. 9 – Faces and passions. Grand Hotel,
                               vol. 7, no. 298, 8 March 1952. Front cover.

11
     See Umberto D., in Novelle Film, vol. 6, no. 222, 1952.

168
                                   Distant Voices, Still Cinema?




        Fig. 10 – Exhibiting heavenly bodies.        Fig. 11 – From neorealism analysis to
             Cineromanzo per tutti, no. 2,          classical editing. Umberto D., in Novelle
              28 May 1954. Front cover.               Film, vol. 6, no. 222, 22 March 1952.



   As well as making reference to shared popular and visual culture, photo- and
cine-romance magazines also included common social experiences of the past. Of-
ten their diegetic spaces and events referred to harsh war and postwar realities,
as many commentators have remarked, such as war itself, ruins, the Resistance or
migration. Photo-romances, and specifically those that adopted photographic stills
instead of graphic illustration (such as Bolero Film) from the very start, displayed
an interest in the difficulty of recent national experiences and assigned a crucial sig-
nificance to photographic medium itself.12 Future film director Damiano Damiani
played a key role in this respect, directing photo-romances in his early career which
made recourse to such aesthetics.13 Further, some columns within photo-romance
magazines also recounted “real” stories. The “È accaduto” [it happened] column
in Grand Hotel, for example, reported scoops from everyday life, sharing some
features with similar columns published in declaredly neorealist film journals.
   The question and function of realism in photo- and cine-romance magazines,
or the presence of the popular press in neorealist film, is complex. Certainly, neo-
realist films did often reflect on the boom in mass culture: in Riso amaro (Bitter
Rice, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949), for example, the main character Silvana browses
Grand Hotel and dances the boogie-woogie.14 Furthermore several documentary


12
   Cfr. the stance expressed in Ermanno Detti, Le carte rosa. Storia del fotoromanzo e della narrativa
popolare, La Nuova Italia, Scandicci (FI) 1990, pp. 104-113.
13
   On Damiani, see Alberto Pezzotta, Regia Damiano Damiani, CEC/Cinemazero/Cineteca del
Friuli, Udine 2004.
14
   It should be also noted that Bitter Rice was itself novelized at least twice: as a graphic photo-

                                                                                                 169
                                        Francesco Pitassio


shorts looked with a mix of curiosity and repulsion at popular media products
such as pin-ups or comic and photo-romance magazines, such as Le fidanzate
di carta (Paper Fiancées, Renzo Renzi, 1951), Zona pericolosa (Dangerous Area,
Francesco Maselli, 1951), L’amorosa menzogna (The Lovable Lie, Michelangelo
Antonioni, 1949). Nevertheless, some neorealist directors, such as Giuseppe De
Santis and Alberto Lattuada, paid great attention to rising mass culture and con-
sequently moulded their works according to narratives and visual motifs derived
from the popular press. To name one striking example, the huge box-office suc-
cess of Lattuada’s ruthless melodrama Anna (1951) could not be conceived out-
side a mediascape that included photo-romance magazines. I would therefore
suggest that the question of realism ought to be framed as a trilateral relation-
ship between neorealism, the popular press and postwar melodrama. The latter
certainly profited from a realist visual style, as proved by Raffaello Matarazzo’s
films Catene, Tormento (Torment, 1950) or I figli di nessuno (Nobody’s Children,
1952) or Clemente Fracassi’s Sensualità (Sensuality, 1952),15 and as well-estab-
lished scholarship has explained.16 However, simplified narratives added to the
realist setting. In this respect, I agree with Lucia Cardone when she describes
photo-romance magazines as belonging to the family of popular realism.17 It is a
family, though, which bears some relationship to a new-born neorealism. Cine-
romance magazines took from the multi-layered visual score of neorealist cinema
only what could easily be subjugated to clear-cut and singular narratives. Thus,
contradictory neorealist urban space and outdoor scenes were typically excluded
from cine-romance frames, which instead privileged indoor family groups and
situations. Quite paradoxically, this happened with a film like La terra trema
(The Earth Trembles, Luchino Visconti, 1948), whose aim was to depict a family
melodrama (it would be a truism to outline the role of melodramatic tradition in
Visconti’s cinema) that was rooted within a specific archaic space: Eastern Sic-
ily’s coastline.18 Except for the first frame, a sort of establishing shot depicting
the fishermen’s village and the seashore, all the stills of the cine-romance depict
medium shots of the main characters, mostly expressing their feelings or living
a simple family life (figs. 12-13) In fact, neorealist films sometimes went in the
opposite direction, borrowing highly simplified narratives from melodramas in
order to convey political discourse, as was the case with Riso amaro or Non c’è
pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, Giuseppe De Santis, 1950).


romance, and as a cine-romance. See, respectively, the extras of the DVD edition Riso amaro,
Cristaldi Film/Dolmen Home Video 2007; Riso amaro, in Novelle Film, vol. 3, no. 101, 1949. We
might also observe that this latter novelization expressly stresses eroticism through terms of visual
and verbal features, thereby enhancing what was already explicit in the film itself.
15
   Also this latter was novelized, as Sensualità, in Novelle Film, vol. 6, no. 222, 1952.
16
   See for instance Adriano Aprà, Claudio Carabba, Neorealismo d’appendice, Guaraldi, Firenze-
Rimini 1975; Emiliano Morreale, Così piangevano. Il cinema melò nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta,
Donzelli, Roma 2011.
17
   See Lucia Cardone, Con lo schermo nel cuore. Grand Hôtel e il cinema, ETS, Pisa 2004.
18
   See La terra trema, in Novelle Film, vol. 3, no. 14, 1949.

170
                                     Distant Voices, Still Cinema?




                 Fig. 12-13 – Taming aesthetic thickness. La terra trema, Novelle Film,
                                    vol. 3, no. 14, 6 August 1949.



   Considering intertextuality in photo-romance and cine-romance magazines
raises at least three relevant issues: cinema’s hegemony in the postwar mediascape,
modes of production, and stardom. In postwar Italy, cinema was certainly the he-
gemonic medium in terms of symbolic power, as well as being the newest and most
financially supported medium, therefore determining and crystallizing visual cul-
ture by rooting it in complex narratives. In order to be qualified as an art in its own
right, cinema needed to incorporate aesthetic categories that were well established
in traditional arts, such as visual art and literature. Italian postwar film culture, and
more specifically neorealism, worked hard to promote what was acknowledged
across Europe following the inter-war period: that the film director was the sole
artistic person responsible for the work of art. Photo-romance and cine-romance
magazines somehow denied this, given that two basic features determining their
very existence: anonymous producers and serial production. In fact the authors of
photo-romances and/or those responsible for novelizations were often anonymous,
and even when explicitly named they remained almost universally in obscurity. Fur-
thermore, photo-romance magazines fragmented their narratives in a series of pub-
lications, whereas cine-romances prolonged the life of the film in another form and
medium. Thus cine-romance magazines declared film’s multiplicity and stressed the
fact that its very existence was not exclusively the outcome of individual aesthetic
genius, but the effect of anonymous, powerful narratives and industrial, inertial
force. As Emiliano Morreale has stated, “cine-romance belongs to the ‘derivative’
exploitation of the film product; […] in the 1950s a particularly interesting articu-
lated system of synergies within the entertainment industry emerged in Italy.”19 Film

19
     Emiliano Morreale, Il sipario strappato. Introduzione ai cineromanzi, in Id. (ed.), Lo schermo di

                                                                                                  171
                                  Francesco Pitassio




                       Fig. 14 – Ingrid Bergman in La Settimana Incom
                         illustrata, vol. 5, no. 51, 20 December 1952.
                                            Front cover.



directors affiliated with neorealism are rarely remembered in the pages of cine-ro-
mance magazines, perhaps excluding Roberto Rossellini, infamous because of his
love affair with Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman (fig. 14).
   In reality, stardom as a transtextual phenomenon became a key issue in cine-
romance magazines for a number of reasons. First of all, this was because female
stars were themselves an identification model for some readers and erotic interest
to others. For both these reasons, pictures of feminine stars were often displayed
on the front covers of cine-romance magazines. In order to give these appear-
ances a more articulated existence, biographical accounts were printed on the last
page of the magazine. Second, because photo-romance magazines were part of a
structured mediascape, it enabled young ambitious talent to emerge in the cul-
tural industry, as in the cases of Sofia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida (figs. 15-16).
Last but not least, by means of national stardom models cine-romance magazines
established a relationship between the Italian and Hollywood film industries.
Publishing regular columns such as “Rosa dei venti” or “Sala di soggiorno” in
Novelle film, underlining both the international and family dimension pertaining
to Italian stars, or by including in cine-romance magazines single biographical
portraits, as Cineromanzo did, the cultural industry promoted alternative, indus-
try-based values, as opposed to authorship and artwork. It was ultimately film’s


carta, cit., p. 34.

172
                                      Distant Voices, Still Cinema?




         Fig. 15 – Getting started. Sofia Lazzaro             Fig. 16 – Getting started. Gina
            before Sofia Loren. Sogno, vol. 4,               Lollobrigida. Sogno, vol. 1, no. 11.
         no. 49, 2 December 1950. Front cover.                 20 July 20 1947. Front cover.



aesthetic function that was generally brought into question in photo-romance and
cine-romance magazines, which centralized instead its narrative value.
   Neorealist films were novelized, as different kinds of film products were. The
main transformation affecting neorealist films was the reduction of a multi-layered
aesthetic and moral representation into well-built, clear-cut, radically dualistic nar-
ratives. Let us consider the shifts occurring in the novelization of a world-famous
masterpiece, directed by one of the major neorealist directors, i.e. Stromboli, terra
di Dio (Stromboli, Roberto Rossellini, 1950). The major changes to the text in-
crease the narrative clarity and reduce everything that is not immediately pertain-
ing to the film. First of all, the cine-romance, originally published in Cineromanzo,20
stresses the film’s value as a star-vehicle by enhancing Ingrid Bergman’s profile on
the front cover, as did film posters of her films under Rossellini’s direction (figs.
17-19). Second, the novelization elevates narrative information, by including in
the plot-line exhaustive references to the past of the main female character, from
which the film’s narrative abstained. Third, the novelization excludes any descrip-
tion, on both verbal or visual levels, by picking only those frames centred on a
character. As a matter of fact, the verbal text provides the characters with complex
psychology, which the film representation avoided, thus leaving obscure, deep
motivations for actions and feelings. Finally, the cine-romance integrates a hetero-

20
     See Stromboli, terra di Dio, in Cineromanzo, vol. 1, no. 29, 1950.

                                                                                                    173
                                          Francesco Pitassio


diegetic and extra-diegetic voice into the narratives with a three-fold function:
connecting episodes, in order to clarify obscure passages and provide the reader
with full explanation; describing the characters’ internal motivation, something
the original aesthetic options refrained from doing, to stress moral uncertainty
and/or freedom;21 and including in the narrative a moral stance that is allegedly
external to the events themselves, and therefore supposedly neutral, thus assigning
to the characters and their respective conduct a position on the scale of virtue.22 In
this respect, voiceover in novelizations did nothing but respond to a basic melo-
dramatic function, i.e. depicting virtue’s misfortunes.23 Thus, voice-over, a recur-
rent feature of neorealist films (as a truthful component that resembled a neutral
documentary voice), was transmuted into its very opposite: a moral, authoritative
and authoritarian voice, reducing visual ambiguity in favour of narrative transpar-
ency. It therefore becomes a scopic regime where the image functioned as seduc-
tion, and the voice as a site of moral redemption.




                   Fig. 17 – Neorealist stardom. Ingrid Bergman and Stromboli.
                    Cineromanzo, vol. 1, no. 29, 14 October 1950. Front cover.


21
   This
   ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
        is particularly true of Rossellini’s films, which were morally normalized through their noveliza-
tion. In addition to the case examined here, see also Europa 51, in Novelle Film, vol. 7, no. 267, 1953.
22
   For a discussion of the voiceover function in postwar novelizations, see Raffaele De Berti, Il cine-
ma fuori dallo schermo, in Luciano De Giusti (ed.), Storia del cinema italiano, vol. VIII, 1949/1953,
Marsilio/Edizioni di Bianco&Nero, Venezia 2003, pp. 116-119.
23
   See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode
of Excess, Yale University Press, New Haven 1995.

174
                       Distant Voices, Still Cinema?




Fig. 18 – Neorealist stardom and melodrama. Ingrid Bergman and Stromboli.
          Cineromanzo, vol. 1, no. 29, 14 October 1950. Back cover.




          Fig. 19 – Neorealist stardom. Angelo Cesselon’s poster
      of Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, Roberto Rossellini, 1950).

                                                                            175
