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Virgil Darelli
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - An History of Italian Movie Theatres. National Policies and Local Modes of Exhibition in the Province of Brescia
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - An History of Italian Movie Theatres. National Policies and Local Modes of Exhibition in the Province of Brescia
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                                                                                       An History of Italian Movie Theatres
                                                                                       National Policies and Local Modes of Exhibition in
                                                                                       the Province of Brescia
                                                                                       Virgil Darelli / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
                                                                                       Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
                                                                                       DOI https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/18935




                                                                                         Recent historiography has been tackling             of the Italian exhibition sector from a cultural,
                                                                                       cinema history from the bottom up, meaning            political, and economic point of view. To do so,
                                                                                       from the point of view of the moviegoing              the first section, after a systematic review and
                                                                                       experience. This activity has been the basis          a theoretical discussion, sought to answer the
                                                                                       of the entire cultural industry of cinema. For        question ‘how should we look into the history
                                                                                       a long time, since its institutionalization2 at       of Italian cinemas?’. Two general and broad
                                                                                       the end of the 1900s, cinema consisted in a           tendencies were found in the literature: a first
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                                                                                       form of entertainment practiced in a dedicated        one, closer to cultural studies, focuses more
                                                                                       place. Studying the cultural history of that          on the analysis of political and promotional
                                                                                       social institution then means to focus on all         discourses;5 a second one, using non-reflective
                                                                                       the elements that form such an experience,3           (i.e., administrative) sources, retraces the actual
                                                                                       which are physical, administrative, political,        form of the exhibition network.6 The research
                                                                                       etc. It follows that scholars have proposed a         developed around this division: one section is
                                                                                       renewed attention to the historical methodology,      dedicated to the negotiation between social
                                                                                       assessing ‘rediscovered’ empirical data, which        actors in the process of regulation, another
                                                                                       is not necessarily strictly tied to the cinematic     one follows the traces left by movie theatres in
                                                                                       world and thus expands towards an intermedial         documents created by modernization processes,
                                                                                       landscape. What also follows is a specific regard     such as bureaucratization and information.
                                                                                       for the ‘margins’, be they social (black and             I started with national regulation and traced
                                                                                       female moviegoing), geographical (the rural), or      a first chronology based on changes in the
                                                                                       industrial (small business or non-profit theatres),   main policies: cinemas’ opening licences,
                                                                                       therefore potentially producing more precise          screen quotas, taxes, financial aid, and direct
                                                                                       historical accounts.4                                 intervention of the State in managing movie
                                                                                         My thesis has focused on the Italian context.       theatres. Then I selected some transition periods
                                                                                       The aim has been to assess the state of the art       (1925-27, 1936, 1947-49, 1956, 1994), where
                                                                                       — referring to academic literature and historic       cultural ideas about cinemas could emerge
                                                                                       sources (especially under-exploited ones) — to        distinctly in parliamentary debates, trade
                                                                                       experiment with a methodology based on ‘new           journals, political newspapers, and government
                                                                                       cinema histories’, and to produce a chronology        documents. Tracing conflicts and positions to


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                165
their actors could help to define underlying            towns, for example, movie theatres often were
problematics. The protagonist of that story was         born under the influence of mutualistic societies,
the relationship between the national exhibitors’       which were very politicized. Commercial
association (born in 1925) and governments.             theatres were rare compared to those owned
The conflict between cultural (and propaganda)          by municipalities, factories, or local associations.
and economic needs was strong, along with               This was particularly true from the late 1920s,
the opposite process of ‘corporatization’ (in the       when the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND),
sense of economic corporatism) that favored             a state managed leisure organization, started
big industry exhibitors, while small and rural          managing its own cinemas – which were often
ones were on their own until much more recent           taken away from those previous societies. I
interventions of financial aid.                         found that in non-city areas of the province those
   In the second part of the research, I analyzed       were the majority (though the situation was
the exhibition sector in the province of Brescia,       different in Southern Italy, where OND was less
Lombardy. I built a database of movie theatres          present), whereas in big cities premiere venues
by combining industry yearbooks, newspapers,            were owned by the biggest Italian exhibitor,
archives, and guidebooks. The dataset contains          ENICM, which was also State owned, although
information mainly about the number of seats,           totally business oriented. After World War II, the
management type (commercial, parish, non-               leading role in small towns was taken over by
profit), location, name, manager, category, and         parish cinemas.
opening days. This has allowed to investigate              In terms of the spread, an important finding
the number of theatres beyond SIAE statistics           was that the attendance crisis of the mid-1950s
(which underestimated that number because of            was delayed in non-urban areas. Ticket sales
its methodology), their geographic distribution         in provincial capitals became a minority in Italy
(the ratio between provincial capital and the           around that period, while attendance per capita
rest of the province, the number of cinemas per         rose in the countryside. Many new theatres were
municipality), their typology, their characteristics,   built in small towns, and the competition was
and ownership (national and big chains in the           thriving, especially between commercial theatres
city, very small circuits in the countryside). In       (now sometimes operated by city exhibitors)
addition, I conducted an in-depth study on a single     and religious cinemas that had a public license.
municipality, in order to understand the ways           The microhistory of Gardone Val Trompia has
the cinematic landscape changed, consistently           shown that government authorizations were in
comparing it to the broader provincial and              the hands of the trade associations and political
national contexts. The final chapter of the section     mediation, while local administration had the
is dedicated to the role of newspapers: local           first say and often called for its own benefits. It
editions of national ones, city-based, and hyper-       has also been found that number of seats and
locals. Which movie theatres appeared in those          operating days grew in the 1950s. This distinct
publications? How advertised? What differences          period of out-of-the-city moviegoing came to
between different ideologically oriented papers?        an end in the mid-to-late 1970s, when cinemas
What differences between city and out-of-the-           slowly but surely declined before disappearing
city cinemas?                                           completely, while, on the contrary, city cinemas
   Various findings about the different types of        were much more resilient.
cinemas, their operational characteristics, and            The historical analysis ends in the mid-1990s,
their degree of diffusion emerged within this           alongside a major regulation change, which
research, especially underlying the difference          canceled screen quotas, allowed multiplexes,
between urban and non-urban contexts. In small          and      progressively    canceled      centralized



166                                                            Darelli, An History of Italian Movie Theatres
authorization. Other areas of work require
further investigation: the thesis aimed to provide
a strong framework chronology, an overview of
sources and methods, and a handful of themes
requiring further scrutiny. Other perspectives
are almost left unexplored, such as the specific
film programs of movie theatres.




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X    167
 Notes
 1
   Ph.D thesis supervised by Professor Massimo Locatelli (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore). For
 more information: virgil.darelli@unicatt.it.
 2
   Paul S. Moore, ‘The Grand Opening of the Movie Theatre in the Second Birth of Cinema’, Early
 Popular Visual Culture, XI.2 (2013), 113–25.
 3
   Robert C. Allen, ‘Relocating American Film History: The “Problem” of the Empirical’, Cultural Studies,
 20.1 (January 2006), 48–88.
 4
   Jane M. Gaines, ‘Why We Took the “Historical Turn”: The Poisons and Antidotes Version’, in At the
 Borders of (Film) History, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani (Udine:
 Forum Edizioni, 2015), pp. 179–90.
 5
   Charles R. Acland, ‘Cinemagoing and the Rise of the Megaplex’, Television & New Media, 1.4 (2000),
 375–402.
 6
   Daniel Biltereyst, Kathleen Lotze, and Philippe Meers, ‘Triangulation in Historical Audience Research:
 Reflections and Experiences from a Multi- Methodological Research Project on Cinema Audiences in
 Flanders’, Participations, 9.2 (2012), 690–715.




168                                                              Darelli, An History of Italian Movie Theatres
