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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - A Cinema of Fragmentation Intertextuality, Intermediality and Narrative Forms in Italian Episode Film (1961-1976)
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Projects & Abstracts
2007-10-01
2023-10-09
2007-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Alice Autelitano
2007/10/01
Università degli Studi di Udine
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - A Cinema of Fragmentation Intertextuality, Intermediality and Narrative Forms in Italian Episode Film (1961-1976)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/21363/18969
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A CINEMA OF FRAGMENTATION
INTERTEXTUALITY, INTERMEDIALITY AND NARRATIVE FORMS
IN ITALIAN EPISODE FILM (1961-1976)
Alice Autelitano / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract
Università degli Studi di Udine




  Episode film has an ambiguous nature: it is actually not a genre, but it is also not simply a strand
of the Italian Comedy. It can rather be considered as a cross-genre narrative formula. In Italy, the
relevance of the films belonging to this narrative formula is powerful enough to justify an ana-
]ytical approach. This thesis, in fact, does not want to trace a history of the Italian episode film,
but it seeks instead to analyze its thematic, narrative and structural characteristics. In particular,
one specific aspect that seems more important and fruitful than all the others has been taken into
consideration: episode film as a privileged place for intermedial and intertextual trends.
  The thesis focuses on the 1960s and 1970s because in these two decades, episode film seems to
take on a number of more coherent characteristics, besides witnessing a more considerable
duction. In fact, the number of episode films not only increases vis-a-vis the production landscape
as a whole, but the larger part of the episode films seems to belong to comedy or farce.
Furthermore, cinema of the 1960s and 1970s - and not just the episode film - starts an intense
dialogue with various other sectors of the mass media of that time.
  The first part of the work tries to clarify and justify the chronological delimitations given to the
corpus of films. The choice to focus on the period spanning from 1961 to 1976 was made after
careful consideration of the internal dynamics of history of cinema together with the history of
 mass media in general.
  As is known, the 1960s and 1970s are two decades of profound transformation for Italian c
 ema, which goes from a flourishing productive situation to one of deep crisis. This movement
 results in the decrease of cinematographic consumption, which ultimately becomes dependent on
 other forms of entertainment. At the beginning of the 1960s, due to the deep changes caused by
 the economic boom, a radical transformation of the cultural industry and of the consumption pat-
 terns takes place in Italy. So an intermedial landscape establishes itself in Italy, where every com-
 municative aspect is intertwined with all the others, and where skills and expertise migrate from
 one medium to the other. This period of exchange between media comes to a definite halt in the
 mid-1970s, in conjunction with the settlement on television legislations that brings about the
 authorization of a private television system of broadcasting.
    Unlike the 1950s, where episode films were mostly linked to authorial experiences, in the 1960s
 and 1970s episode film is an economic strategy that is frequently used. Moreover, the episode
 films belonging to these two decades are primarily comedies and farces. For this reason, it is pos-
 sible to discern a strong homogeneity and thematic repetition in the corpus taken into considera-
                                    predominant
 tion. In fact, we can identify a theme             them:
                                        in all of the uses and customs of the
 Italian people, with a particular interest in the love-sex adventures.
 ALICE AUTELITANO



  With regards to the narrative structure of episode films, the thesis tries to
 narrative typologies: narrative frames or other elements used to conter an element of unity to
  fragmentary structure of the episode film are not so frequently used in the episode films of the
  1960s and 1970s; in fact, it must be noticed that many of the episode films simply placed one
  episode next to another, without attempting to link them via a series of marrative strategies.
    The second part of this work takes its cue from an observation: since the 1960s, when Italy def.
 initely enters into a modern mass culture, cinema is immersed in a network of intertextual and
 intermedial relationships which conditions its production as well as its communication strategies.
      Cinema caters for a spectator who is, at last, familiar with a multimedia landscape, a spectator, in
 other words, who is constantly exposed to various other sectors of the media which interact with
one another. Episode films often contain the thematization of other media as well as a series of
linguistic influences, while bearing a strong structural resemblance with other communicative
forms of the time.
   For all these reasons, intertextuality and intermediality become crucial and extremely produc
tive aspects for the study of a phenomenon such as episode films. According to these initial
      assumptions, each paragraph of the second chapter aims at tracing the relations between episode
   films and different media or entertainment forms: television, advertising, vaudeville, comics, pic-
ture story, literature and popular literature, newspapers. The work takes into consideration even
the question of intertextuality: though mindful of the fact that episode film is not the sole territo.
ry for the analysis of intermedial strategies or metalinguistic devices in Italian cinema, the sheer
amount of quotations, parodies, and film within films made an in-depth examination of such tech-
niques necessary.
  The last part of the thesis specifically takes into consideration two films, which were also cho-
sen in order to delimit the corpus: Pesci d'oro e bikini d'argento (Carlo Veo, 1961) a
e signori, buonanotte (Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy, Luigi Magni, Mario Monicelli, Ettore Scola,
1976). Structured as the programme timetable of another medium, radio in the first film, televi-
sion in the second, both films take on the form of inspirations or parodies of radio and television
         programmes of that time, through a direct dialogue with other sectors of the media. Therefore,
they become highly representative of two different moments of the Italian cultural industry, which
symbolically open and close the chosen time.
  By way of conclusion and for the sake of completeness, together with the bibliography, I have
included an annex which contains an exhaustive and chronologically ordered filmography of the
episode films spanning the period 1961-1976, and detailed information on each film: cast & crew,
a summary of each episode, and finally, information about the narrative structure (e.g. the pres-
ence or absence of a narrative frame).
