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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Writing (and Screening) the National Identity: Italian Film Stars in the 1930s
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Cinéma & Cie
Enrico Biasin
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 Università degli Studi di Udine
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Writing (and Screening) the National Identity: Italian Film Stars in the 1930s
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7
 WRITING (AND SCREENING) THE NATIONAL IDENTITY: ITALIAN FILM
 STARS IN THE 1930s
 Enrico Biasin, Università degli Studi di Udine




Fascist Italian Cinema in the 1930s

   It is possible to assume that at the beginning of the 1930s there was an explicit awareness in
 Italy that different national cultures had different national film cultures, and that such a correla-
tion was taken for granted all over Europe with the exception of that country in which Mussolini
exerted his power. During these years, in fact, in the field of popular culture and within the dis-
courses of film press, journalists and speakers of all sorts gave rise to a critical debate around two
central issues which were intimately correlated. On the one hand, when compared with its con-
temporary German counterpart, it was as if the early Italian sound cinema actually did not exist.
In the course of the first four years of the new decade, about sixty-five feature films were made?,
and the voices that surrounded the same film texts used to repeatedly invoke a "rebirth" of this
cinema. In the light of such a situation, in Cinema Illustrazione, one of the most famous film mag-
azines of the time, it was possible to write in these metaphorical terms: «Our cinematography is
like a nation that has optimal artilleries, but lacks an army able to maneuver and shoot them».
  On the other hand, not only a material presence of cinema was demanded, but an authentic, real,
national film style was also required, in order to produce a good Italian citizen and to be in step
with modern times. In this regard, Antonio Petrucci's observations published in the daily Il Tevere
are clear: «While the whole Nation has its rhythm of life and its well-established trend, the cine-
ma still wanders across the low and uncertain foggy old style of individualism»*. The whole spec-
trum of these discourses attests the necessity to return to the splendours of the past age - the cin-
ema before the First World War -, but, at the same time, it encourages a new sort of stylistic form
in terms of which the Italian film culture in the nation could be organized. So, as these obse
hoped, a future national cinema was possible not only by recovering the (old export foreign mar-
kets, but also by producing a new type of cultural product capable of penetrating into the every-
day life of the Italians and therefore of re-configurating their social identity.
  A step forward was taken in 1934 in this direction. In fact, the Direzione Generale per la
Cinematografia was established on September 29, with the main object of controlling, promoting
and disciplining film production in Italy. According to Jean A. Gili, rather than obeying to coer-
cion, this nationalization of Italian cinema dealt with the moralisation of the medium in order to
imitate what countries like the USA and Russia had programmed in their industries about the
practices of film production, distribution and exhibitionS. Thus, in the view of Luigi Freddi, the
first director of such an institution, the action of the Direzione had to be based on the solutions
tested by these two distinct national models. In particular, it had to be based on the following:

 On the rational and organic statement of initiatives, therefore the preparatory activity and its
 implementation take shape according to the established plans, with order and discipline [...J.
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CINÉMA & CIE, no. 9, Fall 2007
ENRICO BIASIN


   considering the industrial, technical, artistic and ethic criteria sifted at the right moment and
   organically allotted.

  In this cultural and political enterprise, the new Italian film stars - both men and women - had
to take on the central role of representing the nation on the screen. In this article, I intend to con-
sider the construction of the national film identities of Italian actors and actresses and their rela-
tion with their masculine and feminine essences. I would also like to demonstrate how this
process was articulated in a problematic fashion.
   The first step consists in demonstrating how the "public" practice of writing on film stars
involves a series of concerns about their national and cultural identities. In fact, if our aim is to
study, as we will soon see, film stars as a social and cultural sign, it is necessary to investigate
such a phenomenon by questioning not only film texts but also the written text surrounding
them. From our point of view, therefore, the primary film paratexts produced during the 1930s
- specifically, books, newspapers, popular and film magazines and so on - gravitated towards
 the formation of various national strategies about stardom and aimed at transforming a relative.
 ly well-established national identity of a film star into a different one. Thus, on this level of
 analysis, it is possible to follow the methodological models proposed by the field of Critical
 Discourse Analysis, and therefore to assume that a written or spoken text, construed as a cultur-
 al form, gives shape to its ideology in the concrete practice of human language. In this sense,
 according to Stuart Hall's classic sentence: «Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly
 mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and
 through discourse»?.
  The second part of my article deals with the star phenomenon in relation to screening practices.
The intention here is to focus on two famous Italian male stars of the above-mentioned period -
Gino Cervi and Vittorio De Sica - and to see how their masculinity is constructed with reference
to other types of masculinity flowing in the social and cultural space of the nation during the sec-
and half of the 1930s. As a working theory, I intend to promote a notion of masculinity of the
Italian film male stars of these years in terms of non-homogeneity and, to a certain extent, of frag-
mentation, particularly if we compare it with the national authoritative model promoted by the
dominant fascist ideology. In this respect, it seems to me that far from establishing a coherent
identity in terms of cultural and national heritage, some films of the so called "Luigi Freddi's era"
(1934-1938) put into question the gender identities of their male characters; and the way in which
they tried to overcome this trouble corresponds to an exaggeration of their masculinity. This strat-
egy, defined as "masquerade" by Joan Riviere, permits a new articulation of identities w
intent is to re-establish the male subjectivities as "normal" "dominant" and "national".



Writing the National Stars

  In her study on French national cinema, Susan Hayward has recently noted that it is possible to
consider a national cinema on the basis of two fundamental axes of reflection. In the first one, the
goal is to analyse how the national is enunciated in three distinct areas: in the films themselves,
in the written texts about them, and finally, in the context of the archival institutes in which films
are housed and displayed; the movement, along this axis, goes from the cinema as "archive" to
 the national as "institution". The other direction involves the analysis of how to enunciate the
 national, and specifically of «how cinema itself contributes to the construction of the concept of
                                                WRITING (AND SCREENING) THE NATIONAL IDENTITY


the nation and, thereby, to the myth of the "national" in national cinema»; the movement, in this
case, goes from the cinema as "device" to the national as "symbolic order". In this second axis,
the star as sign plays a central role in the definition of what is "national" in a national cinema.
   From this particular perspective, although the star functions as a sign of the indigenous cultur-
al codes, and therefore contributes to cement the values and the traditions of a specific national
imaginary, there might be some cases in which this semiotic phenomenon encounters a number
of difficulties when striving to carry out its aim. As Richard Dyer points out in his seminal book
on film stars, in fact, the image of this fundamental part of cinema institution can be analysed as
a structured polysemy. In conformity with Dyer's remarks, the image of the star is a complex
 totality, and its signification deals with some elements whose aim is to reinforce or to be «to some
 degree in opposition or contradiction»° with one another. The nationality of the Italian film stars
 of the 1930s seems partly caught up in a play of correspondences, non-correspondences and con-
 tradictions, and in this sense, it can be conceived as a total amount of fragments rather than an
 authentic and definite cultural unity.
   Thus, we are now able to say that the written texts about film stars - interviews, biographies,
 announcements, reviews and so on - are meaningful devices in the structuring of such a contin-
 gent entity; and we may also add that these particular paratexts fulfil the central role of creating
 and re-creating "discursive formations" in relation to the identity of film stars and their national
belongings.
  However, rather than focusing on the linguistic aspects of such discourses, I would rather
analyse them as social and cultural practices. Under this identity, these statements are able to
articulate a particular system, which, in the words of Norman Fairclough, is an order of discourse:

  An order of discourse is a network of social practices in its language aspect. The elements of
  orders of discourse are not things like nouns and sentences (elements of linguistic structures),
  but discourses, genres and style. These elements select certain possibilities defined by lan-
  guages and exclude others - they control linguistic variability for particular areas of social
  lifelo

 The quotation highlights the power of discourses to construct an order, and thus to produce
social life meanings. We could say that a national film star is to be read as the result of a number
of social and cultural orders. So as to study this aspect of a film star, using the tools of Critical
Discourse Analysis, I would like to reflect on the formation of the cultural identities related to a
film star, and to consider the role of discourse in producing such identities. Drawing on the words
of Ten A. van Dijk, I wish to explore «how specific discourse structures determine specific men-
tal processes, or facilitate the formation of specific social representations»". These "mental
processes" and "social representations" about fascist film stars nationality are "cultural models"
and "situated meanings"; in fact, as James Paul Gee writes, in the first place, they «don't just exist
in people's heads, but are often shared across people, books, other media, and various social prac-
tices», and secondly, they are «negotiated between people in and through communicative social
interaction»12. In this respect, I intend to focus my attention on some texts which can be found in
the Italian popular press of the 1930s, and to develop an interpretation of these texts in order to
understand which discursive strategies dealt with the construction of national identity in relation
to film stars.
  The problem of male and female actors is a problem that engages the Italian popular press from
the very moment in which different voices belonging to film criticism began to speak about the

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 ENRICO BIASIN


  "rebirth" of national cinema. In this regard, the most urgent issue at stake is represented by the
 generational replacement of the Italian stars who had already lived their Golden Age during the
 1910s and 1920s. The new Italian actors, according to such a demand, will have to form a whole
 in which the gender roles will be finally established and then consolidated. This particular imper-
 ative is considered in an article written by Umberto Paradisi in 1925 on the images of Italian film
 male stars who will become essential parts of the future Fascist culture.

       At long last, the male element is to be male. In the films of our past, the male character has
       never worn a proudly virile expression. Too many weaknesses in his face, in his clothes, in
       his gestures. This is why we were defeated by the Americans, and we also got quite a good
       beating from the Germans!3.

    In its homophobic subtext, this abstract contains a fundamental strategic linguistic device. It is
 clear that the aim of the author is to promote unification and identification in relation to the sex-
 ual identity of the male characters future Italian films. More specifically, the process of unifica-
 tion deals with the word we related to text passages like «films of our past», «we were defeated»
 and «we also got quite a good beating». This pronoun, in fact, aims at connecting the daily and
 its readership within a national subjectivity, thereby enabling the critic to detail some shared con-
 cerns about men and their film representations. As Norman Fairclough notes, an aspect of this
 reduction operated by the we «is that it serves corporate ideologies which stress the unity of peo-
 ple at the expense of recognition of divisions of interest»!4. A specific type of discursive strategy
 therefore runs through this sort of texts, which attempts to construct and to establish a certain
 national identity by seeking a general consensus as well as widespread support with regard to cul-
 tural, aesthetical and social values. On the other hand, however, it is likewise obvious that in this
 sort of texts the model of masculinity which is constructed is based on explicit allusions to other
 geographically conterminous (i.e. German) or non-conterminous (i.e. American) national models
 of male identity.
   In the light of these first considerations, we might say that national cultures are not coherent
 and unified artefacts; as Stuart Hall observes out, it is more useful to think of them in a more
   lematic fashion: «They are cross-cut by deep internal divisions and differences, and "unifi
only through the exercise of different forms of cultural power»S. Thus, discourses which tend to
present aspects of a specific national culture in terms of solidity and homogeneity legitimatize
their assumptions by integrating other forms of difference into themselves. As Ruth Wodak notes,
what is at play here is another type of strategy, a strategy which aims at transforming a relative-
ly well-established national identity into another. For our purposes, we can see it at work, for
instance, in a popular text published in 1931 by the film magazine L'Eco del Cinema; the pecu-
liar function of this text was to launch a young male actor, Carlo Fontana Arnoldi, who, in this
discursive context, was referred to as a «typical Italian actor».

    We have the pleasure and the honour to introduce to you Carlo Fontana Arnoldi, the leading
   actor of Cines Pittaluga. [...] You can see in him an exuberant young guy, endowed with a
   masculine virility; a young man with his hair always dishevelled, an athletic figure, the spir-
   it of an overgrown child, accustomed to all types of sports. [... ]You must also know that he
   practices all sports every single day and he excels in yachting and in tennis in a distin-
   guished manner. He is now preparing one of his great exploits, which will enrich the list of
       records which already belong to him: the crossing from Italy to Libia in his yacht, and he
       will be the daring helmsman of the glorious sailing venture!?
4 00
                                                WRITING (AND SCREENING) THE NATIONAL IDENTITY

  In this excerpt, to recall Fairclough's notion which we mentioned earlier on, it is possible to dis-
cer two distinct forms of orders of discourse competing with one another; each of them strives
to control specific mental processes in order to articulate two types of cultural models in relation
to Carlo Fontana Arnold's masculinity. In the first case, the set of adjectives related to Fontana's
physical aspect and to his social behaviour (exuberant, young, masculine, athletic) is the same
grammatical linguistic device which was used by many hygiene manuals of that time for describ.
ing the "real" image of the Italian man in his physical and spiritual qualities. For example, in
L'igiene dell'amore sessuale. Pagine dedicate agli vomini, a manual published in Italy in 1929,
the author, Giulio Casalini, writes that only through the control of their own excesses men will be
successful in their sexual relations with women and in their ordinary business lives: «A pure life,
the fight against the tendencies generated by imitation and unhealthy excitation - observes
Casalini -, reverberate favourably on all human existence. The character becomes tougher and
stronger. Will becomes energetic and inflexible»18. This meant that the Italian men of the 1930s,
for the purpose of being dominant in the broader sense of the word, had to master their own bod-
 ies, both in a sexual and social way. «In the new Italy - as Victoria de Grazia points out in her
 study on women during the Fascist regime -, real men of character showed their own virility not
 so much by beating or purging their socialist or liberal-democratic enemies with castor oil, but
 rather by scattering the seeds of a large progeny»!?. I shall return to this point later, when I will
 talk about Vittorio De Sica and Gino Cervi's masculinity performances in their movies Il signor
Mar and L'argine.
 The second form of order of discourse which deserves special attention in the text quoted above
deals with those nouns (sports, yachting, tennis, exploits, records list, yacht) which urge the
addressee of the message to re-shape her/his national identity. In particular, these words tend to
come across as discursive fragments of a cultural imaginary that refers to the symbolic meaning
that a country like America has taken on in terms of modernity. In this sense, activities like sport
or yachting are connected with new attitudes that informed the ways of life pertaining to the citi-
zens of the nations in which "free time" had started to become increasingly more organized and
institutionalized since popular culture was regarded by political governments as an emerging
social problem. One of these nations, in addition to just mentioned America, was England; in fact,
as Peter Burke writes: «It was [in] England in the early nineteenth century that we first see the
rise of the idea of a "sporting world" which included hunting, racing, shooting, angling, cricket,
walking and boxing»2. Thus, the text articulates Carlo Fontana Arnoldi's masculinity as a strug-
 gle between a solid image of "Italianess, centred on a straight ideal of virility, and a trans-nation-
al image of man, where the reality of several practices related to the popular culture and leisure
 aims to undo national boundaries.
   Strategies of integration and transformation in their linguistic aspect are clearly visible as cul-
 tural devices in discourses concerning Italian female stars. It is possible to see such strategies in
 action, for example, in a number of articles written by the journalist Francesco Callari in 1939 in
 the pages of the popular journal Film?!. In these texts, Callari tries to analyse the Fascist female
 stardom by means of two complementary axes of reflection: on the one hand, his central aim is
 to solidify not only the image but even the substance of the whole female star system, given that,
 at the end of the 1930s, male actors like Amedeo Nazzari or Antonio Centa with their bodies cap.
 tivated the fantasy of the Italian audience; on the other hand, Callari promotes a sort of corre-
 spondence between contemporary American film stars and Italian ones by trying to establish the
 professional identity of the latter via its close relation with the nationality of the former. With
 regard to this, the following example about Dria Paola and her textual relationship with Andrea
 Leeds is particularly germane:
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 ENRICO BIASIN


      Physically the analogies are many, in the smallness of her shapes, in her hair style, in the
      depth of her lost look, in the anxious pose of her body; therefore, as a "distinct character"
      Dria Paola ideally aspires to Andrea Leeds??.



 Screening the National Male Stars

     In the previous section of this article we observed how it is necessary to begin to see masculin-
  ity as a heterogeneous, contradictory, social and historical notion; masculinity, in other words,
  must be defined not by any essence, but in and through a definite number of relations and trans-
 formations. Masculinities, from this point of view, do not have a pure heart guaranteed by nature,
 but are "invented categories*: «They are - as Sean Nixon notes - the product of the cultural mean-
 ings attached to certain attributes, capacities, dispositions and forms of conduct at [a] given his-
 torical moment»?. Moving from this theoretical assumption, my intention is to analyse the mas-
 culinities' representations of two famous Italian male stars of the second part of the 1930s -
 Vittorio De Sica and Gino Cervi -, and to establish some sort of connection between their film
 performances into distinct texts - Il signor Mar (Mario Camerini, 1937) and L'argine (Corrado
 D'Errico, 1938) - and the role of their bodies in the practices of construction of national identity.
   Both films have in common a fundamental diegetic trait: they present a male character that gets
 embroiled in a situation in which he changes his identity. In the case of D'Errico's film, follow-
 ing a love affair with a foreign woman, Zvanì - a countryman who lives in the centre of Italy -
 leaves his native community to reach Rome, and after putting on the queer clothes of an
 Argentinean gaucho, he starts to perform in musical shows. On the other hand, in Camerini's film,
 Gianni - a Roman newsvendor who loves to travel - tries to romantically win over a foreigner he
 meets during a cruise by pretending to be Max Varaldo, a fictitious Italian nobleman used to min-
 gling with the international jet set.
    Both Il signor Mar and L'argine organize their narratives in three parts. These parts coincide
 with two distinct masculinities which respectively inform about Gianni and Zvanì's subjectivities:
 the first and the last part promote a "controlled" masculinity, in which the two men are reinstat-
 ed in their authentic communities and where their bodies are not displayed in any distinctive fash-
ion (these are the parts of the text in which the heroes, to mention Vladimir Propp?* or, from a
psychoanalytical perspective, Jacques Lacan?5, do not manifest a lack); the central part articulates
instead a different narrative segment in which the two men's masculinity changes qualitatively in
terms of spectacle and becomes de-centred (this is the part of the text in which the heroes try to
come to terms with a lack). It is actually in this main segment of the narration that the performa-
tive aspect of De Sica's and Cervi's "natural" bodies puts their national identity in a critical posi-
tion; and it is actually in this part that their masculinities seem in crisis, too.
   However, it is worthy of note that the notion of performance I am here referring is a popular
one, a notion which I construe as an experience (or set of experiences) of sociability and cultural
knowledge. In this respect, my notion of performance involves a real body articulated by a device
of representation - in the specific case a "real" male body represented on the screen - and, con-
sequently, the social ability to read the semiotic field in which this body is inscribed. As Simon
Frith states,


 Performance requires an audience and an interpretation; it is a form of rhetoric, a rhetoric
 of gestures in which, in performance art at least, bodily movements and signs (including the

140
                                                WRITING (AND SCREENING) THE NATIONAL IDENTITY

 use of voice) dominate other forms of communicative sign [...J. Such a use of the body
 depends on the spectator's understanding of it as both an object (an erotic object, an attrac-
 rive object, a repulsive object, a social object) and as a subject, as a willed or shaped object,
 an object with meaning?.

   The representation of the performing characters in these two texts might be explained in terms
of Joan Riviere's configuration of "masquerade". This concept deals with a set of practices that
women and men put into effect in order to overcome a conflict, an anxiety, a crisis, and as such
it involves an ostentatious manifestation of their exterior sexual qualities. So, in the words of
Riviere, in the same way in which «homosexual men exaggerate their heterosexuality as a
  "defence" against their homosexuality», «women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask
of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men»27. In this sense we are able
to consider Gianni/De Sica and Zvani/Cervi conduct: they try to resist certain national stereotypes
regarding men's sexuality as invoked by Fascist ideology by performing a relative number of acts.
The masquerades they enact - the international Italian nobleman impersonated by Gianni/De Sica
and the Argentinean gaucho parodied by Zvani/Cervi - give rise to a number of contingent situ-
ations in which these characters seem to recreate their own masculinities in order to compensate
for a sexual lack (the foreign women encountered by identifying themselves with other national
constructions. Thus, as Chris Holmlund notes in his analysis of masculinity as multiple masquer-
ade, with such a concept in mind «we do not have to divorce critique from identification: dress-
ing up, putting on, and stepping out are all possibilities»28. In the light of these first conclusions,
it is important to consider a sequence of L'argine, where Zvani/Cervi tries to perform a gaucho
 in the course of a musical show at the night club I Cigno Nero; in it, his body becomes an authen-
 tic spectacle and is meant to be looked at by some women sitting in front of him (Figs. 1-2).
   Identity is, therefore, something we perform, and to see identity as "performativity" is to say
 that we may feel that we have an authentic self; but there is no essence, no pure thing. Identity is,
 rather, constituted within the representation and within the prevalent cultural codes, regulations
 and discourses. To quote Judith Butler: «The "coherence" and "continuity" of "the person" are
 not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained
 norms of intelligibility»?. Identity is a resistant or subversive act, but it is a contingent and strate-
 gic one, given that it can allude to identities culturally available to the subject.




 Fig 1 - L'argine (Corrado D'Errico, 1938). Man as Fig. 2 - L'argine (Corrado D'Errico, 1938). Female
 spectacle. gaze.
                                                                                                141
 ENRICO BIASIN




 Fig. 3 - I signor Mar (Mario Camerini, 1937). Fig. 4 - I signor Max (Mario Camerini, 1937).
 Lifestyle magazines for men. Female gaze.

  By way of conclusion, I would like to take into consideration the part played by Vittorio De
Sica in the film I have just mentioned, Il signor Mar. This actor is certainly one of the most
famous male stars of the 1930s; his prestige reaches its highest point at the end of this decade
when, for example, the film magazine Cinema identifies him as the third best Italian actor of
194030. Vittorio De Sica, as noted by Paola Valentini, is an authentic "inter-medial subject",
shared by a large number of media including theatre, cinema, radio, record industry, popular press
and so on. Yet, his national image is constantly put into question: film magazines like
Cinemagazzino or Film represent his body or his face in connection with other photographic
images belonging to American male film stars such as Gary Cooper32 or James Stewart33
  In the case of the film made with Mario Camerini, Il signor Max, De Sica/Gianni, masquer-
adeing himself as an international nobleman, operates in the same way: he aims to control his
male body by using it performatively as a cultural product and as an "invented category". He can
thus construct a masculinity split in several distinct national identities. We can see it at work, for
example, during the fourth sequence of the film, when Gianni/De Sica, at the port of Naples,
meets the foreign woman; in this occasion a number of cultural objects lifestyle magazines for
men like Esquire) and a technological device (a photocamera Leica) are able to «promote - as Jill
Greenfield et al. points out - a form of masculine identity based on consumption and fashion»
and, in the process, they join the character and his masculinity to other national fantasies Figs.
3-4).

                                                                      [Revision by, Gloria Lauri-Lucente]


T   his text was originally presented as a paper at the International Conference History of Stardom
      Reconsidered, University of Turku, November 9-11, 2006.
2     See Aldo Bernardini (ed.), Il cinema sonoro 1930-1969, Anica, Roma 1992.
3      "Materia prima del Cinema", in Cinema Illustrazione, VII, no. 25, June 22, 1932, p. 3 (my translation).
4     a. petr. [Antonio Petruccil, "L'ultima rinascita", in Il Tevere, April 9, 1933 (my translation).
5 Jean A. Gili, Stato fascista e cinematografia. Repressione e promozione, Bulzoni, Roma 1981, p
    93.
6. Luigi Freddi, "Discorso al publico", in Cinema, I, Vol. I, no. 7, October 10, 1936, p. 251 (my transla-
   tion).

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                                                     WRITING (AND SCREENING) THE NATIONAL IDENTITY

7 Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers
      in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, Hutchinson, London 1980, p. 131.
& Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, Routledge, London-New York 2005, p. 8.
9  Richard Dyer, Stars, British Film Institute, London 19983, p. 64.
10 Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, Routledge, London-
      New York 2003, p. 24.
11 Teun A. Van Dijk, "Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis", in Discourse & Sociery, Vol. 4, no. 2,
      1993, p. 259.
12 James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, Routledge, London-New
      York 1999, p. 52.
13 Umberto Paradisi, "Per far posto e dar prezzo al film italiano", in Il Tevere, August 6, 1925 (my trans-
      lation; my bold emphasis.
14 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, Longman, London 2001, p. 106.
15 Stuart Hall, The Question of Cultural Identity, in Stuart Hall, David Held, Tony McGrew (eds.),
  Moderniry and Its Future, Polity Press/The Open University, Cambridge 1992, p. 297.
16 Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisigl, Ruth Wodak, "The Discursive Construction of National Identities", in
  Discourse & Society, Vol. 10, no. 2, April 1999, p. 161.
17 Galvanometro, "Un lupo... di mare! Carlo Fontana Arnoldi... tipico attore italiano, in L'Eco del
   Cinema, IX, no. 92, July 1931, p. 16 (my translation; my bold emphasis).
18 Giulio Casalini, L'igiene dell'amore sessuale. Pagine dedicate agli vomini, F. Casanova & C., Torino
      1929, p. 97 (my translation).
19 Victoria de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista (How Fascism Ruled Women. Italy, 1922-1945,
   University of California, Los Angeles-London 1992), Marsilio, Venezia 1993, p. 72.
20 Peter Burke, "The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe", in Past and Present, no. 146, February
      1995, p. 139.
21 See "Che cosa potrebbero fare", in Film, I, no. 14, April 8, 1939, p. 6; "Che cosa potrebbero fare", in
   Film, Il, no. 22, June 3, 1939, p. 6; "La fabrica delle attrici", in Film, II, no. 11, March 4, 1939, p. 9.
22 Francesco Callari, "Che cosa potrebbero fare", in Film, Il, no. 22, cit., p. 6 (my translation).
23 Sean Nixon, Exhibiting Masculinity, in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and
   Signifying Practices, Sage, London 1997, p. 301.
24 Vladimir Ja. Prop, Morfologia della fiaba (Morfologija skazki, Academia, Leningrad 1928), Einaudi,
      Torino 1988.
25 Jacques Lacan, La significazione del fallo, in Id., Scritti (Ecrits, Seuil, Paris 1966), Einaudi, Torino 1974,
   vol. II, pp. 682-693.
26 Simon Frith, "Editorial", in New Formations, no. 27, 1995-1996, p. V.
21 Joan Riviere, Womanliness as a Masquerade, in Victor Burgin, James Donald, Cora Kaplan (eds.).
   Formations of Fantasy, Methuen, London 1986, p. 35; originally published in The International Journal
      of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 10, 1929.
28 Chris Holmlund, Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The "Mature" Stallone and the Stallone Clone,
   in Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (eds.), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood
   Cinema, Routledge, London-New York 1993, p. 225.
29 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London-New York
       :1990, p. 23.
    30 See Cinema, V, Vol. I, no. 87, February 10, 1940, p. 1.
    31. Paola Valentini, Modelli, forme e fenomeni di divismo: il caso Vittorio De Sica, in Mariagrazia Fanchi,
       Elena Mosconi (eds.), Spettatori. Forme di consumo e pubblici del cinema in Italia 1930-1960, Marsilio,
       )Venezia 2002, pp. 108-131.
    32: See Cinemagazzino, a. V, no. 58, 9 April 1938, pp. 6-7.
    33' See De Sica's image in Film, a. I, no. 18, 28 May 1938, p. 7; and Stewart's image in Film, a. I, no. 49,
      131 December 1938, p. 7.
    34' Jill Greenfield, Sean O'Connell, Chris Reid, "Fashioning Masculinity: Men Only, Consumption and the
       Development of Marketing in the 1930s", in 20th Century British History, Vol. 1, no.
      1476.




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