The Industrial Soundscape between Fiction and Documentary Film in Italy’s Long 1960s

Authors

  • Alessandro Cecchi Università di Pisa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.37321

Keywords:

Italian film music composers, Italian auteur film, corporate film, 1960s

Abstract

During the long 1960s, which includes the culminating phase of the “economic miracle” and the beginning of the protest movement in 1968, the industrial imagination took forceful hold of the collective mind of the Italian people. While corporate films adopted the rhetoric of industrial progress, feature films offered a negative view of industrialization and underlined its problematic aspects: the exploitation of the working class, class struggle, alienation, pollution, the role of criminal enterprise. In both cases music and sound profoundly influenced the representation of the industrial contexts. Corporate films had a tendency to extol the virtues of labor and industrial production and used music extensively to this end. The wide circulation of these films in this period encouraged a critical approach to industrial contexts from feature film directors: in their films music and sound offered critical readings during the industrial sequences: they posed questions, encouraged ironic or tragic reflection, or gave the sequences grotesque or sinister overtones. This article analyzes film music and sound options in feature films against a backdrop of corporate film communication in order to trace the history of industrial imagination in Italian cinema.

Author Biography

  • Alessandro Cecchi, Università di Pisa

    Alessandro Cecchi is Lecturer in Musicology and Music History at the University of Pisa. He obtained his Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Pavia in 2007. His research interests cover music theory (Kurth, Schenker), musical aesthetics (Adorno, Benjamin), music and German literature (Thomas Mann, Wolfgang Hildesheimer), the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, the stage works by Luciano Berio, the history of film music in Italy (Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, industrial films of the economic miracle), the circulation of musical performance through media (Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli), and the problem of contemporary musical listening. His publications include book chapters (Oxford University Press, Pavia University Press, Kaplan, LIM, Pacini, Astrolabio-Ubaldini, Enciclopedia Italiana), journal articles (Il Saggiatore musicaleStudi musicaliMusic Sound and the Moving ImageMusica/TecnologiaAisthesisCultura tedesca), edited books (Routledge, NeoClassica) and guest-edited journal issues (Civiltà musicale, Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale) focused on the aforementioned topics. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Archival Notes: Sources and Research from the Institute of Music (Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice).

References

Bellotto, Adriano. 1994. La memoria del futuro: Film d’arte, film e video industriali Olivetti 1949–1992. Rome: Fondazione Adriano Olivetti.

Calabretto, Roberto. 2010. Lo schermo sonoro: La musica per film. Venice: Marsilio.

———. 2012. Antonioni e la musica. Venice: Marsilio.

Carocci, Giovanni. 1958. Inchiesta alla FIAT. Nuovi argomenti 31–32.

———. 1960. Inchiesta alla FIAT. Florence: Tipografia Parenti.

Cecchi, Alessandro. 2013 Topoi of technology in Italian ‘experimental’ industrial film (1959–1973). In

Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Semiotics in Memory of Raymond Monelle (University of Edinburgh, 26–28 October 2012), 394-403, ed. N. Panos et al. Edinburgh: IPMDS. http://sites.ace.ed.

ac.uk/edmusemiotics/proceedings

———. 2014. Creative titles: Audiovisual experimentation and self-reflexivity in Italian industrial films of

the economic miracle and after. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8, no. 2: 179-94.

Cecchi, Alessandro, and Maurizio Corbella. 2012. Experimentation, documentation, censorship: A Joris Ivens’s industrial film and the Italian national broadcasting television. Paper delivered at Music and Media 4th IMS Study Group Meeting, Turin, June 28–29, 2012.

Chayt, Eliot. 2015. Revisiting Italian post-neorealist science-fiction cinema (1963–74). Science Fiction Studies 42, no. 2: 322-38.

Comuzio, Ermanno. 1994. Piccioni specchio di Sordi, ovvero: Sembra facile, quella musica . . . In

L’immagine e il suono: Alberto Sordi–Piero Piccioni. Seminario di studio e premio “Il Trefolo d’oro” Università per Stranieri di Siena, 9-26, ed. S. Micheli. Siena: Il leccio.

Corbella, Maurizio. 2009. Paolo Ketoff e le radici cinematografiche della musica elettronica romana, AAA–TAC 6: 65-75.

———. 2011. Sperimentazione elettroacustica e cinema d’autore in Italia negli anni Sessanta: Due casi di studio. Comunicazioni Sociali 1: 93-101.

Dagrada, Elena. 2005. Le varianti trasparenti: I film con Ingrid Bergman di Roberto Rossellini. Milano: LED.

During, Lisabeth. 2016. Saints, scandals, and the politics of love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto

Rossellini. Substance 45, no. 3: 16-32.

Falchero, Anna Maria. 2008. Cinema e industria: I documentari industriali. Storia–Politica–Società 41, nos. 3–4: 129-42.

Gillespie, David C. 2000. Early Soviet cinema: Innovation, ideology and propaganda. London/New York:

Wallflower Press.

Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A history of contemporary Italy: Society and politics 1943–1988. London: Penguin Books.

Halfyard, Janet K. 2010. Mischief afoot: Supernatural horror-comedies and the diabolus in musica. In Music in the horror film: Listening to fear, 21-37, ed. N. Lerner. New York/London: Routledge.

Korczynski, Marek. 2014. Songs of the factory: Pop music, culture, and resistance. Ithaca, NY/London: ILR (Cornell University Press).

Latini, Giulio. 2011. L’energia e lo sguardo: Il cinema dell’Eni e i documentari di Gilbert Bovay. Rome: Donzelli.

Mera, Miguel. 2002. Is funny music funny? Contexts and case studies of film music humor. Journal of Popular Music Studies 14, no. 2: 91-113.

Miceli, Sergio. 1994. Morricone, la musica, il cinema. Milan: Ricordi/Modena: Mucchi.

Morricone, Ennio, and Alessandro De Rosa. 2016. Inseguendo quel suono: La mia musica, la mia vita. Milan: Mondadori.

Mosconi, Elena. 1991. Il film industriale. Comunicazioni Sociali 13, nos. 1–2: 61-90.

Mosconi, Elena, and Luigi Boledi. 1996. Il film industriale. In Un secolo di cinema a Milano, 295-311, ed. R. De Berti. Milan: Il Castoro.

Pizzaleo, Luigi. 2014. Il liutaio elettronico e l’invenzione del Synket. Rome: Aracne.

Rosar, William R. 2006. Music for Martians: Schillinger’s two tonics and harmony of fourths in Leith

Steven’s score for War of the Worlds (1953). Journal of Film Music 1, no. 4 (“Leith Amadeus Stevens: A Festschrift”), 395-438.

Rothermel, Dennis. 2014. Workerist film humour. In Marx at the movies: Revisiting history, theory and practice, 123-46, ed. E. Mazierska and L. Kristensen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tagg, Philip. 1998. Tritonal crime and ‘music as music’. In Norme con ironie: Scritti per i settant’anni di Ennio Morricone, 273-312, ed. S. Miceli. Milan: Suvini Zerboni. http://tagg.org/articles/xpdfs/morric70.pdf (accessed October 2016).

Tillman, Joakim. 2017. Topoi and intertextuality: Narrative function in Hans Zimmer’s and Lisa Gerrard’s music to Gladiator. In Music in epic film: Listening to spectacle, 59-85, ed. S.C. Meyer. New York/ London: Routledge.

Uva, Christian, ed. 2007. Schermi di piombo: Il terrorismo nel cinema italiano. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.

Verdone, Mario. 1960. Note. L’Italia non è un paese povero. Bianco e Nero 21, no. 7: 87-90. Williams, Evan Calder. 2013. The fog of class war: Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven, four decades on. Film Quarterly 66, no. 4: 50-9.

Wierzbicki, James. 2005. Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A film score guide. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Downloads

Published

2019-09-09

How to Cite

Cecchi, A. (2019). The Industrial Soundscape between Fiction and Documentary Film in Italy’s Long 1960s. Journal of Film Music, 8(1-2), 89-108. https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.37321