The Fair and the Museum: Framing the Popular

Popular Italian cinema encompasses many delights: the foundational spectacle of the early historical epics and the passionate theatricality of the first screen divas take their place within a gallery of emotional and sensual pleasures. Even the canonical works of Italy’s post-war art cinema grew from the soil of popular genres and were nourished by traditions of theatricality and entertainment. And yet while Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni are icons of the European auteur canon and neorealism is a core unit of academic study, the vast and diverse output that made cinema a key popular form in Italy remains in many ways more unfamiliar. This volume aims to help correct this imbalance of attention by exploring films that may count in one way or another as popular entertainment. It interrogates the very meaning of the popular and hopes to give a sense of its complexity and specificity in Italian cinema.