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149-747: The cinema of Italy ( Italian : cinema italiano , pronounced [ˈtʃiːnema itaˈljaːno] ) comprises the films made within Italy or by Italian directors . Since its beginning, Italian cinema has influenced film movements worldwide. Italy is one of the birthplaces of art cinema and the stylistic aspect of film has been one of the most important factors in the history of Italian film. As of 2018, Italian films have won 14 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film (the most of any country) as well as 12 Palmes d'Or (the second-most of any country), one Academy Award for Best Picture and many Golden Lions and Golden Bears . The history of Italian cinema began

298-689: A local language of Italy , most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of origin. Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe . It is the third-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union (13% of the EU population) and it

447-683: A Firenze ("Their real heights the Prince of Naples and Princess Elena visit the baptistery of Saint John in Florence") and on the day of their wedding in Dimostrazione popolare alle LL. AA. i Principi sposi (al Pantheon – Roma) ("Popular demonstration at the their heights the princes spouses (at the Pantheon – Rome)"). In the early years of the 20th century, the phenomenon of itinerant cinemas developed throughout Italy, providing literacy of

596-552: A coded structure and conform to the norms of commercial exploitation. This conception of auteur cinema can however seem paradoxical since certain filmmakers qualified as auteurs have filmed some genre films, for example science-fiction films ( Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard , Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut ) or detective films ( Police by Maurice Pialat ). Note that these auteurs have often met with success and were financed or distributed by majors like Gaumont for Truffaut, Godard, Pialat, and André Téchiné . In

745-623: A few months after the Lumière brothers began motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian director is considered to be Vittorio Calcina , a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers, who filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. The first films date back to 1896 and were made in the main cities of the Italian peninsula . These brief experiments immediately met the curiosity of the popular class, encouraging operators to produce new films until they laid

894-506: A few months after the French Lumière brothers , who made the first public screening of a film on 28 December 1895, an event considered the birth of cinema, began motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian director is considered to be Vittorio Calcina , a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers, who filmed Pope Leo XIII on 26 February 1896 in the short film Sua Santità papa Leone XIII ("His Holiness Pope Leo XIII"). He then became

1043-607: A film can only be a film d'auteur if the director has control of the final edit (the famous final cut). For many critics, an auteur recognizes himself before all in his personal universe. The auteur's signature is immediate and is detected, for example, in the type of story or characters favored, the choice of recurring actors, or the aesthetic options repeated from one film to another (light, frame, sound design, transitions, movements of camera, etc.). An auteur thus stays faithful to himself but can take his work in new directions. A simplified vision of auteur cinema tends to consider that

1192-565: A huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages— ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-cia[v]o ("slave", that is "your servant"), panettone comes from the Lombard word panetton , etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when

1341-523: A kind of "summa" of the petty-bourgeois aesthetics of the time. The first film of the genre Telefoni Bianchi was The Private Secretary (1931), by Goffredo Alessandrini . Among the authors, Mario Camerini is the most representative director of the genre. After having practiced the most diverse trends in the 1930s, he happily moved into the territory of sentimental comedy with What Scoundrels Men Are! (1932), Il signor Max (1937) and Department Store (1939). In other films, he compares himself with

1490-409: A label. Conversely, for some viewers, film d'auteur evokes an austere and boring type of art film . The term " auteurisme " is sometimes used, notably by Noël Burch, to qualify the ensemble of what he judges to be the downward slide of auteur films (especially French): falsely demanding attitudes, clichés and visual tics linked to a modernism , a hermeticism and a lazy formalism, openly disdaining

1639-471: A little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016. Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of

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1788-440: A period of crisis due to many factors such as production disorganization, increased costs, technological backwardness, loss of foreign markets and inability to cope with international competition, in particular with that of Hollywood. The main causes included the lack of a generational change with a production still dominated by filmmakers and producers of literary training, unable to face the challenges of modernity. The first half of

1937-602: A poetic and literary origin in the works of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, although the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as

2086-462: A realist setting is Lost in the Dark (1914) by director Nino Martoglio , considered by critics as a prime example of neorealist cinema. The revival of Italian cinema took place at the end of the decade with the production of larger-scale films. During this period, a group of intellectuals close to the fortnightly cinematografo led by Alessandro Blasetti launched a program that was as simple as it

2235-417: A renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as questione della lingua (i.e., the problem of the language ), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving

2384-522: A result. Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by languages of Italy, especially Tuscan and Venetian. These varieties were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts . Italy came to enjoy increasing artistic prestige within Europe. A mark of

2533-495: A seven-vowel system, consisting of /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/ , as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin . Some examples: Film d%27auteur The notion of film d'auteur was born in France in the 1950s when critics influenced by the theories of Louis Delluc , Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin , who constituted

2682-651: A shooting and projecting device not unlike that of the Lumières brothers. Italian Lumière trainees produced short films documenting everyday life and comic strips in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Before long, other pioneers made their way. Italo Pacchioni , Arturo Ambrosio , Giovanni Vitrotti and Roberto Omegna were also active. The success of the short films was immediate. The cinema fascinated with its ability to show distant geographic realities with unprecedented precision and, vice versa, to immortalize everyday moments. Sporting events, local events, intense road traffic,

2831-479: A single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible ; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as educated native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility

2980-513: A united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions: A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to

3129-427: Is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan , 85% with Sardinian , 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese , 78% with Ladin , 77% with Romanian . Estimates may differ according to sources. One study, analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology , inflection , discourse , syntax , vocabulary , and intonation ), estimated that distance between Italian and Latin

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3278-759: Is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin , a development that triggered the " Niçard exodus ", or the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers . Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about

3427-690: Is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia . Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania , although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Some speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties ) and

3576-525: Is definitely over. Even if some performers will move on to directing or producing, the arrival of sound favours the generational change and the consequent modernization of the structures. Italian-born director Frank Capra received three Academy Awards for Best Director for the films It Happened One Night (1934, the first Big Five winner at the Academy Awards), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can't Take It with You (1938). In 1932,

3725-534: Is higher than that between Sardinian and Latin. In particular, its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian . As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive. Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French; see Swiss Italian ), although its use there has moderately declined since

3874-460: Is markedly lower between Italian-Spanish, and considerably higher between the Iberian sister languages of Portuguese-Spanish. Speakers of this latter pair can communicate with one another with remarkable ease, each speaking to the other in his own native language without slang/jargon. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it

4023-410: Is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around

4172-498: Is represented especially by the New German Cinema movement ( Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Werner Herzog , Wim Wenders , etc.). According to them, the director must brand his vision and his style in his work, in the same manner as a writer in the field of literature: it is the metaphor of the "camera-pen". The film must therefore be considered as the work of an author rather than a simple entertainment product manufactured by

4321-594: Is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom ) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See , serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as

4470-535: Is still the largest film studio in Europe , and is considered the hub of Italian cinema. Filmmakers such as Federico Fellini , Roberto Rossellini , Luchino Visconti , Sergio Leone , Bernardo Bertolucci , Francis Ford Coppola , Martin Scorsese , and Mel Gibson have worked at Cinecittà. More than 3,000 movies have been filmed there, of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination and 47 of these won it. During

4619-472: Is that of A Woman's Story (1920) by Eugenio Perego , which uses an original narrative construction to propose a 19th-century morality with melodramatic tones. A particular genre is that of a realist setting, due to the work of the first female director of Italian cinema, Elvira Notari , who directs numerous films influenced by popular theatre and taken from famous dramas, Neapolitan songs, appendix novels or inspired by facts of chronicle. Another film with

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4768-469: Is therefore an independent creator marked for his commitment and the acuteness of his outlook on society. In Eastern Europe , some young auteurs , recognized in the international sphere for their innovative style or the accuracy of their social observation, began to emerge in the 1960s with the temporary appeasement of governance in some Communist states and the relative loosening of censorship committees (New Czechoslovak Wave, New Polish Cinema, etc.). In

4917-549: Is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the 19th century. Other examples are Cocoliche , an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires , and Lunfardo . The Rioplatense Spanish dialect of Argentina and Uruguay today has thus been heavily influenced by both standard Italian and Italian regional languages as

5066-509: The Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa). Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example,

5215-991: The La Voce del Popolo ( Croatia ), the Corriere d'Italia (Germany), the L'italoeuropeo (United Kingdom), the Passaparola ( Luxembourg ), the America Oggi (United States), the Corriere Canadese and the Corriere Italiano (Canada), the Il punto d'incontro (Mexico), the L'Italia del Popolo ( Argentina ), the Fanfulla (Brazil), the Gente d'Italia ( Uruguay ), the La Voce d'Italia ( Venezuela ),

5364-571: The Azzurri Film La regina della notte (1915), the Lumen Film Il romanzo fantastico del Dr. Mercanton o il giustiziere invisibile (1915) and Profumo mortale (1915), all films ascribable to the proto-giallo that multiplied in the following decades, becoming preparatory to the subsequent birth of the giallo . Between 1913 and 1920 there was the rise, development and decline of the phenomenon of cinematographic stardom, born with

5513-587: The Castello Sforzesco ") (1896) and La Fiera di Porta Genova ("The fair of Porta Genova ") (1898), all shot by Italo Pacchioni , who was also the inventor of a camera and projector , inspired by the cinematograph of Lumière brothers, kept at the Cineteca Italiana in Milan. If the interest of the masses were enthusiastic, the technological novelty would likely be snubbed, at least at

5662-1118: The Cineteca Nazionale in 1979. The Lumière brothers commenced public screenings in Italy in 1896 starting in March, in Rome and Milan ; in April in Naples , Salerno and Bari ; in June in Livorno ; in August in Bergamo , Bologna and Ravenna ; in October in Ancona ; and in December in Turin , Pescara and Reggio Calabria . Not long before, in 1895, Filoteo Alberini patented his " kinetograph ",

5811-702: The Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of Northern Italy , the Italo-Dalmatian , Neapolitan and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco- Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy , Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in

5960-649: The Hollywood "dream factory" . The term " auteur " is used today in English to designate directors who have a style of their own or a distinctive vision. In the United Kingdom , the idea of film d'auteur was also born in the 1950s with the critic-filmmakers of the review Sequence , admirative of the work of Jean Vigo and Jacques Prévert and close to the Jeunes gens en colère . Karel Reisz , Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson , founders of Free cinema , call for

6109-674: The Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese ). Italian is widely spoken in Malta , where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently (see Maltese Italian ). Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognized minority language in

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6258-773: The Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia ), although the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire . Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states . Those dialects now have considerable variety . As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian . The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are syntactic gemination of initial consonants in some contexts and

6407-1033: The Middle Ages , the established written language in Europe was Latin, although the great majority of people were illiterate, and only few were well versed in the language. In the Italian Peninsula , as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels ( phonology , morphology , syntax , lexicon , pragmatics ) and are classified typologically as distinct languages. The standard Italian language has

6556-554: The Placiti Cassinesi from the province of Benevento that date from 960 to 963, although the Veronese Riddle , probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy. The Commodilla catacomb inscription is also a similar case. The Italian language has progressed through a long and slow process, which started after

6705-557: The United States at the end of the 1960s, the filmmakers of the new generation recognized themselves in the concept of auteur as defined by Truffaut and profited off the financial crisis within large studios to take power there and put themselves at the center of the conception and production of films, a position of which they had previously been deprived. The directors of the New Hollywood then claim total authority over

6854-743: The Venice Film Festival , the world's oldest film festival and one of the " Big Three " film festivals, alongside the Cannes Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival , was established. In 1934, the Italian government created the General Directorate for Cinema ( Direzione Generale per le Cinematografia ), and appointed Luigi Freddi its director. With the approval of Benito Mussolini , this directorate called for

7003-431: The Western genre. Erotic Italian thrillers, or giallo , produced by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1970s, influenced the horror genre worldwide. Since the 1980s, due to multiple factors, Italian production has gone through a crisis that has not prevented the production of quality films in the 1990s and into the new millennium, thanks to a revival of Italian cinema, awarded and appreciated all over

7152-406: The Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century. The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri , written in his native Florentine . Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia , to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed

7301-620: The White House . After Guazzoni came Emilio Ghione , Febo Mari , Carmine Gallone , Giulio Antamoro and many others who contributed to the expansion of the genre. After the great success of Cabiria , with the changing tastes of the public and the first signs of the industrial crisis, the genre began to show signs of crisis. Pastrone's plan to adapt the Bible with thousands of extras remained unfulfilled. Antamoro's Christus (1916) and Guazzoni's The Crusaders (1918) remained notable for their iconographic complexity but offered no substantial novelties. Despite sporadic attempts to reconnect with

7450-407: The grandeur of the past, the trend of historical blockbusters was interrupted at the beginning of the 1920s. In the first and second decade of the 20th century came a prolific film production aimed at investigative and mystery content, supported by well-assorted Italian and foreign literature that favours its transposition into film. What would later take on the synthesis of the giallo , in fact,

7599-483: The homonymous novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton . Also popular during this period were films about historical figures, such as Caserini's Beatrice Cenci (1909) and Ugo Falena 's Lucrezia Borgia (1910). In 1905, Cines inaugurated the genre of the historical film , which in this decade gave a great fortune to many Italian filmmakers. One of the first of these films was La presa di Roma (1905), lasting 10 minutes, and made by Filoteo Alberini . The operator employs for

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7748-406: The 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture. As of 2022, Australia had the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. This occurred because of support by the Italian community in Australia and the Italian Government and also because of successful educational reform efforts led by local governments in Australia. From

7897-458: The 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry. Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had probably diverged long before the first written records appeared since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread and

8046-450: The 1920s marked a sharp decrease in production; from 350 films produced in 1921 to 60 in 1924. Literature and theatre are still the preferred narrative sources. The feuilletons resist, mostly taken from classical or popular texts and directed by specialists such as Roberto Roberti and the religious blockbusters of Giulio Antamoro . On the basis of the latest generation of divas, a sentimental cinema for women spread, centred on figures on

8195-646: The 1930s, light comedies known as Telefoni Bianchi ("white telephones") were predominant in Italian cinema. These films, which featured lavish set designs, promoted conservative values and respect for authority, and thus typically avoided the scrutiny of government censors. Telefoni Bianchi proved to be the testing ground of numerous screenwriters destined to impose themselves in the following decades (including Cesare Zavattini and Sergio Amidei ), and above all of numerous set designers such as Guido Fiorini , Gino Carlo Sensani and Antonio Valente , who, by virtue, successful graphic inventions led these productions to become

8344-438: The 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons : Ticino and Grisons . In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian Grisons . Ticino, which includes Lugano , the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City . Italian

8493-399: The Dark , silent drama film directed by Nino Martoglio and produced in 1914, documented life in the slums of Naples , and is considered a precursor to the Italian neorealism movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The only surviving copy of this film was destroyed by Nazi German forces during the World War II . This film is based on a 1901 play of the same title by Roberto Bracco . In

8642-460: The Futurists, cinema was an ideal art form, being a fresh medium, and able to be manipulated by speed, special effects and editing. Most of the futuristic-themed films of this period have been lost, but critics cite Thaïs (1917) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia as one of the most influential, serving as the main inspiration for German Expressionist cinema in the following decade. The Italian film industry struggled against rising foreign competition in

8791-458: The Hollywood-style comedy on the model of Frank Capra ( Heartbeat , 1939) and the surreal one of René Clair ( I'll Give a Million , 1936). Camerini is interested in the figure of the typical and popular Italian, so much so that he anticipates some elements of the future Italian comedy. His major interpreter, Vittorio De Sica , will continue his lesson in Maddalena, Zero for Conduct (1940) and Teresa Venerdì (1941), emphasizing above all

8940-417: The Italian dialects has declined in the modern era , as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media from newspapers to radio to television, diglossia is still frequently encountered in Italy and triglossia is not uncommon in emigrant communities among older speakers. Both situations normally involve some degree of code-switching and code-mixing . Notes: Italian has

9089-439: The Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie . Italian literature's first modern novel, I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed ) by Alessandro Manzoni , further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno " ( Florence 's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition. After unification,

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9238-497: The Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Medici Bank , humanism , and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts. The Renaissance era, known as il Rinascimento in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both renaissance (from French) and rinascimento (Italian). During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from

9387-436: The arrival of a train, visits by famous people, but also natural disasters and calamities are filmed. Titles of the time include, Arrivo del treno alla Stazione di Milano ("Arrival of the train at Milan station") (1896), La battaglia di neve ("The snow battle") (1896), La gabbia dei matti ("The madmen's cage") (1896), Ballo in famiglia ("Family dance") (1896), Il finto storpio al Castello Sforzesco ("The fake cripple at

9536-424: The aspirations and fears of a petty-bourgeois society torn between the desire for affirmation and the uncertainties of the present. It was significant that the protagonists of Italian comedians never place themselves in open contrast with society or embody the desire for social revenge (as happens for example with Charlie Chaplin ), but rather tried to integrate into a strongly desired world. Italian futurist cinema

9685-501: The beginning, by intellectuals and the press. Despite initial doubt, in just two years, cinema climbs the hierarchy of society, intriguing the wealthier classes. On 28 January 1897, prince Victor Emmanuel and princess Elena of Montenegro attended a screening organized by Vittorio Calcina, in a room of the Pitti Palace in Florence . Interested in experimenting with the new medium, they were filmed in S.A.R. il Principe di Napoli e la Principessa Elena visitano il battistero di S. Giovanni

9834-448: The car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Fortunato Depero , Gino Severini , Giacomo Balla , and Luigi Russolo . It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. The 1916 Manifesto of Futuristic Cinematography was signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Armando Ginna, Bruno Corra, Giacomo Balla and others. To

9983-444: The case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages. The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time ( Late Middle Ages ) gave its language weight, although Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside

10132-438: The cinematographic works of which they shaped the artistic point of view. They tried in this way to affirm the coherence of their style. In Denmark in the 1990s, a radical process of re-founding film d'auteur was undertaken by the creators of Dogme95 . The genre to which film d'auteur belongs implies a certain control of the filmmaker over his film from an artistic and dramatic point of view, considering in particular that

10281-455: The colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the Italian Eritreans grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school). Italian

10430-405: The country (some 0.42% of the total population). Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus , which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807. It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of

10579-408: The country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to

10728-446: The country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s. Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation . Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara , still has several Italian schools, established during

10877-579: The country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians ( Istrian Italians ) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians ) in

11026-407: The crises that will periodically shake the industry, right up to the present day. The archetypes of this film genre were The Last Days of Pompeii (1908), by Arturo Ambrosio and Luigi Maggi and Nero (1909), by Maggi himself and Arrigo Frusta . This last film was inspired by the work of Pietro Cossa who is iconographically based on the etchings of Bartolomeo Pinelli , neoclassicism and

11175-524: The cultural and historical suggestions of the country. Education is an inexhaustible source of ideas, ideas that are easily assimilated not only by a cultured public but also by the masses. Dozens of characters from texts make their appearance on the big screen such as the Count of Monte Cristo , Giordano Bruno , Judith beheading Holofernes , Francesca da Rimini , Lorenzino de' Medici , Rigoletto , Count Ugolino and others. From an iconographic point of view,

11324-464: The design and fashion industries, in some sports such as football and especially in culinary terms. In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular —other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities—are often called " Italian dialects ", a label that can be very misleading if it is understood to mean "dialects of Italian". The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date

11473-534: The diffusion of Italian television in the country. Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period , Italian is still understood by some in former colonies such as Libya. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule , Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi , who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of

11622-532: The direction of the actors and the care for the settings. Other directors include Mario Mattoli ( Schoolgirl Diary , 1941), Jean de Limur ( Apparition , 1944) and Max Neufeld ( The House of Shame , 1938; A Thousand Lire a Month , 1939). The realist comedies of Mario Bonnard ( Before the Postman , 1942; The Peddler and the Lady , 1943) are partially different in character, which partially deviate from

11771-405: The director must also be the screenwriter, without which he could not claim the complete paternity of his work. According to another restrictive representation, a film d'auteur should imperatively be an independent film, experimental or difficult to access, and produced outside the system of studios and commissioned works. He would set himself in opposition to the " Cinéma de Genre " films that use

11920-478: The educated gentlemen was to make the Grand Tour , visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It was expected that the visitor would learn at least some Italian, understood as language based on Florentine. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until

12069-462: The establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered " historical language minorities ", which are officially recognized as distinct minority languages by

12218-691: The establishment of a town southeast of Rome devoted exclusively to cinema, dubbed the Cinecittà ("Cinema City"), under the slogan " Il cinema è l'arma più forte " ("Cinema is the most powerful weapon"). The studios were constructed during the Fascist era as part of a plan to revive the Italian film industry, which had reached its low point in 1931. Mussolini himself inaugurated the studios on 21 April 1937. Post-production units and sets were constructed and heavily used initially. Early films such as Scipio Africanus (1937) and The Iron Crown (1941) showcased

12367-433: The fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy. Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (such as Spain in the Kingdom of Naples , or Austria in

12516-546: The first cinema users who demanded a greater offer. The popular consensus is remarkable to the point of encouraging the film industry to invest further production resources since these films are also distributed on the French and Anglo-Saxon markets. Thus directors among the most prolific in this field such as Oreste Mentasti , Luigi Maggi , Arrigo Frusta and Ubaldo Maria Del Colle , together with many others less known, direct several dozen films where classic narrative elements of

12665-798: The first italian film production company and the largest and probably the most famous film house in Italy founded by Gustavo Lombardo at Naples in 1904, Cines , based in Rome; and the Turin-based companies Ambrosio Film and Itala Film . Other companies soon followed in Milan, and these early companies quickly attained a respectable production quality and were able to market their products both within Italy and abroad. Early Italian films typically consisted of adaptations of books or stage plays, such as Mario Caserini 's Otello (1906) and Arturo Ambrosio 's 1908 The Last Days of Pompeii , an adaptation of

12814-466: The first time actors of theatrical origin, exploiting the historical argument in a popular and pedagogical key. The film, assimilating Manzoni's lesson of making historical fiction plausible, reconstructs the Capture of Rome on 20 September 1870. The discovery of the spectacular potential of the cinematographic medium favoured the development of a cinema with great ambitions, capable of incorporating all

12963-455: The following Nouvelle Vague – notably François Truffaut – called their wish a cinema breaking the academicism of their elders (for example Jean Delannoy and Claude Autant-Lara ) and inspired by American filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock , Howard Hawks and John Ford . In an article of the Cahiers du cinéma of 1955 in which he evokes Ali Baba by Jacques Becker , Truffaut defines

13112-634: The foundations for the birth of a true film industry. In the early years of the 20th century, silent cinema developed, bringing numerous Italian stars to the forefront until the end of World War I . In the early 1900s, artistic and epic films such as Otello (1906), The Last Days of Pompeii (1908), L'Inferno (1911), Quo Vadis (1913), and Cabiria (1914), were made as adaptations of books or stage plays. Italian filmmakers were using complex set designs, lavish costumes, and record budgets, to produce pioneering films. The oldest European avant-garde cinema movement, Italian futurism , took place in

13261-476: The free website and application Duolingo has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language. According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs , every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in

13410-636: The imprint of Telefoni Bianchi. Italian language Italian ( italiano , pronounced [itaˈljaːno] , or lingua italiana , pronounced [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna] ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire . Italian is the least divergent language from Latin , together with Sardinian (meaning that Italian and Sardinian are

13559-409: The integration of optical effects and stage action, and it was the first Italian feature film ever made. The Last Days of Pompeii (1913), by Eleuterio Rodolfi , used innovative special effects. Enrico Guazzoni 's 1913 film Quo Vadis was one of the first blockbusters in the history of cinema , using thousands of extras and a lavish set design. The international success of the film marked

13708-489: The island of Corsica (but not in the neighbouring Sardinia , which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians , would therein make for a rather slow process of assimilation to the Italian cultural sphere ). The rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia , as well as

13857-640: The language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found scattered across the Southeast of Brazil as well as in the South. In Venezuela , Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay , people who speak Italian as their home language are 1.1% of

14006-498: The late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton , for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian. Within the Catholic Church , Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents. Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in

14155-613: The late 1910s. After a period of decline in the 1920s, the Italian film industry was revitalized in the 1930s with the arrival of sound film . A popular Italian genre during this period, the Telefoni Bianchi , consisted of comedies with glamorous backgrounds. Calligrafismo was instead in sharp contrast to Telefoni Bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic , highly formalistic , expressive in complexity and deals mainly with contemporary literary material. While Italy's Fascist government provided financial support for

14304-534: The late 19th to the mid-20th century, millions of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence. In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul , Brazil, where Talian

14453-514: The law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica ) is closely related to medieval Tuscan , from which Standard Italian derives and evolved. The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the natural changes that all languages in regular use are subject to, and to some extent to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata . The most prevalent were substrata (the language of

14602-541: The main references are the great Renaissance and neoclassical artists, as well as symbolists and popular illustrations. In the 1910s, the Italian film industry developed rapidly. In 1912, the year of the greatest expansion, 569 films were produced in Turin, 420 in Rome and 120 in Milan. Popular early Italian actors included Emilio Ghione , Alberto Collo , Bartolomeo Pagano , Amleto Novelli , Lyda Borelli , Ida Carloni Talli , Lidia Quaranta and Maria Jacobini . Lost in

14751-412: The margins of society who, instead of struggling to emancipate themselves (as happens in contemporary Hollywood cinema), go through an authentic ordeal in order to preserve their own virtue. Protest and rebellion by the female protagonists are out of the question. It is a strongly conservative cinema, tied to social rules upset by the war and in the process of dissolution throughout Europe. An exemplary case

14900-435: The maturation of the genre and allows Guazzoni to make increasingly spectacular films such as Antony and Cleopatra (1913) and Julius Caesar (1914). Giovanni Pastrone 's 1914 film Cabiria was an even larger production, requiring two years and a record budget to produce, it was the first epic film ever made and it is considered the most famous Italian silent film . It was also the first film in history to be shown in

15049-413: The media for the general public, the film d'auteur is frequently opposed to " cinéma commercial" , the first being considered demanding, intellectual, elitist and with a reduced budget while the second is destined for the greatest number or claims to be familial, entertaining, and is produced with significant means. For certain critics, the concept of film d'auteur takes on a qualitative value and becomes

15198-417: The mid-1950s to the end of the 1970s, Commedia all'italiana and many other genres arose due to auteur cinema , and Italian cinema reached a position of great prestige both nationally and abroad. The Spaghetti Western achieved popularity in the mid-1960s, peaking with Sergio Leone 's Dollars Trilogy , which featured enigmatic scores by composer Ennio Morricone , which have become popular culture icons of

15347-515: The most conservative Romance languages). Spoken by about 85 million people, including 67 million native speakers (2024), Italian is an official language in Italy , San Marino , Switzerland ( Ticino and the Grisons ), Corsica , and Vatican City . It has official minority status in Croatia , Slovenian Istria , and the municipalities of Santa Tereza and Encantado in Brazil . Italian

15496-767: The most prestigious awards at national level. Presented by the Accademia del Cinema Italiano in the Cinecittà studios, during the awards ceremony, the winners are given a miniature reproduction of the famous statue . The finalist candidates for the award, as per tradition, are first received at the Quirinal Palace by the President of Italy . The event is the Italian equivalent of the American Academy Awards . The history of Italian cinema began

15645-412: The nation was unified in 1861. Italian is a Romance language , a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan , especially its Florentine dialect , and is, therefore, an Italo-Dalmatian language , a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian . According to Ethnologue , lexical similarity

15794-457: The nation's film industry, notably the construction of the Cinecittà studios (the largest film studio in Europe), it also engaged in censorship, and thus many Italian films produced in the late 1930s were propaganda films . A new era took place at the end of World War II with the birth of the influential Italian neorealist movement, reaching a vast consensus of audiences and critics throughout

15943-426: The national costume, imposing canons of beauty, role models and objects of desire. These models, strongly stylized according to the cultural and artistic trends of the time, moved away from naturalism in favor of melodramatic acting, pictorial gesture and theatrical pose; all favored by the incessant use of close-up which focuses the attention on the expressiveness of the actress. The most successful comedian in Italy

16092-408: The number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower cost and Italian, as the dominant language, spread. Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian Peninsula , as well as the prestige variety used on

16241-590: The official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta . Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels , and the language has a 7-vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants. During

16390-640: The official photographer of the House of Savoy , the Italian ruling dynasty from 1861 to 1946. In this role he filmed the first Italian film, Sua Maestà il Re Umberto e Sua Maestà la Regina Margherita a passeggio per il parco a Monza ("His Majesty the King Umberto and Her Majesty the Queen Margherita strolling through the Monza Park "), believed to have been lost until it was rediscovered by

16539-728: The oldest film festival in the world, held annually since 1932 and awarding the Golden Lion ; In 2008 the Venice Days ("Giornate degli Autori"), a section held in parallel to the Venice Film Festival, has produced in collaboration with Cinecittà studios and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage a list of a 100 films that have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978: the " 100 Italian films to be saved ". The David di Donatello Awards are one of

16688-559: The one who brands into his works original motifs which belong only to himself and no other. This concept, dominant in French critical discourse since the 1960s, makes the director the sole creator to the detriment of the screenwriter or co-screenwriter, producer, and technical team. This vision is contested and seen as rejected since the 1990s, notably by the French-American critic Noël Burch who judges it to be too limited and uniquely focused on form. In Germany , film d'auteur

16837-630: The openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations andà , annà and nare replace the standard Italian andare in the area of Tuscany, Rome and Venice respectively for the infinitive "to go"). There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of

16986-584: The original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most probably simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either. Throughout Italy, regional varieties of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian , are spoken. Regional differences can be recognized by various factors:

17135-458: The other hand, almost everyone still speaks the Corsican idiom , which, due to its linguistic proximity to the Italian standard language, appears both linguistically as an Italian dialect and therefore as a carrier of Italian culture, despite the French government's decades-long efforts to cut Corsica off from the Italian motherland. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it

17284-406: The population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II , contributed to

17433-517: The post-war period, and which launched the directorial careers of Luchino Visconti , Roberto Rossellini , and Vittorio De Sica . Neorealism declined in the late 1950s in favour of lighter films, such as those of the Commedia all'italiana genre and important directors like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni . Actresses such as Sophia Loren , Giulietta Masina and Gina Lollobrigida achieved international stardom during this period. From

17582-469: The proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left. Although use of

17731-528: The pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" between vowels in many words: e.g. va bene "all right" is pronounced [vabˈbɛːne] by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), [vaˈbeːne] by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line ); a casa "at home" is [akˈkaːsa] for Roman, [akˈkaːsa] or [akˈkaːza] for standard, [aˈkaːza] for Milanese and generally northern. In contrast to

17880-415: The publication of Agnolo Monosini 's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612. An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed

18029-422: The re-founding of a cinema that breaks with the conventional workmanship of the majority British productions. The productions derived from it want to be more authentic, singular and anchored in a certain social reality. When Free Cinema was launched in 1956, Reisz declared: "We work outside the habitual framework of the industry and we have in common social concerns which we try to express in our films." The auteur

18178-542: The referendum that allowed France to annex Savoy and Nice, and a group of his followers (among the Italian Savoyards ) took refuge in Italy in the following years. Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles . Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi called for the inclusion of the " Corsican Italians " within Italy when Rome

18327-575: The release of Ma l'amor mio non muore (1913), by Mario Caserini . The film had great success with the public and encoded the setting and aesthetics of female stardom. Within just a few years, Eleonora Duse , Pina Menichelli , Rina De Liguoro , Leda Gys , Hesperia , Vittoria Lepanto , Mary Cleo Tarlarini and Italia Almirante Manzini established themselves. Films such as Fior di male (1914), by Carmine Gallone , Il fuoco (1915), by Giovanni Pastrone , Rapsodia satanica (1917), by Nino Oxilia and Cenere (1917), by Febo Mari , changed

18476-399: The screens. Historical films such as Blasetti's 1860 (1934) and Carmine Gallone 's Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal (1937) were also popular during this period. With the transition to sound cinema, most of the Italian silent film actors, still linked to theatrical stylization, find themselves disqualified. The era of divas, dandies and strongmen, who barely survived the 1920s,

18625-504: The script. In its December 2012 issue, Les Cahiers du cinéma propose a certain number of measures to counter the "ten flaws" of contemporary auteur cinema that it lists and defines (cult of the master, seriousness of a priest, interchangeable actors, non-scenes of montage, etc.). Certain festivals specialize in films d'auteur . The Festival international du film francophone de Namur (the FIFF) gives its selection to films d'auteur from

18774-604: The show Nero, or the Destruction of Rome represented by the Barnum circus . Followed by Marin Faliero, Doge of Venice (1909), by Giuseppe De Liguoro , Otello (1909) by Yambo and L'Odissea (1911), by Bertolini, Padovan and De Liguoro. L'Inferno , produced by Milano Films in 1911, even before being an adaptation of Dante's canticle , was a cinematic translation of Gustave Doré 's engravings that experiments with

18923-469: The silent proto-giallo (mystery, crime, investigation investigative and final twist) constitute the structural aspects of cinematic representation. Elvira Notari , the first female director ever in Italy and one of the premieres in the history of world cinema, directed Carmela, la sartina di Montesanto (1916). While in Palermo , Lucarelli Film produced La cassaforte n. 8 (1914) and Ipnotismo (1914),

19072-401: The streets, in cafes or in variety theatres in the presence of a swindler who has the task of promoting and enriching the story. Between 1903 and 1909 the itinerant cinema Italian film was quieting, until then considered as a freak phenomenon, took on consistency assuming the characteristics of an authentic industry, led by four major organizations: Titanus (originally Monopolio Lombardo ),

19221-406: The tastes of the public. The sound cinema arrived in Italy in 1930, three years after the release of The Jazz Singer (1927), and immediately led to a debate on the validity of spoken cinema and its relationship with the theatre. Some directors enthusiastically face the new challenge. The advent of talkies led to stricter censorship by the Fascist government . The first Italian talking picture

19370-473: The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists —individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in technology play a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the 15th century,

19519-593: The technical quality of Italian films. Many films are still shot entirely in Cinecittà. Benito Mussolini founded Cinecittà studio also for the production of Fascist propaganda until World War II . During this period, Mussolini's son, Vittorio , created a national production company and organized the work of noted authors, directors and actors (including even some political opponents), thereby creating an interesting communication network among them, which produced several noted friendships and stimulated cultural interaction. With an area of 400,000 square metres (99 acres), it

19668-641: The technological advancement of the studios. Seven thousand people were involved in the filming of the battle scene from Scipio Africanus , and live elephants were brought in as a part of the re-enactment of the Battle of Zama . The Cinecittà provided everything necessary for filmmaking: theatres, technical services, and even a cinematography school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia , for younger apprentices. The Cinecittà studios were Europe's most advanced production facilities and greatly boosted

19817-434: The theoretical concept of " politique des auteurs " which consists in studying a film as the continuation of the aesthetic choices of a filmmaker and not as a work entirely apart, attributable to a precise genre or story. Consequently, being an auteur means that the director has full authority over his films. He surpasses technical constraints in order to define his own style. The auteur is therefore, according to Truffaut,

19966-399: The three years leading up to World War I , as production consolidates, mythological, comedy and drama films are exported all over the world. In the meantime, in the actor's field, the phenomenon of stardom was born which for a few years will experience unstoppable success. With the end of the decade, Rome definitively established itself as the main production center; this will remain, despite

20115-469: The title Divina , were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and

20264-542: The total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language. The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the L'Osservatore Romano ( Vatican City ), the L'Informazione di San Marino ( San Marino ), the Corriere del Ticino and the laRegione Ticino ( Switzerland ),

20413-415: The traditional genre of comedy with kammerspiel and realist film, revealing the director's ability to outline the characters of the middle class. While not comparable to the best results of international cinema of the period, the works of Camerini and Blasetti testify to a generational transition between Italian directors and intellectuals, and above all an emancipation from literary models and an approach to

20562-528: The visual medium. This innovative form of spectacle ran out, in a short time, a number of optical attractions such as magic lanterns, cinematographers, stereoscopes, panoramas and dioramas that had fueled the European imagination and favoured the circulation of a common market for images. The nascent Italian cinema, therefore, is still linked to the traditional shows of the commedia dell'arte or to those typical of circus folklore. Public screenings take place in

20711-446: The world. During the 1980s and 1990s, directors such as Ermanno Olmi , Bernardo Bertolucci , Giuseppe Tornatore , Gabriele Salvatores and Roberto Benigni brought critical acclaim back to Italian cinema, while the most popular directors of the 2000s and 2010s were Matteo Garrone , Paolo Sorrentino , Marco Bellocchio , Nanni Moretti and Marco Tullio Giordana . The country is also famed for its prestigious Venice Film Festival ,

20860-515: The years following World War I . Several major studios, among them Cines and Ambrosio, formed the Unione Cinematografica Italiana to coordinate a national strategy for film production. This effort was largely unsuccessful, however, due to a wide disconnect between production and exhibition (some movies weren't released until several years after they were produced). With the end of World War I, Italian cinema went through

21009-426: Was The Song of Love (1930) by Gennaro Righelli , which was a great success with the public. Alessandro Blasetti also experimented with the use of an optical track for sound in the film Resurrection (1931), shot before The Song of Love but released a few months later. Similar to Righelli's film is What Scoundrels Men Are! (1932) by Mario Camerini , which has the merit of making Vittorio De Sica debut on

21158-400: Was André Deed , better known in Italy as Cretinetti , star of comic short film for Itala Film . Its success paved the way for Marcel Fabre ( Robinet ), Ernesto Vaser ( Fricot ) and many others. The only actor of a certain substance, however, was Ferdinand Guillaume , who became famous with the stage name of Polidor . The historical interest of these films lay in their ability to reveal

21307-561: Was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War . Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent , only

21456-503: Was ambitious. Aware of the Italian cultural backwardness, they decided to break all ties with the previous tradition through a rediscovery of the peasant world, hitherto practically absent in Italian cinema. Sun (1929) by Alessandro Blasetti shows the evident influence of the Soviet and German avant-gardes in an attempt to renew Italian cinema in accordance with the interests of the fascist regime. Rails (1929) by Mario Camerini blends

21605-525: Was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy , but King Victor Emmanuel II did not agree to it. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican , which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. Francization occurred in Nice case, and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy. In Corsica, on

21754-443: Was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro , an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of

21903-401: Was produced and distributed at the dawn of Italian cinema. The most prolific production houses in the 1910s were Cines , Ambrosio Film , Itala Film , Aquila Films , Milano Films and many others, while titles such as Il delitto del magistrato (1907), Il cadavere misterioso (1908), Il piccolo Sherlock Holmes (1909), L'abisso (1910) and Alibi atroce (1910), breached the imagination of

22052-658: Was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the Treaty of Turin (1860) . It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania ), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia ), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by

22201-540: Was the oldest movement of European avant-garde cinema. Italian futurism , an artistic and social movement , impacted the Italian film industry from 1916 to 1919. It influenced Russian Futurist cinema and German Expressionist cinema . Its cultural importance was considerable and influenced all subsequent avant-gardes, as well as some authors of narrative cinema; its echo expands to the dreamlike visions of some films by Alfred Hitchcock . Futurism emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as

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