III.

The 1950s and 1960s

Faced, as in the 1920s, with strong competition from Hollywood, the Italian industry embarked in the 1950s on a three-pronged strategy. Low-budget popular comedies and genre films were made for the domestic market, while for larger projects co-production agreements were sought with other European countries. Meanwhile, the Americans were encouraged to invest the profits from the Italian market in productions shot in Italy, the most famous of which was the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film Ben-Hur (1959). Prestigious productions were planned for international distribution, culminating in 1963 with Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), financed by 20th Century-Fox. The enormous success of La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini (1960) and the critical acclaim won by Otto e Mezzo (Federico Fellini, 1963; 8½) and the modernistic L’Avventura (1960) and L’Eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), both by Michelangelo Antonioni, placed Italy once again at the forefront of world cinema. A generation of new author-directors emerged, including Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone!, 1961); Bernardo Bertolucci, with Prima della Rivoluzione (1964; Before the Revolution); and Marco Bellocchio, with I Pugni in Tasca (1965; Fists in the Pocket), who took up important political and cultural themes in a highly personal manner.

The 1960s were also remarkable for the extraordinary worldwide success of a genre of film initially designed mainly for domestic consumption: the Italian or “spaghetti Western“. With Spanish or Yugoslavian landscapes standing in for the American West, spaghetti Westerns created a world of ritualized and almost abstract violent spectacle that found typical expression in the films of the genre’s master, Sergio Leone (Per un Pugno di Dollari/A Fistful of Dollars, 1964; Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966).