Cinema of Naples

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Naples played a prominent role in the rise of another industry of movement: the motion picture industry.

— David Clarke[1]
Sophia Loren, raised in Pozzuoli, is considered one of the most famous actresses in the history of cinema.
Antonio de Curtis, alias Totò, the "prince of laughter": Considered one of the greatest Neapolitan actor of all time.[2][3]

The history of

Internet Movie Database, the first of which would be Panorama of Naples Harbor from 1901.[4]

History

19th century

Étienne-Jules Marey in Naples, January 1, 1882.

During his stay in Naples in 1888, the French inventor

Lumiere Company shot some films in the Neapolitan province, including in the capital, Levée de filets de peche, Via Marina and Santa Lucia,[5]
effectively making it one of the cities with the oldest cinematographic testimony.

In May 1898 the Paduan Mario Recanati, considered the first in Italy to distribute and trade films, opened the first cinema in Galleria Umberto I at number 90;[6] in that year, the new invention was also used for advertising purposes, achieving such success as to worry the Naples Police Headquarters.[5]

20th century

From the start of the century to the First World War

In the early years of the twentieth century, the first Italian film house, namely the Titanus (originally Monopolio Lombardo),[7] was built in the city, in the Vomero district. Founded by Gustavo Lombardo in 1904, it is the largest and probably the most famous film house in the country.[8]

The first short film is due to Roberto Troncone who shot Il ritorno delle carrozze da Montevergine in 1900; he filmed the eruption of

Vesuvius with great popular success and in 1907 projected Il delitto delle Fontanelle in the Sala Elgè in via Poerio, considered the first film produced in Naples.[9]

In 1906 the city newspapers, faced with the success of cinema, witnessed by the twenty-seven cinemas, spoke of an "epidemic":[5] the inauguration of the International Cinema caused riots, put down by the police and it was thought to widen Piazza Carità to solve the problems of circulation caused by the presence of this room.[5] In 1908, six of the seven film magazines published in Italy were Neapolitan and Gustavo Lombardo's «Lux» magazine was also widespread abroad.[5][10]

Francesca Bertini in Assunta Spina, co-directed by her.

In 1907, with La dea del mare by

Melania G. Mazzucco as «the undisputed queen of Italian silent cinema»:[13] Tuscan by birth but with a Neapolitan father she moved to the Neapolitan capital as a child learning its language:[11] she is considered the first diva of cinema and at the time her fame was such that the correspondence came to her specifying only the city where she lived;[14] she was also a screenwriter under the pseudonym Frank Bert.[13]

Around 1913, Giuseppe Di Luggo's Polifilms company was officially founded.

Warner Brothers».[19]

Film Dora was born around 1909, subsequently becoming Dora Film, with Elvira Notari at work as director, screenwriter and producer, of whose work the Library of Congress conserves some copies of A Piedigrotta,[20][21] opening in 1925 in New York City the Dora Film of America, for the public made up of emigrants[22] who will be able to see them with the titles of Mary the Crazy Woman, Blood and Duty, The Orphan of Naples and From Piave to Trieste.[19] Brunetta also defined his films «events inspired by successful songs, or taken from drama, stories of street urchins and "piccerille" (children) who get lost».[19] Family-run production house, after starting to color the films, it went on to produce, with Elvira Notari at the helm, films based on plays by Federico Stella and Crescenzo Di Maio, aiming, according to the memory of her son Eduardo, to make «'o cinema de' napulitane» (the cinema of the Neapolitans).[21]

The period between the two wars

Even in the Fascist era, very little inclined to dialectal folklore, "local" films were born, some of real importance.

— Martini, pag. 218
Fermo con le mani!
.

In the two-year period 1924–1925 a third of Italian films were shot in the Neapolitan capital, in a shed located on the corner of via Cimarosa and via Aniello Falcone.

Fermo con le mani! by Gero Zambuto, Neapolitan legend Totò made his debut as a film actor.[23]

In the 1930s, however, film production moved to Rome, according to Goffredo Lombardo because his father Gustavo wanted to «change the production system and the quality of films»;[10] however, according to the historian Daniela Manetti because a provision of the censorship office for cinema in 1928 already constituted «A very serious limitation to the Neapolitan genre that Lombardo has made appreciated even outside the regional borders and a serious mortgage for Naples as a city of cinema».[10]

From the postwar period to the end of the century

Le mani sulla città. Castel Sant'Elmo
can be glimpsed above.

The early

Le mani sulla città in 1963: the film, awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival of the same year,[26] is defined as a «merciless portrait of a Naples bewildered and devastated by savage and suffocating building speculation that started in the 1950s».[27]

Two films taken from scripts and directed by

100 Italian films to be saved,[29][30] exceeding one billion liras at the time.[31]

In 1981 Neapolitan legend

David di Donatello Awards, for best film and best leading actor.[33]

21st century

In the 21st century, the importance of Naples as a center of film production, filming location and film subject is established, with the release of internationally successful films such as

L'amica geniale and The Bastards of Pizzofalcone.[34][35]

Neapolitan actors and directors awarded internationally

I sette peccati capitali
.

Among the Neapolitan actors,

supporting actress for Naples' cinema history, winning the Nastro d'Argento for Best Supporting Actress in 1955.[39]

Among the directors, Vittorio De Sica, who identified himself as a Neapolitan,[40] was awarded four times with an Oscar.[41]

Naples has also been widely represented in national and international cinematography: great directors have followed one another over the years, starting with the

Napoli velata
.

Films set in Naples awarded internationally

The films set in Naples are cinematographic films produced in the Neapolitan city which include

commercials and chronophotographs
.

Among the most important films set in Naples are:

Cannes Film Festival.[53]

History

The

Lumière Brothers carried out some filming in 1898 on the Riviera di Chiaia, in Via Toledo, on the Vesuvius funicular and in other areas of the city, some filming in 1898. In the Galleria Umberto I the Recanati room was already active since 1897, the first cinema in Italy created by the Venetian Mario Recanati.[54]

The Vesuvio Films plant in Poggioreale in 1912.

From this experience, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the city became one of the poles of the nascent Italian film industry, together with

Fascist Regime decided to centralize film production in Cinecittà. In Naples, Notari also founded a Film Art School (in Via Leonardo di Capua, 15).[56][57][58] In via Purgatorio, in the Poggioreale area, Vesuvio Films was founded by Augusto Turchi in 1909, one of the first film manufacturers in Italy which produced over fifty films until 1914.[59]

As is already the case in other European and American cities, due to the so constant and widespread presence of cinematographic reality in the city of Naples and its surroundings, the so-called cinematographic tourism has also developed here, which offers the possibility of visiting the places immortalized by the most great film directors (such as De Sica or Rossellini) in their films, organizing real itineraries and guided visits to the locations of the most famous films.[60]

The pioneering times of the Neapolitan film industry ended during the

Fascist period: the emphasis placed on the development of Rome and the lowering of costs due to centralization meant that the production of Italian films was transferred to the banks of the Tiber, where they were built the Cinecittà establishments.[61]

Actuality

In the last ten years, thanks to the great work carried out by the Campania Region Film Commission, Naples has become one of the most loved sets in the world. Over 400 productions have decided to shoot films and TV series in Naples between 2015 and 2024.

References

  1. ^ David Clarke, The Cinematic City, Routledge, pag. 49 on Google Books.
  2. ^ CyberItalian. "Totò, un grande attore – parte 2 (Totò a great actor – part 2) – Cyber Italian Blog" (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  3. ^ Michele, De Lucia (November 27, 2021). "Antonio De Curtis aka Totò". CAMPANIA WELCOME. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  4. ^ "Filming Location Matching "Naples, Campania, Italy" (Sorted by Year Descending)". IMDb. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g Barbagallo, pages 139–144
  6. ^
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  7. ^ "Titanus, lo scudo nobile del cinema italiano". La Repubblica (in Italian). February 16, 2014. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  8. ^ "La storia di Titanus". Titanus (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  9. ^ "Napoli nel Cinema". Napoli nel Cinema (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
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  11. ^
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  12. ^ "Francesca Bertini". IMDb. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  13. ^ a b "BERTINI, Francesca in "Enciclopedia del Cinema"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
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  17. ^ a b "La storia della prima Cinecittà italiana al Vomero". Vomero Magazine (in Italian). April 4, 2016. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  18. ^ "LOMBARDO, Gustavo in "Dizionario Biografico"". Treccani (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  19. ^ a b c Brunetta, vol. 1, pag. 32
  20. ^ Notari, Elvira. "Quando il cinema era donna". briganti.info (in Italian). Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
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  22. ^ "NOTARI, Elvira in "Enciclopedia del Cinema"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  23. ^ Martini, pag. 218
  24. ^ "1950 | Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences". www.oscars.org. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
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  26. ^ "Le mani sulla città in "Enciclopedia del Cinema"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  27. ^ Fusco, Gaetano. Le mani sullo schermo: il cinema secondo Achille Lauro. Liguori Editore. p. 73.
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  29. ^ "Cento film e un'Italia da non dimenticare". Movieplayer.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  30. ^ "Ecco i cento film italiani da salvare Corriere della Sera". www.corriere.it. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  31. ISBN 978-88-8440-171-7
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  32. OCLC 61441685
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  33. ^ a b "La Stampa – Consultazione Archivio". www.archiviolastampa.it. p. 19. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  34. ^ "Napoli, il cinema resiste: ecco i set ancora aperti". Corriere della Sera (in Italian). October 26, 2020. Retrieved April 23, 2023.
  35. ^ "Archivi Mario Franco - IL CINEMA A NAPOLI DALLE ORIGINI AD OGGI". Fondazione Morra (in Italian). Retrieved April 23, 2023.
  36. ^ "Lòren, Sophia nell'Enciclopedia Treccani". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  37. ^ "Totò nell'Enciclopedia Treccani". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  38. ^ "Troisi, Massimo nell'Enciclopedia Treccani". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  39. ^ "1955: Nastro d'argento a Tina Pica, regina del cinema –". Rai Teche (in Italian). March 30, 2017. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  40. ^ "Foto e lettere inedite di De Sica, il ciociaro cosmopolita che voleva essere napoletano". Corriere del Mezzogiorno (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  41. ^ "VITTORIO DE SICA, UN ITALIANO CON 4 OSCAR". VeniVidiVici (in Italian). September 17, 2018. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  42. ^ "Mario Monicelli e Rap – 100 anni di cinema". www.comune.napoli.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  43. ^ "Pasolini e Napoli 'Caro Eduardo giriamo un film' – la Repubblica.it". Archivio – la Repubblica.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  44. ^ IDN, Redazione (June 24, 2015). "Maccheroni di Ettore Scola – Itinerari di Napoli" (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  45. ^ "Tornatore: 'Senza Napoli non avrei mai fatto il regista'". Repubblica TV – Repubblica (in Italian). February 9, 2015. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  46. ^ "Gabriele Salvatores: "Il mio ragazzo invisibile è nato in una scuola di Secondigliano"". la Repubblica (in Italian). January 3, 2018. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  47. ^ "Napoli, il primo ciak del nuovo film di Matteo Garrone". Informareonline (in Italian). September 25, 2017. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  48. ^ Esposito, Roberta (June 1, 2014). "Video. La passione napoletana firmata John Turturro". Vesuvio Live (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  49. ^ "Paisà". cinematografo.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  50. ^ "Premi del cinema 1955". Wayback Machine (in Italian). February 20, 2017. Archived from the original on February 20, 2017. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  51. ^ "Matrimonio all'italiana". cinematografo.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  52. ^ "1965 | Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences". www.oscars.org. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  53. ^ "CAROSELLO NAPOLETANO – Festival de Cannes". www.festival-cannes.com (in French). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  54. ^ Vetrano, Dresiana. "Napoli ex Capitale anche del Cinema. Così il fascismo distrusse la Cinecittà napoletana". Identità Insorgenti (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  55. ^ "La prima casa cinematografica d'Italia è nata a Napoli!". Grandenapoli.it. February 20, 2017. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  56. ^ "cinema napoletano elvira notari" (in Italian). June 2006. Archived from the original on September 27, 2012. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  57. ^ "Napoli nel Cinema". Napoli nel Cinema (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  58. ^ "Elvira Notari". enciclopedia delle donne (in Italian). Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  59. OCLC 43439536. Retrieved December 8, 2022 – via www.worldcat.org.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  60. ^ "Campania Movietour | In viaggio nei luoghi del cinema – A Cinematic Journey on Movie Locations". September 12, 2018. Archived from the original on September 12, 2018. Retrieved December 8, 2022.
  61. ^ Paliotti, Vittorio; Grano, Enzo (1969). Napoli nel cinema (in Italian). Azienda autonoma soggiorno cura e turismo. p. 167.

Bibliography

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