The Divo and the Duce

‘We Have Everything to Learn from the Americans’: Film Promotion, Product Placement and Consumer Culture in Italy, 1945-1965

“…It exploited post World War One weaknesses of the European film industry to quickly establish a dominant position. 19 It was supported in this drive by the government, whose trade experts provided market assessments to assist companies, including film ones, on the basis of the Department of Commerce's conviction that 'trade follows the film'. 20 However, the European context presented a number of differences with respect to the United States, in terms of economics, politics and culture.…”

“…65 To capitalise on this, Italian branches of American companies supplied huge quantities of star material to the film press, with some postwar titles such as Star and Hollywood featuring it programmatically. From Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in 1926 onwards, 66 American stars had supported film exports with personal visits to the peninsula. Such publicity-driven appearances were examples of what Boorstin would dub 'pseudo-events'.…”

“…In the booming 1920s, when modern mass consumerism was born, spectators were encouraged to see stars as models for selfprojection and self-fashioning, or what Giorgio Bertellini calls 'the commodified democratisation of their lives'. 76 The studio system worked to burnish and groom stars, who emerged at a time when the highly heterogeneous American society of the period was seeking ways of achieving the orderly domestication of disruptive sexualities. 77 Though younger female stars in Italy seemed to possess common backgrounds and similar physical characteristics, there was a lack of standardisation in star creation that reflected the way the film industry developed, without big studios or any factory system of production.…”