“Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950" (essay) (Book Section)
Title: “Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950" (essay)
Author: Noa Steimatsky
Editor: Brian R. Jacobson
Abstract: Cinecittà – the Fascist-built “Hollywood on the Tiber,” one of the world’s great movie studios, 9 km. southeast of Rome – played a key role in the affairs of the Italian state, the havoc of battle, and post-World War 2 reconstruction. In the context of my broader research project uncovering the studio’s fantastic, often mind-spinning history in the 1940s, I focus in this essay on new findings relating to the establishing of a POW camp in Cinecittà’s backlot in 1942. Its inmates, some 400 black South African prisoners, joined with several dozen black women and children shuffled from occupied France, were deployed as movie extras in both German and Italian propaganda fiction films – a practice that foreshadowed MGM’s postwar use of refugees on these same grounds. Tracing the interplay between disparate historical and fictional mise-en-scènes – one penetrating or enveloping the other under the conditions of war, displacement, and confinement – the essay raises new questions of film culture and institutions in relation to state apparatuses, the reality of the studio and its spatial practices, and the world-making powers of cinema.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520297609/in-the-studio
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Title: In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments
ISBN: 9780520297609

“Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950.” (Book Section)
Title: “Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950.”
Author: Noa Steimatsky
Editor: Brian R. Jacobson
Abstract: Cinecittà – the Fascist-built “Hollywood on the Tiber,” one of the world’s great movie studios, 9 km. southeast of Rome – played a key role in the affairs of the Italian state, the havoc of battle, and post-World War 2 reconstruction. In the context of my broader research project uncovering the studio’s fantastic, often mind-spinning history in the 1940s, I focus in this essay on new findings relating to the establishing of a POW camp in Cinecittà’s backlot in 1942. Its inmates, some 400 black South African prisoners, joined with several dozen black women and children shuffled from occupied France, were deployed as movie extras in both German and Italian propaganda fiction films – a practice that foreshadowed MGM’s postwar use of refugees on these same grounds. Tracing the interplay between disparate historical and fictional mise-en-scènes – one penetrating or enveloping the other under the conditions of war, displacement, and confinement – the essay raises new questions of film culture and institutions in relation to state apparatuses, the reality of the studio and its spatial practices, and the world-making powers of cinema.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520297609/in-the-studio
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Title: In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments,
ISBN: 9780520297609