The Celluloid Atlantic by Saverio Giovacchini

The Celluloid Atlantic by Saverio Giovacchini

Offers a fresh look at American and Italian cinema in the postwar period.

The Celluloid Atlantic changes the way we look at American and Italian cinema in the postwar period. In the thirty years following World War II, American and Italian film industries came to be an integrated, transnational unit rather than two separate, nation-based entities. Written in jargon-free prose and based on previously unexplored archival sources, this book revisits the history of Neorealism, World War II combat cinema, the "Western all'Italiana," and the career of John Kitzmiller, the African American star who made Italy his home and was the first person of color to win the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The Celluloid Atlantic makes the trailblazing argument that culturally hybrid genres like the so-called spaghetti Western were less the exceptions than the norm. Giovacchini argues that the waning of the Celluloid Atlantic in the early 1970s was due to the economic policies of the first Nixon administration, specifically its important, but largely neglected, Revenue Act of 1971, as well as to the ideological debates between Europeans and Americans that intensified during the American intervention in Vietnam.

"The Celluloid Atlantic brilliantly identifies the broad traits of a Cold War cinematic alliance between the US and Western Europe that, beyond a geopolitical partnership and mutual financial interests, impinged upon disturbing ideological positionsGiovacchini's close analysis of key films, including their production and exhibition circumstances, reveals racist practices of self-exculpation that consistently privileged white (colonial) narratives and white characters as the main processes and agents of history. After this study, several decades of Euro-American cinema will not look the same." — Giorgio Bertellini, author of The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America

"Through a series of intriguing, illustrative, and often overlooked case studies, Giovacchini skillfully introduces readers to the ‘integrated cultural zone’ of post-World War II 'cinema of the West.' This cinema emerged from a transatlantic exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas, scripts, models, individuals, and capital—a dynamic that has often been neglected or overlooked in discussions focused on European national differences, autochthony, or US dominance and imperialism. Witty, provocative, and deeply researched, The Celluloid Atlantic represents a remarkable achievement by a historian unafraid to challenge entrenched historiographical assumptions." — Mario Del Pero, Centre d'Histoire, Sciences Po-Paris

Saverio Giovacchini is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Hollywood Modernism, Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal and the coeditor, with Robert Sklar, of Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style.