Italians on the Move: Towards a History of Migration Cinema

My dissertation investigates how Italian cinema has portrayed the extraordinary mobility of the peoples of Italy. The scope of my analysis is limited to sound film, covering a timespan of approximately seventy years (from 1932 to 2000), and is concerned exclusively with films in the Italian language depicting emigration or internal migration. I maintain that the need to recount this phenomenon has given birth to a veritable filmic tradition that, if not unique to Italian cinema, occupies a particularly prominent position in its history. The films I analyze span from Baldassarre Negroni's romantic comedy Due cuori felici (1932) to Guido Brignone's epic Passaporto rosso (1935); from Aldo Fabrizi's family drama Emigrantes (1948) to Eduardo De Filippo's social satire Napoletani a Milano (1953); from Pietro Germi's classic Il cammino della speranza (1950) to Ermanno Olmi's modernist I fidanzati (1963); and from Alberto Sordi's travel comedy Un Italiano in America (Sordi 1969) to Gabriele Salvatores's road movie Marrakech Express (1989). The sheer volume of titles on the subject reflects the staggering numbers regarding Italian mobility, and the goal of this extensive academic study, in which I discuss a wide array of pictures within the larger framework of Italian mobility, is to address the critical oversight surrounding this tradition. Given the large breadth of this study, I employ the term migration cinema to refer to the tradition of Italian films whose narrative centers on one or more characters migrating internally or emigrating. While my approach to the material varies from chapter to chapter in assonance with the issues and preoccupations of the texts I analyze, throughout the entire dissertation I employ the language and the critical tools of narratology and genre studies as the basic scaffolding for the delineation of a comprehensive topography of migration cinema.