Space and time of industry in Italian cinema and literature, 1954--1964: Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino

This dissertation examines the representation of the rapid modernization of Italy in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini and in the novels of Pasolini and Italo Calvino. The study focuses on the ten year period between 1955 and 1965, a time known as the "Economic Miracle". During this epoch provincial and rural Italy were swept away by the rampant transformations brought about by postwar global capitalism and were replaced, almost overnight, by an industrialized society where mass consumption and mass entertainment came to define the new human environment. Framed within the context of the lively theoretical and intellectual debates of the time, this thesis is a study of the aesthetic projects of Antonioni, Pasolini and Calvino. The formal aspects and, specifically, the narrative and linguistic experimentation of the works analysed are seen in the light of questions and issues that emerged during the sweeping process of reorganization neocapitalism brought to Italian society. Particular attention is given to the depiction of transformed urban and industrial settings and to the representation of the contemporary subject's experience of living in (or at the fringes of) such a space. Thus, questions of ideology (reading and interpreting social space), and social practice (living in that space), take on importance in the works of Antonioni. In Pasolini's works, questions of space manifest themselves in terms of a Gramscian Marxist concern for the hierarchies between centre/periphery, rural/urban, and between an industrialized north and a pre-industrial south. And in Calvino's "trilogy on modernity" a space rapidly transformed by real estate development, industrialization, consumerism, and pollution works to examine the subject's presence, action and performance within contemporary society. The picture that emerges draws attention to modernization as the cultural context of Italian cinema and literature during this epoch. Attention is given to the three authors' theoretical pronouncements and to their participation in the debate evolving within Italian culture on the role of the intellectual and of art in society. In the study's conclusion, their distinct trajectories are considered in terms of their contributions to the intellectual history of contemporary Italy.