Reflections on A History of Italian Cinema Without Names: Comedy and Melodrama Revisited

The essay attempts to approach film history in new terms, and to contribute to a discussion which may lead us to the creation of a new ‘topography’ of the basic stylistic elements that, while common to different authors and films, can also find independent and diverse modes of connection. in the effort to overcome traditional approaches to film history, the case study is Italian cinema since, in the aftermath of WW II, such national cinema Italian film always escaped and still escapes traditional definitions of genre; that is, generic cinema certainly exists in an Italian context, and yet it has either found not much space (see for instance the case of horror cinema and/or western cinema) or has been thoroughly reinterpreted. The analysis, then, focuses on the develpment of both melodrama and comedy in an Italian cinematic context.