Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• lino, Daniele

Titel

Produzioni (dis)umane: la fabbrica nella cultura Italiana (1945-1968)

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation is an examination of the physical and ideological significance of factories in Italian literature and film from the postwar period through the 1960s. With emphasis on the years of the “economic miracle”, this study offers a broader and more comprehensive definition of industrial literature and the concept of “progress” as it oscillated between economic and social poles, as well as a comparative analysis of artistic and commercial representations of factories, including promotional materials created by industrial companies starting in the 1940s. The first of four chapters provides a comparison of the representation of factories in Elio Vittorini’s periodical, «Il Politecnico» (1945-1947), with company magazines such as «Pirelli» (1948-1972) and «Civiltà delle macchine» (1953-1979), to showcase the intellectual’s potential role as a mediator between competing social forces and the definition of the factory in the years when Italy emerged as a prominent industrial economy. The second chapter is dedicated to the specific context and intended social function of Adriano Olivetti’s factories. A section of the chapter focuses on the issues of the literary periodical «Il Menabò» (1959-1967) that were dedicated to Industria e letteratura, highlighting the difficulty of defining the “factory novel” (romanzo di fabbrica) and the relevance of industrialism in Italian literature. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two “factory novels” written by authors directly involved in the industrial world: Ottiero Ottieri’s Donnarumma all’assalto and Paolo Volponi’s Memoriale. The final two chapters are dedicated to the cinematic representation of the factory. The third chapter offers an analysis of industrial films, including a series of films produced by companies such as Pirelli, FIAT, and Olivetti, which served as instruments of education and governability, but which also contain distorted representations of modernization and the factory. The last chapter focuses on representations of the factory in Italian cinema of the 1960s, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Deserto rosso (1964) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). These films, in which industrialism becomes a main character, underscore the sense of alienation experienced not only by factory workers, but by modern man in general as the industrial landscape extended beyond the physical limits of the factory.