The World's War on the World's Stage: Italian Movie Studio Cinecittà, 1942-1950

FAIN: FEL-262993-19

Noa Steimatsky, PhD
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (New York, NY 10012)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the history of the Italian film studio Cinecittà from 1942-1950.

I apply to the NEH Fellowship to complete research and write a book on Cinecittà during World War 2 and its aftermath. Copiously documented and illustrated, the book will trace how the Fascist movie studio was seeped in the affairs of state and the havoc of war. New research on Cinecittà’s use as POW camp starting 1942–first by the Italians, then by the Germans, finally by the Allies—will be joined with my work on its later use as DP camp. Most striking is how film productions used black South African POWs as movie extras, foreshadowing MGM’s similar postwar use of DPs. These and other findings–yet to be followed through and analyzed–expand the definition, complexity, and scope of my original project. I aim to reconstruct the most complete narrative of Cinecittà’s vagaries through the 1940s, but am also invested in historiographic questions of film culture and institutions, cinematic space and worldmaking in relation to histories of violence, displacement and confinement.

Associated Products

“Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950" (essay) (Book Section)
Title: “Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950" (essay)
Author: Noa Steimatsky
Editor: Brian R. Jacobson
Abstract: Cinecittà – the Fascist-built “Hollywood on the Tiber,” one of the world’s great movie studios, 9 km. southeast of Rome – played a key role in the affairs of the Italian state, the havoc of battle, and post-World War 2 reconstruction. In the context of my broader research project uncovering the studio’s fantastic, often mind-spinning history in the 1940s, I focus in this essay on new findings relating to the establishing of a POW camp in Cinecittà’s backlot in 1942. Its inmates, some 400 black South African prisoners, joined with several dozen black women and children shuffled from occupied France, were deployed as movie extras in both German and Italian propaganda fiction films – a practice that foreshadowed MGM’s postwar use of refugees on these same grounds. Tracing the interplay between disparate historical and fictional mise-en-scènes – one penetrating or enveloping the other under the conditions of war, displacement, and confinement – the essay raises new questions of film culture and institutions in relation to state apparatuses, the reality of the studio and its spatial practices, and the world-making powers of cinema.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520297609/in-the-studio
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Title: In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments
ISBN: 9780520297609

“Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950.” (Book Section)
Title: “Backlots of the World War: Cinecittà 1942-1950.”
Author: Noa Steimatsky
Editor: Brian R. Jacobson
Abstract: Cinecittà – the Fascist-built “Hollywood on the Tiber,” one of the world’s great movie studios, 9 km. southeast of Rome – played a key role in the affairs of the Italian state, the havoc of battle, and post-World War 2 reconstruction. In the context of my broader research project uncovering the studio’s fantastic, often mind-spinning history in the 1940s, I focus in this essay on new findings relating to the establishing of a POW camp in Cinecittà’s backlot in 1942. Its inmates, some 400 black South African prisoners, joined with several dozen black women and children shuffled from occupied France, were deployed as movie extras in both German and Italian propaganda fiction films – a practice that foreshadowed MGM’s postwar use of refugees on these same grounds. Tracing the interplay between disparate historical and fictional mise-en-scènes – one penetrating or enveloping the other under the conditions of war, displacement, and confinement – the essay raises new questions of film culture and institutions in relation to state apparatuses, the reality of the studio and its spatial practices, and the world-making powers of cinema.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520297609/in-the-studio
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Title: In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments,
ISBN: 9780520297609

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