Once Upon a Time in Italy: Transnational Features of Genre Production 1960s-1970s

In the introduction to his and Steven Ricci's seminal collection on European cinema, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith points out that "the area in which Europe has most seriously lost out over the past twenty or thirty years has been that of popular genre production" and goes on to state that "until the mid-1960s the major European production countries continued to produce genre films of various types [...] mainly for domestic consumption" (Nowell-Smith 1998: 10). However, a closer look at the 1960s popular genre production of some of the major European film industries (Italy, France, Germany) reveals that the emphasis placed by Nowell-Smith on domestic consumption can, in some cases, be misleading. In particular, it is noteworthy that many of the hundreds of genre films produced in Italy from 1959 onwards fared poorly at the domestic box office and, furthermore, that entire genres, such as the Italian horror film or the giallo, continued to prosper even though they were often neglected by the Italian audience. In this essay, we will argue that it is not possible to fully understand European popular genre cinema through a nation-state perspective and, at the same time, that such a cinema is a phenomenon that somehow failed to acquire a stable transnational identity, both economically and culturally. We will focus in particular on a number of Italian-French co-productions of the 1960s, in order to show how they rely on a typically European production system to provide a culturally international or, perhaps, non-national product, mostly aimed at the North-American market. To this extent, Jacques Deray's The Swimming Pool (La piscine) and Umberto Lenzi's Paranoia (Orgasmo) provide two interesting case studies, as they were both produced in 1969 in a joint venture between a French and an Italian company, and share some generic features while being clearly aimed at very different audiences.