Integrazione verticale al contrario? Il ruolo della distribuzione nel sistema industriale del cinema italiano del dopoguerra

The economic history of Italian cinema tends to use Hollywood as a touchstone to investigate the national context and to focus on the production stage and on producers, to the detriment of other subjects, namely distributors, whose activity is traditionally described as that of intermediaries. In our research, focused on the year 1959/60 and conducted on archival material from the Italian National State Archive and on the trade press, we challenge these historical assumptions and follow the money flow that the production of certain films implied and generated, in order to observe the positioning of the different players of the system: State bureaucracy, producers, distributors. We find that networks of local distributors played a pivotal role in the financing of large parts of Italian film production and hypothesize that the same may apply to a larger extent to the post-war years.