'"I padri e i maestri": Genre, Auteurs and Absences in Italian Film Studies

This article discusses the current state of Italian film studies, placing it within a critical context in which Italian cinema is thought to be perennially ‘in crisis’. It addresses the discipline's obsessive interest in neorealism and in auteur cinema, and looks at the history of debate on the contested critical status of Italian popular and genre production, using as a case study the inchiesta in 1955–56 in the Communist newspaper L'Unità on ‘cinema e popolo’. It argues that Italian film studies needs to develop a more sophisticated theoretical and historical approach to the study of both neorealism and popular cinema, in order to account for neglected films such as Vittorio De Sica's collaboration with David O. Selznick, Stazione Termini (1953).