Title:
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Ethnic Audiences and Film Culture : Italian Immigrants, Cultural Identity, and the Distribution of Italian Films in London at the Beginning of the 20th Century
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This thesis examines the relationship between Italian immigrants and cinema in early
twentieth century London. Through an investigation into a variety of both primary
and secondary sources, I retrace the journey of migrant people and of moving images
from Italy to the British capital. The aim of this study is to examine how the cultural
identity of London's Italian community was constructed between 1890 and 1918 and
the place of cinema within this process.
The research engages with a series of questions that are linked to the notion
that cinema's social role and the access of Italians to and involvement in cinema is
better determined by first defining the immigrant community both culturally and
historically. A discussion of the representations of, and discourses circulating about,
Italians and Italian-ness, and the relative availability of cinematic images produced in
or depicting Italy, permit further hypotheses about the response of the colony to
moving images. The study of a very particular audience and the context in which it
was situated, therefore allows me to explore a complex set of cultural and social
histories. As such, the histories of emigration, film production, distribution and
exhibition, and film culture more generally developed in this thesis inform a
thoroughly contextual understanding of the relation between the 'Little Italians' and
the cinema.
In its conclusions the thesis reveals that, among London's Italian community,
the formation of a sense of national identity and of a sense of belonging, whether to
the country of origin or to the country of destination, remained problematic, even
contested. It was elite groups above all that promoted a strong sense of national
affiliation and identity, which was rather different to the experiences and allegiances
of the working class members of the immigrant community. In this sense, my thesis
argues that the importance of the cinema in the cultural life of the London's Italian
colony was principally a result of the use made of it by the upper/middle-class
immigrant elite during wartime.
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