Spaces and Bodies of Industrial Labor in Italian Cinema 1945-1975

The essay analyzes the representation of industrial labor in Italian narrative cinema between 1945 and 1975, i.e. from the postwar moment to the economic boom, and from the labor movement struggles around 1968 to the crisis of Italian industry in the mid-1970s. Industrial workers, a rather scant presence in neorealist films, gradually become a commonplace figure in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s – in politically charged films, in the work of modernist auteurs, as well as in more mainstream, popular cinema. The essay focuses, first of all, on the cinematic spaces of labor and daily life, highlighting the intertwining of industrialization and internal migration in Italy at the time. The focus then shifts towards the workers’ bodies, as they becomes the site of a complex and layered cinematic rendition, involving the registers and codes of both comedy and melodrama in order to convey the specificity of their psycho-physical experience as well as the symbolism they’re invested with.