Lacrime italiane: Catene as the Canon of Post-World War II Italian Melodrama

The aim of this paper is to provide an example of the construction of a generic canon in the context of Italian post World War-II cinema, and to observe how such a construction – just as the genre creating process – can often be an intersection of independent user groups behaviors, which nonetheless bear strict relation with the text’s inner features. I maintain that Raffaello Matarazzo’s Catene, produced in 1949 by Titanus along with its smaller associated company Labor Film, is a very appropriate case study. In fact, that movie had a pivotal role in a broad process that involved the transition of the Italian cinema from the confused productive panorama of the latter half of the 1940s to the more industrially structured phase of the 1950s. Moreover, the canonization of Catene is indeed a very long process, and it can be reconstructed as a network connecting various user groups through 25 years. Finally, Catene happens to be a very heterogeneous text, which seems to be purposely structured in order to meet the expectations of different users.