The Missing Link: Regional Distribution and Exhibition in Post-war Italy

The aim of this chapter is to show the strong interdependence between the sectors
of production and distribution/exhibition in post-war Italian cinema. To do this,
we focus on a little-studied aspect of the Italian film industry: regional distribution.
The basic assumption from which we start is that, at least from the end of World
War One to the advent of private television networks in 1976, regional distribution
constituted the backbone of the Italian film industry. Working as financial enablers,
these distributors and exhibitors provided cohesion and continuity in a system
otherwise characterised by a fragmented production landscape.
In a previous article dedicated to the functioning of the distribution sector and
based on data relating to the first-run exhibition of Italian films in the 1959/60
season, we demonstrated that considerable film production finance came from
local and mid-sized distributors. Films financed by the ‘minimum guarantee’ (the
advance payment made by distributors to producers for the right to distribute films)
were not necessarily B-movies aimed at provincial consumption. Consequently, the
Italian film industry appeared as a localised variation on the package-unit system
described by Janet Staiger, in which post-studio era Hollywood majors, instead of
focusing on content production, preferred to finance and release films produced by
smaller, independent companies. Arguably, the Italian system worked in a similar
way; however, instead of a variety of small- to mid-sized producers providing
content to the nation-wide distribution arms of a few big studios, as in Staiger’s
account of post-war Hollywood cinema, in post-war Italy a grassroots aggregation
of small and medium, often family-run distribution companies funded and released
approximately half of the domestic film output, guaranteeing the routine func-
tioning of a fragmented national film production sector, made of hundreds of small
companies in constant need of financing..
In this chapter, we would like to describe — in light of current knowledge and
available documents — the concrete functioning of regional film distribution in
1940s–70s Italy and its role within the industrial system, especially in relation to
exhibition. Further analysis of distribution can provide some insights not only for
scholars of Italian cinema, but also for those who study any other film industry not
conforming to the Hollywood model.