Laura E. Ruberto (Berkeley City College)

Italian Americans have long had a complicated relationship to screens of all kinds. Italians’ arrival en masse to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century parallels the rise of film technology and the development of film as an art form, an industry, and a social phenomenon. They have thus been connected, some would say, entangled, in all aspects of screen culture ever since—as makers of media, as represented within it, and as consumers of it.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Italian Americans worked as artists, musicians, performers, and other creative types both in live theater venues and in the burgeoning film industry. Their presence in these entertainment spaces countered and contradicted limiting images of Italian immigrants while also at times fortifying them; they were both symbolic referents for the rampant anti-immigrant xenophobia in the United States and simultaneously great participants in the sometimes-exploitative images created by mass media entertainment.

Italian immigrants and their subsequent descendants in silent cinema were commonly depicted as exotic, ignorant, innocent, unusual, as well as a group to be feared. Films such as Wallace McCutcheon’s 1906 The Black Hand and Reginald Barker’s 1915 The Italian reinforced the notion that Italian immigrants were criminally suspect and otherwise outside of mainstream society. Italian immigrant Rudolf Valentino became a wildly successful silent film star, popularizing the image of the Latin Lover and paving the way for further mediated clichés of Italians and Italian Americans as exotic and promiscuous, even though Valentino never played Italian (immigrant) characters. The limited on-screen presence of Tina Modotti similarly reinforced the idea of an Italian immigrant as a strange and wanton character, imagery which would be later reinforced in her photography, even though she also never played an Italian (immigrant) character.

Collectively, these silent film depictions of Italian immigrants were to some degree adaptations from theater and from representations in print illustrations; they also paralleled photographic exposés of Italian immigrants in the same era (i.e., Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives). Moreover, they influenced how Italian Americans were portrayed in the first decade of the sound era: the 1930s Hollywood gangster film genre successes came in great part from films associating Italian Americans with organized crime (e.g., Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface or Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 Little Caesar).

These various mediated characterizations impacted the socio-cultural reception of Italian Americans, supporting broader overall prejudice, strategic discrimination, and at times physical brutalities against them particularly through the first half of the twentieth century (consider, for instance, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the trial and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, or the 1942 Enemy Alien Restrictions). This anti-Italian prejudice should be understood as part of a narrative that reinforced the notion of Italian Americans existing in a liminal white identity of contested privilege and power (a position influenced by a number of factors, including Italian regional differences brought with early immigrants from Italy as well as American regional differences they encountered upon arrival). In some cases, this liminality gave Italian Americans advantages (e.g., they fared much better than Japanese Americans during World War II) while still marking them as marginally outside of structural systems of power.

Screen imagery associated with Italian Americans thus evolved, paralleling changing mainstream attitudes towards Italian Americans. By the years following World War II, Italian Americans were more squarely accepted by dominant US society as white as they themselves also embraced this white status. Even so, a particular Italian American version of whiteness emerged in popular media and consumer culture which continued to represent Italian Americans as part of the working class and as not completely or simply white while ever-more frequently imparting on that ambiguous-white-experience a favored stance.

In the first decades after World War II, this complex Italian ethnic white identity appeared in Hollywood films as well as early broadcast television. Many narratives referenced organized crime (e.g., The Untouchables, ABC: 1959-1963) but others, such as Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949) or George Cukor’s Wild is the Wind (1957), presented, for the first time, hyper-sexualized and desperate Italian American women characters, usually played by Italian-born actors such as Valentina Cortese or Anna Magnani. Other themes from these decades included Italian American urban working-class everyman heroism, generational conflicts, and women’s sexuality in films such as Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955), Full of Life (Richard Quine, 1956) or Love with a Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963)—the latter a rare film to take on abortion before Roe v. Wade.

Screen acting shifted after this era. Italian American actors—especially but not only playing Italian American roles—have been part of the American screen culture from the beginning, but from the post-civil rights decade of the 1970s and following up until our contemporary moment their visual presence has been more impactful. Certain now-iconic roles played by male actors are well documented (i.e., Al Pacino, Robert De Niro), but much less attention has been given to female actors. A short list from the last fifty years includes Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco, Isabella Rossellini, Annabella Sciorra, Mira Sorvino, and Marisa Tomei—all of whom have brought exceptionally vibrant complexity to their performances of Italian American characters.

In the 1970s both film and television productions contained high-visibility story-lines that centered on Italian Americans, especially working-class and urban Northeasterners [e.g., Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977)], and popular television characters such as Penny Marshall’s Laverne Di Fazio (Laverne & Shirley, ABC: 1976-1983) or John Travolta’s Vinnie Barbarino (Welcome Back, Kotter, ABC: 1975-1979). Visual references to Italian American connections to organized crime remained powerful screen images too, in great part shaping consumer and vernacular culture still today. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part One (1972) and The Godfather, Part Two (1974) films, coming after the popular success of Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, had a great deal to do not only with a renewed popularity of Italian American gangster characters across all media but with Italian American themes generally. Coppola’s films as well as films by Martin Scorsese and others featuring prominent Italian American characters revitalized the gangster genre and helped reinforce the idea that being Italian American was cool.

More and more shows and films also involved Italian Americans in great numbers on both sides of the camera, presenting a shift in who was in control of Italian American stories. These changes came at a time when diversity generally was exploited by popular mass-produced culture (e.g., Blaxploitation films) as a celebration of a multicultural America that took hold of US institutions even as racial harmony was far from a reality. By the 1980s, the codified hipness associated with Italian Americans and general acceptance in media representations of this white ethnic group became especially apparent in the work of auteur director, Spike Lee, who has insightfully shaped a number of his films around narratives where Italian and Italian American characters are interconnected with African Americans.

In the latter half of the last century and first decade of the new century, another watershed moment occurred with the success of showrunner, David Chase’s The Sopranos (HBO: 1999-2007), a show that focused on New Jersey Italian American organized crime families and their everyday lives. Among its key innovations were rich narratives and character development which reckoned with Italian American heroification, ethnic maligning, and nostalgia for the motherland. A handful of reality television shows centering on Italian American life came within a few years of The Sopranos, most famously, Jersey Shore (MTV: 2009-2012) which leveraged and re-popularized an Italian ethnic youth culture, so-called “Guido culture”. Meanwhile, Italian American presence continued in big-budget, cinematic productions such as John Crowley’s period piece Brooklyn (2015) and in smaller independent films, such as Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners (2007), the latter which sets up a conventional romantic love triangle with an urban lesbian twist. To some extent, such independent works developed out of the successes of previous filmmakers, such as Nancy Savoca, a director who has consistently centralized Italian ethnic stories on screen, especially those focusing on women.

A review of screen cultures in the twenty-first century would be remiss without commenting on how new, digital media platforms also draw on Italian American imagery in still-evolving ways: from the Italian Canadian puppet Nonna Maria (2005 - ) to various mafia-related third-person video games and the continued transformation of the Super Mario Bros. enterprise. With consumers who are constantly engaged in the creation, manipulation, and dissemination of media through YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other outlets, we are reminded that popular images and “texts” are by no means stagnant but instead richly hybrid, always reproduceable and alterable. At times these digital creations appear as hackneyed ethnic displays reinforcing staid notions of ethnicity and conservative points of view. But even the most derivative meme also suggests that in audiences’ recasting lies the possibility of new concepts and directions for how Italian American culture and identity are lived and understood on a global scale. Thus the screens of today and tomorrow will continue to capitalize on and reflect the multiplicities of experiences and dynamic identities of Italian America.

Nota Bene: This introduction covers productions from the United States, but Italian diasporic screen culture has a global presence, one that shadows transnational mobilities related to Italy: early examples include the Segreto Brothers’ filmmaking in Brazil, Quirino Cristiani’s animation in Argentina, or Elvira Notari’s emigrant shorts in Italy; more contemporary examples from Italy especially evoke ongoing transnational realities (e.g., work by Gianni Amelio, Emanuele Crialese, or Ferzan Özpetek).

Resources

Primary sources