aoleary phenomenology of cinepanettone

7/27/2019 Aoleary Phenomenology of Cinepanettone

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italian studies, Vol. 66 No. 3, November, 2011, 43143

The Society for Italian Studies 2011 DOI 10.1179/007516311X13134938380526

The Phenomenology of the

cinepanettone*

Alan OLeary

University of Leeds

The Italian film industry has often been pronounced moribund but has always

survived by providing critically despised films for a popular audience. Since the early1980s, irregularly at first and then annually, it has produced a series of comedies

with titles like Vacanze di Natale 90 (Enrico Oldoini, 1990) and Natale a Rio(Neri Parenti, 2008), released in time for Christmas and colloquially referred to as

cinepanettoni. In Italian film studies, as in journalistic discourse, the cinepanettonehas become a byword for low quality and a metonym for the degradation of Italian

film culture. The traditional suspicion of the popular (in the sense of mass culture)

in culturally authoritative circles in Italy itself has meant that the cinepanettoneremains almost unstudied. Italian cinema studies remains wedded to the notion of a

national cinema, where the national is conceived of as a kind of diplomatic project

to be presented abroad, and genre and popular filmmaking (and film-going) is stillseen as inauthentic and pernicious. Catherine ORawe has analysed this phenomenon,

and writes that:

tensions around the question of the popular audience in Italy are still evident both in film

scholarship outside Italy, and in mainstream Italian film criticism. These tensions tend

to manifest themselves with particular acuity in relation to the despised genre of the

cinepanettone.1

Precisely for this reason it seems to me that the study of the cinepanettone asthe despised genre par excellence of popular Italian cinema is essential and overdue.

This article is an account of a work in progress: an ongoing investigation into thecinepanettone, its production, its construction in discourse and its audiences. Thearticle is intended as an account of some of the methods employed in the project and

some of the challenges it involves.

* This article is based on entries in the research blog for the project Holiday Pictures: Ritual, Genre and Italian

National Cinema, at . I would like to thank all of those who have

commented on the blog, especially Reena Aggarwal, Luciana DArcangeli, Natalie Fullwood, and Danielle

Hipkins. Special thanks to Alice Santovetti, Catherine ORawe, indispensable interlocutor, and to my research

assistant on the project, Luca Peretti, a doctoral student at Yale. Thanks also to the AHRC and to Leeds

University for awarding an Early Career Fellowship and sabbatical leave, respectively, to allow me to do some

of the research for the Holiday Pictures project.1 Catherine ORawe, The Italian Spectator and her Critics, The Italianist, 30: 2 (2010), 28286 (p. 282).


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432 ALAN OLEARY

Cinepanettone?

The origins of the word cinepanettone itself are unclear, but it was probably coined

in the early 2000s as a journalistic term to refer to the variation of the film di Natale

formula established by director Neri Parenti with his young co-scriptwriters Fausto

Brizzi and Marco Martani. The term will have been intended pejoratively, like thecoinages spaghetti western and poliziottesco (the 1970s Italian cop film), even if

like these it has to some extent being recuperated and drained of its critical content

(see, for example, the fan website ). Still, the term is not

liked by many in the industry itself, because of the implication in it that the films are

a matter of mere consumption, a kind of cultural over-indulgence when the spectator

is already full, akin to the slice of panettone ingested after a substantial Christmasmeal. Film di Natale is the preferred industry term, and publicity material (trailers,

posters) will speak of il vostro film di Natale. The industry term is bland, however,

and fails to give a sense of what might be distinctive about these films, something

that might well be discerned in their power to annoy and even offend; hence thedecision to stick with the colloquial, pejorative cinepanettone.

The relatively recent vintage of the term cinepanettone points to a difficulty:how many and which films belong to the category of cinepanettone; and by whomand how is the category defined? The character of the comedy in the cinepanettonihas changed over the years as they have been handed to different directors and script-

writing teams, but the series derives from a film of 1983, Vacanze di Natale (directedby Carlo Vanzina, and scripted by him with brother Enrico), which was a winter

and updated version of their own Sapore di Mare from earlier the same year, itself adeliberate reworking of the 1959 film Vacanze dinverno, an ensemble comedy of

manners directed by Camillo Mastrocinque with Alberto Sordi and Vittorio De Sica.More or less inclusive definitions of the cinepanettone that I have encountered(whether on fan sites, in the criticism, or in conversation with Italians) tend to

emphasise one or more of the following as criteria of affiliation: only comic films

released for Christmas; only films concerned with Christmas; only those films

produced by Filmauro; only those films with the actor Christian De Sica; only thosefilms produced in the new century. Plainly, none of these criteria is adequate on

its own, but all rarely pertain at the same time. I have resisted offering my own

definition, preferring to compare the sometimes conflicting understandings by fans

and critics. The titles in Table 1 below are derived from two lists on the fan

site , an elenco cinepanettoni originali

2

and gli altri film dinatale.3 These fan lists are anything but definitive and I have adapted them butin a project such as this, concerned with perceptions (that is, discourse) as well as

texts, they are where we must start.4 The fan sites elenco cinepanettoni originali is

2 (accessed 22 June 2011).3 (accessed 22 June 2011).4 The cinepanettone cannot be considered a filone in the same way as, say, the spaghetti western. Christopher

Wagstaff has written of the near-impossibility of studying exhaustively the spaghetti western, of which rough-

ly 450 were released in the period 196478, and of how the inevitable method of sampling has tended to favour

the quality films of the filone: A Forkful of Westerns: Industry, Audience and the Italian Western, in Popu-lar European Cinema, ed. by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 24561 (p.246)). This is not a problem when studying a corpus of just twenty-seven films, and in the era of DVD and

download, availability of the films is assured.


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433THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE CINEPANETTONE

TABLE 1

THE CINEPANETTONECANON

All films were released in December unless otherwise indicated.* I have added the names of directors andproduction companies, and indicated where appropriate the presence of Massimo Boldi (MB) and/or ChristianDe Sica (CDS), the two actors most closely associated with the cinepanettone.

1983Vacanze di Natale. Carlo Vanzina. Filmauro. (CDS)

1984 Vacanze in America. Carlo Vanzina. C. G. [Cecchi Gori] Silver Film. (CDS)

1990Vacanze di Natale 90. Enrico Oldoini. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1991Vacanze di Natale 91. Enrico Oldoini. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1992 (October?)Anni 90. Enrico Oldoini. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1993Anni 90 Parte II. Enrico Oldoini. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1994 S.P.Q.R. 2000 e 1/2 anni fa. Carlo Vanzina. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1995 Vacanze di Natale 95. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1996A spasso nel tempo. Carlo Vanzina. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1997A spasso nel tempo lavventura continua. Carlo Vanzina. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1998Paparazzi. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

1999 Vacanze di Natale 2000. Carlo Vanzina. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2000 Bodyguards Guardie del corpo. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2001 Merry Christmas. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2002 Natale sul Nilo. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2003 Natale in India. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2004 Christmas in love. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2005 Natale a Miami. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (MB/CDS)

2006 Natale a New York. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (CDS)

2006 Ol. Carlo Vanzina. Medusa. (MB)

2007 Natale in crociera. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (CDS)

2007 (November)Matrimonio alle Bahamas. Claudio Risi. Mari Film/Medusa. (MB)

2008Natale a Rio. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (CDS)

2008 (November)La fidanzata di pap. Enrico Oldoini. Mari Film/Medusa. (MB)

2009 Natale a Beverly Hills. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (CDS)

2010 Natale in Sud Africa. Neri Parenti. Filmauro. (CDS)

2010 (November)A Natale mi sposo. Paolo Costella. Mari Film/Medusa. (MB)

* The month of release comes from the Internet Movie Database, where provided, and/or from the date of the censor-ship certificate awarded the film (see the searchable index of titles available on the ANICA website at this address:

http://www.anica.it/online/index.php/produzione-italiana/archivio-del-cinema-italiano.html [accessed 22 June 2011]).

The recent Boldi films have been released in November to avoid competition with the Filmauro cinepanettone.

notable because it includes Sapore di mare but excludes the 1984 Vacanze in America,perhaps because it was produced by Cecchi Gori and not Filmauro. It also excludes

all the recent films starring Massimo Boldi, that is, those released after the actor

defected from Filmauro to produce his own rival series of holiday pictures. Boldis

solo films are instead included in the fan sites second list, along with films featuringLeonardo Pieraccioni which would conventionally be placed in something like an


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434 ALAN OLEARY

oppositional relation to the cinepanettone, not least by Pieraccioni himself, and whichfor that reason are excluded from the table.5

The cinepanettone as phenomenon

The cinepanettone has been successful enough to have become part of the annualfestive rituals for large numbers of Italians. The viewing in the cinema of the

latest cinepanettone has itself, arguably, ritual aspects; it is certainly a phenomenonto be studied. This leads me to the title of this article. The use of the term phenom-

enology cannot but recall Umberto Ecos analysis of the character and appeal of

a notorious television personality in his piquant little study Fenomenologia di

Mike Bongiorno.6 While admiring the perspicacity of Ecos analysis, I want to

distinguish my approach and tone from his: Eco is scornful, witty, and ironic, and

the employment of the polysyllabic fenomenologia is mocking in the context of

Mike and his market. Ecos attitude is the sign of his attempt to distinguish himself

from the object of his study, and despite his pioneering work on popular culture,

it is clear that he treats it as other.7 I am concerned not to be scornful or ironicabout the cinepanettone or its audiences, and my use of the term phenomenologyderives more directly from its use in the study of religion. Try replacing the words

Christianity with cinepanettone, and believer with viewer in the following:

Phenomenology is a long word for two fairly simple things. One, too often neglected, is

using empathy: seeing what the agent sees, or in this case seeing what the believer sees

trying to enter the thoughtworld of Christianity, but not necessarily with any endorse-

ment (or criticism) of the standpoint. [. . .] The second thing which is phenomenology is

analysis and classification.8

I will return to the question of analysis and classification later, but want to

note that, elsewhere, the same writer talks of the attempt to reach an empathetic

objectivity, or if you like a neutralist subjectivity in relation to his theme.9 This

is difficult to achieve in relation to the cinepanettone and its audiences for severalreasons. Foremost among these is the manner in which the cinepanettone has beenperceived or received by right thinking people in Italy itself, by Italian critics, and

even in Italian cinema studies. Discourse about the films makes constant reference to

their vulgarity by which seems to be meant the presence of bad language and

(female) nudity and to their makers alleged indifference to artistic criteria, as wellas to the supposedly celebrated behaviour of the films grotesque protagonists. These

aspects are seen as an uncritical reflection and even glorification of the very worst

aspects of Italian society. Indeed, the cinepanettone is seen as symptomatic or even

5 The distinctions drawn by press, critics and public between the cinepanettone and the films of Pieraccioni orof the comic team Aldo, Giovanni e Giacomo is part of the matter to be studied in a project like mine.

6 Originally published in 1961, and available in Diario minimo (Milan: Bompiani, 1963), pp. 3035.7 John Caughie once observed that many writing on the subject assume that popular culture is what other

people like: Popular Culture: Notes and Revisions, in High Theory/Low Culture, ed. by Colin MacCabe(Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 15671 (p. 170).

8 Ninian Smart, The Phenomenon of Christianity (London: Collins, 1979), pp. 89.9 Ninian Smart, The Phenomenon of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 6.


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partly causative of a supposed (Pasolinian) cambiamento antropologico that has ledto the success of the Right in Italy.10

Expression of this attitude is found passim in the Italian media and on the web,but examples are not lacking in academic criticism, Anglophone or Italian. WilliamHope, for example, describes Natale a Beverly Hills as vacuous and adduces thefilm as an index of the parlous state of film culture in Italy.11 Roy Menarini goesfurther and sees the cinepanettoni of Neri Parentias representing the lowest point towhich the cinema can be dragged, in terms of the films technical quality, screenwrit-ing, acting, direction and artistic design: sono film non redimibili; mescolanocattiva televisione e pessima pubblicit (the relationship with television is a trope inthe criticism).12 Menarini does point out that sub-genres like the cinepanettone what he calls il cinema farsesco folclorico (p. 80) exist in many differentnational/film cultures. What strikes him as particularly regrettable is the fact that astratum of the Italian public places such value on seeing these films year after year:Si tratta, con tutta evidenza, di un appuntamento sociale, di un comportamento

rituale, di una traccia che, a vederla con ottimismo, ci parla di una funzione dimassa del cinema (p. 80). Menarini is surely correct to point to the ritual aspect ofthe film-going that attends the cinepanettone, as I have done above, but it occurs tome that discourse like his, in its content and regularity, is just as ritualistic asthe seasonal consumption of the films themselves. The cinepanettone is regularlydeplored by all but a few critics, and this translates also into a dismissal of thepublic for the films, always implied to be not like us.

The best known study of the cinepanettone is a piece by the writer and publicintellectual Francesco Piccolo in which he gives a witty and perceptive account ofseeing the 2005 releasealong with a packed audience in one of the largest auditoriums

in Italy.13 Piccolo makes clear that the cinepanettone is a kind of film made for otherpeople: less educated, perhaps, but certainly less cultured than ourselves. The peoplehe encounters at Natale a Miami in the Cinema Adriano in Piazza Cavour,Rome, are from another world, and they are not simply strange, they are morallyreprehensible: the women wear fur coats; some are even obese!

Capite cosa voglio dire: un altro mondo. E sia chiaro: sono venuto altre volte al cinemaAdriano, e ho incontrato persone che conoscevo. Oggi, 26 dicembre, no. Oggi il giorno

in cui tutti vanno al cinema; quindi, quelli che ci vanno sempre, non ci vanno. (p. 93)

Ci sono persone di tutti i tipi, dai bambini di otto anni ai nonni che scendono le scale

accompagnati dai figli o nipoti. Ci sono soprattutto gruppi di coppie (due, tre o quattro

10 For examples of discourse that constructs the cinepanettone as a bad thing see: Giorgio Simoncelli, Il Natalenon pi quello di una volta, in Cinema a Natale: da Renoir ai Vanzina (Novara: Interlinea, 2008), pp. 8589;Gianluigi Negri and Robert S. Tanzi Natale con i tuoi... Parenti, Natale al cinema: da La vita meravigliosaa A Christmas Carol (Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2009), pp. 18394.

11 William Hope, Introduction, in Italian Film Directors in the New Millennium, ed. by William Hope, (New-castle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 136 (p. 33n). It is significant that Hope relegates Italys most

successful series of the past several decades to a single haughty footnote.12 Roy Menarini, Il cinema dopo il cinema: dieci ide sul cinema italiano 20002010 (Genoa: Le Mani, 2010), pp.

80, 81. Menarini has, very graciously, responded to my critical invocation of his work in a comment to my

research blog available at (accessed 22 June 2011).13 Francesco Piccolo, Una tonnellata di equivoci, LItalia spensierata (Rome: Laterza, 2007), pp. 91130.


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436 ALAN OLEARY

coppie) di ogni et, e le donne sopra i cinquanta sembrano avere come segno distintivo

la pelliccia; gruppi di amici adolescenti, in particolare maschi; famiglie al completo,

con nonni e senza, e soprattutto in numero di quattro, genitori e due figli, di solito

un adolescente e un bambino, [. . .] La caratteristica dei miei vicini che tre su quattro

(tranne la ragazza) sono molto grassi. (p. 99)

It is unclear if such people should be protected from the films they have chosen to

watch, or whether the films are an organic expression of their lack of taste. But it

does seem clear that the audience and films are seen to exist in a kind of symbiotic

vulgarity. Ifwe (critics, academics, persons of taste) are critical and discerning, they(the public for the cinepanettone) are passive and easily pleased. We are capable ofappreciation and therefore also disparagement, whereas they can only consumewhat they are fed (hence, of course, the pejorative term film-Christmas-cake itself).

Seeing what the agent seesQualcuno, prima o poi, dovr fare anche unanalisi del pubblico

di certi film oltre che del film stesso. (Marco Giusti) 14

My position would be that the public for the cinepanettone is not other, but simplyunknown, and for that reason a part of my project must be the study of the audience

itself. The empirical part of my study has been formulated (to some extent anyway)

as a corrective reply to the seductive pop ethnography of Francesco Piccolo: my

observations and data will be used to test and, where appropriate, correct his conclu-

sions. The empirical part of the project is, moreover, formulated in opposition to the

negative conceptualization of the Italian spectator regularly encountered in criticaldiscourse produced in Italy itself,15 and also in opposition to a deterministic political

economy model of popular culture which sees its products almost exclusively in terms

of how the conditions of production shape cultural content.16 John Storey comments

of the political economy approach that it tends to assume that audience negotiations

are fictitious, merely illusory moves in a game of economic power.17 He goes on:

While it is clearly important to locate the texts and practices of say, popular music

within the field of their economic determinations, it is insufficient to do this and think

you have also analysed important questions of audience appropriation and use. (p. 113)

My guiding assumption for the study of the audience is provided by a writer likeHenry Jenkins, who conceives of the consumers of popular texts as participants whoappropriate and re-circulate entertainment objects in an active fashion.18 As such, the

14 Quoted in the preface to Franco Spicciarello, Alberto Pallotta and Simona Sirianni, Vacanze di Natale diEnrico e Carlo Vanzina (Rome: Un Mondo a Parte, 2003), pp. 46 (p. 6).

15 See ORawe, The Italian Spectator, and Alan OLeary and Catherine ORawe, Against Realism: On a

Certain Tendency in Italian Film Criticism, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16: 1 (2011), 10728,especially pp. 11315.

16 Aeron Davis, Investigating Cultural Producers, in Research Methods for Cultural Studies, ed. by MichaelPickering, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 5367 (p. 53).

17 John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2003), p. 113.

18 See Jenkins blog at [accessed 15 July 2011].


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hypothesis that the empirical part of my research is designed to test is that the view-

ers of the cinepanettone are not passive consumers but active users. I see the spectatoras active rather than passive (or as actively choosing passivity), critical rather than

unthinking, and as a user rather than as a consumer per se. The hypothesis I am

trying to test is that the spectator is not subjected to the films; s/he does things withthe films.

If the public is an unknown, how can we get to know it? Well, one way is to go

along with it to see the cinepanettone, and I have done this just as Francesco Piccolorecounts having done, to experience the films when they are most popular, in

the cinema around Christmas. It is hardly a scientific approach in itself (we cannot

generalize from the reactions of, say, the urban and comfortably-off audience of an

expensive multiplex in the centre of Rome), but it will give some sense of what is

found to be amusing, who might elicit a jeer, and when if not why attention is

likely to wander.

A second way to get to know the audience is to use questionnaires. I am using

these to help analyse the consumption, utilization and circulation of the cinepanet-tone by its audience(s), and in order to try to discern who these audiences are and geta sense of why the films are liked or disliked. This is a lot of information and

not straightforward to elicit, and I do not expect to arrive at definitive answers but

tentative indications. I have produced paper and electronic versions of these question-

naires.19 One short version was distributed, in various locations around Italy,

outside cinemas during the Christmas viewing period of the films. The situation

was awkward and take-up was small. A longer paper version has been distributed in

Italian universities, via friends and acquaintances, left in places I frequented in Rome.

Inevitably, such haphazard distribution will have meant a limited and/or skewed

take-up. The electronic versions of the longer questionnaire have more potential.

These have been/are being distributed via the dedicated email address , and advertised on the project research blog, on the paper

version of the questionnaire, and on the fan website . A web

version has also been set up using the Bristol Online Surveys facility provided at

Bristol University;20 various means, including postings on social network sites, are

being used to advertise this.

Like audience studies done from a feminist perspective, I am working on (or with)

an audience once assumed to be without discernment or agency.21 Unlike much of the

sophisticated work done in feminist audience studies, my empirical and survey workis methodologically crude. Certainly, there is no question of carrying out a statistical

survey I have neither the resources nor the expertise to collect a sample size big or

comprehensive enough. I will not be reporting results so much as offering the spectator

a space to talk back and I mean by this a literal space in print, where members of

19 For substantial methodological guidance on questionnaire design see Chava Frankfort-Nachmias and

David Nachmias, Research Methods in the Social Sciences, 6th edn (New York: Worth Publishers, 2000),pp. 22954.

20 See .21 There are now more than a few such studies. For a useful summaries see the chapter Textual Negotiations:

Female Spectatorship and Cultural Studies in Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman intothe Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2004), pp. 3764.


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438 ALAN OLEARY

the audience are granted as much testimonial authority as a star, a director, a critic

or a fan. This space will take the form of a constructed roundtable of opinions

(included in the monograph of the project) from all of these categories of people.22

As well as observation and questionnaires, then, a third approach to getting

to know the public has been to use interviews. We (Luca Peretti and myself) have

interviewed and will be interviewing fans and non-fans of the cinepanettone, even ifso far we have talked mostly to critics and film historians, and film people involved

and also not involved in the cinepanettone (see Table 2).

Hearing what the agent sells

A virtual roundtable like the one I have in mind is intended to challenge the typical

journalistic/academic privileging of interviews with the creative personnel of films,

usually the director. This is not to say that I am not interested in getting information,in gleaning a sense of how the cinepanettone is made and of the concerns and attitudeof its makers. But one has to be sceptical of material gained in interviews frompersonnel involved in making of a commercial product, be it arthouse or multiplex:

actors will often have a practiced spiel, while producers may have good reason

for withholding sensitive information. Perhaps the material becomes useful when

its content fissures in self-contradiction, or inasmuch as it employs strategies ofself-legitimation that, say, reveal and resist the cultural status of the cinepanettone inItalian critical discourse.

Mary P. Wood has written of the problems and pitfalls of interviewing film people

in a piece for The Italianist.23 The granting of an interview, she writes, is alwaysinstrumental:

Interviews are mediated texts whose content has been filtered through the social and

cultural formation of the individual and the power relationships underpinning areas of

the film industry. Interviews with those involved in the Italian film industry can reveal

the unconscious narrativizing of professional roles, internal competition, professional

identity and personal motivation, the trade stories told in order to align oneself with

particular practices, and how these have changed to take account of the global media

economy. (p. 304)

In effect this means that we have to pay attention to how the personal and profes-sional story is told, as well as to its content. This is old news for oral historians, and

Wood writes that oral history provide[s] rich resources for the historian by thevery way in which subjects [organize] their experiences into narratives (p. 299). She

gives the example of an interview she did with director Francesco Rosi in which the

director describes his entry into the film industry as a set of encounters with famous

men. On the one hand, this was straightforwardly useful stuff for the pre-IMDBresearcher who had to build a map of connections between different personnel in the

industry. On the other hand it showed Rosi validating and reinforcing his own status

by a process of name-dropping, and Wood suggests that this narrativizing tactic is

22 The monograph is due from Rubbettino in late 2012 under the title La fenomenologia del cinepanettone.23 Mary P. Wood, Interview-Intervista-Insight: On the Usefulness of Interviews, The Italianist, 29: 2 (2009),

298305 (p. 299).


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TABLE 2

LIST OF INTERVIEWEES AS AT JUNE 2011

Personnel involved in the production of cinepanettoni

Massimo Boldi (actor and producer)Fausto Brizzi (screenwriter)

Paolo Costella (screenwriter and director)

Luigi De Laurentiis (producer)

Christian De Sica (actor)

Massimo Ghini (actor)

Marco Martani (screenwriter)

Luca Montanari (editor)

Enrico Oldoini (director and screenwriter)

Neri Parenti (screenwriter and director)

Carlo Vanzina (screenwriter and director)

Enrico Vanzina (screenwriter)

Bruno Zambrini (composer)

Critics, academics, film people

Cristina Borsatti (screenwriter and teacher)

Stefano Della Casa (critic)

Marco Giusti (critic)

Francesca Marciano (screenwriter)Silvana Silvestri (critic)

Christian Uva (academic)

The public

Massimiliano Canu (co-organizer of the website)

Pietro Di Nocera (co-organizer of the Vacanze di Natale (1983) fan club and website)

Lorenzo Proietti (film-goer and regular at cinepanettoni)

Enrico Tamburini (co-organizer of the website)

Riccardo Antonangeli, Damiano Garofalo, Nicola Missaglia, Enrico Schir (four graduate film buffs interviewed asa focus group)

typical of the field of the Italian film industry (the terminology is from Bourdieu):

mentioning important names and showing that they have recognized your worth is

a strategy for conquering a place in the fields hierarchy of power, rather than a

demonstration of intrinsic talent (p. 300).

These remarks were confirmed in my interviews with cinepanettone personnel.To give one instance: speaking to actor and producer Massimo Boldi, I remember

feeling that the interview went off-track immediately when Boldi launched into a longnarrative of his career going back to the 1970s, a narrative familiar from Boldis


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440 ALAN OLEARY

own books, other interviews, even Wikipedia.24 In fact, the way in which Boldi had

organized his experience into precisely this narrative was very telling. The story ofhis career and the comparisons Boldi made in the interview as a whole were heavy

with familiar names, from Paolo Villaggio, Renato Pozzetto and Roberto Benigni to

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He also several times mentioned how a given famous

name recognized his talent and insisted on Boldis presence in this show or that film.

Even as he asserted, implicitly and explicitly, the esteem in which he had been

held by colleagues, Boldi was insistent that he was influenced by nobody. I am not

interested in building a psychological profile of the man, but I doubt that the form

of narrativizing Boldi employed was down to his lack of self-esteem (or not only to

that). I take it, instead, that he was replying to those critics (and it is a critical trope)

who assert the lack of value of his work, and that he was trying to validate his own

trade and career by reference to the great and funny. The shadow of older questions

fell on the answers he gave me: Boldi wasnt replying to me as such; he was replying

to years of cultural paternalism that dismisses his genre of work.An interview with a long-term industry insider like Massimo Boldi furnishes one

point of view on the cinepanettone that helps to build towards a triangulation ofperspectives a critical comparison, that is, with other information and points of

view. Through the triangulation of perspectives (of personnel, critics, public), one can

hope to establish some of the facts about the series, about its production, marketing

and reception. More importantly, one can also hope to achieve a sense of the status

of the sub-genre in cultural discourse. Using this method I can try to plot the discur-

sive construction of the cinepanettone by the industry, in criticism, and by the public,and so describe how the cinepanettone is set up for general perception. I can describe

how it is situated in Italian culture, quite independently of the individual films andtheir content (or form, or quality).25

Analysis and classification

The empirical strand of my investigation does not preclude a more traditional

analysis of the cinepanettoni. In discerning the characteristics of the films, I amasking the kinds of questions we always ask in film studies: what kind of stories do

the cinepanettoni tell and what kind of narrative strategies are employed; what kindof characters do they contain, and what cinematic or theatrical lineage do these have;

what is the approach to soundtrack, i.e., what kind of language (accent, register,dialect, dubbing) do they contain, and what kind of music (compiled versus composed

score); what kind of editing techniques, cinematography and mise-en-scne. I will be

asking how exactly and why does the form and content change over time, and to what

extent the evolution of the films can be ascribed to internal conditions (the

same+variation formula employed in all serial forms), to the development of

24 See Danilo Maggi, Io... Boldi (Milan: Targa Italiana, 1991), and Massimo Boldi, Sergio Cosentino, andCristiano Minellonno, Bestia, che dolore! (Milan: Mondadori, 2011).

25 Relevant here too is a study of the promotional and paratextual material around the cinepanettone, forexample the appearances of the cast on widely viewed television programmes like Domenica In and Porta aporta.


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film style and themes nationally and internationally, to a putative relationship with

advertising and television, or to industrial conditions and legislation (for example

about product placement). Another question to be asked is about the relationship

of the cinepanettone to Italian cinema more broadly, and to the cinema of othercountries, as well as Hollywood.

How can we classify the different cinepanettoni? One could begin with a tradi-tional analytical division of the corpus of films according to their directors and/or

scriptwriters, even though this procedure may seem perverse in a commercial form

that is obviously production-driven. As mentioned above, most of the films have been

produced by Filmauro (Aurelio and, latterly, Luigi De Laurentiis), one by Cecchi

Gori, and Massimo Boldis Mari Film has made all but one of his Christmas releases

(in association with Medusa) since the actors split with Filmauro. It is clear from my

interviews with Enrico Oldoini and Paolo Costella that Boldi was prime mover

behind the type of story and locations employed, and had the final say on the edit,

on the films he has produced the same will be true of the Filmaurocinepanettoni

to a greater or lesser degree.

Still, the styles and tastes of different directors and writing teams are apparent

in the films. We can contrast the approaches of the Vanzinas and Neri Parenti, for

example. The latter is an aficionado of slapstick humour: of the Blake Edwards of

the Pink Panther films, and of violent cartoons like Tom & Jerry. The Vanzinaswork, though certainly not lacking in broad comedy, tends towards the ensemble

form of a film like Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) and enjoyment of their filmsmay even be contingent upon recognizing allusions to other films or to contemporary

society and politics (S.P.Q.R. of 1994 is a satire of the mani pulite investigations

relocated to Ancient Rome). When Luca Peretti and I interviewed Marco Martani, ascreenwriter who worked with Neri Parenti and Fausto Brizzi on several post-2000

cinepanettoni, he stressed the difference of his and his collaborators approach tothat of the Vanzinas. Martani and Brizzi had studied on the screenwriting course

RAI Script, a course which stressed Hollywood-style schemas for story structure, and

(according to Martani) the two brought a more studied, deliberately structured,

scientific (his word) approach to comedy and film form, one that was plot-centred

and situation-based in contrast to the iterative gag structure and privileging of the

battuta found in the Vanzina corpus. Martanis claim is only partly persuasive; afterall, a Vanzina film like S.P.Q.R. has a perfectly strong plot, and it features a brilliant

self-reflexive coda which anticipates the work of Martani and Brizzi for Filmauro inthe 2000s. But whatever the accuracy of Martanis remark, it points to a variety of

approach and a development within the cinepanettone that is all too often passed overon the assumption that if youve heard about one of the films youve seen them all.

The corpus ofcinepanettoni could also be divided according to its actors. Over theyears respected stars like Alberto Sordi, Stefania Sandrelli, and Diego Abatantuono

have appeared in the films, and the biggest attraction of Vacanze di Natale (1983)was probably Jerry Cal, then at the peak of his popularity. But the cinepanettone isespecially associated with Christian De Sica and Massimo Boldi, opposing physical,

regional (Rome and Milan respectively) and, as it were, ideological types, even if

Boldi has now defected to star in his own competing version of the genre. Fans I havetalked to are far more aware of the actors than of the directors, and many consider


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442 ALAN OLEARY

De Sica to be the real master even as they regret the demise of the odd couple formed

by De Sica with Boldi.

Finally, one could divide the films by audience. Which films have been produced

with which audience in mind, and which have been most commercially successful?

One might usefully consider the audiences engagement with the films in different

viewing contexts: on television, on home video, via internet download, and also via

internet upload (I have in mind the montages of favourite clips from multiple films

found on sites like YouTube), and of course in the film theatre itself.

I have been discussing, in this section, a more traditional analysis of the films,

and the concern with viewing context just mentioned might seem to take us away

from the matter of the films themselves, but in fact context is key. Whatever the true

character and actual make-up of the cinepanettone audience(s), it is the case that thefilms are designed to appeal to a variegated public, one of all ages, and potentially

of all genders and orientations. Thus the nature of the initial viewing context has

consequences for the form of the text, which is distinguished by an unusually multipleaddress. This was made very clear by Marco Martani in his interview with us, when

he made the epigrammatic suggestion that il film di Natale, in realt, fa divertire a

tutti ma non piace a nessuno. What he meant by this is that the writers and director

pack the various forms of comedy into their films, and even into individual scenes,

in order to entertain everyone in the cinema, from the youngest child to the most

discerning adult. The offer of a comic element for each taste tends sequentially to

generate laughter from each segment of the audience, and the contagious effect of

the laughter is such that it will tend to become universal and continuous. Martani

speculates that the films might be less enjoyable when seen at home, when the

viewer is more likely to pick and choose which bit he or she likes and be indifferentto the rest.

Interestingly, something like this latter point was made by Roy Menarini in his com-

ment to a blog post in which I critically invoked his remarks on the cinepanettone:26

Si tratta di un prodotto molto chiuso per un pubblico altrettanto segmentato, di qualit

infima e soprattutto NON DURATURO, cosa che mi sembra la pi interessante, ovvero

di film che non ha vita alcuna al di fuori della sala. Nessuno rivede mai un cinepanettone,

come dimostrano le vendite DVD e i passaggi (pochissimi) in tv, pay tv, on demand, ecc.

I have already discussed what we may or may not know about the pubblico

segmentato e infimo, but Im interested in responding briefly to the suggestion thatthe cinepanettone non ha vita alcuna al di fuori della sala. Firstly, Neri Parenti told

me that Filmauro prefers to limit the exposure of the films on television in order to

protect the status of the Christmas appuntamento with the film di Natale. Secondly,figures available to us suggest that, actually, the films did well on the rental market

(at least up to 2006 when the available analysis stops).27 But lets assume that Roy

Menarini is right and that the films are not popular on the home screen; the point is

26 See Menarinis comment to the entry at .27 See the figures given in Francesco Casetti and Severino Salvemini, tutto un altro film: pi coraggio e pi idee

per il cinema italiano (Milan: Egea, 2007), pp. 8183.


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that they are not designed to be: these are films designed expressly to be enjoyed inthe social and celebratory context of the cinema at Christmas. They are to be judged

successful to the extent that they manage to fulfil this function.

The presence of multiple address in the cinepanettone suggests to me that we must

articulate a set of criteria for describing and, if we insist, evaluating the films that

is distinct from the traditional set that sees a film as a coherent and unitary object.

(The point about the traditional criteria is that they are posited on a single address,

usually to an ideal spectator assumed to be a projection of the auteur or critic.)

I should be clear: some of the films certainly work in traditional terms; that is to say,

some of them are very good indeed even when seen away from the crowded cinema.

But I am interested in taking seriously the ritual experience, the communal holiday

viewing, and in trying to articulate an approach to the films that accounts for such

a phenomenon in appropriate terms hence the phenomenological approach as

I described it earlier. And it is not, therefore, by accident that I choose an approach

derived from the study of religion:

The choices we make about what entertains us are not innocent or random decisions. We

choose popular texts which speak to us in some basic fashion, which reflect our tastes

and reaffirm our basic beliefs about the social order. Writers such as [John G.] Cawelti,

Thomas Schatz or Rick Altman argue that popular art has displaced religious ritual as

the central means for articulating and reaffirming cultural values.28

Ideology and I

If, in the list given at the beginning of the previous section, I have allowed questions

of gender and ideology temporarily to remain unasked, this is because it is oftenassumed that we know already what the cinepanettone contains and what form ittakes. The quote from K.B. Karnick and Henry Jenkins that closes the section inevi-

tably raises these questions in its talk of reaffirming cultural values: but to be

persuasive, ideological critique needs to be based on evidence not assumptions.

Can we be sure that the more elevated ethics or aesthetics sought in the corpus of

Italian national cinema (conceived of as a diplomatic project) escape the ritualistic

characteristics we might be tempted to deplore in the cinepanettone or in its audience?It is straightforward, once we have gained a certain facility with the techniques of

ideological critique, to dismiss the tastes of the duped, to denounce the appeal of

trash, to consign the producers and consumers of a despised phenomenon tothe dustbin of disdain; much harder, I would suggest, to understand and analyse

sympathetically those tastes, the appeal, that phenomenon. It is a question, if you like,

of intellectual ambition: we can limit ourselves to the expression of abhorrence, or

we can try to explain a phenomenon in all its complexity, not exempting ourselves

from its pleasures.

28 K.B. Karnick and Henry Jenkins, Classical Hollywood Comedy, (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1112.

aoleary phenomenology of cinepanettone

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