Our research is guided by these questions:
a. How does cinema-going figure in the memories of daily lives of people throughout Italy at that time? What material factors in the everyday experience of cinema-going have been overlooked by film history?
b. What was the relationship between audiences and film genres and how did this vary according to gender and place? How do we re-evaluate questions of gender by examining the particularity of female and male spectators’ responses?
c. What role did stars play in determining audience response to films?
d. How did audiences respond to Italian cinema, Neorealism in particular, and to Hollywood cinema?
e. How do the film press and the popular press of that time complement the memories of the period?
f. How did Italian cinema-goers select and watch films? How did the press and the studio publicity influence cinema attendance in Italy at that time?
g. How might cinema-going preferences in that period have related to wider social trends and changes in Italy as a whole?
h. How might our project help us understand the nature of memory work? How might questions of selective memory, forgetting and interference come into play?
