Here There Be Dragons by Michelle O'Leary

Precisely for this reason it seems to me that the study of the cinepanettone as the despised genre par excellence of popular Italian cinema is essential and overdue. 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 still seen as inauthentic and pernicious. The traditional suspicion of the popular (in the sense of mass culture) in culturally authoritative circles in Italy itself has meant that the cinepanettone remains almost unstudied. In Italian film studies, as in journalistic discourse, the cinepanettone has become a byword for low quality and a metonym for the degradation of Italian film culture. Since the early 1980s, 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’. The Italian film industry has often been pronounced moribund but has always survived by providing critically despised films for a popular audience. It may seem a paradoxical gesture given the contested quality and status of the cinepanettoni, but I argue that it is an essential to place the films not at the margins but at the centre of discourse about Italian cinema.

It is also to refuse the idea that Italian national cinema is best conceived of as a kind of diplomatic project intended to represent the ‘best’ of the country’s cinematic culture at an international level. To argue as much is to challenge the conventional idea that Italian national cinema is comprised of realist and auteurist works that have been appreciated outside Italy itself. What I add in this article is a consideration of comedy as a politics of ‘defence’ and mode of belonging, something that leads me to make a claim that the cinepanettone should be considered Italy’s quintessential ‘national’ cinema.

I have published a lot already on the 'cinepanettoni' (‘film-Christmas-cakes’), a series of farcical Italian comedies, one or two of which were released annually in time for the Christmas holidays until 2011.

Here There Be Dragons by Michelle O'Leary