[ecrea] CFP - Special issue: “Catholics, cinema and sex in Italy between the 1940s and the 1970s”

Call for paper: “Schermi. Storie e culture del cinema e dei media in 
Italia” (n. 1, January 2017)

Special issue: “Catholics, cinema and sex in Italy between the 1940s and 
the 1970s”

Edited by Mauro Giori and Tomaso Subini

Deadline: September 15, 2016

In 1961, in his pastoral dedicated to the “Giornata per la moralità del 
cinema” (Day for morality in cinema) organized by Venetian dioceses, the 
bishop of Vittorio Veneto – pope-to- be John Paul I – described 
humankind as “people who walk around keeping a piglet on a lead” because 
of the original sin. Such admission of the centrality of eros in human 
nature by a prominent member of the Church hierarchies recalls Félicien 
Rops famous “Pornocrates” allegory (1878), by which the Belgian artist 
acknowledged the predominant position gained by sex and sexuality within 
the art system, right before the emergence of cinema and psychoanalysis. 
As scholarship inspired by Foucault’s theories (which have become a 
classic) has shown, attempts to manage sexuality and its representations 
were made using different forms of control, that is, not only by 
promoting prohibition and censorship according to a traditional view of 
puritan decency, but also participating in the “discursive explosion” 
that invested Twentieth-century culture.
In Italy, Catholics were naturally confronted with this dialectics 
between silence and loquacity, which shaped the debate on sex and also 
characterized some key stages of film history: the bishop of Vittorio 
Veneto completed his metaphor noticing how, “passing by a ditch, [...] 
the piglet jumps in it, growling merrily”. For the bishop, the cinema 
was that very “ditch, from where one returns with a soiled soul”. 
Between the end of WWII and the late 1970s, when pornography emerged, 
discourse on sexuality progressively involved the cinema, in the context 
of wider debates on society, on its means of communication and artistic 
representation in the wake of controversies on prostitution, night 
clubs, seaside fashion, contraception, sex education, new habits in 
young people, divorce etc.
This issue of “Schermi” will represent an occasion to rethink and 
investigate the role played by Catholics – at both cultural and 
institutional level – in this debate. The issue will be framed within 
the wider context that led to the acknowledgment of the prominence 
gathered by sexuality at the key stages in the development of Italian 
cinema and will receive suggestions elaborated in the field of film 
studies over the last forty years, in terms of historical research as 
well as of theoretical and methodological advances.
We invite submission on the following topics:
- notions of taboo, the obscene and pornography
- threshold between private and public; decency
- Catholics and administrative censorship
- cinema, politics and legislation
- Catholic film criticism (journals and critics)
- currents and debates within the Church
- relationship with the diverse strands of secular culture
- the Venice Film Festival and its management
- the role of Church institutions (Ente dello Spettacolo, Secretariat 
for Morality, etc.)
- knowledge on sex: medicine, psychoanalysis, investigations, surveys, 
sex education, pedagogy, conferences, journals
- representations of specific themes and issues: family, male/female 
opposition, marriage, prostitution, divorce, contraception, 
homosexuality, the body, etc.
- gender issues, sexual subcultures
- Catholic cinema
- popular cinema and its genres
- single films and authors
- stardom
- the public: idealizations and actual behaviour
- paratexts (magazines, bills, etc.)
- the cinema and its relationship with other medias (variety show, 
theatre, television,
- journals and magazines, photostories, novelizations, comics, etc.)

Scholars who intend to submit an abstract are invited to access the 
online database of our research project (“Catholics and cinema in Italy 
between the 1940s and the 1970s”) to outline their proposal. The 
database (http://users.unimi.cattoliciecinema) contains scanned copies 
of more than 7000 documents (complete with index and metadata with 
keywords allowing specific queries). The documents have been collected 
from ecclesiastical archives and have seldom (if at all) been the object 
of research. Scholars who have not yet subscribed to the database can 
request an account to (tomaso.subini /at/ unimi.it <http://unimi.it>).

300-word proposals, together with a short bio, must be sent to schermi 
/at/ unimi.it <http://unimi.it> by September 15, 2016.
We will accept proposals both in Italian and English.

Dr Mauro Giori (University of Milan): (mauro.giori /at/ unimi.it 
<http://unimi.it>)
Dr Tomaso Subini (University of Milan): (tomaso.subini /at/ unimi.it 
<http://unimi.it>)


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