Italian science fiction cinema, the expression of a film genre that remained a minority in Italy, is, with some exceptions, a cinematic strand of popular entertainment, characterized by films born in the wake of successful American films but with much lower production costs. Some of these films made in Italy, although considered B movies, were known and admired even abroad; among the directors who contributed to the development of the strand were Antonio Margheriti (Anthony M. Dawson) and Mario Bava, who distinguished themselves respectively in space opera and science fiction horror.
The birth of the strand is traditionally dated to 1958, but the rediscovery of earlier silent works has led to reconsideration of this date. Italian fantastic and science fiction cinema is marked by a frequent mixture of different genres, with a particular closeness to horror; satire and parody also represent one of the most characteristic contributions of Italian cinema to science fiction. Alongside more strictly genre production, some art film directors, active during their careers in different genres or forms, also occasionally engaged with science fiction: Elio Petri, Marco Ferreri, Ugo Tognazzi, Pupi Avati and Gabriele Salvatores. Outside national borders, Italian figures such as special effects creator Carlo Rambaldi, three-time Oscar winner, The Academy document lists awards for King Kong, Alien and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. and Dino De Laurentiis, producer also of an Oscar-winning film, operated as well. The film was La strada, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; the Academy lists Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti as producers.
From the second half of the 1980s Italian genre cinema entered a crisis; in the following decade the tendency to produce science fiction for the international public was exhausted. In the 2000s, independent productions gained prominence instead: digital technologies made it possible to contain some costs and expanded the ways of distributing and viewing films. Since the 2010s Italian science fiction has returned with dystopias, eco-dystopias, uchronias and post-catastrophe narratives, as well as stories about the relationships between human beings, technology and the environment.
Origins
For a long time 1958 was indicated as the start date of Italian science fiction in cinema: in that year The Day the Sky Exploded (La morte viene dallo spazio, 1958) was released, a film by Paolo Heusch in which the Earth is threatened by a rain of asteroids and which anticipates the disaster film strand; the subsequent rediscovery of silent works, particularly The Mechanical Man (L'uomo meccanico, 1921), has however led to a reconsideration of this date. The second half of the 1950s was a golden period for overseas cinematic science fiction, and Heusch took up a strand of clear American origin; photography and special effects were by Mario Bava. An Italian-French co-production, The Day the Sky Exploded gives a decisive role to atomic energy: an atomic rocket causes the initial threat, while in the finale the great powers employ nuclear-tipped missiles to destroy the asteroids. In the United States it was released in 1961 under the title The Day the Sky Exploded; in Italy it cost 120 million lire and grossed 142 million, while the film has been considered one of the best Italian genre films and a contemporary review praised the ingenuity of the plot and the ability to maintain narrative tension until the conclusion.
However, there are fantastic-science fiction films well before 1958, which prevent the beginning of the strand from being fixed with certainty in the post-war period. If these films are also included, Italian cinematic science fiction goes back at least to 1910, with the short film Un matrimonio interplanetario by Enrico Novelli (Yambo), a comedy telling the story of a love between an earthling and a beautiful Martian, sparked by an observation through a telescope and nourished by radiotelegraphic signals. Among the first expressions of Italian cinematic science fiction is also Le avventure straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola (1913), a fantastic comic film starring and directed by Marcel Fabre and based on the novel by Albert Robida. Even a lost film of 1920, Il mostro di Frankenstein directed by Eugenio Testa, often identified as the first Italian horror film, although the loss of the film and the scarcity of surviving materials do not allow its genre to be established with certainty, can in turn be considered one of the very first science fiction films in Italy. The plot features a scientist who manufactures a man by means of a chemical formula; the creature rebels against its creator and causes a series of disasters before being stopped. The story thus arises from a scientific or technological element.
Silent production also included strands linked to scientific inventions and medicine, aerial warfare and futurism. In L'altro io (1917) by Mario Bonnard a transplant of part of the brain causes the appearance of two distinct consciousnesses in the protagonist, while Il sole e i pazzi (1920) by Umberto Paradisi revolves around a machine powered by electricity obtained from solar rays and designed to influence the behavior of the mentally ill. Aerial warfare appears in the fourth episode of Le avventure straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola, with airships and other flying machines engaged in a technological war; it returns in La guerra e il sogno di Momi, where the protagonist's dream includes the bombing of a village by airships and biplanes, with stop-motion animated toy soldiers. On the futurist side, Mondo Baldoria (1914) by Aldo Molinari was presented as the first futurist film, although Marinetti rejected it as a counterfeit of the movement, while Vita futurista (1916) by Arnaldo Ginna was the first actual futurist film production and only a few fragments survive.
In 1921, still in the silent film era, André Deed, known to Italian audiences for his comic character Cretinetti, wrote, directed and starred in L'uomo meccanico, among the very first films in cinema history centered on a robot (in this case remote-controlled) and the first to show a clash between a good robot and an evil one; the control of the machine by a foreign woman also recalls gender relations and places the consequences of its destructive use on whoever operates it. On the theme of the automaton there is also La bambola vivente of 1924 by Luigi Maggi, in which a scientist builds an automaton taking his daughter as a model. The first Italian animated film attributable to the genre is Dalla Terra alla Luna, an animated film made in 1920 by Carlo Alberto Zambonelli for Tiziano Film; the following year Gino Zaccaria made Un viaggio nella Luna, "where, among a group of puppets, we find one who with his dreams ends up traveling through space and reaching the Moon".
The first Italian sound film of the genre is Mille chilometri al minuto! (1939); the farcical excursion into the fantastic by Mario Mattoli took Italian sound cinema into space for the first time with a flight to Mars, which however is interrupted almost as soon as it begins: instead of reaching the Red Planet, due to a calculation error the rocket falls back to Earth after a few days of travel. The record lists the censorship certificate of 19 December 1939. The record includes a review by Arnaldo Frateili published in La Tribuna on 5 April 1940. Science fiction elements are present in La casa senza tempo (1945), directed by Andrea Forzano (under the pseudonym Andrea Della Sabbia) who also wrote the subject and screenplay, which has been defined as "an extravagant example of Italian 'yellow-pink' spy-fi made in the midst of the world conflict". Starring Rossano Brazzi and Vivi Gioi together with many other popular actors of the "white telephone cinema", it began as a propaganda film for the Fascist regime: a spy story about a group of fascists trying to discover military plans for the construction of a new warplane by the Anglo-American forces, triggering a series of mysterious disappearances and murders, although in the end the protagonists manage to triumph over the enemies. After the end of the war and the collapse of the fascist regime, the film was re-dubbed and re-edited, and thus the group of fascists became a group of partisans and the enemy forces changed from Anglo-American to Nazi. An earlier spy film had been directed in 1938 by Domenico Gambino: Lotte nell'ombra, with Antonio Centa and Paola Barbara, whose plot revolves around the theft of the formula for a new military explosive.
Macario contro Zagomar (1944), by Giorgio Ferroni, builds its plot around a professor's invention, a machine that forces the same movements on everyone within its range and that a criminal tries to seize. Science fiction began to find success in Italy only in the 1950s, however. Italian literary science fiction gained recognition as a genre in 1952, with the publication of the first specialized magazines, Scienza fantastica, Mondi nuovi and Urania. The Italian term "fantascienza" was born in the same year, created by Giorgio Monicelli as a free calque of the American science fiction.
La bisarca (1950), by Giorgio Simonelli, includes, in the protagonist's dream, a man who, after having accidentally swallowed uranium, ends up exploding and blowing up the ark on which the characters are. È l'amor che mi rovina (1951), by Mario Soldati, inserts into the comic plot a spy intrigue centered on a ring containing an atomic substance stolen from secret laboratories, capable of causing violent explosions when it comes into contact with snow. Stasera sciopero (1951), by Mario Bonnard, adopts a brain transplant as a comic device, with the brain of a dead man implanted in the skull of the miserly protagonist and the consequent alternation of the two personalities. In Noi due soli of 1952, directed by Marcello Marchesi, Vittorio Metz and Marino Girolami, the protagonist dreams instead that an atomic experiment has wiped out the human race, leaving only three survivors. The Franco-Italian co-production Alarm in Morocco (Allarme a sud, 1954) by Jean Devaivre builds its spy plot around a ray developed at a secret German base, able to paralyze and kill.
Another of the first Italian films defined as "science fiction" is Baracca e burattini of 1954 directed by Sergio Corbucci, inspired by the theatrical revue of the same name by Maccari and Amendola. It tells of a dweller of the Moon who, after the explosion of a bomb, falls to Earth; a puppet, as soon as it is touched by the extraterrestrial, comes to life and shows him the nature and function of various terrestrial objects. Io piaccio (1955), by Giorgio Bianchi, adopts as a comic device a hormonal preparation that should instill courage but instead makes the protagonist irresistible to women.
The boom of the 1960s