CATHERINE O'RAWE

Magnani and the ‘amalgam’: Authenticity, Performance, and Non-Professionals in the Post-War Period

Critical ideas of Anna Magnani’s ‘authenticity’ as an actress, or the apparent elision of her professional status, have been recently challenged, in favour of more nuanced accounts of her ‘oscillazione tra autenticità e artificio’ (Pierini 2017, 148). However, it is clear that Magnani is often aligned with the non-professional actor, both in her performance style, and in her casting alongside many actors ‘presi dalla strada’, from Roma città aperta to Mamma Roma. This paper will examine this alignment, focusing on Magnani’s work with child (non)actors in films as diverse as Abbasso la miseria! (Righelli, 1945) to Vulcano (Dieterle, 1950) and Suor Letizia (Camerini, 1957). It will also examine her positioning in relation to crowds of non-professional extras, in films such as Bellissima (Visconti, 1952), L’onorevole Angelina (Zampa, 1947), and Assunta Spina (Mattoli, 1948), among others.

Magnani’s work with non-professionals can be analysed as an example of the Bazinian ‘amalgam’ of stars and non-professionals in neorealism. This unstable chemical mixture, in Bazin’s terms, could produce only temporary effects: however, the longevity of Magnani’s work with non-professionals, beyond and outside the confines of neorealism, suggests a productive avenue for star and performance studies to explore, and will illuminate the dynamics of casting, acting, and reception that have characterised her star persona.

BIO:

Catherine O’Rawe is Professor of Italian Film and Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and co-author with Jacqueline Reich of Divi: la mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Donzelli, 2015). She is currently working on a project investigating the non-professional actor in post-war Italian cinema, which was funded by a British Academy Fellowship in 2017-18.