Folk Music in Italian Post-War Film. The Politics of Remediation, 1945-1975

In the early post-war decades, Italy witnessed a vigorous development of both ethnomusicology and the folk music revival. Their relationship with folk music was complicated: while folk music was celebrated as a repository of anti-capitalist values, it was also discussed in terms that resonated with orientalist and classist tropes. This ambivalence emerges nowhere more clearly than in the numerous narrative and documentary films that featured folk music produced between the 1950s and 1970s, which contributed in unique ways to the lively discourse of folk music at this time. This book explores the intersections and exchanges between Italian cinema, ethnomusicology and the folk music revival during this period. Through a number of case studies, it investigates the dynamics of the remediation of folk music in fiction and documentary films, and discusses the cultural politics, aesthetics, medialities and techniques of this encounter between directors, film music composers and the folk music world.