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Studies of \"Classic Hollywood\" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the \"Transition Era\" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.

My dissertation analyzes the production of urban space in Italian cinema from Fascism to the Economic Miracle. I focus on the cinematic representation and perception of space and place as they inform notions of modernity and regional identity in urban settings. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, I refer to space as a calculable homogeneity that corresponds to the modernity of \"scientists, planners, and technocratic subdividers who identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived\". Place, on the other hand, is typically understood as an area of aesthetic, cultural, and historical uniqueness that corresponds to a certain geographic specifitity coincident with regionalism. It is \"described, imagined, altered and appropriated\" according to lived experience. But rather than take these terms oppositionally, I argue that representations of space and place in Italian cinema should be seen as part of the same discursive practice that continually redefined the image of the Italian city, setting up commonplace notions of modernity and regional identity in a fluid co-dependent relation. This process not only made the modern Italian city legible and more accessible to a general public in the period leading up to World War II as Italy transitioned from a rural-agrarian society to an urban-industrialized one, but it also served as a model to other European national cinemas afterward, providing a pathway for understanding how cinema could continually negotiate and renegotiate the representation of heterogeneous urban identities in an increasingly unified globalized society. Using Milan, Rome and Napes as three case study cities, I trace the construction and evolution of these different regional identities alongside concurrent images of the modern Italian city from the 1930s through the 1960s. Across four chapters, I survey a broad selection of Italian film, both popular and arthouse, from which I single out emblematic films for close visual and narratological analysis. In this way, I establish general trends of spatial representation while also providing concrete and specific examples of how such representations were constructed and perceived. Chapter 1 describes the crystalization of spatial representation in Fascist cinema via a philosophical notion of poses, supported by a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. I argue that spatial representations became ironically still and regionalist as Italian cinema modernized and industrialized under government funded cinema studios, or teatri di posa. As a result, a vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric of spatial representation developed in Fascist cinema through which the urban settings in Italian films became more legible and interpretable, but also stereotypical. This chapter includes readings of films by Camerini, Ophüls, Palermi, Mattòli and Bonnard. Chapter 2 describes a move away from teatri di posa to shooting on the \"authentic locations\" of Neorealism. I historicize the term \"authentic location\" by reflecting on spatialized notions of authenticity in the theoretical works of György Lukács and André Bazin. Ultimately, I argue that Neorealism's luoghi autentici (authentic locations) quickly became luoghi comuni (commonplaces, or stereotypes) once again after experimental modes of spatial representation coalesced into concrete regionalist topes. Here, I analyze films by Rossellini, De Sica, Giannini and De Filippo. Chapter 3 questions the absolute novelty of Economic Miracle cinema as defined by scholars vis-à-vis La dolce vita's landmark status. In counterpoint, I describe a number of unacknowledged stylistic continuities of spatial representation between Fascist and Economic Miracle cinemas. In turn, I argue that it can only be an ideological distinction that explains this oversight, for the images of Italy's modern, democratic and capitalist cities might be compromised if they should become associated with the earlier repugnant urban modernities of Fascist cinema. This chapter includes analysis of films by Camerini, Mattáli, Risi and Pasolini. In Chapter 4, I add a theoretical foundation to support my reading of stylistic continuities of spatial representation between Fascist and Economic miracle cinemas by defining a Fascist-Comsumeist aesthetic based on a comparative reading of Sontag's \"Fascinating Fascism\" (1975) and Baudrillard's \"Consumer Society\" (1970). I argue that economic and sexual desires, on top of the ideological ones described in Chapter 3, point to a spatial representation of desire in which the actual image of a place becomes less significant that the motivating forces behind its perception and consumption. Here, I analyze films by Fellini, Camerini, Monicelli, Ophüls, Rosi, Antonioni, and De Sica.