Speaking of Books with Saverio Giovacchini: The Celluloid Atlantic: Hollywood, Cinecittà, and the Making of the Cinema of the West, 1943–1973
Speaking of Books with Saverio Giovacchini: The Celluloid Atlantic: Hollywood, Cinecittà, and the Making of the Cinema of the West, 1943–1973
University Libraries
Thursday, October 16, 2025 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm McKeldin Library, 4109The Celluloid Atlantic changes the way we look at American and Italian cinema in the postwar period. In the thirty years following World War II, American and Italian film industries came to be an integrated, transnational unit rather than two separate, nation-based entities. Written in jargon-free prose and based on previously unexplored archival sources, this book revisits the history of Neorealism, World War II combat cinema, the "Western all'Italiana," and the career of John Kitzmiller, the African American star who made Italy his home and was the first person of color to win the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The Celluloid Atlantic makes the trailblazing argument that culturally hybrid genres like the so-called spaghetti Western were less the exceptions than the norm. Giovacchini argues that the waning of the Celluloid Atlantic in the early 1970s was due to the economic policies of the first Nixon administration, specifically its important, but largely neglected, Revenue Act of 1971, as well as to the ideological debates between Europeans and Americans that intensified during the American intervention in Vietnam.
Saverio Giovacchini is Professor of History at the University of Maryland where he has served as the director of the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies on two occasions (2010-3; 2021-2). He is the author of Hollywood Modernism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001) and Celluloid Atlantic: Hollywood, Cinecittà and the Cinema of the West, 1943-1973 (Albany, NY: Suny Press, 2025). With Robert Sklar, he has edited Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012). His new book project centers on the transnational career of film director Oscar “Budd” Boetticher (1916-2001).