Blessed Cinema: State and Catholic Censorship in Postwar Italy

Abstract

Film censorship in Italy was as rigorous throughout the 1950s as it had been under Mussolini’s regime. The postwar period represented, however, a decisive moment: Italy experienced one of the highest box-office intakes in Europe and a new film law, introduced by Giulio Andreotti in 1949, transformed censorship practice into a preventative form of control under the ideological and legislative pressure of the Catholic establishment. This crucial turning point would set a standard practice—slightly modified in 1962 and again in 2007, but substantially the same—in which state censorship would be echoed by that of Catholic Church, whose main aim was to “promote a moralizing cinema.”