Italian Thrilling Spectacle Between Aesthetics, Ethics, and Ideology. Popular Genres of Italian Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Czechoslovak Film and Non-Film Periodicals (1960–1989)

Abstract This study examines journalistic, publicist, and critical discourse in relation to the popular genres in the Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s in Czechoslovak film and non-film periodical press. Of interest are mainly comprehensive texts that analyse Italian popular genres as a genre system and a specific corpus of films that belong to the same genre. Czech and Slovak translations of foreign studies and texts (with the exception of some examples), interviews with Italian filmmakers, short glosses, or informative texts are beyond the scope of this research. This study reflects critical, journalistic, and publicist interpretations and views by Czechoslovak press of popular genres in national Italian cinema in the selected historical period. Research is divided into two parts that develop specific aspects of these analytic questions. The first part analyses texts about this subject matter in various film a and non-film periodicals, including newspapers and journals with emphasis on long studies and interpretations of a few categories of popular genres viewed in the extensive context of their national, socio-cultural, iconographic, and industrial aspects. The second part deals only with the popular genre of western all’italiana (western in Italian style), which represented an international cinematic and socio-cultural phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and was of the greatest interest to Czechoslovak critics, journalists, and publicists in relation to popular genres of Italian cinema in general.