Intermediality In The 1950s Italian Film Industry: The Case Of The Titanus' Film-Canzone

The aim of this essay is to point out how, during the 1950s and the 1960s, the Italian film indus- try deployed cross-medial strategies in order to contrast the cinema’s loss of leadership in the media scenario. I will use Titanus, one of the leading companies in the Italian post World War II cinema, as a case study. In fact, Titanus’ films were often inspired by other popular media, like the Neapolitan sceneggiata – that is a local kind of singing stage-melodrama – the vaudeville, the pulp magazines or the fumetti. Furthermore, between the 1950s and the 1960s, Titanus also gave life to a short cycle of very peculiar musical comedies, whose plots were basically adaptations of the lyrics of successful songs from the contemporary Italian music industry. Finally, Titanus man- aged to expand its own activity to other sectors of the cultural industry, by starting a sheet music publishing house and even launching its own record label. In this essay, I will connect this phe- nomenon to the Italian media context, and in particular to the first major industry crisis which hit Italian cinema in 1956. In order to do that, I first have to introduce both the Italian post WWII film industry, and the role of the Titanus company.