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 industry deployed cross-medial strategies in order to contrast the cinema’s losing of leadership into the media scenario. I have used 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 gave life also 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 also managed to expand its own activity to other sectors of the cultural industry, starting a sheet music publishing house and even starting its own record label. In this essay, I have connected this phenomenon to the Italian media context, and in particular to the first major industry crisis which struck Italian cinema in 1956