"Titanus was born before Italian cinema" - Film historian Simone Starace on the history of TITANUS

The legendary production and distribution house Titanus is the subject of a major retrospective at the Film Festival Locarno this year, called Retrospettiva Titanus. Cronaca Familiare del Cinema Italiano. This retrospective, which focuses primarily on the fifties and sixties productions of Titanus when it flourished under helm Goffredo Lombardo, is also represented in a book by the same name that was co-curated by Simone Starace. The following interview on some of the key representative historical elements of Titanus was carried out at Il Cinema Ritrovato (you can listen to the Italian version of the Interview on FRED Film Radio by clicking here).

Matt Micucci: TITANUS TRULY REPRESENTS THE HISTORY OF ITALIAN CINEMA.
Simone Starace: More than that. Titanus was born before Italian cinema. The year widely considered as the birth of cinema in Italy is 1905, but Titanus was born in 1904. This made it so that their system was so well rooted and fortified that even films they didn't directly produce would have to go though the Titanus way to get done or distributed. Even foreign films that needed to be dubbed would make use of Titanus facilities. Not to mention that sometimes their sets would be used by other productions to be shot on.

MM: WHAT WERE THE KEY DISTINCTIVE ELEMENTS OF TITANUS FILM PRODUCTIONS?
SS: Titanus focused on the Neapolitan melodrama genre to build up a reputation. But these melodrama were of such good quality that they automatically garnered a reputation for being arthouse. This aura that Titanus had built up made it so that when they worked with such auteurs as Rossellini and Visconti, they too allowed themselves to be influenced by it. It happened with the father of neo-realist Rossellini and his use of Neapolitan music and features in Journey To Italy. But also with Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers, the film in which he cast Alain Delon and thus opened up to celebrity casting but at the same time told the story of Sicilian fishermen. With all this we see Goffredo Lombardo's mark and his belief that commercial and arthouse cinema didn't necessarily have to be two separate categories of films, but rather entities that could feed off of each other and be enriched in the process.

MM: THE ELEMENT OF FAMILY IS IMPLIED IN THE TITLE OF THIS RETROSPECTIVE, BUT HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT WITHIN TITANUS?
SS: The thing was that Titanus, as the title of our book hints at, truly was a family affair. It started with the father Gustavo and was carried on by Goffredo and these were the years where the production house flourished. Family is just a re-occurring theme in everything Titanus made, the first project Goffredo made himself was Nobody's Children in 1951 by Raffaello Matarazzo, a film that ponders on the theme of paternity. Here's the thing, Goffredo reused his father's neapolitan techniques for a more national audience.

MM: BEING FROM NAPLES ALSO HAD A CERTAIN INFLUENCE...
SS: During the years of silent films Italian cinema was struggling to find its own identity. Gustavo Lombardo found a way to become succesful by producing films that were strictly aimed at a more restricted target audience - the people of Naples. Paradoxically, this works also because this type of films appealed to immigrants all over the world. This went on throughout the years. The melodramas such as Chains and Tormento [both by Matarazzo], but also in the musical vehicles by popular Italian artists such as Rita Pavone and Gianni Morandi that directly lifted the structure of the 'sceneggiate Napoletane', a type of Neapolitan traditional melodramatic musical. So we can say that Titanus was quite possibly the biggest and post important European film production and distribution company with huge ambitions but at the same time still looked at the past and treasured its deeply rooted Neapolitan origins.

MM: IN THE END AMBITION GOT THE BETTER OF GOFFREDO LOMBARDO.
Yes, there are a few things that Titanus did to become even more succesful on a global scale. It did this by burrowing the structure of Hollywood productions, particular with historical epics. This worked for a long time until its demise that came with probably the most representative of these was the Robert Aldrich film Sodom and Gomorrah. This was a film that was thought out in a courageous yet wrong way and so despite the fact that the film was actually a pretty good film and quite succesful with the audience it was always going to lose money. And it did, which eventually led to Titanus having to shut down all production activities at the start of the sixties.