EXTENDED DEADLINE CALL FOR PAPERS XXVIII INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF FILM STUDIES Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts Roma Tre University November 28-29, 2022 “Italian Film Production Practices 1949-1976. The Exception and the Rule” Organisers: Leonardo De Franceschi, Elio Ugenti, Christian Uva, Vito Zagarrio 1949 was the year in which Law no. 958/49 known as the “Andreotti Law” was passed. The aim of the new law was to incentivise Italian productions and rebalance the relationship between the circulation of American and Italian films in Italy. 1976 was the year in which the Constitutional Court ruled on the “liberalisation of the airwaves” and changed the history of Italian television forever. These two dates mark two momentous turning points for audio-visual production in Italy (Comand, Venturini 2021) and constitute the terms a quo and ad quem of the XXVIII International Film Studies Conference “Italian film production practices 1949- 1976. The exception and the rule”, and of the Prin Project “Modes, memories and cultures of film production in Italy (1949-1976)” of which the Conference is part. Between these two dates, numerous historical and cultural processes transformed the Italian film system and determined the establishment of a “rule” - or of several rules - according to which a series of dominant production models that followed one another during this thirty-year period took shape. Fundamental in this sense is Law no. 1213 of 1965 (the “Corona Law”), which was the first major intervention in the field of film legislation after the Andreotti Law of 1949 and subsequent amendments made in 1956 and 1959, which continued to be the reference law for forty years, until the Urbani Decree was passed in 2004. The legislative framework (Cucco, Manzoli 2017) is crucial if we are to try to define the Italian film industry after the Second World War, which was founded on completely different mechanisms and procedures to the Hollywood standard of the Majors. State support has always been fundamental in the Italian film industry, allowing certain entrepreneurs to build a loosely structured industry that was not based on a “system” logic which they were able to benefit from (Corsi, 2001). This process ended up determining standards (economic, format, running time, censorship) that gradually became decisive for the circulation of films and their access to movie theaters.