The Industrial Soundscape between Fiction and Documentary Film in Italy's Long 1960s

During the long 1960s, including the culminating phase of the “economic miracle” and the beginning of the protest movement in 1968, the industrial imagination took forcefully hold of the collective mind of the Italian people. While corporate films adopted the rhetoric of the industrial progress, feature films offered a negative view of industrialization and underlined the problematic aspects: the exploitation of the working class, class struggle, the problem of alienation, the consequences of pollution, the role of criminal enterprise. In both cases music and sound profoundly influenced the representation of the industrial contexts. Corporate films showed the tendency to extol the virtues of labour and industrial production and to this purpose used music massively. The wide circulation of these films in this period encouraged a critical approach to industrial contexts by feature film directors: in their films music and sound offered critical readings during the industrial sequences: they posed questions, encouraged ironic or tragic reflection, gave the sequences grotesque or sinister overtones. This article analyses film music and sound options in feature films on the backdrop of corporate film communication in order to trace the history of the industrial imagination in the Italian cinema.