Abstract
This short, dense, digressive study expands from its ostensible object—a segment in an omnibus Italian film made in 1962—to a consideration of its place in post-neorealist cinema. But it's also the occasion for a sprawling meditation on the Olivetti corporation in Italian society, gendered divisions of labor in midcentury capitalism, the aesthetics of industrial design, literature of the workplace, automation, precarity, and a lot more.
Renzo and Luciana, one of four short films by different directors in Boccacio ‘70, is representative of a genre Pinkus defined as “boom comedies,” which humorously depicted aspects of the transition underway in the late fifties through the mid-sixties as Italy integrated consumerist culture into an economy still divided by northern industrial production and southern latifundia agriculture.
The director of this forty five minute segment, Mario Monicelli, is in good company among the other three Boccacio ‘70 directors—De Sica, Visconti, and Fellini—and the screenwriter who provided the frame for the film (Cesare Zavattini). Monicelli is better known for his hilarious working class take on the heist or caper genre, Big Deal on Madonna Street, and The Organizer, a rendering of a strike in a Turin factory at the turn of the last century. The politics of Renzo and Luciana, according to Pinkus, are subtler and the humor of Monicelli's other films less foregrounded here, hewing more closely to a naturalistic rendering of the story.
Renzo and Luciana work in the same factory in Milan—she in accounting, he in the mailroom. The plot, based on a short story by Italo Calvino, involves the couple's struggle to find some privacy in their families’ jammed living quarters and an equally crowded city, and after getting married (in secret because company policies require women to be single), to become financially secure. Renzo attends night school, studying to move up from the mailroom. After the marriage is discovered, Luciana gets a job in another factory, and Renzo puts night school on hold to work as a night watchman.
Although Pinkus states emphatically at the outset. “One thing that the present short book is not is an iconography of the worker in Italian cinema” (p. 9), a great deal of Clocking Out seems devoted to just that. Lengthy deconstructions of scenes such as workers leaving the factory and shots of clocks in the workplace reference not just Italian but French and American cinema history (e.g., the Lumiere brothers’ eponymously named Workers Leaving the Factory, King Vidor's The Crowd, Chaplin's Modern Times, Billy Wilder's The Apartment).
Not only do her glosses of scenes from these films and others undercut her denial; so do her sideways explorations of the substantial body of fiction by and about Italian workers, especially those set within factories.
Pinkus teases many topics out of one image, repeated in variations in several films: a closeup of a hand on a calculator, which for Pinkus becomes the springboard to examinations of male/female and white/blue collar work roles, automation in the workplace, and how Olivetti, an early “tech” company, gets left behind by advances in cybernetics. The boom comedies provide—at least in retrospect, Pinkus demonstrates—some first glimmers of the transition from mechanical to digital workplace technologies. Along the way she explores the rise and fall of Olivetti's model of paternalist private social welfare in a non-union but relatively enlightened workplace owned by a socialist employer.
I don't know how useful this smart, eclectic, quirky monograph might be for labor educators unless you’re teaching a graduate seminar on Italian mid-century labor history, or “Film at Work: The Italian Model.” But if you’re into Italian neorealist cinema and ever wondered what came afterward and why, this book is for you.