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Cinema

Italian cinema began just after the Lumière brothers introduced motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian director is Vittorio Calcina, who filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. Cabiria, from 1914, is the most famous Italian silent film. The oldest European avant-garde cinema movement, Italian futurism, took place in the late 1910s.

After decline in the 1920s, the industry was revitalized in the 1930s with the arrival of sound. A popular Italian genre, the Telefoni Bianchi, consisted of comedies with glamorous backgrounds. Calligrafismo was a sharp contrast to the Telefoni Bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic, highly formalistic, expressive in complexity, and deals mainly with contemporary literary material. Cinema was used by Mussolini, who founded Rome's renowned Cinecittà studio, for the production of Fascist propaganda.

After World War II, Italian film was widely recognised and exported until an artistic decline occurred in the 1980s. Italian film directors include Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini, recognised among the greatest of all time. The mid-1940s to the early 1950s was the heyday of Italian neorealism, reflecting the poor condition of post-war Italy.

As the country grew wealthier in the 1950s, a form of neorealism known as pink neorealism succeeded, and the commedia all'italiana genre and other film genres, such as sword-and-sandal and spaghetti Westerns, were popular in the 1960s and 70s. Actresses such as Sophia Loren achieved international stardom. Erotic Italian thrillers, or gialli, produced by directors such as Dario Argento in the 1970s, influenced horror. Recently, the Italian scene has received only occasional attention, with movies such as Cinema Paradiso, Life Is Beautiful and Il Postino: The Postman.

Cinecittà studio is the largest film and television production facility in Europe, where many international box office hits were filmed. In the 1950s, the number of international productions made there led to Rome's being dubbed " Hollywood on the Tiber ". More than 3,000 productions have been made on its lot, of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination, with 47 wins. Italy is the most awarded country at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, with 14 wins and 3 Special Awards. As of 2016, Italian films have won 12 Palmes d'Or, 11 Golden Lions, and 7 Golden Bears.