Franco-Italian Laughter. The Development of French and Italian Film Comedy in the 1950s

The article explores the relationship between French and Italian cinema on the example of the comedy genre of the late 1940s-1950s. In France, this interaction was made through the dialogue with the tradition of the silent comic cinema and pantomime, discoveries in the field of sound score, convergence with the genre of cloak and sword drama and costume movies. At the same time, comedy was a reaction to the trauma and despondency associated with the long occupation and competing with “the black film”. In Italy, the rise of this genre was connected with neo-realism and competition with the American cinema for the audience, the dose of melodrama and a return to the tradition of “divas” coming from the 1910s. Italian film comedy of the 1950s and 1960s is a dialectal comedy rooted in popular culture, in contrast to the comedies of the Mussolini era, which were liberated from regional peculiarities, irony and were unified. The feature that unites Italian and French comedy of the 1950s is the outstanding comedians brought up on the school of variety theatre and music hall. The article also examines in detail the Franco-Italian coproduction model, which showed the structure and dynamics of the European film process as a whole and in a dual perspective, addressing both mass and independent cinema. Film production itself turns out to be a kind of bridge between France and Italy, pointing out the most diverse and unexpected parallels and overlaps.