Starting in the summer of 1944, on June 6, just two days after the U.S. troops entered Rome, the Allied Control Commission took over the studio space of Cinecittà, Italy’s famed film studios. By August the city of cinema—which had only opened eight years earlier (Mussolini had inaugurated it on the symbolic anniversary of the founding of Rome, April 21, 1937)—became a camp for displaced persons. 

 

Most refugees were Italians who had lost their homes, but there were also hundreds who arrived from former Italian colonies, as well as others from close to thirty different nations. At times there were upwards of 3000 people housed among sets sectioned off with haystacks and plywood. Although much of the studio space was “liberated” of its war refugees by 1947, it was late August 1950 before Cinecittà was fully restored to its original purpose.

 

Among the few visual reminders marking this extraordinary moment in Italian (cinema) history is a little-known film directed by an almost-forgotten Italian American filmmaker. Information about the filmmaker, Jack Salvatori (1901-1974), and the film, Umanità (1946), is almost nonexistent.

 

Noa Steimatsky, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, recounts the fascinating history of the studio and offers a wonderful close reading of Umanità in her article “The Cinecittà Refugee Camp” (Spring 2009, October).  Steimatsky’s central argument involves a reconceptualization of postwar neorealist films, which, oddly enough, again and again ignored the existence of the Cinecittà camp, its explicit Fascist references, and its hundreds of child refugees—even as neorealist filmmakers attempted to represent the everyday tragic realities, especially those of children, in Italy’s dopoguerra city streets (think Bicycle Thief).

 

Steimatsky also points out that one of the most revealing visual documents of the Cinecittà refugee camp is Salvatori’s fictional film. The film—from what I have gathered as I have not been to the Italian film archives to see it—constructs a series of war-related romances among the ruins of late-forties Italy and the downtrodden backdrop of the camp. Included among the lovers is a pair of American aid-workers. This cinematic nod to the Marshall Plan predates the kind of films produced during the “Hollywood on the Tiber” period (starting with Mervin LeRoy’s Quo Vadis in 1949, just as the refugees were leaving, as Steimatsky notes), during which American companies found ways to take advantage of cheap labor, exotic Mediterranean settings, and economic incentives meant to benefit Italian companies. 

 

So far I’ve managed to find only a few facts about Salvatori and I’m eager to discover more. One intriguing tidbit: he was born Giovanni Salvatori Manners in Rome, to a family originally from Ireland. This transnational identity in and of itself offers a useful example of how migratory movements are rarely as straightforward as they first appear and raise all sorts of interesting cultural and socio-historical questions.

 

After spending time making movies in New York, Salvatori moved to France, where he directed and starred in films, apparently until the beginning of World War II. He worked for Paramount, which, along with other U.S. studios, had built soundstages on the outskirts of Paris, in Joinville, in order to take advantage of the European market and produce multi-language films. In fact, Paramount produced at least five different versions of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 short story “The Letter.” The English-language version was filmed in what today is called the Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York—where Rudolf Valentino and the Marx Brothers made their movies—but the German, Italian, Spanish, and French versions were all filmed in Joinville. (The Marx Brothers and Valentino suggest their own complicated set of issues related to ethnic representation.) 

 

Salvatori directed the Italian version of "The Letter," La donna bianca, which seems to have screened in New York, as did at least some of his other films. Indeed, the work history of someone like Salvatori forces us to reevaulate the direction of influence immigrants and immigrant communities have on both their adopted and native countries and to recognize the multidirectional ways culture moves. (I am reminded here of the work of film scholars such as Giorgio Bertellini and Sabine Haenni, both of whom have taken an interest in, among other things, the reception of early Italian-language films in the U.S. and the nonlinear movement of culture associated with Italian transnational migration, especially within urban, entertainment spaces.)The story of Jack Salvatori, a largely unknown immigrant filmmaker whose cultural sensibilities draw from Italian (and presumably Irish) connections, suggests a peculiar and under-examined moment of displacement within Italy’s borders; in so doing he illustrates some of the unusual ways immigrants continue to have a say in the construction of their homeland.