Coloring the Coastline: Italian Beachside Comedies and the Color Film Transition

The beachside is a strategic vantage point from which to observe the transformation of Italy in the middle of the boom years (1958– 1963), when the nation experienced a period of vertiginous economic growth. One of the telltale signs of social transformations underway in Italy was in fact the phenomenon of summer beach vacations: formerly thought of as a place for the regeneration of both the body and the spirit, vacationing was transitioning into a massive experience, into what Christian Uva calls a “horizon where a particular carnivalesque condition is acted out”, an “arena naturally predisposed to theatricality”. Among the elements that make the beach a particularly carnivalesque place is color, present both on the objects and the bodies collected there and in the many images that have come to document and promote the beach experience. This chapter aims to analyze from both a technological and an aesthetic point of view a specific form of color representation of the beach: the beachside comedy, a subgenre of the commedia all’ italiana, that comprised approximately fifty films released between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. The beachside comedy is indeed one of the popular genres of Italian cinema through which Italian audiences first presided over the large-scale transition from black and white to color. This corpus of films therefore offers a privileged view for reconstructing the mutations in visual modes of perception that occurred as Italy moved into the multicolor era of its postwar economic boom.