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Italy

1941-1945

La Nave bianca (The White Ship), Roberto Rossellini’s first feature film, is released.   Originally intended as a documentary, the entire film was shot aboard the hospital ship Arno and the entire cast was made up of Medical Corps staff and naval officers. [MORE]

Fascist authorities seize and destroy the negatives of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione.   The director, however, manages to save a print. [MORE] [ADD]

Ossessione, 36-year-old aristocrat Luchino Visconti’s first feature is released.   Based without acknowledgement on American pulp writer James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, the film is labeled neo-realist by critic Antonio Pietrangeli three years before the movement really begins.   It stars Massimo Girotti, Clara Calamai and Juan de Landa in a deadly love triangle. [MORE] [ADD]

Studios are closed and the shooting of two films, Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du paradis and Yves Allegret’s La Boite aux reves, is interrupted because of military battles in Italy. [MORE] [ADD]

23-year-old screenwriter Federico Fellini marries actress Giulietta Masina in Rome [MORE] [ADD]

Following the liberation of Rome, Roberto Rossellini begins filming Roma Città Aperta (Rome, Open City), with Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani. [MORE] [ADD]

Partisans free Luchino Visconti from a prison in San Gregorio where he was held for acts of resistance by the fascist regime. [MORE] [ADD]

French actress Corinne Luchaire is arrested as a collaborator, along with her father, press tycoon Jean Luchaire.   She will receive a prison sentence and be deprived of her civil rights as a French citizen for 10 years, while her father is shot by a firing squad.   [MORE] [ADD] 

– Italy’s main trade associations are founded this year: the national entertainment association (Agis); the national exhibitors' association (Anec), part of Agis; and the national association of cinema enterprises (Anica).  [MORE] [ADD]