Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyse the distribution of American movies in Italy in the central part of the twentieth century (1930-1996), using methods derived from both social sciences and quantitative history. For this goal, I will apply Pierre Bourdieu's «serial history» to the Italian local market, while also following Franco Moretti's quantitative work on literary industries. In particular, I will apply Moretti's method to a sample of more than 11,000 American movie titles, so as to detect some historical patterns. The extent to which variations in titles - such as their length, the presence of geographical marks or person's names, and so forth - can explain the overall organization of the movie market is still to be understood: with this in mind, the article aims to propose a new way to analyse the evolution of cultural industries.