Abstract

Tied to technical and, in its field, scientific development and obligated to broader popular success, the production model of cinema historically had as its audience the urban and provincial proletariat, in need of role models, public and private. Cinema was meant to console and distract, to propose models of collective life and to represent, at the same time, relations between social classes. However, in the author’s opinion, Mass cinema, both in Italy and Europe, has predominantly portrayed the rich and privileged social classes with all the ambiguity of admiration, showing it in its most conspicuous and most enviable aspects.