Italian Cinema

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression-what Pasolini called the cinema of poetry. While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film-its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art-have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably Italian?

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet, novelist, essayist and filmmaker who also worked as a screenwriter for some of the most important Italian directors including Mario Soldati, Mauro Bolognini and Bernardo Bertolucci, to name a few. While Pasolini’s poems, novels and films are widely studied, his work as a screenwriter has not attracted much critical attention. This is partly because Pasolini tended to collaborate with directors whose artistic tastes were very different from his own, making it difficult to understand what he could possibly bring to the films on which he worked. The fact that he took his first steps in the screenwriting teams for which Italian cinema was famous has also contributed to downplay his screenwriting activity. One such example is his contribution to Federico Fellini’s screenplays. Fellini first approached Pasolini because he wished to revise the dialogue in Le notti di Cabiria, which he thought lacked the authentic feel of the language spoken in the Roman slums where the film took place. Although critics have always assumed that Fellini discarded Pasolini’s revisions to his scripts, archival sources tell a different story, revealing Pasolini’s key contribution to Fellini’s work and his eagerness to leave a lasting impression on it.

I have now recorded full-length commentaries for four ‘classic’ Italian films: Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), and Il conformista (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). Although these credentials hardly make me an expert on the subject, I have learned some lessons about audio commentaries that I think are worth sharing. First lesson: do not risk going into a studio to record a commentary without a script of some kind. It is true that many audio commentaries — usually those done by the film’s director — are unscripted and perhaps even recorded in a single take. Occasionally these are good, but more often they have long sections where the director cannot think of anything interesting to say or just tells background anecdotes. However, this is the person who made the film, so even if they have nothing much to say about it we forgive them for it. Film scholars cannot crave the same indulgence from listeners. I can think of only one case of a really good scholarly commentary on an Italian film that is not closely scripted, and that is Robert Gordon’s on the Arrow Films dual-format edition (2011) of Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948). I, however, have increasingly come to use more and more detailed scripts for my commentaries, timed right down to the second. I may want to draw attention to a shot that is on screen for just one or two seconds and it comes in right at the beginning of a scene. I have to find a way of commenting on it either just before it appears, or while it is on screen, or just after, but I cannot place my remarks too much on either side, otherwise listeners may not understand which shot I am talking about. For me, therefore, repeated rehearsal and exact timing — in other words, a pre-written script — are essential if I want to be sure I cover a certain number of points about a film. The first time I did a commentary I had not anticipated these problems. It was the commentary on Ossessione, which I did together with Lesley Caldwell, whose first time it also was. Lesley and I had several meetings beforehand, going through the film sequence by sequence, deciding what we would say and which of us would say it. It was an enjoyable process and we thought that was all there was to it. But The Italianist, 33. 2, 183–189, June 2013

Except for comedy, Italian popular cinema in the postwar era was mainly characterized by ephemeral genres and subgenres that would follow the model of a successful national or foreign movie and then exploit it to the point of complete saturation. A good example is the spaghetti Western, which became extremely popular in the wake of Sergio Leone’s 1964 success Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), only to disappear within about a decade. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is the fact that, unlike the Hollywood studio system, the Italian film industry was utterly disorganized, comprising countless short-lived, small production companies with no interest in building up fashionable filmic formulas for long-term use. Thus among successful genres such as the film operistico (opera film), the peplum (sword and sandal), and the giallo (thriller), comedy appears to be the only exception. As old as Italian cinema itself, comedy not only survived every crisis in the movie industry but also became increasingly important, and it is now the only popular form of Italian film (all the other genres disappeared or moved to television). This can be explained by the Italians’ well-known passion for comedy. Long before the birth of film, comedy had a long-standing tradition in Italian theater, going back at least as far as the renowned commedia dell’arte in the sixteenth century, characterized by farce, irreverent parody, mockery, and biting satire.

This essay looks at two main questions. (1) Why is toxicity, despite its resistance to visualization in the documentary (according to Schoonover), so important in Italian film? As Roberto Esposito has argued, Italy has a long tradition of Italian thought characterized by a particular interest in the fragility and precarity of the human body and the body politic, part of biopolitical thinking; moreover, modern Italy has a tragic and all too well-established history of toxic dumping within the nation as well as beyond its borders, especially in Africa. (2) How have Italian fiction films rendered the toxic visible? I turn to a series of examples, in both art films and popular genres, to show how they manage to visualize both toxicity and its impacts through a series of highly charged fantasies: changes to body and mind that are simultaneously wrapped up in fantasies about gender, species, and power.

Federico Fellini (1920–2020), special issue of <i>Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies,</i> vol 9, no. 1, 2021

The Introduction discusses the main relationships this book investigates: art cinema and film festivals, film festivals and Europe, and Italian cinema and film festivals. I consider the various terms through which we might taxonomise films celebrated at festivals—world cinema, global art cinema, peripheral cinema—before outlining the Eurocentric histories of the film festival network and dominant canons of art cinema. I show how the meaning of terms such as art cinema is contingent upon the flows of prestige, geopolitical relations and economic structures in which film festivals participate. The introduction then focuses on Italian cinema’s status as emblematic of filmmaking dependent on festivals for circulation and its centrality to the historical development of the European film festival circuit.

The Italian cinema is regarded as one of the great pillars of world cinema. Films like Ladri di biciclette (1948), La dolce vita (1960), and Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988) attracted unprecedented international acclaim and a reputation, which only continue to grow. Italian cinema has produced such acting legends as Sophia Loren and Roberto Benigni, as well as world-renowned filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lina WertmYller, the first woman to ever be nominated for the Best Director award. The A to Z of Italian Cinema provides a better understanding of the role Italian cinema has played in film history through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendixes, black-&amp;-white photos, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, film credits, and terminology.

A self-taught artist initially trained alongside Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and considered today by both his country’s critics and his peers as one of the most important Argentinean directors, if not the most important, Leonardo Favio (1938–2012) often expressed his views on Italian cinema and Federico Fellini’s films without openly acknowledging their effect on his films. Despite this positioning, I intend to illustrate in this article how Favio’s cinematic universe has been traversed and shaped by Italian cinema, as by a red thread. More precisely, I aim to highlight how Favio, after incorporating several themes, characters and approaches of neorealist cinema in his only short and in his first film, included dialogues with Fellini’s cinematic universe in almost all his subsequent releases. The encounter with the cinema of Italian Maestro, without ever diminishing the originality and specificity of Favio’s films, turns them into a sort of resonance box for Fellinian echoes.

Preface 1. The Silent Era 2. The Coming of Sound and the Fascist Era 3. The Neorealist Era: Masters of Neorealism - Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti 4. The Neorealist Era: Exploring the Boundaries of Neorealism 5. The Neorealist Era: The Break With Neorealism, the Cinema of the Reconstruction in Rossellini and Antonioni, Fellini's Trilogy of Character and Grace and the Return of Melodrama with Visconti and De Sica 6. The Italian Peplum: The Sword and Sandal Epic 7. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Commedia all'italiana - Comedy and Social Criticism 8. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Neorealism's Legacy to a New Generation and the Political Film 9. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: The Mateur Auteurs - New Dimensions of Film Narrative in Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica, and Fellini 10. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: The Spaghetti Nightmare - the Italian Horror Film from the 1950s to the Present 11. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: A Fistful of Pasta - Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western 12. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Mystery, Gore, and Mayhem-- the Italian Giallo XIII. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema: Myth, Marx, and Freud in Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci 13.. The Poliziesco: Italian Crime Films from the 1970s to the Present 14.. The Old Guard Never Surrenders: Italy's Prewar Auteurs in the 1980s and 1990s 15.. The Third Wave: A New Generation of Auteurs with Moretti, Nichetti, Trosi, Salvatores, Benigni, Tornatore, Giordana, Amelio, and Ozpetek 16. Italian Cinema Enters the Third Millennium Endnotes Bibliography List of photo credits Index.

Italian Cinema is the only complete and up-to-date book on the subject available anywhere, in any language. New coverage from 1989 to the present includes the Italian horror-film genre, Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful et al.), Bernardo Bertolucci (Stealing Beauty), Franco Zeffirelli (Tea with Mussolini), Michael Radford (The Postman [II postino]), Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo), Maurizio Nichetti (The Icicle Thief et al.), Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, The Starmaker), and much more. The book has been extensively revised and updated, including all-new notes, bibliography, plus videocassette and DVD information.

This article offers new perspectives on the telephone in Italian cinema, specifically in the movement from the human to the posthuman vis-à-vis visual representation. Telecommunication has maintained a unique place in Italian cinema throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and provides insight into the anxiety of both the socio-economic status and of the human subject itself. From Roberto Rossellini’s The Human Voice to Paolo Genovese’s Perfect Strangers, the telephone acts as a key protagonist articulating the crisis of human subjectivity with respect to ever-increasing technological influence. Not only is the telephone an ‘actor’ in the Italian film tradition, but its function as both a means and an arbitrator of communication exerts control over the course of human action. As both a nonhuman object and physical/mental influencer, the telephone facilitates the transition from the human to the posthuman, informing our understanding of nonhuman technological agency in our daily lives.

Research Article| January 01 2020 Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative Kathleen Lapenta; Kathleen Lapenta KATHLEEN LAPENTA is a senior lecturer in Italian at Fordham University and is co-director of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative. Her research specializes in modern Italian culture, diaspora studies, and memory at the intersection of literature and cinema; and she has published on Giovanni Verga, Florestano Vancini, Roberto Rossellini, as well as on Italian American identity and representation. She is currently at work on a book-length project that investigates representations of national diasporas in the contexts of migration, exile, and border crossings in Italy and abroad throughout the twentieth century. She is member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Diaspora Studies Seminar at the University of Calabria. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Jacqueline Reich Jacqueline Reich JACQUELINE REICH is professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her areas of expertise include star studies, film history and theory, and Italian and Italian American cinema. She is the author of The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2015) and Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is also co-author, with Catherine O’Rawe, of Divi: La mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Donzelli, 2015) and co-editor with Piero Garofalo of Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (Indiana University Press, 2002). Currently she is co-director, with Dr. Kathleen LaPenta, of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, a community-engaged oral history research project at Fordham. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen Lapenta, Jacqueline Reich; Performative Ethnicity, Embodied Memory, and Oral History in Narratives from the Bronx Italian American History Initiative. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (1): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Benedetto Croce’s description of fascism as ‘a moral illness of our time’ provides a useful starting point for thinking about the phenomenon of cine-revisionismo storiografico and the representation of Fascism and fascists in Italian cinema. In many films from the post-war period and beyond, the metaphor of moral illness is literalised in portrayals of fascist characters who are shown as mentally or physically sick or disabled (often confusing the two), in contrast to the otherwise healthy and wholesome body of Italians. Addressing the conflation of physical and moral impairment in three 1960 films that grapple with the memory of Italy’s Fascist past – Roberto Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night), Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome), and Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43) – this article argues that in these films, bodies that do not conform to an able-bodied male norm function as lieux de mémoire that permit both the expression and containment of painful memories of the Fascist period.

The most creative phase of Italian neorealism took place within a single decade, from the early 1940s to the early 1950s. As we have already seen, a number of works produced during the fascist era are generally considered precursors to neorealist style, including the fictional documentaries by De Robertis, Genina's L'assedio dell' Alcazar , Rossellini's early war trilogy, as well as a few key dramatic films from the early 1940s unconnected with war themes, such as Visconti's Ossessione ( Obsession , 1942), Blasetti's Quattro passi fra le nuvole ( A Stroll in the Clouds , 1942), and De Sica's I bambini ci guardano ( The Children Are Watching US , 1942). There is universal agreement, however, that international recognition of bold neorealist innovation in cinematic art came only with the success of Rossellini's Roma citta aperta and Paisa . On the other hand, critics have too often failed to realize that Rossellini and other important directors and scriptwriters identified with the advent of neorealism, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini, began almost immediately after the early success of Rossellini's two films to move Italian cinema beyond a doctrinaire adherence to such critically praised elements of neorealist filmmaking as nonprofessional actors, documentary photography, authentic locations, and socially defined protagonists even as they were winning awards and critical praise at film festivals all over the world. Almost every truly original and innovative Italian director reacted negatively against an attempt on the part of some leftist or progressive critics to dictate what we would probably term today a “politically correct” cinema.