Italian Director Research Articles

„If you do not believe, look up in here, at my plate”. The Confabulation of Truth in Curzio Malaparte’s Reportages

The text concentrates on the war reportages by Curzio Malaparte, an Italian writer, journalist, diplomat and director. They were previously viewed as formally perfect works of reporting, but presently they provoke controversies, mostly because of considerable modifications of facts and the inclusion of strongly subjective fragments. The article is an attempt at capturing the hidden sense of Malaparte’s confabulative text constructions beyond the strategies of autocreation and the author’s striving for commercial success. The article also deals with an important formal aspect of the reports, namely the issue of the permissible relation between the regimes of Warheit and the order of Dichtung. The article makes use of the theories of Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, Klaus Theweleit, Paweł Zajas, Phillippe Lejeune and others.

Pasolini and the women of Accattone: challenging eternal ragazzi in the Eternal City

This essay analyses Accattone (1961), the first film of Italian director, poet, and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini. Specifically, we ground our reading of Accattone in a nuanced, culture-specific understanding of fluid gender relations in the culture of post-war Roman slums. We argue that, to date, the significance of the female characters in Accattone has been underappreciated. Our essay attempts to fill that gap in the literature by examining the central roles women play in Pasolini’s first film. Indeed, the female characters create and delimit the world in which Accattone, the main male character, lives. Central to their importance to the plot is the gender fluidity and performativity of the women, as well as Accattone. We contend that the female characters perform complex identities that fuse motherhood, prostitution, and womanhood. We demonstrate how their identities necessarily contain a strongly historicized and cultured motherly element, which facilitates the poverty-stricken borgate and enables continuity of life in the Eternal City.

Cecilia Mangini

This essay offers a feminist reading of the work of Italian film director Cecilia Mangini. Drawing on an archaeological approach, it focuses on Mangini's experience as a woman in Italian cinema and her contribution to the realization of three movies—To Arms! We're Fascists! (codirected with Lino Del Fra and Lino Micciché, 1961–62), Stalin (directed with Lino Del Fra and Franco Fortini, 1962–63), and Being Women (1963–65)—all clear examples of the counterhegemonic cinema that Mangini developed in the fissures of mainstream, male-dominated practices. In her view, nonfiction film is a tool for cultural and political struggle, and it must affect the present in order to provide democratic access to knowledge. Following the Gramscian notion of the organic intellectual, Mangini has built a specific aesthetic and a personal approach to film direction, which aims to reach the broadest audience possible and, at the same time, to develop a coherent feminist militant discourse.

Um artesão da imagem e do som: entrevista com Romeo Castellucci

O texto apresenta uma entrevista comentada com o encenador italiano Romeo Castellucci na qual os autores propõem um diálogo que busca transcender a forma pergunta-resposta, tocando em questões fundamentais do trabalho de sua companhia, a Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Como fruto dessa conversa, surgem discussões que remetem, sobretudo, à relação entre imagem e som na concepção de suas obras e à problematização da forma teatral a partir de um constante diálogo com outras artes.

Films Effecting/Affecting Politics: La Bataille d'Alger (1966) and Indigènes (2006)

Viewed in light of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Alger, a balanced depiction of a guerrilla war between the FLN (Algerian National Liberati...

In Accents Yet Unknown: Reenacting Caesar’s Death in a Roman Prison

This essay focuses primarily on the Italian film Cesare deve morire (2012), an adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar acted by prisoners in Rebibbia District Prison, Rome. (1) If we use Linda Hutcheons definition of adaptation as derivation that is not a derivative--a work that is second without being secondary and Jean Marsdens description of appropriation as seizure for one's own uses, this production can be seen to fall into both of these (partly overlapping) categories. (2) At the same time, the shape-shifting Julius Caesar finds a poignantly revealing representation in its new form. This paper intends also to highlight the relevance of the presence onstage of Caesar's dead body, both in the English play and in the prison courtyard, in an attempt to demonstrate that the physical presence of the corpse is a determining element in both works. While examining the choices made by the Italian directors in order to tailor the language and the scenes to the setting of a contemporary prison, some more general considerations are made on the possible affinities between theatre and jail and on some of the implications of reading and acting Shakespeare during imprisonment. In 2012, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, both in their early eighties, winners of many prizes, and well known for their literary adaptations (Tolstoy, Pirandello, Dumas) produced the film Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die). (3) This film, which we could call a docudrama or docufilm, is based on a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by prisoners held in the Carcere di Rebibbia, a high-security prison in the eastern suburbs of Rome. (4) The film won the 62nd Berlin Film Festival, five David di Donatello awards, and was selected as the Italian entry for the best foreign language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards. The production records the yearly project carried out by the Italian theatre director Fabio Cavalli, which consists in involving prisoners--whose crimes range from drug trafficking and participation in organized crime to murder, and whose sentences vary from ten to fifteen years to life imprisonment--in acting activities organized as part of a rehabilitation program. The Taviani brothers had been to see one of these performances and suggested to Cavalli that he should attempt to put on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and that they might try to film the phases of its production, from casting and rehearsals to the actual performance on the prison stage. Cavalli agreed and the project took place. There are numerous factors specific to this Roman play contributing to making this adaptation particularly striking and memorable. The staging of the Forum scene particularly, with Caesar's dead body and speeches concerning the legitimacy of murder, acquires special resonance for inmates who know they will end their days in that same place. Widely recognized as a watershed in Shakespeare's dramatic writing, coming almost certainly in 1599 between the comedies and histories and just before the great tragedies and thus a kind of gateway to plays where the nature of power is seen in a larger perspective and with deeper symbolic significance, Julius Caesar has lent itself to multiple interpretations and classifications. Moral exemplum, chronicle, or revenge tragedy, derived mainly (but possibly not only) from North's translation of Plutarch's Lives--the lives in question being those of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony--it has often been seen as a play lacking a main character, the eponymous protagonist speaking only six percent of the total lines and dying before the middle of the play. The real theme, then, is not so much Julius Caesar but his death and the debate over the legitimacy of the killing of a sovereign when--and if--he is on his way to becoming a tyrant, a theme which has inevitably encouraged numerous rewritings for both stage and screen and which, as we shall see, brought out abundant parallels with the personal history of the Italian offenders who acted in Cesare deve morire, most of whom came from the south of Italy and were involved in criminal organizations with their own inner rules and hierarchies. …

La noia della grande bellezza: Il film di Sorrentino attraverso il romanzo di Moravia

This article proposes to read the 2014 Oscar Prize winning film La grande bellezza, by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, alongside Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel La noia, taking as a starting point the similarities between the works’ protagonists: Jep Gambardella, an eccentric failed writer, in Sorrentino’s film, and Dino, a painter who quits painting and is involved in a troubled love story, in Moravia’s novel. Both works are homodiegetic narrations of their respective protagonists’ memories; both focus on their artistic failure and psychological distress; both of them connect failure and distress with a desperate love. The anthropological analysis of the film’s plot and its dialogues aims to demonstrate that film and novel alike, show the existential crisis of an individual: in the novel, the protagonist’s crisis is transfigured into the feeling of tedium and deals with the problem of possessing Cecilia’s body; in the film, it is symbolised by the upsetting relationship with beauty and is mediated by the languages of memory, love and the sacred. La grande bellezza may be considered a representation of man’s difficult relationship with reality, in its tautological alternation of beauty and triviality, just as La noia was fifty years earlier.

Animalidad en las películas de Pier Paolo Pasolini

El presente articulo estudia el problema de la animalidad en tres peliculas del director italiano: Uccellacci Uccellini (Pajaritos y Pajarracos, 1966), Porcile (Pocilga, 1969) y Salo (1975). La figura del animal esta presente en estas peliculas para senalar el limite de lo humano o aquello que sencillamente esta fuera de lo humano. La figura del animal tiene en Pasolini un rendimiento a la vez estetico (a partir de su teoria del “cine de poesia”) y politico que pone en tension las divisiones tradicionales o modernas entre lo humano y lo animal.

The Great Beauty: Italy’s inertia and neo-baroque aestheticism

In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, Rachel Donadio looks at the movie as a commentary on the impasse that seems to paralyze Italy. Through this viewfinder, the journalist writes, Sorrentino sets the stage to have his say on ‘a culture that is blocked, resigned, embalmed in elegant decline’, where ‘inertia overwhelms all forward momentum’. As with other movies produced in the last two decades, most notably Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, The Great Beauty is part lament, part critique of all that is wrong with a country that the fiction identifies with its political leadership. Italian directors criticize the country’s pervasive atmosphere of inertia and decadence. Sorrentino has often remarked that although his films are not political per se, their representation is a critique of Italy’s current state of affairs. Contemporary history, that is, lies at the core of his artistic engagement. Yet, the baroque aestheticism of The Great Beauty reworks current tensions in an ambiguous fashion. This chapter employs journalistic sources and textual analysis of the film to inquire into what kind of cultural memory of contemporary Italy emerges from the scene. It uses Sorrentino’s neo-baroque aesthetic register and filmic philosophy of civic engagement as frameworks to explore history in the making. To this end, the essay refers to Patricia Pisters’ recent work in The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012).

OS PASSOS CRIATIVOS E ARTÍSTICOS DO DIRETOR GIORGIO STREHLER NA CONSTITUIÇÃO DE SUAS ENCENAÇÕES

Na constituição de montagens teatrais a criatividade do diretor de teatro Giorgio Strehler se expressava sobremaneira. Cada passo criativo e intelectual do diretor no percurso preparatório de suas encenações era permeado por reflexões, estudos e, sobretudo, inspiração. A preparação de seus espetáculos era sinônimo de pesquisa profunda: em primeiro lugar, acerca do texto dramático e suas implicações e, em segundo, acerca da própria encenação e de seus elementos constitutivos.Com base nesses pressupostos, o objetivo deste trabalho reside em observar os passos criativos e artísticos do diretor italiano Giorgio Strehler na constituição de suas montagens teatrais, desde a preparação dos elementos cênicos, até a preparação dos atores na constituição de seus papeis. A conclusão que se obteve com esse estudo foi que a exigência e o envolvimento de Strehler na preparação das montagens teatrais o conduzia, quase sempre, a resultados satisfatórios e, como conseqüência, suas encenações se enquadram em uma esfera artística de alta qualidade estética e cultural.

A missão italiana

Esta resenha enfoca o livro <em>A missão italiana</em>, de Alessandra Vanucci, dedicado a situar a presença dos diretores italianos no Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia (TBC) e no teatro brasileiro entre as décadas de 1950 e 1960. Além disso, mostra a formação do Grupo dos Onze na Roma ainda ocupada pelos nazistas e suas primeiras atuações profissionais. A autora desenvolve renovadas estratégias analíticas e derruba alguns mitos ainda persistentes em nossa historiografia.

Visual-spatial intelligence in propaganda and public relations discourse: The case of Roberto Rossellini’s early and educational-historical films

The aim of this paper is to analyze two of the least known periods of Italian director RobertoRossellini’s career – the fascist trilogy and his educational project for TV – as a paradigm of visual-spatialintelligence, and show their contribution to the construction of a theory of film discourse in publicrelations. Regarding the fascist period, what stands out is the unique, anti-propaganda staging, a far cryfrom the fascist cinema of the age, and more characteristic of documentary cinema. By contrast, thefilms that form part of his educational project make them public relations techniques in the termsunderstood by filmmakers from the British documentary movement and PR practitioners like JohnGrierson. In those films, in order to achieve his purposes, Rossellini created a zoom lens device namedPancinor that can be considered a mechanism of visual-spatial intelligence as well as a public relationsaudiovisual technique.

Fanon, Violence and Rebellion in Italian Cinema

This essay deals initially with the influence of Frantz Fanon's ideas among filmmakers like Giuseppe Bennati, Valerio Zurlini (Italy) and Glauber Rocha (Brazil), and subsequently focuses in particular on the work of the Italian director Valentino Orsini (1927–2001), friend and collaborator of the Taviani brothers, both a filmmaker and a faculty member at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy. Orsini's work has not received the same attention as Gillo Pontecorvo's, but his films insistently engaged with issues like political violence, decolonization and partisan resistance. His commentaries, published in the most important Italian film journals, profoundly reflected on the role of artists and intellectuals in public life and national and international politics. The essay concentrates particularly on three films directed by Orsini: I dannati della terra (1969), inspired directly by Frantz Fanon, Corbari (1970) and Uomini e no (1981).

Besieging the Courthouse: The Proxemics of Law Between Totalitarian Awe and Populist Rage

In 2006, acclaimed Italian film director Nanni Moretti released Il caimano [“the Caiman”], a surreal depiction of Silvio Berlusconi’s career as controversial businessman and politician. In one of the last sequences, an indicted Berlusconi leaves the courthouse of Milan, while his supporters besiege its premises and set them on fire. Admired for his capacity of prophetically foreseeing the developments of Italian society (2011 film Habemus Papam, by the same director, somehow ‘predicted’ the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI), Nanni Moretti’s apocalyptic vision was confirmed by reality on March 11, 2013, when a group of deputes and senators from PDL, Silvio Berlusconi’s political party, ‘besieged’ the courthouse of Milan in order to interfere with the new trials the political leader was involved in: an affair of prostitution of minors, known as “the Ruby case”, and the alleged corruption of a senator. Since when Silvio Berlusconi has been the center of the Italian both political and juridical arena, and with the increasing representation of his trials in Italian and international media, the courthouses of such trials, and particularly that of Milan, have turned more and more into the theater of a socio-political showdown, in which what matters though is not only what takes place in the Court, but also, and perhaps even more, what happens in the area surrounding its premises. Here pro- and -anti Berlusconi partisans have gathered daily in order to manifest their stand to both the citizenry and the media; here media professionals have been stationed 24/7, waiting for the next scandal; and here a dramatic battle line between the political power and the juridical one inexorably materializes with all the violent evidence of its proxemics. The essay analyzes through semiotics a series of verbal and especially visual texts representing the courthouses of Silvio Berlusconi’s trials, with the goal of understanding what this imagery reveals of the current trends of Italian socio-political and juridical arena. More broadly, the essay compares this case study with other instances of courthouses besieged by crowds, so as to semiotically seize the delicate equilibrium of the judiciary proxemics between totalitarian and populist ideologies of law.

Moretti’s Children: The Next Generation?

Nanni Moretti’s La stanza del figlio/The Son’s Room (2001) reveals the effects of a child’s death on the protagonist Giovanni (a psycoanalyst played by Moretti) and his family. This film appears after Aprile/April (1998), which narrates both the birth of the director’s son Pietro as well as the Italian electoral campaign in 1996 in the month of the title. The arrival of a biological son followed by the death of a fictional one in Moretti’s oeuvre suggests greater implications for the parent-child relationship in Italy. This phenomenon also comments on the relationship between generations of Italian directors. An examination of Moretti’s earlier autobiographical film Caro diario/Dear Diary (1994) gives insight into this director’s relationship to other artists and also suggests implications for the future of Italian filmmaking.

Italian film-makers in China and changing cultural perceptions: Comparing Chung Kuo – China (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972) and La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (Gianni Amelio, 2006)

Abstract This article compares the representation of China in two Italian films shot in country, namely Chung Kuo – China (Antonioni, 1972) and La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (Amelio, 2006). In the intervening 30-odd years changes have occurred to the Italian perception of China. Specifically, this perception appears to have shifted from a widespread fascination for Maoism, to a negativity linked to the ongoing economic changes caused by globalization that saw a redistribution of wealth and power, and in which Italy and China appeared to symbolize the two extremes on the scale of a reversed power relationship. The two films are analysed on the basis of three assumptions. The first being that until the nineteenth century the encounter between the West and China was mainly one sided, with Italy being the first western culture to approach China. The second that Italian directors were among the first westerners to make full length films in the People’s Republic of China. The third that film-makers are intellectuals influenced by the historical period in which they film. This analysis will revolve on a historical contextualization, a discussion of meaningful film sequences, and the implications emerging from a comparison of the two films.

Cassava Westerns: Ways of Watching Abderrahmane Sissako

This essay takes Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s statements about the impression Spaghetti Westerns made on him as a teen as an entry point to consider new insights into Sissako’s films that emerge when they are viewed comparatively through the genre convention of the western. Rather than arguing that Sissako seeks to fulfill or depart from such conventions, the essay shows that Sissako’s experience of the genre is in fact common to a number of West African artists and that his approach to landscape, quest narratives, and seriality resonate with the Spaghetti Western genre. Yet the influence of key francophone thinkers like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon is equally strong in Sissako’s work. The political engagement that motivated many Italian directors is transmuted in Sissako’s work to address the slow violence of globalization, using familiar generic tropes to anchor viewers confronted with cross-genre, self-reflexive, and open-ended films.

Spaces and bodies: The legacy of Italian cinema in contemporary Chinese film-making

Abstract Italian neorealist films have had a strong impact on Chinese cinema since the founding of the PRC in 1949. Chinese directors of the 1980s and 1990s have looked at the works of Italian neorealist directors with renewed interest and Jia Zhangke’s early films have come to epitomize the lasting imprint of Italian Neorealism in China. This article investigates the influence of Italian neorealist tradition (and beyond) on Chinese film-makers whose careers started after the turn of the century and whose works share a concern for the interplay of individuals and their surroundings. The essay also argues that space has a hermeneutic role for understanding the influence of Neorealism on certain recent Chinese narrative and documentary films. In line with the perception of an increasingly fragmented society, the impact of Italian directors on contemporary Chinese film-makers such as Liu Shu, Li Ruijun and Wang Bing emerges as an on-going process of re-appropriation rather than the lasting imprint of master teaching. While textual or stylistic references may not always be immediately apparent, the influence of Italian directors on contemporary Chinese film-making becomes clearer after some close analyses of certain Chinese films in conjunction with an examination of the directors’ own observations.

Disability and Deviance: Dario Argento’s Phenomena and the Maintenance of Abledness as a Critical Framework

This exploration of disability directly applies Campbell's understanding of "abledness" to the film Phenomena by Italian director Dario Argento. Phenomena (1985) explores, through the diegetic response to protagonist Jennifer Corvino's ability to communicate with insects, the shifting cultural association between disability and deviance. The film begins with the traditional response to disability, what education psychologist Kaoru Yamamoto considers the cultural importance of classifying and interpreting disabled bodies by fitting them into a narrative of deviance for surveillance and control. Throughout Argento's film, characters attempt to classify Jennifer; scientists seek to diagnose her "affliction" through the medical model of disability, while Jennifer's schoolmistresses interpret Jennifer's behavior as a disciplinary problem based in environmental factors. This represents the structural model of disability, but in each instance, the attempt to classify Jennifer fails to diagnose or discipline the supposed "deviant, disabled body." Through this failure, the film dramatizes contemporary critiques of traditional models that examine disability, moving beyond to explore what Fiona Kumari Campbell has called "the maintenance of abledness" in sexed, raced, and modified bodies. By normalizing Jennifer's ability, then, Phenomena offers a framework for examining the process through which elements of "abledness" become normalized, a concept which many theorists now argue should maintain the focus of disability studies.

“This is a Matter of Numbers, Not of Heart”. Re-signing Shock Labor in 1970s Film

The 1970s mark a turning point in the representation of “exemplary workers”, shock workers and work heroes, who had for years been part of the enterprise to increase (mainly) industrial production in state socialist countries and beyond. From its very beginnings, shock labor was inseparable from its representation in the mass media, mainly documentaries and propaganda films. In contrast, in the early 1970s, post-war work successes turn into a caput mortuum, a worthless residue of early “official” socialism. Accordingly, the image of the shock labor movement and of shock workers-as-innovators turns out to be interesting material for artists and filmmakers, who resurrect and rediscover this long-forgotten idea, turning it into an instrument of criticism of the system that advocated it, without criticizing the movement’s most prominent actors. Yugoslav, Polish and Italian directors Bahrudin Bata Cengic, Andrzej Wajda and Elio Petri in their films Slike iz života udarnika (Images from the Life of a Shock Worker, 1972), Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble, 1976) and La classe operaia va in paradiso (Lulu the Tool, 1972) respectively, re-sign the essence of work heroism. The problem of increasing production quotas, a “good and happy family life” accompanied by indispensable cultural education and the inclusion of workers in political life are some of the prevailing topics these directors use to build their own eclectic, critical as well as apologetic vision of the shock labor past or present. Key words: shock labor, Stakhanovism, film, Alija Sirotanovic, socialism, Slike iz života udarnika