Italian Cinema Research Articles

Analyzing the Circumstances under Which Art Was Born from Italian Neorealism - The Suffering of the Times and the Rise of Art

Abstract: This essay is a unified study of the formation and development of Italian Neorealist cinema in Italy from the pre-World War I period to the post-World War II period as the time of study. Taking Italian Neorealism as an example, it explores the relationship between the suffering of the times and the rise of art. In addition to how Italian Neorealism was born against the backdrop of war and social upheaval, it influenced the subsequent French New Wave cinema and global cinema, and in particular generated far-reaching references in Third World cinema. By analyzing the gradual decline of Italian cinema from its peak in the early twentieth century, which relied on its historical and cultural heritage, through the impact of Hollywood globalization and the economic hardships of World War I, all the way to the suffering of Italian society and the collapse of the economic market during and after World War II, the study demonstrates how Italian Neorealism, through its use of long shot filming, non-professional actors, live-action productions, and documentary narratives, redefined the mission of cinematic art beyond its traditional entertainment function to give voice to the underclass. The article delves further into the influence of Italian Neorealism on the French New Wave and Third World cinema, particularly regarding its influence on social realism and political critique. It is expected to continue inspiring future filmmakers, especially those working in independent and developing country cinema.

Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema: Archives from a Film Culture by Dalila Missero, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 188 pp., £90.00 (hardback), £19.99 (paperback), £5.00 (Ebook), ISBN: 978-1-474-46324-9 (hardback), 978-1-474-46325-6 (paperback), 978-1-474-46327-0 (Ebook)

Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema: Archives from a Film Culture by Dalila Missero, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 188 pp., £90.00 (hardback), £19.99 (paperback), £5.00 (Ebook), ISBN: 978-1-474-46324-9 (hardback), 978-1-474-46325-6 (paperback), 978-1-474-46327-0 (Ebook)

She Doesn’t Even Know She Made Them: Ambiguous Attribution in Italian Exploitation Films

Abstract Starting in the late 1950s, exploitation filmmakers operating in Italy sometimes used pseudonyms, allonyms or prestanomi. This article examines the multiplicity of motivations behind this practice, and attempts to untangle some of the implications of the use of pseudonyms in Italian exploitation cinema, especially as it relates to the complex dynamics of gender and nationality in the film production sector. It compares the case of the alias O. Hellman, which appears in a small number of exploitation films in the 1970s, with similar ones from that period, including ones in which the ambiguity of authorial attribution involves husband and wife teams – an ambiguity fascinatingly compounded by the protectionist measures of Italian film policy and the contradictory evidence of primary and secondary sources. Finally, the article reflects on the implications of this practice on data-based gender research in the Italian film industry.

Quo vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology by Ivo Blom

Quo vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology by Ivo Blom

Anna Magnani: The (difficult) birth of a female film

This interview with Monica Guerritore reports on her project of making a film about Italian actress Anna Magnani (1908–73). In the interview, Guerritore talks about the film’s screenplay and her ideas about the construction of the character. The text also entails, through a thorough analysis of the development of Magnani’s career, important reflections on the transformations of Italian cinema, with references to Guerritore’s own experiences as an actress (both for the stage and the screen), stage director, playwright and literary author.

Liliana Cavani at the fourth edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies conference, Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media, The American University of Rome, 13–15 June 2024

Liliana Cavani accepted the invitation to participate in the fourth edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media (JICMS) studies conference, held at the American University of Rome from 13–15 June 2024. Cavani attended a panel dedicated to her depictions of St Francis before taking the podium for an interview that was moderated by Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College), the co-organizer of the conference and principal editor of JICMS, and Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton University), a leading scholar on Cavani’s body of work from Princeton University. Cavani reflected on her enduring fascination with St Francis despite her upbringing in a secular household, discussed many of her other films, and shared her opinions on the current state of affairs in Italy and beyond. At the end of the session, after Cavani hinted at her plans for the future, the moderators and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome), who co-organized the conference with Laviosa, presented the director with a plaque in recognition of her Inimitable Contribution to World Cinema.

Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media: Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies – fourth international conference, The American University of Rome, 13–15 June 2024

The fourth international conference of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies (JICMS) was held at The American University of Rome on 13–15 June 2024. The co-organizers were Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College) and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome) and this year’s title was Re-examining the Past and Envisioning the Future of Italian Cinema and Media. Participants from five continents and various countries, with diverse academic backgrounds, including film studies, Italian studies, media studies, social sciences and industry practice, came together for three days of stimulating discussions and productive exchanges of ideas and perspectives. The keynote address ‘Non-fiction filmmaking in contemporary Italy’ was delivered by Áine O’Healy from Loyola Marymount University. The conference was further enriched by the presence of directors Paolo Benvenuti, Monica Guerritore and Liliana Cavani. This report provides an overview of the conference.

Once upon a time in Naples: Intermediality and Bildung as chronotope in The Hand of God and Martin Eden

Beginning from Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), a famous American Bildungsroman, this article invokes Bakhtin’s chronotope to better understand a contemporary cinematic discourse predicated on the cultural maintenance of the post-Enlightenment masculine subject. Tracing the development of the Bildung genre-as-chronotope across key examples of post-war and contemporary Italian cinema – Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – I compare adaptation of Martin Eden with Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God (2021). Where the latter’s ending reimagines the conclusion of I Vitelloni, Martin Eden is the filmic equivalent of the modernist novel’s deconstruction of the nineteenth-century realist novel’s spatio-temporal and epistemological boundaries. And, where Sorrentino’s alter-ego protagonist must leave Naples for Rome in order to succeed as a filmmaker, Marcello’s intermedial evocation of Naples amplifies the book’s paean to socialism while reproducing, in another modality, the failure of London’s intended critique of individualism. Finally, in none of these films is the invisibly essential masculinity of the subject superseded by a post-humanist alternative.

From Mater Dolorosa to Mater Degenerata: Sacrifice and Subversion in Deledda’s Cenere and Duse’s Film

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the presence of positivist and proto-Eugenic discourses in Grazia Deledda’s novel Cenere (1904) and the eponymous film adaptation by Febo Mari and Eleonora Duse, Cenere (1916). I introduce the term ‘mater degenerata’ as a trope that shows a direct influence of Lombrosian ideas on Italian literature and early Italian cinema. I argue that both authors are obsessed with the mother’s body, and their work reflects a diffused anxiety in Italian culture regarding unfit mothers. The essay has two main parts. In the first part, I introduce the ‘mater degenerata’ trope. In the second part, I offer a comparative analysis of Grazia Deledda’s novel and Febo Mari and Eleonora Duse’s film and highlight how Lombrosian positivist imageries were used in early twentieth-century Italian literature and cinema to depict the degenerate mother and to express social concerns regarding motherhood, reproduction, and national identity in liberal Italy.

Italy’s colonial archives and its history of racial violence. An interview with Gaia Giuliani, author of Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (2013) and Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2019)

ABSTRACT This interview is dedicated to the pioneering work of Gaia Giuliani in critical race, whiteness and postcolonial Italian studies in Italy and internationally, over ten and five years, respectively, from the publication of Bianco e nero: Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani (with Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Mondadori Education, 2013) and Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Race and Nation in the Italian Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2012) set a milestone in scholarship on Italian visual culture and race. Lorgia Garcia Peña, scholar and activist, is a professor of Latinx Studies at the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her Translating Blackness (Duke, 2022) conceived Latinx Caribbean diaspora (also in Italy) as part of both Black migrants’ oscillating border-crossings and their forms of resistance to colonialism and racism. Both scholars have long been in dialogue with Giuliani’s scholarship.

Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema: Archives from a Film Culture, Dalila Missero (2022)

Review of: Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema: Archives from a Film Culture, Dalila Missero (2022) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200 pp., ISBN 978-1-47446-324-9, p/bk, £19.99

Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956–1975, Michael Guarneri (2020)

Review of: Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956–1975, Michael Guarneri (2020) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 232 pp., ISBN 978-1-47445-811-5, p/bk, £19.99

Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema: Legacies and Transformations into the Twenty-first Century, Anthony Cristiano and Carlo Coen (eds) (2020)

Review of: Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema: Legacies and Transformations into the Twenty-first Century, Anthony Cristiano and Carlo Coen (eds) (2020) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 332 pp., ISBN 978-1-47447-403-0, p/bk, $19.99/$90.00

Mourning the Italian boys: ‘Gen Z’, masculinity, teen stardom

This article aims to help fill a quasi-void in Italian film scholarship regarding media representations of Italian teen gender identities. It explores the role of Italian performers belonging to the so-called ‘Generation Z’, in terms of their emerging professional trajectories – with a focus on the post-pandemic context – and representations of gender, finding that the ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ played by Italian teen actors in movies and media outlets negotiate emerging cultural and social trends in representing gendered identities. Through a close analysis of filmic and media texts, as well as a trove of data acquired via ten in-person interviews conducted with carefully selected Italian actors, the article also examines how their characters and media personas negotiate traditional gender stereotypes and the cultural status of their profession.

The term «neo-mythology» in the foreign humanities discourse of the XX-XXI centuries: the specifics of its existence

The article is devoted to the specifics of existence of the term «neo-mythology» in the foreign humanities discourse of the XX-XXI centuries. The foreign texts, which contain the term «neo-mythology» as a key word, have become the focus of research for this article. The genesis and semantics of the idea of «neo-mythology» in foreign research papers are the subject matter of the research. The origin matters of the term «neo-mythology» in the Italian cinema of the 1950s-1960s are overviewed in detail. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the main tendencies of the development of the notion «neo-mythology». Russian and foreign researches touching upon contemporary mythology differ both in the content and in the usage of the term «neo-mythology» crucially. The following research was inspired by the necessity to find the terminological equivalents in Russian and foreign scientific works on modern mythogenesis. The research is based on structural-semantic and semantic-cognitive methods. Traditional methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison and generalization are used. The results of the research enabled us to make conclusions on the peripheral role of the term «neo-mythology» in foreign scientists’ works and conclude that their preferences lie within the terms «contemporary/modern mythology». The term «neo-mythology» in the foreign discourse is mostly used in works, which are either devoted to the research of some aspects of mass culture or closely connected with Russian humanities. The usage of the term «neo-mythology» in foreign research of mass/pop culture reflects the background of theoretical analysis of modern mass consciousness turning to myths. The conclusions made in the research are supposed to help Russian scientists work with foreign studies of contemporary mythology more productively.

Franco-Italian Laughter. The Development of French and Italian Film Comedy in the 1950s

Franco-Italian Laughter. The Development of French and Italian Film Comedy in the 1950s

‘I’d Like to See an Italian Film or TV Series in Which a Girl Moves Abroad’: Italian Girlhood and Nomadic Experiences

ABSTRACT This article explores the portrayal of contemporary Italian girlhood in the context of Italian media studies. It critically examines the emergence of a new media depiction of Italian high-school girls in the role of exchange students abroad. Given the widespread prevalence of this trend, which has received limited academic attention, the representations of these young travellers are examined across different media, offering insights into their dynamic agency as cultural intermediaries within Italian society. The inquiry draws from data from the AHRC research project A Girls’ Eye View. It analyses excerpts from project interviews and social media in order to shed light on the emergence of nomadic Italian girlhood as portrayed in TV series and on the TikTok platform. By exploring Italian girls’ nomadic aspirations, the study provides valuable insights into the dynamic relationship between travel, education, and the impact of social media on their lives.

A Roman holiday with ‘open heritage’? Exploring copyright law and cultural heritage law’s role for our collective cultural interest in Italian film and Italian fashion

A Roman holiday with ‘open heritage’? Exploring copyright law and cultural heritage law’s role for our collective cultural interest in Italian film and Italian fashion

‘Film, Fashion, Costume in Italy and Beyond’

This editorial positions the study of fashion and costume against the field of film studies and the history of Italian cinema and media. Although scholarly approaches to this field of study first appeared in Anglo American literature at the beginning of the 1990s, the pioneering work of Italian historian and film critic Mario Verdone has yet to be acknowledged. The anthology Verdone edited in 1950, a pivotal year of Italy’s post-war reconstruction, was the first of its kind: prior to its publication, the relationship between costume, fashion and film had never been the subject of scholarly enquiry. The title of Verdone’s book, La moda e il costume nel film (‘Fashion and costume in film’) calls attention to how these arts, techniques and industries work in the actual process of making films. Verdone’s book offers a context for the articles contained in this volume.

ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 – Modes, Memories and Cultures of Italian Film Production 1949–1976

ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 – Modes, Memories and Cultures of Italian Film Production 1949–1976