Italian Filmmaker Research Articles

Reel simulations: CGI and special effects in two films by Paolo Sorrentino

ABSTRACTCriticism on two recent films by director Paolo Sorrentino (La grande bellezza, 2013; Youth, 2015) has tended to identify them with a formalistic retreat from the afflicted state of the Italian nation. Instead of analysing these films according to their relation to historical reality, this article examines Sorrentino’s use of special effects and how form, reflexivity, and motion achieve new levels of cinematic expressivity in the digital format. It argues that the new techniques and technology utilized in these films represent a potentially positive creative direction, away from transparent, photographic realism and towards arrangements of visual illusion that are typical of global digital media in the age of media convergence. In order to substantiate this thesis, the essay traces material and theoretical connections between Italian filmmaking, its links with the stationary art of painting, and video games.

Billboard, banner, blackboard: Marina Warner’s photographs of the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

How a Mathematician Started Making Movies

The author’s father, Luciano Emmer, was an Italian filmmaker who made feature movies and documentaries on art from the 1930s through 2008, one year before his death. Although the author’s interest in films inspired him to write many books and articles on cinema, he knew he would be a mathematician from a young age. After graduating in 1970 and fortuitously working on minimal surfaces—soap bubbles—he had the idea of making a film. It was the start of a film series on art and mathematics, produced by his father and Italian state television. This article tells of the author’s professional life as a mathematician and a filmmaker.

The Representation of Migrants in Italian Cinema, from the Stereotypes to the Socio-Political Mission of Present-Day Film Directors

The mass media are more than ever taking on the role of a socialization agency and contributing to the construction of new social representations. They are producing and perpetuating stereotypes that get crystallized in the individual and collective imagination, determined and defined by the goods produced by the culture industry. For decades now, and with different disciplinary approaches, the social sciences have demonstrated the role and importance of the mass media in constructing the social representations, stereotypes and prejudices of immigrants, and therefore the relationships between the different groups and cultures that live throughout the land. The present article deals with the major results of an empirical research, conducted at the Sapienza University of Rome, on the relationship between Italian cinema and the topic of migration: a topic that has always been a favorite leitmotif of the mass media the world over, especially cinema. The main objective of this survey was to compare images and representations formed on Italian immigrants in the world with the more recent ones of foreigners in Italy, through both the study of cultural products that address these issues (such as films and film-documentaries) and interviews focusing on some of the most famous Italian filmmakers who have dealt with this topic. With this in mind, I will analyze (in comparative terms) the corpus of films and stereotypes – positive and negative – that stud our cinematic firmament, in order to try to understand if films are still capable today of conducting the social function they have always done.

Not Even in a Dream. Emigration and immigration in new Italian cinema

Abstract After a historical and theoretical review, this article analyses several generations of film-makers whose works address the phenomena of emigration and immigration as represented in Italian cinema. The classic, post-war Italian cinema often describes emigration from the country, but in the last two decades, new Italian cinema has dealt with the topic of immigration in its diverse and complex forms. More specifically, the discussion will focus on the generation of the post-fascist Italy (Germi, De Seta), the ‘modern’ Italian film-makers (such as Bertolucci), the auteurs of the 1980s and 1990s (Tornatore, Giordana, Amelio) and lastly the generation of the New Italian Cinema of the 2000s (Crialese, Segre, Mazzacurati, Salani, Noce, Di Matteo, Munzi, Cupellini, Giovannesi among others).

Anglo-Italian co-productions in the 1950s and 1960s: film finances, the Prince and Venice

This article presents an examination of material from archives, much of it little known and little researched, on the Italian film industry. The importance of archive sources in pinpointing the processes that bring a film to the screen continues to inform film research. The main documentation explored is that of the Film Finances Archive, only recently made available to researchers. This is considered in tandem with data from the Italian State Archive, and a range of other critical and narrative sources. Of these, particularly significant is the correspondence and autobiography of Prince Alessandro Tasca, a little-known figure, who was the Film Finances representative in Italy. Italian filmmaking from 1950 to 1960 is the main focus because it is given extensive coverage in the Film Finances Archive, when the company was involved in a number of Anglo-Italian co-productions. The field of Anglo-Italian co-productions has been described as an ‘undiscovered world’. It is thus contended that, through exploration of this newly available archive material and other relevant sources, the study offers a fresh perspective on the context of postwar Italian filmmaking.

Shooting ‘sublime blondes in tight dresses’: the paparazzi in fiction film and television from La dolce vita to Dirt

In his 1960 film La dolce vita, Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini called his photographer ‘Paparazzo’. Although photographers who snap celebrities, with or without consent, and sell the results to the press existed before La dolce vita, Fellini’s nickname for them endured. The figure of the paparazzo has, from that moment, served as a convenient tool for a number of filmmakers to observe, get close to, and unveil their favourite subject: the blond bombshell – as illustrated by Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) in La dolce vita, Jill (Brigitte Bardot) in Vie privée/A Very Private Affair and Stormy (Stormy Daniels) in the television series Dirt. Using Visual Studies methodology, this article analyses what is at stake when representing the male photographer’s perspective as he captures the blonde woman in his viewfinder. This article argues that the film director uses the paparazzo as an agent of visibility and discovery to unveil the female character, to glorify her, but also to degrade her.

‘Avec la participation exceptionnelle de…:’ Riffaterrean readings of the ungrammatical performances of Line Renaud and Laura Betti

This article explores the ‘doubling’ of actress Line Renaud in Claire Denis’s film, J’ai pas sommeil (I Can’t Sleep, 1993) and of actress Laura Betti in Catherine Breillat’s film, À ma sœur! (Fat Girl, 2001); both appear as diegetic characters in each narrative, but also make brief appearances as themselves through aural or visual media presented within the diegesis. I read these dual appearances through Michael Riffaterre’s theory of intertextuality as ungrammaticality, wherein aspects of a text which appear to rupture narrative progress or verisimilitude – lexical inconsistencies, contradictions, or unusual patterns of speech, for instance – may be argued to herald connections to latent intertexts. I explore the doublings of Renaud and Betti as devices which jolt the viewer out of immersion within narrative, forging connections with, in Renaud’s case, the true events which inspired Denis’s film and, in Betti’s case, with her work with Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. In both instances, the ungrammatical appearances of Renaud and Betti are investigated for their potential to encourage deeper, critical readings of Denis and Breillat’s films, in which issues of sexuality, society and spectatorship are paramount.

The archite(x/c)ture of cinematic Milan

The paper focuses on the issue of cinematic representation of Milan. The approach is based on Henri Lefebvre’s well-known argument regarding the importance of the textual nature of the city per se applicable to the analysis of the cinematic city. The analysis considers the ways in which Italian filmmakers represent Milan. It attempts to outline the ‘classical map’ of textual Milan created in Italian cinema and examines its changes in Luca Guadagnino’s recent film Io sono l’amore ( I Am Love, 2009). The analysis of the configuration of the diegetic city-space together with the exploration of the narrative devices in the representation of the city in Guadagnino’s film help to delineate the significance of a new cityscape and evaluate the changes to the ‘classical map’ of cinematic Milan.

A cinema of poetry: aesthetics of the Italian art film

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?

TOWARDS A TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN FILM

The topic of this roundtable prompts me to reflect with some optimism on the contrast between the uncertain status of Italian film studies when I began teaching and researching in the field over twenty years ago, and the flourishing profile it enjoys today as a sub-discipline of Italian studies in the Anglophone academy. It also obliges me to acknowledge that the institutional inclusion of Italian screen studies (ISS; now encompassing both film and television) within italianistica has meant that it exists in relative isolation from some of the theoretical discourses and methodological trends developing in the broader field of film and media studies, more specifically transnational film criticism. My own introduction to the study of cinema occurred in the context of a film studies department in the 1980s, at a time when the discipline was marked by the conjunction of semiotics, psychoanalytic film theory, and feminism. This theoretical background did not necessarily provide the most compelling preparation for a teaching career in a department of Modern Languages and Literatures, where the focus of my research was expected to match the field in which I was hired to teach, that is, Italian studies — then, as now, dominated by literary history and analysis. Nonetheless, it enabled me to bring theoretical discourse to bear on my investigation of Italian cinema and Italian cultural production more generally. It also trained me to approach all films as texts that offer rich potential for deconstructive inquiry, rather than as aesthetic objects to be cherished or cast aside according to predetermined hierarchies of value. My decision to focus my research on contemporary Italian cinema met with some incomprehension at the outset, particularly among italianisti. This resistance has not yet entirely disappeared. ‘Ma il cinema italiano non esiste piu’ is the dismissive comment I still hear, more often in Italy than elsewhere, from a number of colleagues who assert that the films produced in Italy over the past twenty or thirty years are rarely worth viewing, much less worth studying. Rather than reflecting a reasoned assessment of Italian cinema at present, such claims are symptomatic of a refusal to move beyond out-dated evaluative criteria and canonical hierarchies, such as the embalmment of neorealism as the gold standard of Italian filmmaking, the privileging of a discourse of autori, and so on — taken-for-granted values that were astutely challenged in a landmark article by Catherine O’Rawe about five years ago, and further elaborated in a more recent study by Alan O’Leary in collaboration with O’Rawe. The Italianist, 34. 2, 268–271, June 2014

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.

Nostalgics, thugs and psycho-killers: Neo-fascists in contemporary Italian cinema

Neo-fascism played a crucial role in the Italian political panorama of the second half of the twentieth century. However, despite its importance, this political movement has been significantly underrepresented in contemporary Italian cinema. Italian cinema has been traditionally characterized by a strong political commitment and left-wing film-makers have often attempted to examine issues emerging from within groups close to their own political position. While Italian cinema is characterized by a proliferation of films that focus on left wing or communist heroes, neo-fascists have been systematically excluded from screen representation or confined to the roles of one-dimensional villains: either dangerous, anti-social thugs like in Teste rasate/Skinheads (Fragasso, 1993); leaders of coup d'état associated with the military like in La polizia ringrazia/Execution Squad (Vanzina, 1972) and Vogliamo i Colonnelli/We Want the Colonels (Monicelli, 1973) or vicious psycho-killers like in San Babila ore 20: Delitto inutile/San Babila 8pm (Lizzani, 1976). However, today, twenty years after 1989 and the collapse of ideologies, Italian film-makers have started a process of historical revision that goes beyond the simplistic opposition good versus evil. This tendency is particularly apparent in recent productions such as Romanzo Criminale/Crime Novel (Placido, 2005) and particularly Mio fratello è figlio unico/My Brother Is an Only Child (Luchetti, 2007) which, while avoiding to justify or celebrate neo-fascist ideology, attempt to explore the sociocultural motivations that lie behind the political choice of Italian neo-fascists.

Psychoanalysis to the People!: Alienation, Anguish, and the Unconscious in a Review of the Italian Left, 1961–9

This article explores how the Italian filmmaker and novelist Lorenza Mazzetti (1928–) has appropriated psychoanalysis. By looking at her novels and basically at her column of personal advice within the Communist weekly Vie Nuove during the 1960s, the article shows her increasing use of psychoanalytic insights as a form of defending a secular sexual morality and changes in gender relations as well as way of analysing the relationship between youth and politics. The article highlights Mazzetti's initial distrust towards psychoanalysis, and contrasts it with her increasing enthusiasm for psychoanalysis as a necessary companion of revolutionary activism. It takes Mazzetti's case as evidence of the receptivity towards psychoanalysis among Italian Communists.

Mujeres tras la cámara: panorama de las cineastas italianas de las últimas décadas, con una entrevista a la directora siciliana Costanza Quatriglio

The recent history of Italian cinema includes several women directors who have contributed to the diversity and variety indispensable in any artistic discipline. However, these directors have received relatively little public recognition and the distribution of their films has been limited. The fact that production by women remains relatively unknown implies that there is only partial knowledge of contemporary Italian cinema. Therefore, this article attempts to highlight this lesser known part of this industry through the analysis of the main Italian women filmmakers of the last two decades, their common universe and individual peculiarities. An interview with director Costanza Quatriglio is also included as an epilogue. She sets out the keys to her work and offers a previously unpublished reflection on the current state of Italian film and the role of women directors in it.

The violence of history in Marco Bechis’s Argentina

This article analyses two feature films, Garage Olimpo (1999) and Figli/Hijos/Children (2001), by Italian film-maker Marco Bechis. The films are conceived as a diptych revolving around the 1976–1983 Argentine dictatorship and its traumatic legacy in the following decades. Through a close reading of Bechis’s films, this article aims to highlight how the director has forged a form of cinema that is subtly political not only in the subjects represented but also in the (filmic) language that expresses these themes. Scholars who have examined Bechis’s works have read the two films, and in particular Garage Olimpo, within the context of Argentine cinema. In addition to this Hispano-centric viewpoint, my analysis will consider a wealth of writings and interviews that have been released in Italian. The understanding of Bechis’s point of view that one gains through this material allows for a deeper, more nuanced interpretation of his films than the exclusively Argento-centric reading.

The age of innocence? Child narratives and Italian Holocaust films

This article critically assesses the use of children as narrators in two recent Italian Holocaust films: Roberto Benigni'sLa Vita é Bella(1997) and Ettore Scola'sConcorrenza Sleale(2001). The analysis places the films and their choice of narrator in the context of the child in European Holocaust film and argues that the child's perspective, often used to qualify the actions of adult characters and cast a questioning or even accusatory gaze on them, is used in these Italian films to perform the opposite function. Focusing on cinema as a site of memory and as a site of emotions, the article suggests that Italian filmmakers use children to infantilise the audience, induce pity rather than reflection, and discuss Italy's role in the Holocaust while reassuring audiences of the life-affirming, democratic and humanitarian values of post-war Italians. This political and historiographical use of the child's emotions not only reinforces the need to insist on the revision of thebrava gentemyth, but also invites a thorough reconsideration of the complexity of the relationship between the historical film and the emotions.

The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema

The essay discusses contemporary Italian filmmakers’ sustained interest in the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony. Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodramas, Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto Saviano and Salvatore Settis.

Allegory, applicability or alibi? Historicizing intolerance in Ettore Scola's Concorrenza sleale

In 2001, renowned Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola released his film Concorrenza sleale. Upon its release, Scola stated repeatedly that his historical film about the anti-Jewish legislation of 1938 aspired to go beyond the historical setting in order to convey acritique of intolerance in contemporary Italian society. Moving from an analysis ofthe film's evolution from script to post-production, this article offers a textual and contextual analysis of Concorrenza sleale, investigating its relationship both to the period the film seeks to represent and to the time of its production. Questioning both the allegorical ambitions of the film and the political implications of historicizing the issue of racism in Italy, this article argues that Scola's film is ultimately unable to abandon the italiani brava gente template, thus leaving its ambitious questions about Italian attitudes towards the other not only unanswered, but also unasked.

From heaven to hell: The representation of the ThyssenKrupp tragedy in contemporary Italian documentary film-making

ABSTRACTThis essay focuses on the following documentaries: Simona Ercolani's La classe operaia va all'inferno/The Working Class Goes to Hell (2008), Pietro Balla and Monica Repetto's ThyssenKrupp Blues (2008) and Mimmo Calopresti's La fabbrica dei tedeschi/The Germans' Factory (2008). The three works portray what happened inside the ThyssenKrupp plant in Turin on 6 December 2007, when seven steel factory workers died after a deadly fire. To properly examine these documentaries, and to better account for their structural organization and narrative strategies, I employ Bill Nichols' theory on the different modes of representation in documentary film-making as discussed in his Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Following Nichols theory, I classify Ercolani's documentary as expository, Balla and Repetto's as observational and Calopresti's as interactive.