‘The Spectacle of the Unseen: Marco Bellocchio and Lure of the Catholic Church’ in Italian Studies (Cultural studies issue) 68: 3, 2013, pp. 399-410 (original) (raw)
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Bellocchio's films' cultural function(s)
Keywords: Cold War and Culture, Integration and Implosion, Feminist Catharsis, Catholic Mobs, Initiation Rites disguised as Adolescent Rebellion, The Catholic Church and Abuse, Attic Tragedy, Man without the Polis
Moralizing Cinema. Film, Catholicism and Power, 2015
This essay on the post-WWII period, illustrates how the Catholic Church was marked by the tension between the willingness to promote cinema and the need to exercise control over it. This tension emerges in Church documents, catholic exhibition strategies, and catholic audiences. It was also evident in the oscillations of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico judgements on films. Between the fifties and sixties, in particular, the growth in the percentage of films that audiences were denied highlights the progressive dominance of the pedagogic model that saw cinema as just teaching tool.
Journal of Italian Film and Media Studies, 2017
The “Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma” (OCIC), was founded in 1928. It established itself, during an existence that spanned more than seventy years (1928-2001) as an influential institution that played an important role in setting the Catholic agenda with regards to cinema. The OCIC derived its influence largely from an intermediate position between its member organisations (national and local Catholic organisations active in the field of film production, distribution, exhibition or film criticism and guidance) and the Vatican. This intermediary position, however, was not built overnight. Devising policies that were acceptable to its members from across the world, both on a national and supranational level, was a difficult exercise and the OCIC occasionally had to deal with members and other associated organisations either ignoring OCIC or trying to bypass it and deal directly with the Vatican. Maintaining its relationship with the Vatican meanwhile was a permanent exercise in balancing OCIC’s own independent course and the interests of its members with the obedience to the Holy See, necessary to obtain the Vaticans approval. Gaining an insight in this balance and how it was maintained is crucial to understanding the OCIC’s history and its position in the field of (Catholic) cinema organisations. In this paper, we will do so by delving into engagements between the OCIC and the Vatican during the postwar period, a pivotal moment in the OCIC-Vatican relations. During this period, the OCIC had to reestablish itself after its wartime inactivity. Due to changing political, societal and religious circumstances, this involved more than just restarting activities. OCIC had to reconfigure/redefine itself in order to stay relevant in the postwar world. Developing its relationship with other national and international film organisations and, more importantly, with the Vatican were crucial to this endeavour. However, the experimental foundation of the Pontificia Commissione per la Cinematografia Didattica e Religiosa, which marked the first instance of direct Vatican interference in the field, put considerable strain on the OCIC-Vatican relations. At a time when OCIC itself was trying to prove its relevance to the outside world, it was suspicious of potential competitors like this new institution within the Papal Curia and fearful of losing its independence. Our focus will be on the period between 1948 and 1952: between the foundation of this commission, and its replacement by a permanent Pontificia Commissione per la Cinematografia. This case study is based on extensive archival research. We use the OCIC archives (KADOC, Leuven University) as well as a number of archival documents made available through the project “I cattolici e il cinema in Italia tra gli anni ’40 e gli anni ’70” . Our research relies in particular on a set of documents from the archives of the Italian Azione Catolica, and the personal archives of Mgr. Ferdinando Prosperini, who was a prominent figure having held various important positions in the Italian Catholic Action, the OCIC and the Vatican.
The primary objective of this collection is to examine the ways in which religion, culture and politics converge in configuring the contradictions of post-war Italy’s cultural history, starting from the assumption that conducting a critical reflection on Italian postwar visual culture requires investigating the inevitable impact of Catholic religion on everyday life in its social, political and cultural dimensions. The volume takes advantage of the privileged position of cinema to explore and critique religion’s influence on the Italian cultural landscape. This edited anthology thus seeks to probe how religion is experienced, practiced, criticized and represented from various methodological perspectives (historical, philological, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, popular studies, etc.) through four main sections: ‘Propaganda and Censorship’, ‘Framing Belief: Pasolini and Petri’, ‘Religion in Italian Popular Cinema’ and ‘Ancient Rituals, Modern Myths’. Contributors: Roberto Cavallini, Roberto Chiesi, Silvia Dibeltulo, Juan Juvé, Fernando Pagnoni, Laura Rascaroli, Daniele Rugo, Tomaso Subini, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Fabio Vighi.
LA RICOTTA. THE SACRED TRANSGRESSED, 2008
This essay investigates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s representation of the declining Catholic identity in twentieth-century post-war Italy and juxtaposes to it an alternative Marxist vision of Christianity in his short film La ricotta, included in Alfredo Bini’s Ro.Go.Pa.G (1962). It presents the cultural and political circumstance of the film production and deconstruct Pasolini’s narrative strategies in the light of his unorthodox Marxism, attentive to the poor people on Cinecittà set, namely the protagonist Stracci (literally “Rags”) and his fellow proletarians the production’s extras.
American Journal of Sociology, 1998
This is a collection of sole-authored essays revolving around questions concerning the end of the nation-state, diaspora, new modernity, deterritorialization, the concept of culture, postcolonialism, the production of locality, flows, and "'scapes" and the work of the imagination. The author is a prominent advocate both for a new postnational discourse and an anthropology that captures the qualities of translocal culture. He has distanced himself from dominant academic establishments by extending his intellectual interests across the boundaries of literature, history, ethnography, and politics and by foregrounding his own biography as a traveler across continents. At the universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago, he has steered transnational studies into the field of cultural globalization, deliberately seeking to render the specifics of our age as a new intellectual project.