THE LANGUAGE OF ITALIAN CINEMA (original) (raw)

Film studies - "Italians in Italian Cinemas"

Film studies - "Italians in Italian Cinemas", 2020

Movies are a well-known universal and wonderful medium for both entertainment and art. In addition to this, movies are an incredibly concrete example of reality can be represented, yet shaped according to someone’s decisions, which are of course the director’s. When it comes to Film Studies, all narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political characteristics of the film can be questioned and analyzed. This is one of the most interesting characteristic of movies: they consist of numerous stimuli for teaching cultural behaviors, attitudes or language uses. This Topic Exploration paper aims to present how “Italianity” can be represented in cinema. In order to proceed with such investigation on what can be regarded as concrete and representative examples of “Italianly-connotated” behaviors, identities and values, some scenes belonging to Roberto Benigni’s (1952) film production present will be taken into account. The conclusion of the author’s is that taking advantage of such stimulating and rich cultural resources like films for future language and culture teaching contexts cannot but be incredibly compelling to present days’ students, now more than ever.

A Lexicon for Italian cinema: A conversation about history, theory and critique (JICMS 5.1)

This article represents the outcome of a round table organized and conducted by Giacomo Tagliani about the Lessico del cinema Italiano/Lexicon of Italian Cinema (2014–2016). This research and editorial project comprises three volumes and 21 entries that address the history of Italian cinema through an original and challenging approach, namely to detect a list of conceptual clusters able to provide new perspectives over the heritage of Italian films. In this refined version, the authors who took part in that round table, that is, Roberto De Gaetano (also editor of the volumes), Massimiliano Coviello, Luca Venzi and Francesco Zucconi, outline their involvement in the research project, their specific methodological references, their peculiar vision of the history of Italian cinema and eventually their point of view onto its current situation. This written conversation offers a broad survey of Lessico’s key aspects and addresses important methodological, theoretical and critical issues, trying to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among different fields of studies.

Carlota Joaquina Notes on the Presence of Languages in Film

2001

What is the language spoken in Brazilian cinema? The link between Brazilian cinematography and Lusophony (Portuguese-speaking) seems obvious. The hypothesis behind these reflexions, however, takes as its departure point the fact that Lusophony is a multidimensional complexity, one which includes different modes of speech and goes far beyond the limits of the official language, be it from Portugal, Mrica, Asia or Brazil. Besides, the initial question may serve the investigation of other audiovisual media, such as television, and it can possibly help define the contours of a Brazilian spectatorship. Such definition, in its turn, can be useful for the research of those media, since it encapsulates a series of articulated phenomena: consumer and audience behavior, cultural identification and the focus of my attention here, reading strategies of audiovisual texts. These notes are gathered in three different sections: the first one deals with the presence of languages in international cin...

Il linguaggio cinematografico Film language Schede di sintesi – Outlines Il suono Sound

Noi andiamo a vedere un film, non diremmo mai che andiamo a sentire un film. Come dice Monaco, la parte auditiva è data per scontata, e non ci rendiamo quasi mai conto del ruolo che gioca nel creare l'effetto totale a cui siamo esposti come spettatori. Così occorre fare uno sforzo per identificare il suono in un film e per distinguerne le diverse componenti ... We go and see a film - we would never say that we go and listen to a film. As Monaco says, the auditive part is taken for granted, and we are barely aware of the role that it plays in creating the total effect we are exposed to as viewers. Thus we need a conscious effort to identify sound in a film and to distinguish its different components ...

Italian Film: The State of the Field

Italian Studies, 2015

Around the 1910s, as Francesco Casetti writes, early commentary on Italian film was 'a kind of muddled discursive crowding, more than an ordered constellation, where different contributions emerge, side by side, even overlapping, but also in dialogue with each other'. Specifically,

Cinema -Language: The "Subject" that Transforms human

Aligarh Journal of Liguistics, 2017

If one would propose to formally look at cinema as a language, then beyond the scope of influence and effect there can be an imagination of affect in this relationship. The way language has its practitioners and audience (speakers predominantly, but one intends to use this word with caution here. The attribute of speech and its entanglement with creation becomes very specific in case of cinema. This paper intends to explore that relationship to some extent) and it is their act that keeps the language alive and changes its course in due time, this paper similarly would like to see cinema as the language which is perceived to be changing with its practitioners. Echoing the explorations of Deleuze one may try to look at language first, and then the language through a form of cinema, one may refer to it as an inescapable part of our lived experience. But this experience relays to the audience a sensation outside the realm of thought or recognizable empirical categories, a sensation that only has possibility of being felt or sensed. Thus media language recreates the audiences into its "speakers". If film can be considered a language, the very craft and form of it, then one may take a step forward to state that the person experiencing it, through "sensation" is turned into a bloc of "affects". Thus our being is not one. It is not one human being perceiving the language anymore, but a series of "becomings." Thus the whole idea that the change in language is brought forth by human usage can be challenged and upturned. Here we could see the language changer the human being. In this manner, a new gaze can be turned towards the scope of media linguistics and that is the intended focus of this paper.

Language conflict, glottophagy and camouflage in the Italian cinematic city

GLOBE, 2021

In this paper, I would like to present an analysis of the social environment of language contact in Italy exploring how historically the language policy in the era of fascism produced a complex idea of the Italian language community. I will use the notions of spatiality, glottophagy and camouflage to indicate, describe and analyse how this came to be and still is the case, and I will try to contextualize this process in the fascist history of Italy. In the second part, I will focus on the relationship between language, space and society as represented in Italian cinema, unpacking the relationships between fascism and Italian language policy and the language structured by socioeconomic and cultural conflicts. Discussing the language structure in three cinematic cases, I want to demonstrate how Italian cinema has interpreted the relationship between different languages and conflict in the repertoire in the moment when social conflict started to be filmed by some film directors at the end of the Second World War.