Q+A on Contemporary Italian Cinema Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Italian Cinema in the Twenty- First Century: Representing the Precarious Subject
Italian Industrial Literature and Film, Edited by C. Baghetti, J. Carter and L. Marmo, Peter Lang, Oxford-New York, 2021
This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first article of the postwar Italian Constitution states that the Republic is founded on labor. Forces across the political spectrum, from Catholic to communist, invested labor with the power to build a new national community after Fascism and war. The 1950s-1970s saw dramatic transformations, in economic, social and cultural terms, as labor moved from agriculture to industry and a whole generation of Italian writers and filmmakers used literature and cinema to interpretand influence-these changes and to capture the new experiences of industrial labor. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation's work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors. Carlo Baghetti is a postdoctoral fellow at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid (École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques). He holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Aix-Marseille Université and l'Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma. He is the editor of Il lavoro raccontato. Studi su letteratura e cinema italiani dal postmodernismo all'ipermodernismo (2020) and a special issue of Costellazioni (2020) dedicated to representations of work in Europe. Jim Carter is Lecturer of Italian at Boston University. His articles on Italian industrial culture, especially at the Olivetti company, have appeared in journals like Modern Italy and Italian Culture. In 2018-2019, he won a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenzo Marmo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Universitas Mercatorum and also teaches at the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale." In 2017, he was Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo melodramma noir (2018).
Editorial, ITALIANIST Film Issue, 32: 2 (2012), pp. 151-53
The editorial thanks Prof Millicent Marcus of Yale for her work on the Film Issue since its founding in 2009, and goes on to discuss the condition of Italian cinema and media studies, making a polemical call for 'permanent revolution'.
After Brunetta: Italian Cinema Studies in Italy, 2000-2007
After Brunetta? Only in the sense that Italian cinema studies is written in the wake of Gian Piero Brunetta’s pioneering work, and is always indebted to it. In fact, Brunetta remains our contemporary. The range of his work means that scholars with very different interests find valuable material therein. Aspects adumbrated or underdeveloped in Brunetta’s writing continue to suggest new perspectives to others. At the same time, single volume histories of the Italian cinema must always seem to be written in the shadow of Brunetta’s work, or suffer unfavourable comparison with Brunetta’s own redactions of his multi-volume histories. The late Lino Micciché writes in the premessa to the first of the published volumes of the Storia del cinema italiano overseen by Micciché for Einaudi in terms of ‘una collettanea mega-storia del cinema italiano’ to be distinguished from the ineluctable point of reference, ‘la Storia di Gian Piero Brunetta, che costruisce a nostro avviso l’encomiabile massimo sforzo storiografi co che un solo individuo possa compiere sui primi novanta anni di un fenomeno così ampio, così diffuso, e così rilevante’. Brunetta, it seems, covered the ground first; the only possible successor is really a ballooning palimpsest: a fifteen-volume history written by dozens of authors. Or, just perhaps, it might be the whole range of recent publishing on Italian cinema, which is my subject in the remainder of this article. Brunetta himself has noticed that ‘sulla spinta della crescita della domanda universitaria, si assiste a una fi oritura dell’editoria cinematografi ca’, and it is this fioritura that I hope to give an account of here. This article presents an overview, selective and necessarily subjective, of the concerns and themes that have occupied scholars and critics of Italian cinema since the turn of the century.
Workshop report: Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2017
It was the fifth workshop held as part of the Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories project, an initiative led by Alan O'Leary (Leeds) with co-investigators Austin Fisher (Bournemouth), Robert Gordon (Cambridge) and Catherine O'Rawe (Bristol). The project is intended to 'provide a radically extended account of the modes, genres and registers in which dramatic Italian films have dealt with the history of Italy'. 1 The Leeds workshop brought together scholars and non-academic partners from across the world in order to clarify research priorities and methods around the theme of film and history in the Italian and other contexts, and to work towards a major funding bid, in this case to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). 2 The #ICIH workshop featured six panels in which brief position papers were presented, followed by comments from a respondent and discussion. Panels focused on the definition of historical film, on methodologies and approaches, and on public engagement, or 'impact'.
History, 2017
A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema – which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.