Italian Cinema

Con le espressioni “Cinema a domicilio”, “piccolo cinematografo privato”, “cinema in casa”, giornalisti, intellettuali e addetti ai lavori salutano l’avvento della programmazione televisiva italiana sperimentale, alla fine degli anni Trenta. Alla fine degli anni Quaranta, quando la RAI riprende quegli studi e quegli esperimenti che, nel giro di pochi anni, porteranno al varo del servizio regolare di trasmissione, il dibattito si rianima; ma la ricerca dello specifico televisivo si accompagna questa volta alla crescente preoccupazione per l’avvenire del cinema stesso quale mezzo di intrattenimento di massa. Attraverso lo spoglio sistematico delle riviste corporative dell’AGIS, il mio intervento intende esaminare il posizionamento degli esercenti cinematografici italiani nel conflitto cinema-televisione e il loro contributo alla messa a punto delle principali strategie di contenimento della concorrenza.

With the labels “home cinema”, “small private cinema”, “home theater”, journalists, intellectuals and professionals welcome the advent of experimental television in Italy, during the late thirties. At the end of the forties, when RAI resumes those studies and experiments that, within a few years, will lead to the launch of the regular television service, the debate is revived, but the search for the specificity of the medium is accompanied by a growing concern for the future of cinema itself as mass entertainment. Through the study of AGIS’ major corporate magazines, this essay will examine the positioning of the Italian film exhibitors in the conflict cinema-television, and their contribution to the development of the main strategies of containment of the competition.

Mario Bava is considered as one of the most important directors of all the times, especially if we talk about the horror genre. In this paper his heritage will be analysed as an highly inspirational one not onaly in Italy, but in the International panorama as well.

Deadline: July 18, 2022.
The international conference *Transatlantic Visions: Italian Film Cultures and Modernisms in Post-War America (1949-1972)* focuses on the presence of Italian cinema in post-World War II U.S. cultural consumption. Its aim is to map the transatlantic exchanges that permitted or fostered the circulation and influence of Italian cinema in the United States in various ways during the period under consideration.

This article examines the relationship between costume and character, self and appearance in Luca Guadagnino’s film, I Am Love (Io Sono l'Amore, Guadagnino: 2009). As played by Tilda Swinton, Emma Recchi is a woman whose dress reveals a meticulous record of her emotional journey, providing an almost text-book case of costume performing emotional exteriority. Complicating any straightforward analysis of costume design in I Am Love, however, is a deep fashion consciousness that pervades the film and goes beyond the widely publicized association with fashion houses, Jil Sander, Fendi and Hermès, to a recognition of fashion as a complex discourse able to canvas multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Just as Guadagnino draws on other narratives and other films to tell his story, Swinton’s off-screen life and on-screen personae shadow her portrayal of Emma, constructing a character who is both the unique individual of ‘I Am Love’ and the hollow image of fashion that is the Emma of ‘I Am Style.’

The life and works of writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) are dotted with references to Africa, Africans, and their diaspora, starting from 1958 until his death in 1975. His constructions and representations of Africa and Africans were multifaceted and had numerous intellectual, political, poetic, erotic, aesthetic, and autobiographical goals and nuances. However, Pasolini's "African gaze" in its entirety is deeply connected to his wider approach to alterity, subalternity, the South, and-as I will explain- to his construction of the "Pan-South" (Panmeridione) running through his work. This chapter will first identify the tools-both national (including the centrality of the dualistic theorization of Italy's Southern Question) and transnationalthrough which Pasolini's multifaceted Africa was conceived, and will then focus on his representations of the Horn of Africa. Even though Pasolini's Africa was influenced by Marxist, Pan-Africanist, anticolonialist, Gramscian, and post-Gramscian discourses, it was also much affected by Italy's self-representations and the construction of a "Mediterranean Africa" that emerged during Italian colonialism, both before and during Fascism. This is particularly evident in Pasolini's Eritrean texts, which, between 1968 and the mid-1970s, openly referred to Eritrea and the Eritreans as a former Italian colony and a colonized people. Literary representations of Italian East Africa were very rare in Italy after World War II, with Ennio Flaiano's 1947 novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill), set in the Horn of Africa in the mid-1930s during Italy's military campaign in Ethiopia, representing a great exception. Pasolini is the author who, after Italy's loss of its African colonies, most continuously and significantly approached Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa. His Eritrean texts, despite their being difficult and disturbing, provide unique and precious tools to retrace and rewrite the underlying continuity between prefascist colonialism, Fascism, and postcolonial representations of Italian colonial Africa.

L’economia del film è un’area di ricerca relativamente giovane e in espansione dedicata all’industria cinematografica e allo studio delle logiche che governano le sue attività. Il volume analizza i processi di finanziamento, produzione, distribuzione e circolazione dei film, il mercato cinematografico, i protagonisti tradizionali e di più recente comparsa che operano nel settore (come Netflix e Amazon), e la complessa rete di politiche europee, nazionali e locali che regolamentano e sostengono il sistema, soffermandosi di volta in volta a riflettere sulle diverse forme di valore che il film assume per gli stakeholder coinvolti. Il film è infatti un prodotto complesso, su cui convergono interessi pubblici e privati diversificati, istanze artistiche ed economiche, frutto di un processo che si declina in maniera differente a seconda della cultura produttiva di cui è espressione. Questa complessità da una parte articola il ruolo che il film ricopre all’interno del sistema economico e della società contemporanea; dall’altra rende più che mai complesso quantificare e determinare il suo successo.

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.

L’opera è dedicata agli incroci interdisciplinari tra lingua, letteratura e cinema, ai luoghi della creatività e alle reti della comunicazione multimediale. I temi principali dei saggi raccolti sono la lingua e la letteratura italiana nell’era della transmedialità, i rapporti linguistici e semiotici tra la letteratura e le arti visive, le stratificazioni e le relazioni nel mondo della cultura digitale, lo spazio creativo in rapporto alle lingue e al raccontare e agire ipermediale e ipertestuale, il tempo libero e le rappresentazioni dell’amore nell’era di internet e dei social network.

La digitalizzazione della sala offre un punto di osservazione privilegiato per ricostruire il campo di tensioni che, a partire dagli anni ’80, ha prodotto una serie di cambiamenti. Il colore costituisce uno degli elementi che, fin dagli albori del digitale, ha più fortemente operato come elemento di innovazione delle tecniche, dei flussi di lavoro e delle retoriche visive. A questo proposito, il digital turn può essere considerato anche nei termini di un vero e proprio color turn, attraverso il quale il colore si impone come elemento chiave per la produzione e il consumo di immagini nei film e nei media contemporanei.

"Salò", or 120 minutes of "a fossil". On transgression and its negation in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film

The article is an attempt to analyse the problem of transgression in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom”. The author argues that although at the visual level the film appears as a perverse work of art, its message remains very conservative. “Salò”, being a loose adaptations of Sade’s “The 120 days of Sodom” is not (unlike the source text) praise of permanent transgression. Pasolini actually thematises the latter, showing (coldly) its abysmal dimension. That anti-transgressive overtone of the film (which was to be, first of all, the polemics with the tendencies observable in contemporary, permissive culture and its fascist, exclusive essence, which bothered the director) results in the absence of any non-normativity positively connoted. Its lack – surprising in the context of the Italian director’s artistic output – makes “Salò” (a supposedly “sick”, “appalling” and “nihilistic” work of art) appear as the most prudish in its message of all Pasolini’s films, which also seems to be a subversive defence of the “civilisation of life” (understood in a conservative way).

Artykuł stanowi próbę przyjrzenia się problemowi transgresji w filmie Piera Paola Pasoliniego „Salò, czyli 120 dni Sodomy”. Autor dowodzi, że chociaż film na płaszczyźnie wizualnej jawi się jako dzieło perwersyjne, to jednocześnie jego wymowa pozostaje bardzo zachowawcza. „Salò” będące luźną adaptacją „120 dni Sodmy” Sade’a, nie jest (w przeciwieństwie do powieściowego pierwowzoru) pochwałą permanentnej transgresji. Pasolini raczej tematyzuje tę ostatnią, pokazuje (na chłodno) jej infernalny wymiar. Ów „antytransgresyjny” wydźwięk filmu (mający być przede wszystkim polemiką z niepokojącymi dla reżysera tendencjami współczesnej, permisywnej kultury i jej „faszystowską”, ekskluzywną esencją) powoduje, że w analizowanym dziele nie znajdziemy żadnej, pozytywnie konotowanej, nienormatywności. Jej – zaskakujący na tle całej twórczości Włocha – brak sprawia, że „Salò” (utwór rzekomo „chory”, „bulwersujący” i „nihilistyczny”) okazuje się nie tylko najbardziej pruderyjnym w wymowie obrazem Pasoliniego, ale wydaje się również przewrotną obroną (konserwatywnie rozumianej) „cywilizacji życia”.

Texto en castellano

DE ESCIPIÓN A BERLUSCONI. UNA HISTORIA DE ITALIA EN 50 PELÍCULAS
Cuenta André Breton que, cuando el grupo surrealista acudía al cine, acostumbraba a entrar comenzada la proyección, y la abandonaba al poco tiempo para volver a irrumpir en otra sala, donde se exhibía otra película, en cualquier momento de la función. Al final de la jornada, las secuencias dispersas, cubiertos los huecos en la imaginación, iban construyendo en la memoria un nuevo argumento, a partir de la lógica irracional, fragmentaria y elíptica del inconsciente. Algo de la visión «sonámbula», y profundamente liberadora, que reivindicaba el surrealismo, subyace en el viaje por el imaginario histórico a través del cine italiano que recorre las páginas de este libro. Los autores proponen un itinerario punteado de elipsis, saltos, pasadizos subterráneos, flashbacks y flashforwards, un recorrido transhistórico que se apoya en el asincronismo entre el tiempo que señalan las tramas, a partir del cual se ha ordenado la selección de los films, y el de su producción y estreno en sala. En resumen, lo que este volumen plantea es una de tantas historias posibles de Italia —tantas como antologías probables— a través del objetivo de la cámara.

Capítulo dedicado al analísis de la filmografía de Sorrentino desde el punto de vista de los protagonistas masculinos a través de sus crisis de identidad.

¿Qué tienen las películas de Paolo Sorrentino, que convocan siempre nuestra mirada más atenta y gozosa, y en cuyas imágenes presentimos formuladas nuestras más secretas obsesiones? ¿Qué tiene la película La gran belleza, su obra maestra, que arrebata sin remedio a tantos espectadores? ¿Cómo funciona su reconocible lenguaje fílmico, lleno de composiciones y encuadres desbordantes, músicas inesperadas que se vuelven necesarias y magnéticos colores que esconden múltiples significados? ¿Y qué enigmas sobre el tiempo y el deseo laten bajo sus filmes y conmocionan sus imágenes?

Raúl ÁlvarezJosé Ángel BarruecoCarla F. BenedictoShaila García-CatalánRussell J. A. KilbournIsrael ParedesAarón Rodríguez SerranoRicardo Sánchez RamosCarlos TejedaLorenzo J. Torres Hortelano

Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames. 
Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks
Elena Gorfinkel, King’s College London (U.K.)

Part 1: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics

Chapter 2: Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema
Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Chapter 3: Frame
Adrian Martin, Monash University (Australia)

Chapter 4: Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China
John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge

Chapter 5: The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary
James Tweedie, University of Washington

Part 2: Global Ideality, History, Representation

Chapter 6: Toward an Archeology of Global Rhythms: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, 1929) and its Reception in France
Laurent Guido, University of Lille (France)

Chapter 7: When Cinema was Humanism
Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick

Chapter 8: African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation
N. Frank Ukadike, Tulane University, New Orleans

Chapter 9: Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema
Patricia White, Swarthmore College

Part 3: Kinships, Identifications, Genres

Chapter 10: Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul University

Chapter 11: Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Peter Y. Paik, Yonsei University (Korea)

Chapter 12: The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández
Gilberto M. Blasini, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Chapter 13: The Gangster Film as World Cinema
Jian Xu, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Chapter 14: Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema
Tami Williams, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/global-cinema-networks/9780813592725

This paper was written for the GSA annual conference in 2011. It offers a detailled analysis of the German-Italian war movie HIMMELFAHRTSKOMMANDO EL ALAMEIN (1968), which tells the same events from three different, conflicting perspectives: the Germans, the Americans, and the Italians. Doing so, the movie deconstructs generic conventions of war movies, highlighting their ideological aporias.

Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi are part of a new generation of documentary filmmakers committed to produce social and political “narratives of change” with any low tech or high-end means possible.  Their three collaborative documentaries to date, Improvvisamente l’inverno scorso (Suddenly, Last Winter, 2009), Italy: Love it or Leave It (2011) and What is Left? (2014), employ a combination of experimental strategies and distribution practices that have proven successful in reaching different audiences and raising social awareness in Italy and abroad.
In a consciously self-reflexive effort, all three films star the directors themselves, Gustav and Luca, as protagonists. As in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore (1964), his inquest on sex, in which the body of the homosexual poet was constantly on screen, in their documentaries Hofer and Ragazzi are also always on display, their bodies the markers of sameness and difference simultaneously, exposing the assumption and limit of the Italian heteronormative hegemonic order. By casting themselves and acting in front of the camera, in a calculated choice to embody the very issues they are addressing, the directors also challenge the presumed objectivity of the documentary genre emphasizing instead its subjective and performative aspects.

The real and beyond in Alain Resnais and Federico Fellini: from origins to the years of the dream

Thèse dirigée par Didier COUREAU, UGA préparée au sein du Laboratoire UMR 5316 Litt&Arts (Arts & Pratiques du Texte, de l'Image, de l'Ecran & de la Scène) dans l'École Doctorale Langues, Littératures et Sciences Humaines. Thèse soutenue publiquement le 10 décembre 2018.

This thesis examines three Italian films, focusing on how the films represent Italian life at the time of the Holocaust, and how these representations reflect shifts in understanding regarding the experience of the Holocaust in Italy. Chapter One explores how the political environment for the Jewish characters in Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis disposes them to perform their daily lives as normally as possible while anti-Semitic legislation deteriorates their rights as Italian citizens. Chapter Two examines Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist in terms of a split between the surface illusion of normality, manifest in the film's polished aesthetics and the calm veneer of its protagonist, and the volatile reality lurking beneath. Chapter Three examines how Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful makes explicit what had been left implicit in the previous two films: i.e., that official accounts of the Italian experience of the Holocaust have promoted as fact what is best seen as a fable.

In this article I seek to position La masseria delle allodole (2007) within Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's filmography, contending that the brothers' cinema, taken as a whole, amounts to a vast and intricate historical project. I argue that the filmmakers' method is based on simultaneous recall and remembrance, on memory and memorial-ization. Drawing on a variety of secondary sources, I suggest that the Tavianis' period pieces are no static monuments, but vibrantly dialogic reevaluations of the past.