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Bicycle Thieves by 
The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini by
Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977)--movie-maker, bon vivant, and passionate intellectual--was the key figure of Italian neo-realism, the godfather of the French New Wave, and a television pioneer; the maker of such classics as Open City, Paisan, Stromboli, Flowers of St. Francis, Voyage in Italy, and Louis XIV; Anna Magnani's lover; Ingrid Bergman's husband; and Isabella Rossellini's father. Continually enmeshed in controversy, perhaps no other figure in the history of world cinema has been so reviled--and so revered. Tag Gallagher's masterful biography of Rossellini, the first in any language, was fifteen years in the making. It is the result of assiduous research, lengthy interviews with almost everyone who knew him, and investigations into the making and reception of his films. The cast of characters includes Vittorio Mussolini, Il Duce's son and Rossellini's Fascist-era producer; Howard Hughes, who produced Stromboli and then, in a fit of jealousy over Ingrid Bergman, butchered its American release; and dozens of other people. Combining a portrait of a dynamic and daring man with brilliant discussions of his work, Tag Gallagher tells a story as rich and moving as Rossellini's miraculous films.
The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema by
This rich, wide-ranging book explores Italy's national film style by relating it closely to politics and to the historicist thought of Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Here is a new kind of film history--a nonlinear, intertextual approach that confronts the total story of the growth of a national cinema while challenging the traditional formats of general histories and period studies. Examining Italian silent films of the fascist era through neorealism to modernist filmmaking after May 1968, Angela Dalle Vacche reveals opera and the commedia dell'arte to be the strongest influences. As she presents the whole history of Italian cinema from the standpoint of a dialectic between these two styles, she offers brilliant interpretations of individual films. The "body in the mirror" is the national self-image on the screen, which changes shape in response to historical and political context. To discover how the nation represents, understands, and recognizes this fictional "body," Dalle Vacche discusses changes in the strongest parameters of Italian cinema: allegory, spectacle, body, history, unity, and continuity. In her hands these concepts yield a wealth of insights for film scholars, art historians, political scientists, and those concerned with cultural studies in general, as well as for other educated readers interested in Italian cinema. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema by
Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. Brutal Vision challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist filmsOCoincluding such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves OCoshould be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In his readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealismOCOs international distribution, Karl Schoonover reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. He traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see howOCoin their views of injury, torture, and martyrdomOCothese films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the periodOCOs call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid. Brutal Vision interrogates the role of neorealismOCOs famously heart-wrenching scenes in a new global order that requires its citizenry to invest emotionally in large-scale international aid packages, from the Marshall Plan to the liberal charity schemes of NGOs. The book fundamentally revises ideas of cinematic specificity, the human, and geopolitical scale that we inherit from neorealism and its postwar milieuOCoideas that continue to set the terms for political filmmaking today.
Cinema after Deleuze by
Cinema After Deleuze offers a clear and lucid introduction to Deleuze's writings on cinema which will appeal both to undergraduates and specialists in film studies and philosophy. The book provides explanations of the many categories and classifications found in Deleuze's two landmark books on cinema and offers assessments of a range of films, including works by John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and others. Contemporary directors such as Steven Spielberg, Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai are also examined in the light of Deleuze's theories, thus bringing Deleuze's writings on cinema right up to date. Cinema After Deleuze demonstrates why Deleuze is rightly considered today to be one of the great philosophers of cinema. The book is essential reading for students in philosophy and film studies alike.
A Cinema of Poetry by
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"?
Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique by 
Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema by 
Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives by
This collection of essays brings Fellini criticism up to date, employing a range of recent critical filters, including semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist and deconstructionist.
Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film by
Federico Fellini professed a desire to create "an entire film made of immobile pictures." In this study, Hava Aldouby uses this quotation as a launching point to analyze Fellini's films as sequences of "pictures" that draw extensively on art history, and particularly painting, as a reservoir of visual imagery. Aldouby employs an innovative pictorial approach that allows her to uncover a wealth of visual evocations overlooked by Fellini scholars over the years. Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film sheds light on the intertextual links between Fellini's films and the works of various artists, from Velazquez to Francis Bacon, by identifying references to specific paintings in his films. Using new archival evidence from Fellini's private library, brought to light for the first time here, Aldouby draws out Fellini's in-depth knowledge of art history and his systematic employment of art-historical allusions.
Film: An International History of the Medium by 
The Films of Federico Fellini by
The Films of Federico Fellini examines the career of one of Italy's most renowned filmmakers through close analysis of five masterpieces that span his career: La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord and Interview. Providing an overview of Fellini's early career as a cartoonist and scriptwriter for neorealist directors such as Roberto Rossellini, this study traces the development of Fellini's unique and personal cinematic vision as it transcends Italian neorealism. Rejecting an overtly ideological approach to Fellini's cinema, Bondanella emphasizes the director's interest in fantasy, the irrational and individualism.
The Films of Roberto Rossellini by
The Films of Roberto Rossellini traces the career of one of the most influential Italian filmmakers through close analysis of the seven films that mark important turning points in his evolution: The Man with a Cross (1943), Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Machine to Kill Bad People (1948-52), Voyage in Italy (1953), General della Rovere (1959) and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966). Beginning with Rossellini's work within the fascist cinema, it discusses his invention of neorealism, a new cinematic style that resulted in several classics during the immediate postwar period. Almost immediately, however, Rossellini's continually evolving style moved beyond mere social realism to reveal other aspects of the camera's gaze, as is apparent in the films he made with Ingrid Bergman during the 1950s; though unpopular, these works had a tremendous impact on the French New Wave critics and directors. Rossellini's late career marks a return to his nonrealist period, now critically reexamined, in such works as the commercially successful General della Rovere, and his eventual turn to the creation of didactic films for television.
The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 by
Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood. From Roberto Rossellini's Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new "cinephile" generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty. The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
The Funambulist Pamphlets: Vol. 11 Cinema by
"The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema. Volume 11 is devoted to the topic of Cinema: Spike Lee, Béla Tarr, Michelangelo Antonioni and the many other filmmakers named in this volume do not seem to have much in common at first sight; nevertheless, considered through the interpretation of a Spinozist materialist philosophy, their films might have something to say to one another. Take the mud of Red Desert (Antonioni), the volcanic slopes of The Bad Sleep Well (Kurosawa) and the soil of Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring magnified in Pina (Wenders), for example. What these material manifestations have in common is that they are all in relation with bodies, themselves assemblages of moving matter. Similarly, consider Spike Lee's dolly shot, Orson Welles's labyrinth, Béla Tarr's entropy, and Peter Watkins's democratic improvisations: they all manifest the power of immanence and its inexorability. These films involve no deus ex machina; everything in them comes 'from the ground' in a continuous refusal of a celestial or other form of transcendence. Developing this kind of reading of these films allows us to avoid a traditional chronological reading of history of cinema in favor of another, one more dedicated to the philosophical vision of the world that cinema triggers"
Giuseppe de Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema by
Vitti draws on his extensive personal interviews with De Santis as well as on the latter's previously unpublished writings. This volume captures the intelligence, passion, aesthetic flair, and occasionally fiery temperament of this important filmmaker.
Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style by
Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period and aimed at recovering the reality of Italy after the sugarcoated moving images of Fascism. Lasting from 1945 to the early 1950s, neorealism produced world-renowned masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1947). These films won some of the most prestigious film awards of the immediate postwar period and influenced world cinema. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism. The traditional story notwithstanding, the meaning and the origins of the term are problematic. What does neorealism really mean, and how Italian is it? Italian filmmakers were wary of using the term and Rossellini preferred "realism." Many filmmakers confessed to having greatly borrowed from other cinemas, including French, Soviet, and American. Divided into three sections, Global Neorealism examines the history of this film style from the 1930s to the 1970s using a global and international perspective. The first section examines the origins of neorealism in the international debate about realist esthetics in the 1930s. The second section discusses how this debate about realism was "Italianized" and coalesced into Italian "neorealism" and explores how critics and film distributors participated in coining the term. Finally, the third section looks at neorealism's success outside of Italy and examines how film cultures in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States adjusted the style to their national and regional situations.
A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 by
From a war-torn and poverty-stricken country, regional and predominantly agrarian, to the success story of recent years, Italy has witnessed the most profound transformation--economic, social and demographic--in its entire history. Yet the other recurrent theme of the period has been the overwhelming need for political reform--and the repeated failure to achieve it. Professor Ginsborg's authoritative work--the first to combine social and political perspectives--is concerned with both the tremendous achievements of contemporary Italy and "the continuities of its history that have not been easily set aside."
Inspiring Fellini: Literary Collaborations behind the Scenes by
Introduction A Not So Solitary Genius: Traversing Authorial Politics and Methodological Anxieties An Ambiguous Adherence: Esotericism in Fellini's Work and Collaborations 1 Tullio Pinelli Neutralizing Tragedy: A Pattern from La strada On A Metaphysical Fellowship: Transcending Christianity Nothing but Images: La voce della luna 2 Ennio Flaiano Frivolously Yours: The Public Dispute over Authorship The Self as Monster: Satire and Compassion in La dolce vita A Light in the Night: Negotiating Epiphany from I vitelloni to 8 1/2 3 Bernardino Zapponi The Script as Collage: The Unbound Notebooks of the 1970s Popular Culture and Neurosis: Toby Dammit and Beyond 4 The Poets An Organic Mind: Brunello Rondi from La dolce vita to Provad'orchestra You Are My Labyrinth: The Poetic Brotherhood with Pier Paolo Pasolini Eroticism as Dream and Nightmare: A Dialogue with Brunello Rondi Remembering Corporality: Tonino Guerra in Amarcord and E la nave va Maternal Pre-grammaticality: Pasolini, Guerra, and Zanzotto Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Italian Cinema: Arthouse to Exploitation by
Pocket Essentials is a dynamic series of books that are concise, lively, and easy to read. Packed with facts as well as expert opinions, each book has all the key information you need to know about such popular topics as film, television, cult fiction, history, and more. From a topless Sophia Loren in a 1950s historical epic and the erotic obsessions of Fellini to the legacy of Sergio Leon's Westerns, Italian cinema has it all. Barry Forshaw leads readers through the glory of the Mediterranean arthouse, the Spaghetti Western, and everything in between, collecting a host of comprehensive essays on the subject and presenting all the key films in an easy-to-use reference.
Italian National Cinema 1896-1996 by
From such films as La Dolce Vita and Bicycle Thieves to Cinema Paradiso and Dear Diary, Italian cinema has provided striking images of Italy as a nation and a people. In the first comprehensive study of Italian cinema from 1886-1996, Pierre Sorlin explores the changing relationship of Italian cinema and Italian society and asks whether the national cinema really does represent Italian interests and culture.
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City by
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City is a valuable introduction to one of the most influential of film movements. Exploring the roots and causes of neorealism, particularly the effects of the Second World War, as well as its politics and style, Mark Shiel examines the portrayal of the city and the legacy left by filmmakers such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. Films studied include Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Umberto D. (1952).
Italian Neorealist Cinema by
How has Italian neorealist cinema changed the boundaries of cinematic narration and representation? In this new study, Torunn Haaland argues that neorealism was a cultural moment based on individual optiques. She accounts for the tradition's coherence in terms of its moral commitment to creating critical viewing experiences around underrepresented realities and marginalised people. By examining both acclaimed masterpieces and lesser known works, parallels are drawn to realist theories and to past and present cinematic traditions. The ways in which successive generations of directors have readopted, negotiated and broken with the themes and aesthetics of neorealist film are discussed and evaluated, along with neorealist tendencies in other arts, such as literature. An engaging and informative read for students and scholars in Italian Studies, Italian Neorealist Cinema presents a new approach to a key cinematic tradition, and so is essential reading for everyone working in the field of Film Studies.
Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach by
The end of the Second World War saw the emergence of neorealist film in Italy. In Italian Neorealist Cinema, Christopher Wagstaff analyses three neorealist films that have had significant influence on filmmakers around the world. Wagstaff treats these films as assemblies of sounds and images rather than as representations of historical reality. If Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà, and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette are still, half a century after they were made, among the most highly valued artefacts in the history of cinema, Wagstaff suggests that this could be due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled narratives, performances, locations, lighting, sound, mise en scène, and montage. This volume begins by situating neorealist cinema in its historical, industrial, commercial and cultural context, and makes available for the first time a large amount of data on post-war Italian cinema. Wagstaff offers a theoretical discussion of what it means to treat realist films as aesthetic artefacts before moving on to the core of the book, which consists of three studies of the films under discussion. Italian Neorealist Cinema not only offers readers in Film Studies and Italian Studies a radically new perspective on neorealist cinema and the Italian art cinema that followed it, but theorises and applies a method of close analysis of film texts for those interested in aesthetics and rhetoric, as well as cinema in general.
Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema by
Unlike countries like France, the Czech Republic or Brazil, Italy did not have a new wave properly understood as a movement. However, while new artistic schools were emerging in many other countries, Italy was undergoing its most dramatic social and economic transformations. Those violent changes, together with the perceived necessity of renewing the aesthetic heritage of Neorealism, sparked a drastic regeneration of the cinematic language and marked the most memorable period of Italian film history.Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema explores the ferments of Italian cinema from the mid-50s to the end of the 60s, situating its wealth in the context of other national cinemas emerging at the same time. Olmi, Pasolini, Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, the Taviani Brothers, Cavani, Rosi, Ferreri and many others all made their debut or directed their most representative works during the period. The book brings to the surface the lines of experimentation and artistic renewal appearing after the exhaustion of Neorealism, mapping complex areas of interest such as the emergence of ethical concerns, the relationship between ideology and representation, and the role of Italian counter-culture.
Luchino Visconti by
From the early cinematic career of Frank Capra to the psychologically revealing films of Martin Scorsese, the books in this series offer an authoritative guide to the study of film and its trends by studying individual filmmakers and cinematic movements.
Luchino Visconti by
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's classic study of the Italian film director Luchino Visconti was first published in 1967 and revised in 1973. This edition has been updated to include the last three films that Visconti made before his death.
Mafia Movies by 
Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema by
Michelangelo Antonioni, who died in 2007, was one of cinema's greatest modernist filmmakers. The films in his black and white trilogy of the early 1960s--L'avventura, La Notte, L'eclisse--are justly celebrated for their influential, gorgeously austere style. But in this book, Murray Pomerance demonstrates why the color films that followed are, in fact, Antonioni's greatest works. Writing in an accessible style that evokes Antonioni's expansive use of space, Pomerance discusses The Red Desert, Blow-Up, Professione: Reporter (The Passenger), Zabriskie Point, Identification of a Woman, The Mystery of Oberwald, Beyond the Clouds, and The Dangerous Thread of Things to analyze the director's subtle and complex use of color. Infusing his open-ended inquiry with both scholarly and personal reflection, Pomerance evokes the full range of sensation, nuance, and equivocation that became Antonioni's signature.
Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church and Film Censorship in Hollywood by
Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it.
Neorealist Film Culture, 1945-1954 by
Unique, truthful, brutal... Neorealism is often associated with adjectives stressing its peculiarities in representing the real, its lack of antecedents, and its legacy in terms of film style. While this is useful when confronting auteurs such as De Sica, Rossellini or Visconti, it becomes problematic when examining a widespread cultural practice that realistic modes deeply affected. This cultural production included filmmaking, literature, visual culture and photography, as well as media discourses. It was internally contradictory but fruitful inasmuch as its legacy influenced national culture for many decades to come. The volume spotlights post-war Italian film culture by locating a series of crossroads, i.e. topics barely examined when discussing neorealism: nation, memory and trauma, visual culture, stardom, and performance. The aim is to deconstruct neorealism as a monument and to open up its cultural history.
New Trends in Italian Cinema by
Is the legacy of the Neorealist film-making mode (or should we say mood?) a withered one? If not, what is the ideal dialogue between contemporary Italian directors and this momentous page of their cultural history all about? The aim of this book is to show that, far from being exhausted, the vivifying lymph of post-Second World War Italian Neorealism continues to sustain the aesthetic praxis of many artists. Predominantly, the staying power of Neorealism becomes apparent in the stringent moral urgency behind the realization of films such as Gomorra, Lamerica, or Terra Madre. All of them, although cinematically very sophisticated, retain the anxiety of engagement and the impassionate look upon reality that characterized the masterpieces of Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. All the essays in this collection highlight how, in responding to the unprecedented challenges of the New Millennium, Italian movie makers such as Garrone, Amelio, or Olmi, are able to recapture the ethical and methodological spirit of classic Neorealism in very interesting ways.
Roberto Rossellini by
This study combines close analyses of Roberto Rossellini's formal and narrative style with an account of his position in the political and cultural landscape of postwar Italy.
Screen Writings: Partial Views of a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary: Volume I by 
Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism: : Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Italy by
In this exciting new book, Gelley considers the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic. This study re-examines the director's postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussion on Italian national identity: rather than marking a radical break with the director's early neorealist successes, Rossellini's films with Bergman in fact extend the boundaries of neorealism and challenge the standard reading of its basic tenets, especially the relationship between character and setting. Gelley reassesses the relationship between European postwar and American cinema, looking at how the image of the Hollywood star was translated and transformed when it was imported into Rossellini's Italy. Rossellini's insertion of the Hollywood star into the native landscape had a significant influence on the director's approach to the neorealist aesthetic. His filming of the encounter between Bergman and the Italian landscape involves not only a re-interpretation and transformation of the Hollywood star persona, but also a challenge to the idealized notion of an authentic Italian national collective free of foreign influence. The disruption of Bergman's character into the Italian landscape became one means whereby the director was able to explore the ambivalence inherent in any attempt to construct a national identity.
Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity by 
Teaching Sound Film: A Reader by 
Traditions in World Cinema by
The core volume in the Traditions in World Cinema series, this book brings together a colourful and wide-ranging collection of world cinematic traditions - national, regional and global - all of which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. Topics include: German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, British new wave, Czech new wave, Danish Dogma, post-Communist cinema, Brazilian post-Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-revolutionary African traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi pianmelodrama, Japanese horror, new Hollywood cinema and global found footage cinema.Features*Includes a preface by Toby Miller.*Each chapter covers a key world cinema tradition and is written by an expert in the field: Roy Armes, Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Peter Bondanella, Corey Creekmur, Adrian Danks, Peter Hames, Randal Johnson, Robert Kolker, Myrto Konstantarakos, Jay McRoy, Negar Mottahedeh, Richard Neupert, Christina Stojanova, J.P. Telotte, Stephen Teo.*Traditions are examined from a wide range of views and include historical, social, cultural and industrial perspectives.
The Transatlantic Gaze: Italian Cinema, American Film by
Tracks the influence of Italian cinema on American film from the postwar period to the present. In The Transatlantic Gaze, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan documents the sustained and profound artistic impact of Italian directors, actors, and screenwriters on American film. Working across a variety of genres, including neorealism, comedy, the Western, and the art film, Carolan explores how and why American directors from Woody Allen to Quentin Tarantino have adapted certain Italian trademark techniques and motifs. Allen's To Rome with Love (2012), for example, is an homage to the genius of Italian filmmakers, and to Federico Fellini in particular, whose Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (1952) also resonates with Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as well as with Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty (2000). Tarantino's Kill Bill saga (2003, 2004) plays off elements of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a transatlantic conversation about the Western that continues in Tarantino's Oscar-winning Django Unchained (2012). Lee Daniels's Precious (2009) and Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna (2008), meanwhile, demonstrate that the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, which arose from the political and economic exigencies of postwar Italy, is an effective vehicle for critiquing social issues such as poverty and racism in a contemporary American context. The book concludes with an examination of American remakes of popular Italian films, a comparison that offers insight into the similarities and differences between the two cultures and the transformations in genre, both subtle and obvious, that underlie this form of cross-cultural exchange. Mary Ann McDonald Carolan is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Director of the Italian Studies Program at Fairfield University.
Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics by
First published in 1995, P. Adams Sitney's Vital Crises in Italian Cinema has become a work of enduring importance in the study of Italian films produced from 1945 to 196. Examining over twenty key works of the period, Sitney identifies and explores the major thematic crises at the heart ofseminal films produced by the likes of Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michael Antonioni, and Federico Fellini. The debate over regional dialects and a unified national language find reflection in Visconti's La terra trema and its source, the novel I Malavoglia. The father-son relationshipserves as an opportunity to consider the tension between filial loyalty and individuality in works such as Uccellacci e uccellini and Ladri di biciclette.Romantic love juxtaposed with lust against the background of Roman Catholic iconography exemplifies another recurring predicament in the nation's cinema. Rocci e i suoi fratelli, La Dolce Vita, and Accatrone all feature female and male characters grappling with the idea of woman as either theepitome of Marian virtue of Magdalene-like sexuality. With such films under discussion, Sitney provides the relevant political and cultural context to demonstrate how the changes in Italian life found their way into cinematic art. A new afterword extends the range of the study to the early 1970s, asit considers the pastoral ideal deflated by urban reality in Padre padrone and L'albero degli zoccoli.
Vittorio de Sica by
Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. This anthology reveals, however, that his production was remarkably multifaceted.
