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While Italian cinema has long been popular with international audiences, a surprising unfamiliarity remains regarding the rich traditions from which its most fascinating moments arose. Directory of World Cinema: Italy aims to offer a wide film and cultural context for Italian cinema’s key aspects, from political radicalism to opera, from the art house to popular cinema. Essays by leading academics about prominent genres, directors, and themes provide insight into the cinema of Italy and are bolstered by reviews of significant titles. From the silent spectacle to the giallo, the spaghetti western to the neorealist masterworks of Rossellini, this book offers a comprehensive historical sweep of Italian cinema that will appeal to film scholars and cinephiles alike.

Introduction by the Editor

Film of the year I

Io sono l'amore

Film of the year II

Le quattro volte

Industry spotlight

Valerio Jalongo interview

Cultural crossover

Opera and Cinema

Directors

Federico Fellini

Nanni Moretti

Silent cinema

Neorealism

Melodrama

Comedy

Giallo

Gothic horror

Peplum

Spaghetti western

Political cinema

Contemporary cinema

Sujets

Directories

Película fotográfica

Reference

Rossellini

Cinema of Italy

History of film

Roberto Rossellini

Film

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505350
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Volume 6
DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA ITALY
Edited by Louis Bayman
First Published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Publisher: May Yao Publishing Assistant: Melanie Marshall
Cover photo: I am Love
Cover Design: Holly Rose Copy Editor: Heather Owen Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971 Directory of World Cinema eISSN 2040-798X
Directory of World Cinema: Italy ISBN 978-1-84150-400-1 Directory of World Cinema: Italy eISBN 978-1-84150-535-0
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
CONTENTS

DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA ITALY
Acknowledgements
Introduction by the Editor
Film of the Year I Io sono I amore
Film of the Year II Le quattro volte
Industry Spotlight Valerio Jalongo Interview
Cultural Crossover Opera and Cinema
Directors Federico Fellini Nanni Moretti
Silent Cinema Essay Reviews
Neorealism Essay Reviews
Melodrama Essay Reviews
Comedy Essay Reviews
Giallo Essay Reviews
Gothic Horror Essay Reviews
Peplum Essay Reviews
Spaghetti Western Essay Reviews
Political Cinema Essay Reviews
Contemporary Cinema Essay Reviews
Recommended Reading
Online Resources
Test Your Knowledge
Notes on Contributors
Filmography
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the contributors, many of whom have provided input that goes far beyond simply the credited work here, as well as all the staff at Intellect Press. I would in particular like to thank Hannah, Paul and Peggy Bayman, Jo Bennett, Nick Church, Jonathan Driskell, Laurence Kelvin, Hope Liebersohn, Mariana Liz, Elizabeth Taylor, Russ Hunter and Hesham Yafai for their comments on various aspects of the book. John Berra was of great help; Sergio Rigoletto also deserves thanks for the extra help he gave on matters of translation.
Louis Bayman
INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR

This was my last chance. You know it Melina: for me, theatre is life. So says theatrical impresario Checco to the woman whose heart he has broken but whose money he needs to stage a show. The actors are Peppino De Filippo and Giulietta Masina, themselves imports to cinema from the popular theatres in which they first became famous. In the film, rehearsals follow, with a crack shot, dancers, and a piano/trumpet duo taking uneasy steps in the construction of a performance. With the clash of a gong, their less-than-successful practice attempts cut to the public success of the grand musical spectacle, which seals the impresario s financial success, repairs his marriage, and ensures the happy continuance of the theatrical troupe.
The film is Luci del variet /Variety Lights (1951). Its sentiment sums up a certain joyous, accessible trait in Italian cinema, and a faith in the show as having almost magical powers of consolation for poverty, or loneliness, or simple disappointment at the rest of life. In the world of the film, strangers are liable to burst into opera arias on the street while any unfamiliar young woman on the train could be an aspiring dancer. The unreality of this image indicates an attitude that the important stuff of life is entertainment, a sentiment echoed even in the directorial duo that made the film, it being a debut from the budding arthouse auteur Federico Fellini in partnership with Alberto Lattuada, the master of popular dramatics.
And yet such a scene may not be what immediately springs to mind as the common image of Italian cinema. After all, Italian cinema was at the forefront of politically-committed realism. Further, it is Italy s arthouse film-makers who, maybe more than any other, contributed to the image of the post-war European auteur and cinema as an artistic endeavour at the upper end of cultural seriousness.
Is the more accurate image one of political commitment and modernist masterworks, or the traditions of comedy and melodrama? Can Italian cinema principally be characterized as a socially-engaged cinema of documentary realism, or by the operatics of excessive theatricality? Is its true heritage the prestige cinema of directorial genius or the popular cinema of genres and filoni (strands), the cycles of formulaic, highly popular, low-budget productions whose brief life-spans of intense exploitation each led to total eclipse as fashions changed?
Of course, the problem lies in posing the question this way (even disregarding the question of individual taste), its gross simplification courting stereotypes of national cultural character. To characterize is to select and distil from the full variety of cinematic production. And it is also the task which is set in compiling a fraction of the thousands of films from the richly diverse cultural achievement that constitutes Italian cinematic production.
What is certainly not difficult is to discern a heyday of Italian cinema in the three decades that followed the Second World War. This was the period in which neorealism was credited with creating a new cinematic language, and of a boom in Italian film production of all kinds, leading to the invention of filoni such as gothic horror s tales of the macabre or the specifically Italian take on the American frontier known as the spaghetti Western. It was also the period which saw the flowering of the talents of Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini, and, later, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci, only the most famous names from a broad auteur system. Italian film production created in this period a space for exploration and for difference, for creative partnerships and artistic independence, and a vast cultural output allowing dense intertextual reference and direct engagement with social change.
This period did not, however, appear from the blue. It was during Fascism s attempts to revive an industry in crisis that national production was first re-established. A key goal for the cinema under Fascism was to create a popular medium to communicate the regime s favoured images and ideas. Going further back, a desire for realism is found in the historical epics whose reconstructions of ancient epochs were also key in establishing the grandiose possibilities for cinematic spectacle. Central internationally to the creation of the feature film, Italy also granted the world the first cinematic star system in the shape of the divas of the silent screen. And while, as the interview below with Valerio Jalongo makes clear, economic and political forces, as well as the influence of television, have created a sense of crisis since the mid-1970s, Italian cinema remains an important part of popular entertainment and national culture.
The selection of films is not based solely on a personal evaluation of the best of Italian cinema but to balance the range and development of Italian cinema, and its role within national culture and international film history. The merit of a film or film-maker for inclusion involves consideration of commercial and historical importance, the intellectual and academic questions raised, or artistic qualities - each overlapping but not coincident categories. Nevertheless, any reader with a knowledge of Italian cinema will find - amidst the many pleasures the volume also offers - omissions, most obviously of any separate entry on Michelangelo Antonioni, or, for those of different tastes, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso/Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988). Mitigation can be requested solely in pointing to the fact that selection must take place, and we hope to have saved some gems for future volumes.
Despite a weighting towards the post-war decades the reader will find a full historical sweep on offer, from Italy s first fiction film, La presa di Roma (1903), to the Films of the Year . With individual filoni the historical sweep available is not always all that great - the selection of films for the peplum runs from 1958-1962. The meta-genres of melodrama and comedy, on the other hand, dominate across Italian cinema just as they do in Italian culture more generally, and are present not only in their own chapters but also in the sections on Silent and Contemporary cinema which mark the beginning and end-points of the volume s main section. The chapters balance popular and domestic traditions with more prestige forms, whether in Visconti s lifelong interest in opera realized in the emotionality of cinematic melodrama or a maestro of cinematic violence such as Dario Argento. The weighting is pushed more decisively back to radical and art cinema in the choice of director profiles and in the chapters on neorealism and political cinema, although, even here, who could imagine Fellini without his cartoonist s eye, Lina Wertm ller without her experiments with popular comedy - in short, a cross-fertilization between entertainment and high-minded goals?
To return to the opening problem of the characterization of Italian cinema, it is the productive aesthetic, industrial, cultural, and political tensions between popular and arthouse, realist and spectacular, the renowned and the overlooked that are key to a comprehensive understanding of Italian cinema. It is with this in mind that two Films of the Year have been chosen: Io sono l amore/I am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009), a lavish and melodramatic tale of the crisis of a rich Milanese family, and Le quattro volte/The Four Times (Frammartino, 2010), a quasi-documentary of Calabrian goatherders. Yet the opposition is set up precisely so as to then be re-thought: as th