Orienting Italy

China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers

Mary Ann McDonald Carolan

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781438490601, 9781438490618
• eBook ISBN: 9781438490625
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Italian Language

Explores Italian filmmakers' representations of China and the Chinese, both at home and abroad.

Winner of the 2022 Book Award for Performance and Visual Culture presented by the American Association of Teachers of Italian

Orienting Italy explores contemporary Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese in both documentary and fictional films. Delineating the contours of this fascination, the book begins with the works of Carlo Lizzani (Behind the Great Wall, 1958) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Chung Kuo-China, 1972), both of whom ventured to China with the aim of documenting new, yet physically and culturally distant, realities. Their documentary investigations yielded to fictional portrayals, from the lavish view of a historical Middle Kingdom by director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, 1987) to the stark consideration of Italian economic exchange with contemporary China by Gianni Amelio (The Missing Star, 2006). The wave of Chinese migration to Italy in the late twentieth century created a new sense of otherness within Italy as Chinese migrants became the subjects of fictional narratives and documentaries in the works of Stefano Incerti (Gorbaciof, 2010) and Andrea Segre (Shun Li and the Poet, 2011) and Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco (Miss Little China, 2009). In the twenty-first century, a new chapter in the relationship between Italy and China has emerged in the form of transnational collaborations in the art and business of filmmaking.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Documenting China between Fact and Fiction: La muraglia cinese/Behind the Great Wall (Carlo Lizzani, 1958)
• 2 An Italian Director in China: Chung Kuo—Cina/Chung Kuo—China (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972)
• 3 A Tale of the Forbidden City: Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’ultimo imperatore/The Last Emperor (1987)
• 4 Orienting Neorealism: Gianni Amelio’s La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (2006)
• 5 The Chinese Woman in Italy: Gorbaciof (Stefano Incerti, 2010) and Io sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (Andrea Segre, 2011)
• 6 Documenting Chinese Immigrant Youth and Italian Anti-Immigrant Prejudice: Miss Little China (Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco, 2009)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography and Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover