A Companion to Italian Cinema

Frank Burke

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119406396
  9781444332285
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119006176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Written by leading figures in the field, A Companion to Italian Cinema re-maps Italian cinema studies, employing new perspectives on traditional issues, and fresh theoretical approaches to the exciting history and field of Italian cinema.

• Offers new approaches to Italian cinema, whose importance in the post-war period was unrivalled
• Presents a theory based approach to historical and archival material
• Includes work by both established and more recent scholars, with new takes on traditional critical issues, and new theoretical approaches to the exciting history and field of Italian cinema
• Covers recent issues such as feminism, stardom, queer cinema, immigration and postcolonialism, self-reflexivity and postmodernism, popular genre cinema, and digitalization
• A comprehensive collection of essays addressing the prominent films, directors and cinematic forms of Italian cinema, which will become a standard resource for academic and non-academic purposes alike

Part I
First Things

1
Introduction

Frank Burke

Italian Cinema and (Very Briefly) Visual Culture

Beginning with the silent era, Italian film has had a remarkable international history. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) was the first film shown on the lawn of the White House (Schatz 2004, 34). Far more important in cinematic terms, it had a significant influence on D. W. Griffith, particularly Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages (1916).¹ Neorealist films were hugely influential worldwide—comprising arguably the most important film “movement”² in terms of global impact in the history of the medium, as the chapter by Ruberto and Wilson in this volume attests. Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946) enjoyed a stunning reception in the United States. The former ran for 70 weeks in New York City, and the latter enjoyed even greater success with the critics and at the box office, ending up as the highest grossing foreign film of that time (Rogin 2004, 134). Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) won a special Oscar in 1947 for best foreign‐language film when there was no competitive category for foreign films, and his Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) did the same two years later (Sklar 2012, 71), while also enjoying great international success.

Serving as a bridge from neorealism to the next major international moment in Italian cinema—the auteur film—Federico Fellini’s La strada (La Strada, 1953) enjoyed a three‐year run in New York City and launched the director on a path to five Oscars. And of course Italian directors such as Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bernardo Bertolucci were in the vanguard of the 1950s and 1960s international art film, while the commedia all’italiana bestrode with great success the art film and a lighter vein of international cinema also popular during the period. As Pravadelli justly claims in this volume, “From 1945 to roughly 1970 no national cinema—not even French cinema—produced as many influential films and stylistic trends as did Italian cinema.” On the basis of the success of its silent, neorealist, and art cinema, Italian film stands as the second most important national cinema, after Hollywood, of the twentieth century. Though it is dangerous to overvalue the importance of Oscars and mistake them for true international dispersion and influence, as both Anglo and Italian film commentators are wont to do, it is nonetheless significant that Italian films and personnel have won more Academy Awards than those of any other non‐English‐speaking country. It is even more significant to note the influence of Italian directors, beyond neorealism, on international filmmaking—in particular, as Carolan (1914, 1) notes, “the profound impact that Italian cinema has had on filmmaking in the United States.” She continues, “Italian masters such as Vittoria De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, and Michelangelo Antonioni have imprinted their techniques and sensibilities on American directors such as Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, Woody Allen, Neil LaBute, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, and others.” Naturally, we need to add Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and many more to the list of American directors. There are many filmmakers not on Carolan’s list who have acknowledged the influence of Fellini alone (and, in particular, his Otto e mezzo—8 ½, 1963) on their work.³

Viewer popularity has, for the most part, been seen as the appeal of Italian cinema among not mainstream filmgoers but cineastes: people for whom a taste in movies signifies a kind of cultural capital that is of little or no interest to most blockbuster devotees. This type of popularity is reflected in the large number of Italian offerings in The Criterion Collection. However, there is also an impressive audience of fans of Italian “B” movies and cult and “trash” cinema: genres and subgenres such as sword‐and‐sandal, spaghetti western, horror/thriller/giallo, erotic comedy, espionage, crime/police drama, and porn. These movies have contributed greatly to the dispersion of Italian cinema in the English‐speaking world, but because so many of these have been viewable only in VHS and DVD, available from relatively obscure and unquantifiable sources, one cannot easily determine their importance relative to the “B” and cult offerings of other non‐English national cinemas. Nonetheless, it would be no surprise to find that Italy stands first among non‐English cinemas in the variety and diffusion of its noncanonical films.

The “high cinema” of the 1960s is no more, for reasons addressed in the chapters by Corsi and, to a certain extent, Pravadelli. Nonetheless, the preparation of this volume coincided with the enormous success of Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), which, according to IMDB (2016), has won 53 awards and 72 nominations in festivals and competitions worldwide, capped by a 2014 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. At the same time, CNN (2016) launched Style Italia, “a new series dedicated to the past, present and future of Italian design,” with features that run from the obvious (“Food, Family and God: How Italy Won the Race for Beauty”) to the somewhat less so (“The Curious Beauty of Italian Street Signs” and, not to slight Italian cinema, “Ennio Morricone’s Film Philosophy”). The success of Sorrentino’s film points to the recurrent though diminishing ability of Italian cinema to triumph on the international scene. The meaning of both triumph and diminishment, as well as what La grande bellezza may or may not tell us of contemporary “Style Italia” and today’s visual culture in general, will be explored in this Companion, particularly in chapters by Corsi, Ferrero‐Regis, and Wood on the Italian film industry and in observations by Riva in the volume’s closing forum. The Style Italia series points to the importance Italy has held in the history of Western visual culture, from the age of city‐states to the present. However, Italy’s role in the forefront of the visual has not come without its downside, as some of the clichés evident in Style Italia make clear. The association of Italy with physical beauty and fashion has helped sustain certain prejudices about Italian “superficiality.” I will return to this later in discussing an arguable neglect of Italian cinema on the part of cinema studies (though not on the part of Italian scholars) in the English‐speaking world. Here is not the place to delve deeply into some of the complications around superficiality, cliché, and a kind of reductive association of Italy and italianità to (mere) style evident in the CNN series. And a celebration of Italian design on such a well‐trafficked site has its advantages in terms of international validation of Italian creativity. However, the series does raise issues that have a bearing on the image of Italy and how that gets reflected in the reception of Italian cinema.

Contributors and Aims of This Volume

The Companion brings together authors from Italy, the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It combines established scholars, many of whom were present at the birth of Italian cinema studies in the English‐speaking world, with a younger generation that is bringing new interests, new methodologies, to the study of Italian film. At the same time, the established scholars represented here have undergone significant evolution, adapting to and at times spearheading innovation in film analysis, and developing strategies appropriate to a changing Italy and its changing cinema.

Although all the contributors to this compilation have an academic orientation, Peter Brunette’s originating vision (see Preface and In Memoriam), which I happily adopted, was to provide a Companion that would serve the needs of the general reader as well as those of the specialist. In terms of the former, the volume seeks to offer an overview of the development of Italian cinema, hence the periodization that informs roughly half the book. It also seeks to provide discussions that are free of the jargon one generally finds in academic analysis, as well as to offer a glossary of terms that are specific to Italian culture, history, and film.

But of course, a companion to Italian cinema must also be a companion to Italian film studies insofar as it is within the field of academic study that the history, significance, value, and implications of Italian cinema are often most fully explored and “archived.” As a companion to Italian cinema studies, the book addresses all the major issues that have informed academic discussion of Italian film. At times, and with editorial intent, certain discussions that have characterized recent analysis of Italian film, such as those around the transnationality, intermediality, and intertextuality of Italian cinema and around the critique of the “crisis‐renewal” paradigm, help problematize periodization and point to alternative ways of approaching Italian film history.

To ensure the accessibility of academic discussion to the nonspecialist, the volume opens and closes with broad‐ranging informal coverage of the academic sweep of Italian film studies and Italian film. A conversation with Peter Bondanella and a forum of noted film scholars not represented elsewhere in the Companion help contextualize the theoretical issues, methodologies, and analyses that fall between. And, as general policy, the Companion seeks to heed Christopher Wagstaff’s warnings in the forum against over‐theorizing and over‐”methodologizing” (quotation marks mine) Italian film—respecting, instead, the concretezza and specificity of the cinematic pleasures and intellectual challenges offered by this field of study.

Because of the conversation and forum, I am spared the responsibility of surveying the landscape of Italian cinema and thus turn quickly to an interpretive overview of what the volume tells about the nature of Italian cinema and Italian cinema studies.⁴

The Contents of the Companion

The chapters of this volume addres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Notes
• Glossary
• Preface and In Memoriam
• Part I: First Things
• Part II: Historical/Chronological Perspectives
• Part III: Alternative Film Forms
• Part IV: Critical, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Issues
• Part V: Last Things
• Index
• End User License Agreement