From made in Italy to etno-chic. Some thoughts on costume design in contemporary Italian cinema (class, gender and national identity)

This article outlines an overview of the relationship between costume and film in contemporary Italian cinema, with particular reference to class, gender and ideological discourse. Considering Italian film production in the last fifteen to twenty years, from popular film to auteur cinema, the article lays out the challenge of cultural stereotypes about ‘Made in Italy’ and its meanings in a global age. The significance of costume will be explored in terms of plot and character development, mise-en-scène and visuality, negotiating cinematic technique, film analysis and cultural interpretation. More specifically, and with particular reference to the work of Stephen Gundle, we investigate how costume design of male and female characters embodies national discourses such as nostalgia, male anxiety and the ideals of feminine beauty

PASTA OR PARADIGM: THE PLACE OF ITALIAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN POPULAR FILM

The year is 1930, the film is Little Caesar, and Hollywood begins its long and often irresponsible tradition of portraying the Italian-American male as gangster, thug, sociopath. The gangster genre has traditionally focused on male activities--men in groups, their rites of passage into underworld manhood, and their perverted American dreams of success achieved through community extortion, syndicated corruption, and blood murder. But hidden in the story of Caesar Enrico Bandello, who has justifiably been called our archetypal film gangster, we also discover fragmentary, but important, early portrayals of the Italian woman in America

Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film by Monica Seger

Review of Monica Seger\u27s Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film

The representation of conflict in the discourse of Italian melodrama

This paper is part of an extensive study of cinematic dialogue in a variety of film genres in Italian, which aims to address the disregard for the verbal plane that characterises film theory and, particularly, genre theory. Assuming a pragmatic and functional semantic perspective, it analyses the scripted dialogues in films against the backdrop of the literature on real life discourse. The focus of the paper is confrontational talk in Italian melodramas from early 1960s to the present. Conflict in such films is, to an extent, comparable to the cooperative sequential rebuttal of speakers' turns that typically occurs in comedies. However, melodramas are also marked by more incisive and subtle patterns of confrontation that can be summarised as 'disaffiliative dysfluency'. The forms of such break in the conversational flow are discussed and illustrated with selected scenes from a number of films

Unusually Gothic : Robert Sigl's Laurin (1987)

Marcus Stiglegger revives a lost Gothic treasure in this brief discussion of Robert Sigl's Laurin—a rare case of German genre film-making and the heir to FW Murnau's legacy. Phantastic genre cinema is very rare in contemporary Germany—especially in the 1980s, the time when Italian horror reached another peak with Dario Argento's Opera (1985). The cliché of the German "easy comedy" ruled mainstream film production at the time, and so it appeared a kind of miracle when 27-year-old writer/director Robert Sigl was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize in 1988 for his debut feature: the Gothic horror fairytale Laurin

Double time : Facing the future in migration’s past

Interpretations of Italian films about migration tend to refer to the historical experience of emigration or of colonialism as the historical coordinates through which these films are best understood. This article looks at four recent films featuring migrants in prominent roles that appear to elide such an interpretive framework. While the past and its intrusive effects do feature strongly in these films, it is difficult to produce a predictable linear and causal narrative that would link past, present, and future in predictable ways. Stylistically, the four films also represent a notable move away from the realist political agenda and aesthetic that has tended to dominate Italian film production on the topic of migration. This article argues that their adoption of the features that recall those of film noir (in its Italian manifestation) suggests a new range of thematic and social concerns that refer as much to possible futures as well as known pasts. There is a particular focus on the topic of bodily reproduction which is no longer limited to the sphere of the sexual. The opportunities offered by technology for the body to reproduce in new ways alters the parameters of how the nation might be imagined.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

La Primera Guerra Mundial en el cine italiano:La grande guerra

Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra is the first Italian film to approach the delicate matter (In Italy) of the First World War. Until 1959, the year the film was made, First World War had been a subject excluded from the silver screen. The few films made showed an idilic vision of the war: the Italian soldier as a hero and Italy as a great power. Monicelli’s film caused a big scandal during the sixties: the first time such a tragic subject was made comic material. The film offers a magnificent representation of the Italian society and the moral and living conditions of the soldiers were in. It’s a essay about the war, it’s absurdity, horror and fear. A war which caused a moral wound in the Italian population, a war noone spoke aloud about, until this film was released

Neorealist Cinema and Post-Neorealist Cinema

ITALIAN NEOREALIST CINEMA AND ITALIAN POST-NEOREALIST CINEMA One may think that a crowded area of film studies such as the history of Italian cinema and, more specifically, the history of Italian cinema in the 1945-1970 time frame could be experiencing a slowing down. On the contrary, the scholarship on Italian film is alive and well and has in fact known a phase of revival in the last few years...

Reading the geographies of post-war British film culture through the reception of French film

This paper examines the ways in which British specialist film culture anticipated and received the resumed supply of French films at the end of the Second World War. It finds that in serious film journalism and within the rapidly expanding film society movement, new French cinema was the focus of at least as much British attention as Italian neo-realism – the European cinema more famously associated with the era. The paper posits that a number of factors, including anti-Americanism, combined to position the delayed wartime and immediate post-war French releases as a site of impossible expectations and subsequent interpretative difficulty for British cinephiles. In particular, through a case study of the local mediation of French cinema in the English city of Nottingham, this paper considers the role of published criticism for setting the local viewing frame within the provincial film society movement. By tracing the tensions surrounding the circulation of film prints, information, and opinion relating to these prestigious cultural imports, it becomes possible to gain greater insight into both the range of nationally specific meanings attributed to the imported films and the geographic and cultural inequalities at work within the film culture of the country of reception