Fame amid the Ruins. Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism STEPHEN GUNDLE, 2020

Author(s):  
David Ellwood
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfio Leotta

The release of Conan the Barbarian (1982) played a crucial role in the emergence of the sword and sorcery film, a subgenre of fantasy cinema featuring muscular heroes in violent conflict with wizards and other supernatural creatures. Italian genre filmmakers attempted to capitalize on the international popularity of sword and sorcery by quickly producing a number of low-budget films, which emulated the stylistic and narrative features of Conan. Over a period of six years, between 1982 and 1987, the Italian film industry produced almost two dozen sword and sorcery films, which achieved mixed results at the box office. Although recently an increasing number of international film scholars have focused on the critical examination of Italian genre cinema, to date, little attention has been devoted to the study of Italian sword and sorcery. By examining the aesthetic features of four Italian sword and sorcery films (Gunan il guerriero [1982], Ator l’invincibile [1982], Hercules [1983] and The Barbarians [1987]), as well as their modes of production and distribution, this article proposes the first comprehensive critical examination of this filone.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Maria Pia Pagani

From a historiographical point of view, the Italian diva Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) as an actress-manager offers an original case study in relation to her only film performance in Cenere ( Ashes, 1916). This is a film adapted from the eponymous novel by Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926). In the 1910s, when Duse decided to work in the Italian film industry, she was a celebrity and her name was a guarantee of success for the Ambrosio Company in Turin. The film producers wanted to use her celebrity in order to ensure success at the box office. As an actress-manager with a long and acclaimed international career in the theatre, Duse knew this mechanism very well, but her position was contrary to their expectations. In fact, she aimed to present herself as an anti-diva, with her wrinkle-furrowed face and white hair, proposing a fascinating artistic creation based on the ‘mother roles’ that she had created for the theatre. This paper explores new elements concerning the position of Duse as an actress-manager for the Italian film industry in the 1910s. It is focused on her strategy of reiterating her stage success in playing a mother. On film, she did not want to be an instrument used for commercial purposes, and she did not want to create a common popular diva film. With Cenere, Duse's capability as an actress-manager can be seen in her creation of this non-conventional, poetic role for the silent film industry in wartime Italy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Francesco Bono

This essay deals with a number of Italian and Austrian films produced around the mid-1930s as a result of the cinematic cooperation that developed between Rome and Vienna at the time. The essay’s goal is to investigate a complex chapter in the history of Italian and Austrian film which has yet received little attention. The Austro-Italian cooperation in the field of film, which developed against the backdrop of the political alliance between Fascist Italy and Austria’s so-called Corporate State, involved some of the biggest names in Italian and Austrian cinema of the time, including Italian directors Carmine Gallone, Augusto Genina and Goffredo Alessandrini, Viennese screenwriter Walter Reisch, and Italian novelist Corrado Alvaro. In particular, the essay will consider the Italian film Casta Diva (1935) and its debt to one of the most famous Austrian productions of the 1930s, Willi Forst’s film Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933). Further films to be discussed include Tagebuch der Geliebten (1935), Una donna tra due mondi (1936), Opernring (1936), and Blumen aus Nizza (1936). Tagebuch der Geliebten was based on the diary of Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, who lived in Paris in the late 19th century. Una donna tra due mondi starred Italian diva Isa Miranda, Opernring Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, Blumen aus Nizza German singer Erna Sack.These films should be truly regarded as transnational productions, in which various cultural traditions and stylistic influences coalesced. By investigating them, this essay aims to shed light on a crucial period in the history of European cinema.


Author(s):  
Jan Baetens ◽  
Domingo Sánchez-Mesa

A modo de expansión y aplicación del marco teórico y metodológico sobre inter- y transmedialidad propuesto por los autores en un artículo previo en Tropelías (n.27), este ensayo explora, tanto desde una perspectiva histórica como narratológica, el género del cine-foto-novela o cineromanzo, un tipo tremendamente popular, pero de escasa vida y ampliamente olvidado, de “cine narrado” o “cine impreso” de finales de los 50 y comienzos de los 60. Adoptando el lenguaje visual de la fotonovela así como las innumerables constricciones del contexto de publicación de revistas para mujeres de la época, el cineromanzo parece, a primera vista, un caso típico de lo que falla cuando las adaptaciones fílmicas se ven obligadaa a ser tan “fieles” como sea posible. En la práctica, sin embargo, el cine-foto-novela demostró ser capaz de generar diversas innovaciones. A través de un close-reading del cineromanzo de La ventana indiscreta, de Alfred Hitchcock (1954), se trata de demostrar esas capacidades creativas de una industria despreciada, al tiempo que se ilustra un proceso de transmedialización popular que precede al tiempo de las narrativas transmediales de última generación. Expanding on the theoretical and terminological framework on inter-  and transmediality proposed by the authors in a previous Tropelias contribution (n.27), this essay explores in a both historical and narratological perspective the genre of the film photo novel or cineromanzo, a widely popular, but short-lived nowadays largely forgotten case of “narrated cinema” or “cinema in print” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Adopting the visual language of the photo novel as well as the countless constraints of the publication context of the women’s magazines of that day, the film photo novel seems at first sight a typical example of what goes wrong when film adaptations are obliged to be as “faithful” as possible. In practice however, the film photo novel proved capable of various innovations. This article offers a close-reading of the Italian film photo novel of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which demonstrates the creative possibilities of a despised creative industry while illustrating a popular transmedialization process which comes before the last generation transmedial narratives.


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