Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma: opera, melodrama and the Resistance

Modern Italy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O'Rawe
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Film History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
World War ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy's experience of the Second World War and the Resistance, through canonical films such as Rossellini'sRoma città aperta(Rome, Open City, 1945). It is important, however, to restore a full picture of the array of genres which narrated and refracted the Resistance experience in the post-war period. To this end, this article looks at a key genre that has been overlooked by scholarship, the opera film ormelodramma. In examiningAvanti a lui tremava tutta Roma(Before Him All Rome Trembled, Gallone, 1946), the article considers Mary Wood's contention (inItalian cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2005, 109) that in this period ‘realist cinematic conventions were insufficient for the maximum perception of the historical context’, and that the ‘affective charge’ of melodrama was essential for restoring this complexity. It assesses the appeal to the emotions produced by the film, and the ways in which this is constructed through the bodily and vocal performance of the operadivo, and questions the critical division between emotion (always viewed as excessive) and authenticity (seen in neorealism, the mode of seriousness) which has seen the opera film relegated to the margins of post-war Italian film history.

scholarly journals Historical Context in the Latest Lithuanian Music: Contemporary Tensions

Menotyra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jūratė Landsbergytė
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
80Th Anniversary ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Post War ◽  
Language Of Music ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Second World

The historical context opens its unresolved issues inside contemporary cultural consciousness. It gives the language of music a specific dimension of dramatic tensions. Here, composers’ propositions acquire a coded imagery close to the aesthetics of modernist catastrophe. The musical text becomes highly contextual and filled with the knowledge arisen from history. It is like an encrypted message about the current transformation of history. The texture of the work becomes an expression of the signs incorporating also non-musical sounds or visual space. Semantics play a crucial role in soundscapes. In this sense, we can talk about the war and post-war semantics, which is making its comeback into Lithuanian music. Here, the aesthetic poles of tension or the dramaturgy of conflict arise and are realised through the spectra of hum or expression of identities. In this context, two recent works by Lithuanian composers should be mentioned: they accurately respond to the tensions and wounds of the Second World War that continue to bleed inside the identity consciousness of the Lithuanian nation. These wounds are the Holocaust and the post-war partisan struggle against the Soviet occupation. The topic of ‘war after war’ acquires its musical task in Vytautas Germanavičius’s (b.1969) work Red Trees (2018) for flute, cello, and organ dedicated to the partisan commander Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. It is important to stress that Vanagas has been recognised as a de facto leader of the state and, thanks to sustained efforts of historians and archaeologists, his remains, which were discovered in the Vilnius Orphans’ Cemetery, were reburied in the Pantheon of State Leaders. All this forms an exceptional historical dimension, which finds an original reflection in Germanavičius’s work. Meanwhile, the Holocaust theme connects vividly with the 80th anniversary (late in 2020), of the deed of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who saved over 6,000 Jews in 1940. Algirdas Martinaitis (b.1950) work Visa for Life (2020) for two flutes, oboe, and organ is dedicated to Chiune Sugihara. Here, the composer combines, in a unique way, the worlds of the Japanese, the European tradition and Jewish music. His musical expression is based on the dramaturgy of transformation (the constant running of the toccata). In this way, each composer voices the context of the past: its tension transforms the language of music. It should be noted that both works bring back the catastrophe of the Second World War and the post-war period, which is a painful drama of the history of the Baltic States and not yet sufficiently understood in the world. As a result, the former meditative face of Baltic music identity changes accordingly.

scholarly journals Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past: Tracing Memory Amnesia

Fascism ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Giacomo Lichtner
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
World War ◽  
Long Term Trends ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Second World

In Italy, cinema has contributed to constructing a paradox of memory in which the rememberer is asked to prevent past mistakes from happening again and yet is encouraged to forget what those mistakes were, or that they ever even took place. Through an examination of the long-term trends in Italian cinema about the Fascist period, this article explores its recurrent tropes alongside its recurrent absences, isolating in particular the act of killing and Italy’s African Empire as crucial absences in Italy’s memory. The dominant narrative of italiani brava gente explains popular amnesia and institutional silences that still surround the darkest and bloodiest pages in Italy’s history. From the narratives of innocence and sacrifice that populate the canon of Italian film about Fascism to the sanitised representations of Italy’s wars of aggression or the boycott of Moustapha Akkad’s The Lion of the Desert (1981), this paper argues that recurrent presences and absences in Italy’s cinematic memories of the long Second World War have not been random but coherent, cogent and consistent.

scholarly journals Back for good: melodrama and the returning soldier in post-war Italian cinema

Modern Italy ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O’Rawe
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
World War ◽  
Familial Relations ◽  
To Come ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Second World ◽  
Alternative Ethics

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy’s experience of the Second World War and the Resistance. However, this article argues that viewing this period of Italian cinema solely through the lens of neorealism has obscured the importance of the affective charge of melodrama in constituting an alternative ethics of representation in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Italy, one that worked via an appeal to the emotions. It posits that the traumas of Fascism, war, occupation, and Resistance were worked through by Italian cinema after the war in a range of genres and modes, principally melodrama.By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier orreduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by thereduceto familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

Western Ethnic Borderlands in the Influence of Russian-Soviet Propagangda Before and in the Years of the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (46) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Russian Identity

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics

“Product Not Available in Pre-War Quantities – but Quality Remains the Same”: Remarks on Advertisements as Historical Sources

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Press ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The article focuses on advertisements as visual and historical sources. The material comes from the German press that appeared immediately after the end of the Second World War. During this time, all kinds of products were scarce. In comparison to this, colorful advertisements of luxury products are more than noteworthy. What do these images tell us about the early post-war years in Germany? The author argues that advertisements are a medium that shapes social norms. Rather than reflecting the historical realities, advertisements construct them. From an aesthetical and cultural point of view, advertisements gave thus a sense of continuity between the pre- and post-war years. The author suggests, therefore, that the advertisements should not be treated as a source for economic history. They are, however, important for studying social developments that occurred in the past.

Contextualizing Discrimination of Religious and Linguistic Minorities in South Thailand

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mark Joll
Keyword(s):  
High Tide ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
World War ◽  
Intractable Conflict ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Second World

Abstract This article explores how scholarship can be put to work by specialists penning evidence-based policies seeking peaceful resolutions to long-standing, complex, and so-far intractable conflict in the Malay-Muslim dominated provinces of South Thailand. I contend that more is required than mere empirical data, and that the existing analysis of this conflict often lacks theoretical ballast and overlooks the wider historical context in which Bangkok pursued policies impacting its ethnolinguistically, and ethnoreligiously diverse citizens. I demonstrate the utility of both interacting with what social theorists have written about what “religion” and language do—and do not—have in common, and the relative importance of both in sub-national conflicts, and comparative historical analysis. The case studies that this article critically introduces compare chapters of ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious chauvinism against a range of minorities, including Malay-Muslim citizens concentrated in the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. These include Buddhist ethnolinguistic minorities in Thailand’s Northeast, and Catholic communities during the second world war widely referred to as the high tide of Thai ethno-nationalism. I argue that these revealing aspects of the southern Malay experience need to be contextualized—even de-exceptionalized.

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