The operatic and the everyday in post-war Italian film melodrama

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-273
Author(s):  
Dalila Missero
Keyword(s):  
The Everyday ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War

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.

Night Raiders

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eloise Moss
Keyword(s):  
Residential Buildings ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Security Technologies ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Post War ◽  
The City

Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968 is the first history of burglary in modern Britain. Until 1968, burglary was defined in law as occurring only between the ‘night-time’ hours of nine p.m. and six a.m. in residential buildings. Time and space gave burglary a unique cloak of terror, since burglars’ victims were likely to be in the bedroom, asleep and unawares, when the intruder crept in, prowling near them in the darkness. Yet fear sometimes gave way to sexual fantasy. Eroticized visions of handsome young thieves sneaking around the boudoirs of beautiful, lonely heiresses emerged alongside tales of violence and loss in popular culture, confounding social commentators by casting the burglar as criminal hero. Night Raiders charts how burglary lay historically at the heart of national debates over the meanings of ‘home’, experiences of urban life, and social inequality. This book explores intimate stories of the devastation caused by burglars’ presence in the most private domains, showing how they are deeply embedded within broader histories of capitalism and liberal democracy. The fear and fascination towards burglary were mobilized by media, state, and market to sell insurance and security technologies, whilst also popularizing the crime in fiction, theatre, and film. Cat burglars’ rooftop adventures transformed ideas about the architecture and policing of the city, and post-war ‘spy-burglars’ theft of information illuminated Cold War skirmishes across the capital. More than any other crime, burglary shaped the everyday rhythms, purchases, and perceptions of modern urban life.

Intimacy and Hedonism: The Aesthetics of the Terrazza in Italian Cinema

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-408
Author(s):  
Nicoletta Asciuto
Keyword(s):  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Aesthetic Development ◽  
Architectural Space ◽  
Cinematic Space ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War ◽  
Film Aesthetics

This article discusses the developments of the terrazza (“roof terrace”) as a cinematic space in post-war and contemporary Italian films. By taking a historical approach, I show how the terrazza has evolved, from the post-war years to the present, to become an architecture of intimacy and hedonism. In Italian film aesthetics, the terrazza replaces the piazza (“square”), the space normally assumed to represent quintessential Italian life. This article considers the cinematic and aesthetic development of elevated architectural space in five key films, ranging from the post-war classics Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti ( Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura ( The Adventure, 1960), through Una giornata particolare ( A Special Day, 1977) and La terrazza ( The Terrace, 1980) by Ettore Scola, to Paolo Sorrentino’s very contemporary La grande bellezza ( The Great Beauty, 2013), a film clearly indebted to the aesthetics of its ground-breaking predecessors.

The Italian Film Industry (1945–1985)

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War ◽  
Film Market ◽  
First Time

The chapter provides an overview of the history of the post-war Italian film industry from crisis to crisis, that is to say from the ground zero of 1945 (when the whole Italian film business had to be politically and economically reorganised, together with the rest of the war-torn country) to the ground zero of 1985 (the year in which, for the first time in almost three decades, Italian film production fell below the rate of 100 films made per year, as the culmination of a crisis that started in the mid-1970s). The chapter opens with an in-depth production history of I vampiri / Lust of the Vampire (Riccardo Freda, 1957), followed by an account of the 1958-1964 boom in the production of pepla, the historical-mythological adventures of the sword-and-sandal kind. Both cases (an isolated commercial failure the former; a short-lived box-office goldmine, or filone, the latter) are emblematic of the functioning of the Italian film industry between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s – a state-subsidised system mostly based on a constellation of medium, small and minuscule business ventures piggy-backing on popular genres/trends in the local and/or global film market.

‘It was good to get out into the fresh air after seeing this film’: Horror, Realism and Censorship in Post-Second World War Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Paul Frith
Keyword(s):  
Social Issue ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World

Existing research on British cinema during the 1940s has often assumed an opposition between realism and fantasy or, as it is also known, ‘realism and tinsel’. However, through an analysis of contemporary critical reception and censorship discourses, it becomes apparent that this division was nowhere near as clearly defined as is often argued. While the ‘quality’ realist film of the 1940s demonstrates a concern with verisimilitude and the reproduction of the surface appearances of reality, when confronting the darker aspects of reality, realism was deemed to be far more closely associated with the horrific. Following a number of decisions made by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) which were heavily criticised by the local authorities and the press, the Board became increasingly wary of these horrific confrontations with the everyday. The release of The Snake Pit (1948) in the UK sparked a series of debates in the press, with one side questioning the suitability of a film dealing with the particularly sensitive subject matter of mental illness for the purpose of shocking and horrifying audiences, and the other side championing the maturity shown by Hollywood when dealing with an important social issue. This article therefore looks beyond traditional perceptions of 1940s British cinema in order to demonstrate a shift in the role played by both realism and horror in the post-war period.

Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Film Censorship ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Show Business ◽  
International Distribution ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War

The book takes as its subject a corpus of thirty-three vampire movies made, distributed and exhibited during the peak years of film production in Italy, and certified to be of Italian nationality by state institutions such as the Italian Show Business Bureau and the Italian Film Censorship Office. Positioning itself at the intersection of Italian film history, horror studies and cultural studies, the book asks: why, and how, is the protean, transnational and transmedial figure of the vampire appropriated by Italian cinema practitioners between 1956 and 1975? Or, more concisely, what do the vampires of post-war Italian cinema mean? The aim is to show that – in spite of Italian vampire cinema’s imported and derivative nature, and its great reliance on profits coming from distribution on the international market – Italian cinematic vampires reflect their national zeitgeist from the economic miracle of the late 1950s to the mid-1970s austerity, twenty years of large political and socio-economic change in which gender politics were also in relative flux. The result of an original research into film production data, film censorship files, screenplays, trade papers, film magazines and vampire-themed paraliterature, the book leaves the well-trod track of award-winning art films to shed light on some of the so-called ‘lower forms’ of cinematic culture, looking for the economic backbone and cultural instrumentality of post-war Italian cinema in the run-of-the-mill genre movies rushed through a cheap production and into domestic and international distribution to parasitically (vampirically?) exploit a given commercially successful film.

Coming to Terms with Horror

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Festić
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Post War

AbstractThe paper discusses the possibilities of building a framework for conceptualization and understanding of the effects of the atrocities committed upon the collapse of ‘ex-Yugoslavia’. It relates the war-horrors and personal and collective traumas to the everyday of the people(s) of both the communist and post-communist times, and includes empirical cross-references from the social relations, cultural, educational and political contexts while revealing the ambivalent meanings of the ‘ghosts of the past’ and of their ‘return’. In rethinking the notions of the signifier, representation, the abject from the social/the symbolic, the text argues for the centrality of memory work based on victims’ experiences and their articulation in public spaces in the post-war societies. Envisioning the move forward and safer inter-ethnic relations on the discussed territories argues for individual responsibility in the processes of (re)construction and (re)formation of complex personal, collective and national identities, lived memory and institutions and in attempts to inter- and intracommunicate the particularized units.

With the Labor of These Slaves

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-182
Author(s):  
Ryan A. Quintana
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
The State ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Post War ◽  
Liberal Subjectivity ◽  
Developmental Policy

This chapter explores South Carolina’s developmental policy and reform agenda in the post-War of 1812 era, arguing that public works and the labor of state slaves were part of a broader project seeking to produce both the state as well as liberal subjectivity. As the chapter argues, while South Carolinians were influenced by broader governing trends throughout the Atlantic world, their experience was directly shaped by the everyday practices of the state’s enslaved majority, who they absolutely relied upon. Subsequently, leaders broadened their vision of the state to accommodate the violence required for its maintenance.

Malaysian Pirates, American Cowboys and the Marginalised Outlaw: Constructing Other-ed Adventurers in Italian Film

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aliza S. Wong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War

This chapter examines the ways in which a hero of the nineteenth century — a Malaysian pirate who, in his rescuing of the imperially downtrodden, the exploited, and the betrayed, spoke in actions and words with anti-imperialist flourish — became reimagined as a twentieth-century, post-war anti-hero by a director of westerns all'italiana who had, in his own films, fashioned a bandit, a ‘noble savage’, who opened the eyes of a Texas ranger to the corruption of the aristocracy and Orientalist assumptions. The first section introduces the nineteenth-century Italian children's author Emilio Salgari, and the hero of his most famous and well-loved novels: the pirate Sandokan. The second section analyzes Sergio Sollima's radical westerns, focusing on the protagonist of La resa dei conti and Corri, uomo, corri: Cuchillo, played by the Cuban-American-Italian actor Tomás Milián. The final section examines the ways in which Sollima melds his vision of the anarchic borderlands of the USA and Mexico with his imagining of the primitive wilds of Southeast Asia in his 1970s television series and films, bringing Sandokan, Salgari, and Sollima together.

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