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.

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.

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.

Disappearing acts: disability, gender, and the memory of Fascism in Italian film

Modern Italy ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-166
Author(s):  
Sarah Patricia Hill
Keyword(s):  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Post War

Benedetto Croce’s description of fascism as ‘a moral illness of our time’ provides a useful starting point for thinking about the phenomenon of cine-revisionismo storiografico and the representation of Fascism and fascists in Italian cinema. In many films from the post-war period and beyond, the metaphor of moral illness is literalised in portrayals of fascist characters who are shown as mentally or physically sick or disabled (often confusing the two), in contrast to the otherwise healthy and wholesome body of Italians. Addressing the conflation of physical and moral impairment in three 1960 films that grapple with the memory of Italy’s Fascist past – Roberto Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night), Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome), and Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43) – this article argues that in these films, bodies that do not conform to an able-bodied male norm function as lieux de mémoire that permit both the expression and containment of painful memories of the Fascist period.

scholarly journals Gender and Migrant Roles in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films: Cinema as an Apparatus of Reconfiguration of National Identity and ‘Otherness’

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.

Post-War Italian Cinema

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Treveri Gennari
Keyword(s):  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Post War

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.

Cecilia Mangini

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Dalila Missero
Keyword(s):  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Nonfiction Film ◽  
Personal Approach ◽  
Italian Film ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Organic Intellectual ◽  
Access To Knowledge ◽  
Archaeological Approach

This essay offers a feminist reading of the work of Italian film director Cecilia Mangini. Drawing on an archaeological approach, it focuses on Mangini's experience as a woman in Italian cinema and her contribution to the realization of three movies—To Arms! We're Fascists! (codirected with Lino Del Fra and Lino Micciché, 1961–62), Stalin (directed with Lino Del Fra and Franco Fortini, 1962–63), and Being Women (1963–65)—all clear examples of the counterhegemonic cinema that Mangini developed in the fissures of mainstream, male-dominated practices. In her view, nonfiction film is a tool for cultural and political struggle, and it must affect the present in order to provide democratic access to knowledge. Following the Gramscian notion of the organic intellectual, Mangini has built a specific aesthetic and a personal approach to film direction, which aims to reach the broadest audience possible and, at the same time, to develop a coherent feminist militant discourse.

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