Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese Robert Casillo

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-99
Author(s):  
Marc Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Martin Scorsese ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Italian American

The Godfather Trilogy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Mason
Keyword(s):  
Francis Ford Coppola ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Auteur Theory ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Family ◽  
Crime Family ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gangster Films

The Godfather Trilogy forms an important body of work in American cinema, not only because the films, particularly Part I (1972) and Part II (1974), have received acclaim from journalists, critics, and audiences but also because they have received so much attention from academics. The emphasis in the study and appreciation of the trilogy has, however, been on Parts I and II, partly because of their complexity and longevity but also because of how they helped redefine the gangster genre in portraying the Mafia on film, and because of the films’ contributions to the development of New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (all of which have formed important perspectives in academic approaches to the trilogy). Part III (1990) has been felt by critics either to be a disappointment or a coda to the prior incarnations of the series, although it has also attracted academic interest for these very reasons. It is, however, Parts I and II that have served as the main focus of critical attention and not only as gangster films—even if the study of genre has had further influence because their generic revisions introduced the Mafia film. This innovation has produced a range of academic responses that locate the films via reference to histories of organized crime and author Mario Puzo’s representation of the Mafia crime family in the novel on which Parts I and II are based as well as accounts that extend discussion to consider their influence on related representations of the criminal underworld, their impact on popular conceptions of the Mafia, and their representation of Italian-American ethnicity and related areas such as the family and gender. The family has also formed another nexus of connections in criticism because it is so often treated in relation to American culture, and this has also generated a significant body of work on the political and ideological consideration of capitalism in the films. Finally, because Francis Ford Coppola was an important influence in New Hollywood Cinema, there have also been significant considerations of all three films by reference to auteur theory and to Coppola’s balancing of artistic and commercial imperatives.

Martin Scorsese

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Writing Centers ◽  
Martin Scorsese ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come

Martin Scorsese’s name has come to symbolize many broad ideas over the past few decades, to the point where he is no longer merely a filmmaker, but rather a cultural touchstone. He is associated with a particular religion (Catholicism), ethnicity (Italian), genre (gangsters), and time period (New Hollywood), while also being the foremost cinephile in American cinema, influencing whole generations in his wake. Consequently, the amount of writing on Scorsese is quite vast, and this bibliography will try to represent that variety while pointing readers to the best of this work. It is thus organized with a focus on Scorsese’s own scholarly contributions, interviews, career overviews, anthologies, major films, documentaries, and influence. There is a temptation to try to divide the work thematically, since so much of the writing centers around either religion, ethnicity, or masculinity, but doing so would risk perpetuating this overemphasis in the scholarship while also not representing the best writing on this important auteur. Thus, while certainly the work on Italian-Catholicism and masculinity will be frequent within the citations to come, they will not predominate among the selections taken as a whole. This bibliography also attempts to give some of the history of Scorsese scholarship itself, focusing on scholarly touchstones that tended to define particular historical moments and how Scorsese has been useful to particular critical approaches and/or arguments.

scholarly journals Italian-Americans’ Contested Whiteness in Early Cinematic Melodrama

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerio Coladonato
Keyword(s):  
Early American ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Society

The concept of ‘whiteness’ has acquired a central role in race studies. The historical process through which the Italian-American community became ‘white’ is a relevant case study for showing the constructedness of this category and the power relations that underpin it. This paper focuses on the role played by early cinematic melodrama in light of wider social and political transformations that led to the assimilation of Italian immigrants into American racial discourse. In early twentieth-century United States, mass immigration and the institutionalisation of cinema were two inter-related phenomena. Cinema became a ‘respectable’ medium by assigning itself a moral and didactic role. Attending film screenings was, for millions of immigrants, a way to become ‘Americanised’. In the same period, wider socio-political discourses contributed to the re-signification of ‘whiteness’ in American society. In order to accommodate both the need of cheap immigrant labour and nativist ideologies concerned with the purity of the ‘white’ (e.g. Anglo-American) core of society, ‘whiteness’ became fragmented into an array of racially inflected ‘national types’. Among them, Italian-Americans were only provided with ‘probationary whiteness’, and were still deemed as racially inferior and ‘unfit for self-government’. US cinema deployed melodramatic narratives to negotiate the ‘white’ status of Italian-Americans through the polarised moral discourse that characterised this particular genre. It is possible to trace different stylistic paradigms of early American cinema by comparing several melodramas directed by D.W. Griffith and later movies, such as Reginald Barker’s The Italian (1915). The representations of Italian-Americans as Others in cinematic melodrama, and their subsequent assimilation into dominant racial ideology, reveals the variable and complex meanings of the social category of whiteness.

Linking EST With the Invention of the Telephone: The Italian American Connection

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernardo J. Carducci ◽  
Nancy T. Totten ◽  
Gabrielle M. Carr
Keyword(s):  
Italian American
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