Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema, Karen Pinkus (2020)

Review of: Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema, Karen Pinkus (2020) Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 157 pp., ISBN 978-1-51790-854-6, p/bk, £18.99

"Facci Lei!": Subtitling Humour in 'Fantozzi' (1975)

<p>Subtitling provides scholars and translators alike with the challenge of negotiating meaning across languages and cultures in an extremely limited space. The subtitler faces many restrictions than can severely affect a translation. However, subtitles are central to making films more widely and easily accessible. These difficulties are challenging at the best of times and are compounded by the specific difficulties of translating comedy. Humour is both universal and at the same time culturally specific. Anthropologists, sociologists, literary theorists and scholars have amply demonstrated how deeply intertwined humour, culture, and language are. It is for this reason that the current project will expand on the literature of subtitling humour, applying the relevant theories associated with both subtitling and translating humour to the Italian film classic Fantozzi (1975). The character Ugo Fantozzi has been a cult figure in Italian culture and society since his appearance in Italian cinema and literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the films in particular he has come to represent the average Italian of the post-economic miracle, whose life does not quite match the dreams of wealth and prosperity emphasized by the media. Fantozzi epitomises the average, and while his character has received little academic attention to date more credible academic studies are emerging since the death of his creator, Paolo Villaggio, in 2017. Fantozzi, therefore, provides the perfect cultural product for a discussion of what it means to translate Italian culture and humour, combining this with considerations about the emerging field of translation studies of subtitling. By providing a complete translation of Fantozzi in English, accompanied by a critical commentary, in this thesis I attempt to show how, despite all the restrictions imposed by the field of subtitling, as well as the difficulties of translating humour, a subtitler can still produce well thought out and reliable subtitles that convey the cultural and comedic aspects of film, and more specifically of this beloved Italian icon.</p>

"Facci Lei!": Subtitling Humour in 'Fantozzi' (1975)

<p>Subtitling provides scholars and translators alike with the challenge of negotiating meaning across languages and cultures in an extremely limited space. The subtitler faces many restrictions than can severely affect a translation. However, subtitles are central to making films more widely and easily accessible. These difficulties are challenging at the best of times and are compounded by the specific difficulties of translating comedy. Humour is both universal and at the same time culturally specific. Anthropologists, sociologists, literary theorists and scholars have amply demonstrated how deeply intertwined humour, culture, and language are. It is for this reason that the current project will expand on the literature of subtitling humour, applying the relevant theories associated with both subtitling and translating humour to the Italian film classic Fantozzi (1975). The character Ugo Fantozzi has been a cult figure in Italian culture and society since his appearance in Italian cinema and literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the films in particular he has come to represent the average Italian of the post-economic miracle, whose life does not quite match the dreams of wealth and prosperity emphasized by the media. Fantozzi epitomises the average, and while his character has received little academic attention to date more credible academic studies are emerging since the death of his creator, Paolo Villaggio, in 2017. Fantozzi, therefore, provides the perfect cultural product for a discussion of what it means to translate Italian culture and humour, combining this with considerations about the emerging field of translation studies of subtitling. By providing a complete translation of Fantozzi in English, accompanied by a critical commentary, in this thesis I attempt to show how, despite all the restrictions imposed by the field of subtitling, as well as the difficulties of translating humour, a subtitler can still produce well thought out and reliable subtitles that convey the cultural and comedic aspects of film, and more specifically of this beloved Italian icon.</p>

Coming of age in Milano: Ermanno Olmi from sponsored cinema to feature filmmaking

This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953–61) and feature filmmaking (1961–2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of – even commenting on – sponsored cinema.

Il ‘gioco di telefono’: The posthuman and cellular technology in Paolo Genovese’s Perfect Strangers

This article offers new perspectives on the telephone in Italian cinema, specifically in the movement from the human to the posthuman vis-à-vis visual representation. Telecommunication has maintained a unique place in Italian cinema throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and provides insight into the anxiety of both the socio-economic status and of the human subject itself. From Roberto Rossellini’s The Human Voice to Paolo Genovese’s Perfect Strangers, the telephone acts as a key protagonist articulating the crisis of human subjectivity with respect to ever-increasing technological influence. Not only is the telephone an ‘actor’ in the Italian film tradition, but its function as both a means and an arbitrator of communication exerts control over the course of human action. As both a nonhuman object and physical/mental influencer, the telephone facilitates the transition from the human to the posthuman, informing our understanding of nonhuman technological agency in our daily lives.