Italy’s ragioniere? The national and international relevance of Ugo Fantozzi

Ugo Fantozzi was given life by author and actor Paolo Villaggio in the late 1960s. Inarguably a staple figure within Italian comedy and society, this character remains relevant in modern-day society despite the last film being released in 1999. The Italianità of the Fantozzi series, partially based on people from Villaggio’s life, is unmistakeable. In this article, the Fantozzi films are analysed to show how Fantozzi can be considered so uniquely Italian through many of the themes, dialogue and references to society and culture, yet, at the same time, a universal comedic figure who shares many traits with very well-known and well-regarded British and American television comedy series. Fantozzi, however, never made it to English-speaking shores. While it is likely we will never know the success the franchise could have had, this article shows that it had every possibility of being a success.

A girl and a shoe: Marcel Fabre’s Amor pedestre

In Amor Pedestre (1914), part of a series of silent Italian comedy shorts directed by and starring Marcel Fabre, shoes truly take centre stage, as the actors are shot entirely from the knees down. While the emotions, behaviours and gestures of the evolving story are conveyed solely through the movement of the performers’ feet, it is through shoes that we come to recognise the characters, their gender and their class. By reducing the whole of the actor’s body to a part and questioning the notion of the face as the essential element in silent film, Amor Pedestre subverts established conventions and challenges traditional film grammar.

Early Years, Early Films

Rosi's cinematic sensibility was influenced by his father's photography and sketching, his formative years he spent in Naples, and his apprenticeship with Visconti. La sfida (The Challenge, 1958), his debut work, which shows great affinity with the work of Cartier-Bresson, announces Rosi's future themes: the seductions and traps of power, the collusion between organized crime and business, the harsh social reality of Italy's South. His second, more ambitious work, I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), is one of the first Italian films confronting the cultural and ethnic issues arising from southern Italian emigration. The film, which alternates documentary-like scenes with popular Italian comedy, is enhanced by the location shooting that will become a hallmark of Rosi's cinema. Rosi departs from the overly melodramatic style of La sfida and develops an aesthetic characterized by a realist exactness of space and penchant for exploring psychological states of mind.

Italian Film Comedy

From Dante’s Divine Comedy to the more human forms of commedia all’italiana, the varieties of humor in Italian movies follow the fortunes and misfortunes of the Italian people. This chapter considers why so much Italian comedy, like Italian food, appeals to global audiences with its consistent focus on marriage, sexual politics, and the little guy trying to get by with a touch of larceny. It also explores Italy’s preoccupation with its unique regional stereotypes and the darker regions of the human comedy. Throughout their long history, and especially on the screen, Italians have always been ready to laugh at their own flaws and root for the trickster.

«ПРИКЛЮЧЕНИЯ ПИНОККИО» КАРЛО КОЛЛОДИ И ИТАЛЬЯНСКАЯ КОМЕДИЯ ДЕЛЬ АРТЕ. В ПОМОЩЬ УЧИТЕЛЮ НАЧАЛЬНЫХ КЛАССОВ

The article explores the world-famous work of the Italian writer Carlo Collodi The Adventure of Pinocchio. Despite the fact that the book of Carlo Collodi is addressed to a children's audience, it contains features of satire on Italian reality. The book The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi throws us back to folk laughter culture (term of M. Bakhtin), which is inseparably linked with the traditions of the Italian comedy dell’arte. Just in it Collodi draws the plot for his work. In the book about the adventures of Pinocchio, there is a lot from the carnival laughter culture and from the farce theater in particular. This includes scenes of fights, denudation, buffoonery, throwing various objects by literary characters into each other, dousing the main character with water or sewage, the unprecedented gluttony of the fairy tale characters, their ridicule and humiliation, grotesque exaggeration of appearance, as well as other methods of folk farce. Collodi’s “rhinology” (term of V. Vinogradov) belongs to the world of carnival laugh culture. Mask Medico della Peste (“plague doctor”) with a large bird’s beak is one of the main places in the Italian comedia dell’arte. And the Italian proverb “Who he lies, his nose grows” in some way explains the magical episodes of Pinocchio’s “rhinology” related to the expansion of his nose to huge sizes at those moments when the main character of the fairy tale begins to lie. The book about the wooden man was widely known and recognized in literary circles, and its main character Pinocchio became the prototype of Burattino by Alexei Tolstoy.

Subtitling in the classroom: Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (1976)

Several studies in the recent past have proven that subtitling is undoubtedly beneficial in foreign language acquisition.1 This project aims to prove the same for a New Zealand context, a country where the scope of audio-visual translation is rather limited and among students who have had little to no exposure to subtitling audiovisual material. The current project is based upon two separate studies, one undertaken by Jennifer Lertola and Cristina Mariotti, the other by Jennifer Lertola and Laura Incalcaterra-McGloughlin.2 The project involved 23 second-year students of Italian at Victoria University of Wellington who, as part of their course work during their second semester of study, where tasked with subtitling the Italian comedy classic Il secondo tragico Fantozzi into English.

Représentations des textes et des savoirs chez Charles Estienne : la « vive parole » d’un humaniste

Homme aux savoirs multiples et homme de vulgarisation, Charles Estienne (1514–1564) s’intéressa à la traduction et à l’édition théâtrale parallèlement à ses activités éditoriales et scientifiques, tant en latin qu’en français. Non pas en marge, mais au centre d’une carrière consacrée à la parole du partage des savoirs, l’intérêt pour le théâtre de Charles Estienne se manifeste d’abord par la traduction française d’une comédie italienne contemporaine, rééditée au moins deux fois, puis par des éditions annotées pour la jeunesse d’une comédie de Térence, l’Andrie, qui se continuent par la traduction française de cette comédie, accompagnée d’un traité sur les Jeux des Anciens. Ces deux pièces de théâtres sont représentatives de l’entreprise de Charles Estienne visant à rendre accessible à un plus grand public les grandes oeuvres du passé classique comme de la modernité italienne. Surtout, ces textes sont conçus pour la représentation, dans un cadre éducatif mais aussi, simplement, pour le plaisir du spectacle théâtral. La mise en français, mais aussi la mise en lisibilité (par des lexiques, annotations, commentaires, abrègements etc.) paraissent de fait constituer une mise sur scène du texte source, qui sera dit lors de la représentation mais également par son médiateur, le vulgarisateur (qui traduit, édite, rend compréhensible et diffuse). Ainsi, la traduction pour la scène illustre une parole humaniste, de la transmission et du partage des savoirs : une représentation de la reprise et de la vulgarisation. A man of much learning and a man of popularisation, Charles Estienne (1514–1564) was interested in theatrical translation and edition both in Latin and in French, as well as in many other editorial and scientific activities. Interest in theatre was at the centre of Charles Estienne’s career consecrated to knowledge sharing; it manifested itself first in the French translation of a contemporary Italian comedy, re-edited at least twice. Then he produced several annotated editions for young people of a comedy by Terence, Andria. These were followed by the French translation of this same comedy, accompanied by a treatise on the Jeux des Anciens [Plays of the Ancients]. These two plays are representative of Charles Estienne’s endeavour to make the great works of from classical past as well as contemporary Italy accessible to a wider public. Above all, these texts are designed for performance, in an educational context but also simply for the pleasure of theatrical spectacle. The rendering of the French, and the rendering of readability (through lexica, annotations, commentaries, abridgements etc.) stage the source text, which would be spoken during the performance but also stage its mediator, the populariser (who translated, edited, made comprehensible and disseminated the text). Thus translation for the stage illustrated a humanist position on the transmission and sharing of knowledge: a performance of revival and popularisation.