Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies

Third International Conference

Italian Cinema and Media:

Past and Present, Continuity and Change, Expectations for the Future

The American University of Rome

Rome 16 - 18 June 2022

Papers Abstracts

a Marca, Pablo (Brown University, United States)

Adapting folklore in the 21st century: The case of Matteo Garrone

Fairy tales constitute one of the genres of folklore that arguably have been part of culture for centuries. In the

transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries, fairy tales have often been censored and adapted to conform to

certain ideas of pedagogy, confining them to the genre of children’s literature. However, they still constitute an

ever-present genre that permeates all sorts of media, suggesting that the constant return of fairy tales might have

the trace of something more than pure entertainment and moral lessons for children. In contrast, theoretical and

philosophical debates in the 21st century invite a non-humanist, one could say posthumanist, reading of these

texts, negotiating the relevancy of these texts for ethical and political practices. In his filmic adaptations of fairy

tales, Matteo Garrone has thematized some of these contemporary debates, bringing to the screen grotesque and

yet fascinating figures that one can interpret as posthuman subjects. The folkloric element has often been present

in Garrone’s oeuvre, but it is with his adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales (2015) and, more

recently, Pinocchio (2019), that one can see the full potential of a modern, direct retelling of fairy tales. Focusing

on these two films, this paper will show how Garrone worked with the source texts to achieve two goals: first, to

emphasize the non-anthropocentric perspective of the fairy tales; and second, to present an example of a modern

storyteller who, through the camera, can demonstrate why fairy tales are still relevant, and should be reclaimed

today.

Andreazza, Fabio (Università di Chieti, Italy)

Gli allievi di regia del CSC: Reclutamento e attività didattica (1935-1949)

L’intervento prende le mosse da un’indagine sistematica sui documenti d’archivio relativi agli allievi di regia del

Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia dal 1935 al 1949, i primi quindici anni di vita della scuola. Il materiale

conservato riguarda quasi cento studenti: nomi importanti del cinema italiano come Vittorio Cottafavi o Giuseppe

De Santis e figure minori o addirittura sconosciute anche agli storici. L’insieme dei documenti mi ha consentito

di ricostruire il sistema di reclutamento vigente nel CSC e, anche se in modo parziale, i modi in cui si svolgeva

l’attività didattica. Nella relazione mi propongo di offrire una sintesi di questa ricerca.

Angeli, Silvia (University of Westminster, United Kingdom)

‘Where Do We Go Now?’ Marcello, Munzi and Rohrwacher’s Futura (2021)

This paper focuses on the documentary Futura (2021), written and directed by Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi,

and Alice Rohrwacher. Defined by the trio as “a collective enquiry” (inchiesta collettiva), the film consists of a

series of interviews with boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 20, carried out during a journey across Italy.

The project, which has illustrious antecedents in the reportages of Mario Soldati and Luigi Comencini, offers a

compelling portrait of a generation’s fears and desires while functioning as a social barometer for the country.

Subject matter aside, Futura is equally interesting in terms of form. Extracts from Soldati’s and Comencini’s

works are interspersed throughout the documentary, as is archival footage – most notably images of the 2001 G8

summit Genoa, including an overnight police raid on Armando Diaz school. It thus becomes clear that, in spite

of its title, Futura is a film which looks back as much as it does forward. Finally, the collective nature of the

project is worth noting: a collaboration between three of the most distinctive contemporary authorial voices in

Italian cinema, Futura’s egoless configuration cannot but help feel as a manifesto of sorts, an antidote to today’s

unrepentant individualism that simultaneously interrogates the potential and possibilities of Italy’s youth and its

cinema.

Aulino, Biagio (University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada)

L’uso del dialetto siciliano nei film di Giuseppe Tornatore

In questo saggio le varietà linguistiche usate da Giuseppe Tornatore nei film Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988)

e Barría, La porta del vento (2009) vengono analizzate nel continuum sociolinguistico proposto dal linguista

Gaetano Berruto (1995, 2011, 2012). In modo particolare sono esaminate le forme di italiano dell’uso medio,

dialetto siciliano, dialetto siciliano italianizzato e italiano regionale nella dimensione cinematografica e in

relazione ai diversi contesti comunicativi. Nella valutazione di queste variazioni linguistiche si prenderà in

considerazione il tempo, lo spazio e la posizione sociale del parlante all’interno di due delle quattro dimensioni

di variazione del modello di Berruto (2011). Attraverso una prospettiva sociolinguistica, si cercherà di spiegare

le varietà linguistiche in relazione ai personaggi evidenziando come usi diversi alterano non soltanto la lingua,

ma anche la capacità del film di essere strumento rappresentativo dell’Italia del secondo Novecento.

Battisti, Fabiana (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Picone, Aida (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Netflix Italia: Specchio di un mondo che cambia? Uno studio sulle rappresentazioni della comunità

LGBTQ+

Netflix, a leader on the national scene (Altroconsumo, 2020), explicitly declared (Netflix, 2021) its willingness

to promote a more inclusive depiction of LGBTQ+ community. This intention aligns with findings in the literature

over the last decade, according to which the LGBTQ+ issue has been increasingly covered in the media (Chu,

2017). The amount of LGBTQ+ audiovisual content, as well as the range of portrayals on the topic, have risen in

Italy too. This is significant given that Italy is one of the most problematic countries in Europe in terms of

LGBTQ+ discrimination (Worthen, 2018). It has been argued that these representations perpetuate forms of

discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals (Heim, 2020). The characters are represented as socially isolated,

bullied (Marcoux, 2020), one-dimensional (McInroy & Craig, 2017), afflicted by identity crises or split

personalities (Raley & Lucas, 2006). Taking into account movies produced by the platform, available in the first

quarter of 2021 on Netflix Italia and tagged with the keyword LGBTQ+, the analysis investigates the extent to

which such stereotypes emerge in Netflix contents, and if and how the platform overcomes them through less

stigmatised representations. Content analysis was chosen as the method of investigation, (re)structuring the

variables from previous studies (Buonanno, 1983, 2020; Raley & Lucas, 2006; Corfield, 2017; Dye, 2020), to

identify «the border between the worlds of social inclusion and exclusion» (D'Amato, 2007). The first outcomes

highlight a willingness to overcome traditional stereotypes, even though film production is limited to a few

countries, and Italy is not among them. Moreover, lesbians enjoyed greater visibility compared to what was

observed previously (Vanlee et al., 2018); no portrayals of other categories (BTQ+) were found. The research has

been carried out by Fabiana Battisti, Maddalena Carbonari, Aida Picone and Fabio Virgilio.

Bauman, Rebecca (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, United States)

We are what we wear: Youth, identity and fashion in contemporary Italian TV

The current trend of teen-oriented television in Italy has generated a range of series popular with both youth and

adult audiences. While these programs vary in format, setting, and tone, they all exhibit one feature that has

preoccupied fans and fashion bloggers but has of yet received scant attention from media scholars: the importance

of fashion. The teenage protagonists in these series utilize clothing to role-play or affirm their identities through

costumes that range from prestigious designer names to unbranded casual styles; high-concept street gear and

athleticwear; military and school uniforms; conservative business attire and playful patterns reminiscent of

children’s clothing. Analysis of these varied clothing styles demonstrates how costume design is not only a means

of promoting fashion trends and aesthetics, but can be a singular vehicle for expressing the primary preoccupation

of these young protagonists, all of whom struggle to negotiate their shifting identities and to visually configure

the self in a hypermediated world. From the way high fashion becomes a mean of self-expression and personal

transformation in such series as Baby and We Are Who We Are to the more subtle usage of anonymous stylistic

references in such programs as Zero, Summertime and SKAM Italia, costumes have the expressive function of

thematically channeling issues of gender and sexual identity, race, and class. This presentation closely examines

significant fashion motifs in these programs to explore how, through costuming, contemporary teen series hold

the potential to offer more nuanced visions of adolescent identities in Italy today.

Bellocchio, Maria Letiza (University of Arizona, United States)

A casa mia? La ricerca della propria casa per le protagoniste di Maura Delpero

Il mio intervento esplora la filmografia di Maura Delpero: i due documentari Signori professori (2008) e Nadea

e Sveta (2012), e il film di finzione Maternal (2019), concentrandosi sulle modalità con cui la regista traduce in

immagini un discorso complesso sul significato dell’espressione sentirsi a casa propria nel contesto del

pluralismo culturale e della mobilità della società liquida contemporanea. L’analisi comparata dei tre film mi

permetterà di creare connessioni a livello tematico e di linguaggio cinematografico, mettendo a fuoco i modi della

rappresentazione filmica della ricerca al femminile di un posizionamento nel mondo e la continuità tra

documentario e film di finzione. Funzionali al mio discorso saranno, infatti, riflessioni sulla dinamica tra

movimenti di macchina e inquadrature fisse, sulla ricorrenza di simmetrie visive, sull’assenza di flashback o

flashforward come di interventi della regista o sguardi in macchina dei personaggi, e sull’uso di attori

professionisti e non.

Benelli, Elena (Concordia University, Canada)

Migrancy, exclusion and belatedness in Dagmawi Yimer’s Waiting

Migrations represent one of the most unsettling and yet enriching forces of human history, capable of redesigning

national configurations and reshaping borderscapes. If the only approach to international migrations that Italy and

other European countries have applied “view migration as challenging and threatening to their territories, to their

identities, and ways of imagining themselves and others” (Loshitzky 629), Italian documentary filmmaking has

become “one of the most innovative and creative artistic sites in Italy, challenging established forms and subject

matters” (Clò and Angelone 84) while offering the visual opportunity to redefine migrancy as well as to theorize

social justice in Italy. In my paper, I will analyze the experimental documentary/video essay Waiting (2020) by

Dagmawi Yimer (documentarist and co-director of the Archivio Memorie Migranti), and Shahram Khosravi (a

professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and a refugee himself). While European borders can

be interpreted as “social processes and practices of spatial differentiation” (Brambilla 17), the refugees coming

from the South of the world disrupt the homogenous space and time of European democracy, as they are

constantly excluded from it, not only spatially but also temporally, in a perpetual state of belatedness. Waiting

investigates through multimedia practices the experience of migrancy, exclusion and temporal disbelonging. Its

stratified narration proposes a new visual configuration of the politics of social exclusion putting forward a

powerful creative expression to “positive change, social justice and equality, working together towards the

progressive re-creation of our common world” (T.J. Demos xxiii).

Bernabei, Maria Ida (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy)

Cesaro, Laura (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy)

Oggi parla: Figure della produzione e spazi di (auto)rappresentazione nella trade press cinematografica

In questa relazione sonderemo le forme, ma soprattutto le strategie, di rappresentazione e autorappresentazione

delle figure professionali operanti nel mid-management produttivo – non solo produttori ma anche direttori di

produzione e ispettori di produzione – in un ampio corpora di periodici di settore tra il finire degli anni Cinquanta

e la metà degli anni Settanta. Si analizzeranno in prima istanza rubriche di rilievo dedicate ai lavoratori – come Il

personaggio del mese su «La Fiera del Cinema», Profili su «Cineproduzione italiana», Oggi parla su «L’Araldo

dello Spettacolo» e Figure del nostro cinema su «Cinespettacolo» –. In seconda istanza, un focus su

«Cineproduzione italiana», testata curata dai direttori di produzione, renderà conto di differenti metodologie di

lavoro e approcci al sistema attraverso scritture di lavoratori appartenenti al reticolo produttivo.

Biernacka-Licznar, Katarzyna (University of Wrocław, Poland)

Piccolo grande cinema: adattamenti cinematografici della letteratura italiana per ragazzi nel XX secolo

Lo scopo del mio intervento è quello di offrire una serie di esempi che illustrino le relazioni tra i libri italiani per

l’infanzia e i loro adattamenti cinematografici che hanno segnato un’impronta significativa nella storia del cinema

italiano e internazionale per ragazzi. Finora, gli studi sulle dinamiche di adattamento della letteratura italiana per

l’infanzia allo schermo si sono concentrati principalmente sui testi letterari della prima metà del XX secolo (p.

es. M. Verdone 1953; F. Rotondo 1998; G. Rondolino 2004; P. e D. Boero 2009). L’idea di rivolgermi ai film per

un pubblico giovanile nel mio intervento è radicata nella convinzione che esaminare le produzioni

cinematografiche basate su opere letterarie dalla prospettiva dell’anno 2022 sia un’impresa gratificante. Aiuterà

non solo a identificare i film che sono entrati nel canone del cinema per ragazzi, ma anche a esplorare le produzioni

più recenti a cui hanno accesso i giovani destinatari attraverso altri canali; ad esempio, YouTube e Netflix. Ho

anche intenzione di discutere i contatti cinematografici tra l’Italia e paesi selezionati dell’Europa dell’Est, che

hanno (o meno) portato alla creazione di film importanti. Il mio discorso procederà in tre fasi. In primo luogo,

delineerò le più importanti opere letterarie italiane che fanno parte del canone italiano della letteratura per

l’infanzia. Successivamente, in questo contesto, presenterò e discuterò esempi di adattamenti cinematografici. In

conclusione, mi permetto di presentare le ragioni storiche (e non solo) che ne hanno determinato il successo o, al

contrario le ragioni del fallimento di alcune pellicole.

Bini, Andrea (The American University of Rome and Temple University-Rome, Italy)

Il kitsch nel cinema italiano

Come e dove investigare le varie forme del kitsch nel cinema Italiano? Se si prende in considerazione il cinema

popolare elementi kitsch sono ovviamente presenti, come testimoniano i generi di maggior sfruttamento

sensazionalistico degli anni ’70 testimonianza di una industria cinematografica sempre più crisi, come nel filone

del cosiddetto porno-nazi o i mondo movie. Tuttavia lo stesso kitsch ha una storia lunga e complessa che sarebbe

molto riduttivo identificare con i film popolari di massa low brow. La posizione di questa presentazione parte da

un punto di vista differente dal modo in cui il kitsch viene comunemente definito: questo non è tanto il

sottoprodotto inevitabile di una società consumista di massa, quanto piuttosto elemento costitutivo del modo in

cui viene teorizzata e vissuta l’arte e l’esperienza artistica nell’‘800 a partire dal Romanticismo. In questo senso,

il rischio di scivolare nel kitsch è proprio dell’arte con ambizioni high brow per cui è il cinema d’autore italiano

- proprio in quanto si presenta come tale - a mostrare varie forme assai interessanti di kitsch, ovviamente molto

più sottili e sfuggenti di quelle, più riconoscibili e sfacciate (ma anche più oneste) del cinema popolare. Non è un

caso che un regista come Monicelli abbia sempre rifiutato di essere considerato un autore ma solo un artigiano. Il

kitsch nel cinema d’autore Italiano include quindi sia elementi che possiamo definire di contenuto (banalizzazioni,

cliché, ecc.) spesso molto simili a quelli del cinema popolare, ma innanzitutto di tipo stilistico, volte a fornire la

necessaria aura che farebbe di un regista un “autore”.

Blázquez, Elena (University Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

La influencia del cine militante italiano en la práctica cinematográfica de Helena Lumbreras durante el

tardofranquismo y la transición

Spanish filmmaker Helena Lumbreras (1935-1995) started her career in Italy during the 1960s. From 1962 to

1970, she studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and collaborated with Unitelefilm. Her

foray into political cinema was her graduation film, España (1964), a short feature anti-Francoist film. This short

film was a first step towards making evidently committed militant cinema, which she put into practice in her

following film Spagna ’68 (1968), a documentary produced by Unitelefilm about the student and workers

struggles in Spain under dictatorship. With this film, Lumbreras advocated for using film as a tool for direct social

transformation. After nearly eight years in Italy, Lumbreras settled back in Spain in 1970. Her return arose from

a personal drive to directly take part in the anti-dictatorial struggle. All this resulted in Lumbreras founding the

film collective Colectivo de Cine de Clase, which was inspired by the militant collective film movements that

Lumbreras had encountered in Italy. The purpose of the Colectivo de Cine de Clase’s documentaries was to

become audiovisual tools capable of covering information that the official media did not report, as well as

promoting, through the production and circulation of controversial images, sociopolitical change capable of

influencing the present and the immediate future. The Colectivo de Cine de Clase itself declared on one occasion

that they did not intend to be part of the history of cinema, but to make history with cinema, thereby asserting

their desire to use cinema as a social and political tool.

Bonifazio, Paola (University of Texas Austin, United States)

So far and yet so close: Romance and western readers in Italian newsreels

This presentation examines Italian newsreel productions from the late 1940s to the early 60s that represent the

comics industry and its fans, in particular, women and children who are readers of fotoromanzi and western

narratives. It shows how continuities between readerships (both depicted as naïve and corruptible) are grounded

in cross-pollination of romance and western genres in publications that heavily exploited media convergence to

build fandom. The romance and western genres are assimilated, politically, in harmony with narratives that have

consistently played across generic boundaries, despite the fact that the market had progressively kept them

separate, labelling fotoromanzi a feminine and western comic a masculine kind of reading. Placed in historical

perspective, this apparent contradiction fits the framework of governmentality within which, as I argued

elsewhere, political and religious agencies of power established relationships with Italian citizens in the aftermath

of fascism and World War II. Cultural technologies such as newsreels could serve the purpose of maintaining

and fostering the social order through distribution of models of conduct; portrayals of the comics industry and its

fans can be framed against the foil of the threatening potential that its fandom posed to the establishment and in

the context of the political efforts to normalize its social effects from the late 1940s onward. At the same time,

economic powers such as publishers and film producers also participated in the education of citizens and the

construction of citizenry, to the benefit of their own prosperity as they were, in return, supported by the same

agencies who could rage a battle against them. Contradictions emerge in the crack of this alignment, for in a

democratic and capitalist society, readers/consumers held economic and political powers themselves: on one

hand, publishers must take fans into great consideration as they play a pivotal role in the success of their products;

on the other, politicians and religious leaders alike must bear the consequences of increased liberties in a

democratic and capitalist society. Economic and political independence of women, children’s access to consumer

culture, the rise of the middle-class were both perks and threats to established political, gender, and cultural

hierarchies in a changing Italy, at the dawn of the economic boom.

Bonnici, Glen (University of Malta)

Metareferential insularity in Giuseppe Tornatore’s La migliore offerta and La corrispondenza

Giuseppe Tornatore’s most recent fiction feature films, La migliore offerta (2013) and La corrispondenza (2016)

both reflect the director’s new preference for international settings, the use of foreign languages and characters

who are artists in different fields. In this paper I will discuss another similarity which is frequently overlooked:

the wider reaching metareferential discourse that the films make through their spatial dimension. Both texts

portray a series of insular spaces that implicitly comment on cinema, visual culture and the fictionality inherent

in contemporary life. Physical (the house, the island, the vault) and more abstract spaces (the technological screen,

the painting) will be analysed in their interactions with one another as their clearly defined closed borders

paradoxically open the way to a deeper metareferential signifying level in which the limits of well-established

notions are questioned. The concluding observations will show that unpacking the spatial metaphors used by

Tornatore makes the continuity of these two films with his earlier works easier to perceive and that, in addition

to more apparent motifs and techniques, self-reflexivity in film can also be channelled through the medium’s

engagement with spaces that are not the cinema theatre, the soundstage and other related locations of the industry.

Brizio-Skov, Flavia (The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, United States)

Rocco Schiavone, la serie TV: Problemi di genere, giustizia e legalità

Rocco Schiavone, la fortunata serie tv ormai giunta alla quinta stagione, nasce nel 2016 dagli omonimi romanzi

di Antonio Manzini e viene trasmessa da Rai 2. Il programma, prodotto da Cross Productions e Rai Fiction,

registra una media di 3,3 milioni di telespettatori a episodio e uno share di oltre il 13% nella prima stagione, nella

seconda stagione mantiene tre milioni di spettatori a episodio e nella quarta uno share del 10.3% con 2.570.000

spettatori.

Il grande successo di pubblico deve attribuirsi al fatto che il personaggio di Rocco Schiavone, duro con

sé stesso come con gli altri, nasconde dietro il suo cinismo un forte senso di umanità e una personalissima idea di

giustizia. In queste pagine, si vuole infatti dimostrare come la fortuna di questa fiction sia dovuta a due fattori:

una operazione di ibridismo operata all’interno del genere giallo, con una mescolanza delle formule e un

assemblaggio di topoi provenienti da disparati sotto-generi; e una continua contrapposizione tra giustizia e

legalità, ovvero tra quello che il codice penale richiede a un rappresentante della legge, e le libertà che il nostro

vicequestore si prende. Libertà che costringono lo spettatore a interrogarsi su una miriade di quesiti che lo

pongono di fronte ai problemi dell’Italia di oggi, e esulano i confini della città di Aosta dove le storie si svolgono,

forzandolo a ponderare su dilemmi universali: È giusto farsi giustizia da soli se la legge non ci viene in aiuto? È

giusto ingannare i disonesti? È giusto rubare ai ladri per dare ai bisognosi? È giusto avere un codice etico personale

e amministrare la giustizia?

Buesa, Andrés (University of Zaragoza, Spain)

Rural children revisited: A progressive sense of place in Alice Rohrwacher’s Le meraviglie

In an increasingly global Italy, people—but also goods, data, information—move around more than ever before.

“Mobility changes the way we understand society, culture, politics and community”, and a crucial part of this

shift is how a heightened sense of mobility engenders anxieties about our feeling of place (Aday 2017, 7).

Prompted by Doreen Massey’s questioning—"if everything is moving where is ‘here’?”—this paper explores

how contemporary Italian cinema negotiates understandings of place in the context of the rural (Massey 2005,

138). In particular, it focuses on how Alice Rohrwacher’s Le meraviglie (2014) approaches ideas of place and

belonging in rurality through the figure of the child. Inasmuch as they are often culturally coded in terms of

stability, fixity, and rootedness, rural children provide a productive terrain from which to explore the crisis of a

sense of place in a changing world. Bringing together scholarship from the mobilities turn, children’s geographies,

and film studies, this paper contends that the cinematic child articulates a dynamic and open—rather than static,

localist and fixed—understanding of place. Against the Romantic tendency to associate childhood and nature as

a way of grounding essentialist ideas of place, the film draws on children’s heightened openness to the others in

order to present place as an “articulated moment in networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey

1991, 28). Le meraviglie downplays the romanticised affinity of childhood with nature and the land. Instead, it

foregrounds children’s relationships to others—often social outcasts—as the constitutive element of what Doreen

Massey calls a “progressive” or “global” sense of place: a sense of place that acknowledges the hybrid dimension

of contemporary places “without being threatened by it” (1991, 29).

Buonanno, Milly (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Alle origini della televisione italiana: grandi donne dietro il piccolo schermo

In keeping with the conference's call to look back, the paper aims to offer a first exploration of the professional

roles played by women in the early days of public television in the 1950s and 1960s. No doubt that a large gender

inequality affected the professional personnel in early Italian television (Brancati 2011). Nonetheless, the advent

of TV allowed women in front of the screen to become familiar with a variety of new roles (albeit limited) on-

screen—announcers, presenters, show girls—which contributed to the process of women’s emancipation already

underway in Italy (Gundle 2006). Shifting the focus from the visible female figures on screen to those who

operated in invisibility behind the screen, the paper intends to specifically explore the narrow area of above-the-

line creative works (such as scriptwriting, direction etc.). Women who did these jobs were a small minority,

compared to the large component of below-the-line workers. However, the under-representation of women in key

behind-the-screen positions did not exclude that, since the medium’s inception, skilled and strong-willed female

figures would emerge in creative and decision-making roles (Cassamagnaghi 2016). These pioneering figures

have remained largely neglected in the historiography of Italian television, in contrast to what can be observed in

the field of film and women studies, which have for some time now been engaged in investigating the work and

role of women in cinema (Cardone et al. 2021) following an already consolidated international trend (Conor et

al. 2015). The paper, which aims to be the prelude to a more systematic reconstruction of the female historiograhy

of Italian television, will focus on the group of pioneers - Alda Grimaldi, Lyda Ripandelli, Carla Ragionieri,

Fernanda Turvani, Maria Maddalena Yon, Elisa Quattrocolo - who, since the beginning of the new medium,

covered the unprecedented, above-the-line and still today scarce female position of television directors.

Busetta, Laura (Università di Messina, Italy)

Tagliani, Giacomo (Università di Palermo, Italy)

Inquiring into the future: Futura and the contemporary forms of the inchiesta documentary

We analyse how the collective project of Futura (Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher,

2021) re-elaborates 20th-century approaches to the inchiesta documentary form. Busetta and Tagliani focus on

Futura’s explicit references to this form and its historical context (i.e., formal echoes, use of archival footage).

Moreover, the two scholars discuss the relevance of this work in relation to key concepts in documentary studies

(i.e., (multiple) authorship, voice, subjectivity and confession) in order to draw broader conclusions about new

trends in contemporary Italian documentary practice.

Caputo, Ylenia (Università di Bologna, Italy)

Italiani di seconda generazione. Le nuove celebrità della serialità televisiva teen

Il contributo è volto a indagare le figure di due celebrità emergenti della generazione Z: Coco Rebecca Edoghame

(Summertime - Netlix) e Giuseppe Dave Seke (Zero - Netflix), rispettivamente prima attrice nera e primo attore

nero protagonisti in un teen drama italiano. Il loro protagonismo rivela una rinnovata attenzione per aree

storicamente sottorappresentate nella produzione audiovisiva italiana. L’urgenza di nuove rappresentazioni è

confermata dall’attivismo online e offline dei due giovani attori che fanno dell’inclusione la loro bandiera e

rivendicano una narrazione più autentica degli italiani di seconda generazione.

Carbone, Marco Benoît (Brunel University, London, United Kingdom)

‘Carbonara is not an option’: Authenticity, food nationalism and irony on social media pages ‘Italians mad

at food’

The paper analyses the Facebook community “Italians mad at food”. Here, users share ironic, sarcastic, and more

or less indignant comments on food recipes presented elsewhere as “Italian” (on TV programmes, other social

media pages, advertisement, cookbooks, etc.) and seen by the members as failing to conform with expectations

of proper Italian-ness (e.g. cheese imitations; unorthodox or “prohibited” toppings/pineapple pizza;

“inappropriate” recipes). Such “wrong” interpretations of Italian cuisine typically elicit humorous dismay, but

may enmesh more seriously or even problematically onto nationalist and ethnocentric intransigence or mockery

of other food cultures or user interpretations, seen as guiltily deviating from rigidly understood Italian culinary

norms. Social media provide channels to trans/nationally construct, share, and gatekeep discourses on food and

group identity (Rousseau 2012; (Ichijo/Ranta 2016; Andersson 2018; Karaosmanolu 2018: within this context,

one can observe protective and essentialist attitudes in national/regional perspective (Tuchler 2015). Focusing on

discourses on food through categories like fixity (as opposed to experimentation), authenticity (as opposed to

fluidity), and Italianness (as opposed to everything “un-Italian” or inauthentic), the paper investigates how ideas

of “appropriateness” vs. “appropriation” may articulate ironic as well as more serious claims of cultural purity

within contemporary Italian food cultures. Focusing on reactions to traditional carbonara recipes and its

deviations, the paper observes how social media may perpetuate an “everyday nationhood perspective”

(Antonsich 2015) or even a “banal nationalism” (Billig 1985), looking at transnational articulations of ideas of

Italian cuisine as a tradition rich in gastronomic/cultural capital and self-obsessions (Tuchler 2015) (Paura 2019).

Cardini, Daniela (Università IULM, Italy)

Sibilla, Gianni (Università Cattolica di Milano, Italy)

Mamma mia! Le canzoni italiane come sound branding nelle serie tv internazionali, tra innovazione e

stereotipi

La musica pop svolge un ruolo fondamentale nelle serie tv contemporanee, anche in relazione alla loro dimensione

transnazionale, da molteplici punti di vista. L’intervento analizzerà i modelli delle canzoni pop italiane nelle serie

italiane e internazionali, delineandone le funzioni narrative, nonché i meccanismi industriali ed economici che

portano alla loro scelta ed inclusione. L’intervento si focalizzerà sul modo in cui le le canzoni vengo usate sia per

rafforzare sia per ridefinire gli stessi stereotipi dell’italianità: verrà identificato un “Italian sound branding”

attraverso l'analisi di canzoni italiane presenti nelle serie tv internazionali prodotte in Italia. Saranno prese in

considerazione produzioni come Gomorra (Sky Italia, 2014-2021), Suburra (Netflix, 2017-2020),

e Summertime (Netflix, 2020-), per poi discutere il ruolo svolto dalla canzone italiana in produzioni internazionali

come The Young Pope (Sky Italia, HBO, Canal +m 2016), Master of None (Netflix, 2015-2021) e La casa de

papel (Netflix, 2017-2021).

Carolan, Mary Ann (Fairfield University, United States)

China and Italy past and present: Across, beyond and within the borders

An examination of the cinematic representation of China and the Chinese in contemporary Italian film from the

middle of the last century to the present reveals social, political, and artistic bonds that link these two cultures.

Such an analysis also demonstrates the way in which the relationship between the two countries, both of which

locate themselves in the middle, Italy in the Mediterranean and China as the Middle Kingdom, has evolved over

the last half century. Italian fascination with China and the East produced authentic portrayals as well as imaginary

constructs. Early documentaries by Carlo Lizzani and Michelangelo Antonioni delineated the contours of this

cultural fascination in La muraglia cinese/Behind the Great Wall (1958) and Chung Kuo – Cina/Chung Kuo –

China (1972) in an attempt to document new, yet distant, realities. These cinematic investigations yielded to

fictional imaginaries of China, with a lavish view of a historical Middle Kingdom by director Bernardo Bertolucci

(L’ultimo imperatore/The Last Emperor (1987) and a stark consideration of Italian economic exchange with

contemporary China by Gianni Amelio in La stella che con c’e’/The Missing Star (2006). The wave of Chinese

migration to Italy in the late twentieth century created a new sense of otherness within Italy as Chinese migrants

became the subjects of fictional narratives and documentaries in the works of Stefano Incerti (Gorbaciof, 2010),

Andrea Segre (Io sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet, 2011) and Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco (Miss

Little China, 2009). In the twenty-first century, a new chapter in the relationship between Italy and China has

emerged in the form of transnational collaborations in the art and business of filmmaking.

Carter, Jim (Boston University, United States)

The filmmaker as historian in Olivetti industrial cinema

The industrialization of twentieth-century Italy transformed the social position of art: no longer strictly an

expression of the producing classes, art became a market commodity whose creation was justified by the

anticipation of a profitable sale. At the same time, there emerged another strand of art that was neither independent

from the market nor a commodity in itself: sponsored art was intended to promote the sale of a separate

commodity or the public image of an entity like a business or a government agency. My current book project

explores the development of sponsored art in Italy, focusing especially on the intellectual class whose work was

transformed to support mass production and consumption. This paper analyzes a group of filmmakers recruited

by the Olivetti typewriter, calculator and computer company who were employed as historians, creating visual

meta-narratives that advertised Olivetti products, underwrote the company’s social power and endorsed the

consumer society of which it was a leader. Films like Un millesimo di millimetro (Virgilio Sabel, 1948), La

telescrivente Olivetti (Aristide Bosio, 1955) and Elea classe 9000 (Nelo Risi, 1960) visualize longue durée

histories of mechanical reproduction, communication and calculation that conveniently end in the affirmation of

Olivetti technologies, as if to claim for the company the heritage of Archimedes, Chappe, Pascal and many other

pioneers of Western science.

Casiraghi, Lucia (Indiana University - Bloomington, United States)

A far l’amore comincia tu: A content analysis of Raffaella Carrà’s songs

My paper focuses on Carrà’s songs. It identifies the main themes and messages that Carrà conveyed with her

music through the analysis of a corpus of her songs, using the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti. I

demonstrate how the representation of women and gender roles, and the use of storytelling function to create an

original relationship between Carrà the star, and her public.

Catanese, Rossella (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy)

Nastri d’acciaio and Vita di un porto: Industrial poems of post-war reconstruction in the Italian non-fiction

cinema

Two interesting documents of non-fiction film heritage from the post-World War II era in Italy are Nastri

d’acciaio (P. Belli, 1955) and Vita di un porto (A. Miano, 1955), both held by Archivio Nazionale Cinema

d’Impresa – CSC in Ivrea, digitized by the lab ‘La Camera Ottica’ in Gorizia (University of Udine). Both short

films are industrial documentaries, promoting Italian infrastructures and transportation during a stage of big

changes for the country, in terms of economic development and groundwork reconstruction which took place

after the Second World War. Both films apply this pedagogic turn through a lyrical formula: the poetry of

modernity as a hopeful horizon of integration between technology and humanism, between societal needs and

industrial infrastructures.

Cervini, Alessia (Università di Palermo, Italy)

Tagliani, Giacomo (Università di Palermo, Italy)

Antichi, Samuel (Università della Calabria, Italy)

Cavallotti, Diego (Università di Cagliari, Italy)

Polato, Farah (Università di Padova, Italy)

Bellano, Marco (Università di Padova, Italy)

Green Screen. Questioni ambientali ed estetiche sostenibili nelle pratiche audiovisive italiane

This round table aims at creating a transdisciplinary dialogue about the different forms through which the vast

domain of the “green discourse” has been tackled by Italian cinema and media in a critical-aesthetical perspective.

Despite the growing importance of the field of the Environmental Humanities in academic research and discourses

as a peculiar theoretical point of view that intersects more established disciplinary domains, it seems that the

cinema and media studies area has been affected by this turn mainly from a thematic perspective. On the contrary,

reflecting on the potentialities of images to create, broaden, and develop a peculiar aesthetics of sustainability is

a compelling task to understand how the environmental question is transforming present audiovisual language

and, in turn, how this very language could influence the environmental debate. From this point of view, the Italian

case is exemplary. As a matter of fact, the rise within mainstream global debate of questions related to

sustainability and environment has greatly affected recent Italian audiovisual practices. This issue has been

addressed from different points of view, also resorting to an established tradition in the depiction of landscape

developed by Italian visual media throughout the decades: for instance, documentaries dealing with climate

change or sustainable practices; feature films narrating peculiar relationships between subjects and environment;

mixed media formats and amateur videos representing exemplary experiences of resistance and resilience. Despite

being included only recently in Italy’s political and social agenda, the environmental question has quite a long

history in the national audiovisual production that needs to be unfolded in all its implications. To this end, the

roundtable will cover different disciplinary perspectives (such as film and media studies, environmental studies,

critical theory, postcolonial studies, semiotics, aesthetics) and different media formats (cinema, television,

performance, videoart). Participants will discuss about audiovisual objects that attempt to develop a peculiar

aesthetics of sustainability, also reflecting on specific practices that resort to these issues to produce new and

original discourses. Assuming the crucial role of film and media not only in social behaviors, but also in the

academic research, this roundtable is finally conceived as a contribution to a broader reflection assessing the

theoretical implications of the Environmental Humanities and their growing importance within Italian Studies.

Ciofalo, Giovanni (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Infiniti anni Ottanta. Il cinema italiano in un decennio che non ha mai avuto fine

The Eighties were a fundamental decade in recent Italian history. The social, cultural, communicative and

technological transformations that took place in those years have marked the subsequent evolution of the Country.

From this point of view, we must consider that period as a non-linear process of modernization. A process that

was capable of influencing, in both positive and negative terms, habits and traditions, consumption practices and

fruition modes, political ideologies and cultural visions. In this regard, the objective of this contribution is to

reflect on the characteristics of the media landscape that was being composed during the 1980s, with particular

reference to cinema. In that period, Italian cinema seemed to be marked by deep contrasts, such as the one between

foreign and Italian films and the one between commercial and art-house films. On the one hand, the increase in

the number of foreign, and above all American, films in Italian cinemas was giving rise to a new "American

invasion". On the other, the declaredly commercial trend of a "new" Italian comedy was gaining ground. This

new genre seemed to be the only one able to compete with international films and, above all, the only one able to

influence the subsequent evolution of Italian cinema, much more than it appeared to be.

Di Martino, Emilia (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Italy)

Di Nuzzo, Annalisa (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Italy)

Nuove donne italiane da una prospettiva transmediale. Il caso di Karima 2G, un’identità transculturale

che dà voce all’esclusione sociale

Karima 2G è una cantante italiana di origine liberiana il cui linguaggio è “emotivamente messo a frutto” (Wilce

2009: 2) per resistere a una visione esclusivamente bianca dell'italianità. Voce potente contro l’ingiustizia (di

recente è stata citata dal NYT per aver organizzato una manifestazione di solidarietà per il Black Lives Matter in

Piazza del Popolo, a Roma), è anche ballerina, beatmaker e produttrice. Le sue canzoni (in particolare il suo

album di debutto) hanno forti sfumature affettive, che si manifestano attraverso più “canali”: suono, testi, ma

anche gesti, postura, sguardo e mimica facciale si intersecano nei cluster semiotici che emergono dai video della

sua opera artistica. In questa presentazione discuteremo della costruzione discorsiva dell’emozione nelle canzoni

di Karima 2G e del significato pragmatico di tale “discorso emotivo”, ovvero di come Karima 2G trasmette la sua

posizione ideologica in modalità multimodale. Inoltre, mostreremo che anche i dati biografici di Karima 2G, intesi

come la storia della sua vita personale, sono cruciali in questo quadro. La nostra indagine si basa su

un’antropologia della persona (Levy 1994) che si concentra sul soggetto piuttosto che su categorie, classi ed etnie

socio/antropologiche vuote. La nuova cultura italiana e le nuove affiliazioni identitarie, relative in particolare alle

seconde generazioni di migranti, sono rappresentate, attraverso l'esempio di Karima 2G, come un modello

significativo che definisce i nuovi italiani (Appadurai 2005[1997]).

Dupré, Natalie (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Lanslots, Inge (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Giorgio Pressburger come passeur di memorie transnazionali nell’Orologio di Monaco di Mauro Caputo:

Immaginari letterari e audiovisivi a confronto

Il presente contributo si propone di studiare la ricezione e l’eredità letteraria di Giorgio Pressburger nei

documentari di Mauro Caputo. Nei primi anni sessanta, poco dopo la sua fuga dall’Ungheria, Giorgio Pressburger

(1937-2017) si afferma in Italia come scrittore di testi teatrali, radiofonici e televisivi, e a partire dal 1986 di

racconti e romanzi. Fin dai primi suoi scritti quest’autore translingue instaura un dialogo in italiano con la sua

terra d’origine, dando ampio spazio ai ricordi della comunità ebraica di Budapest in cui è cresciuto e vissuto fino

nel 1956. La sua produzione letteraria si iscrive nel filone di scritture genealogiche che ricompongono frammenti

sparsi di biografie familiari al fine di ‘documentare’ le proprie origini. Dopo la scomparsa dell’ultima parente che

ispira la raccolta di racconti L’orologio di Monaco (2003) quel legame intenso con il mondo delle origini si

trasforma in un’autodichiarata “ossessione genealogica” (p. 7).)Attraverso una serie di scelte strutturali e formali

che attingono a vari generi, Pressburger si allontana dal modello del romanzo familiare o genealogico per

interrogarsi sulla possibilità stessa di stabilire una qualche continuità con un passato interrotto e cancellato dalla

violenza. Oltre alla ricostruzione di ricordi personali e di una serie di presunte genealogie biologiche il narratore

de L’orologio di Monaco intesse una fitta rete intertestuale volta a mappare le sue discendenze letterarie e

filosofiche. Il presente contributo analizza la ricezione de L’orologio di Monaco nell’omonimo documentario

(2014) in cui il regista Mauro Caputo segue il suo concittadino mentre quest’ultimo visita i luoghi delle sue origini

in Ungheria cercando di ristabilire delle connessioni con il proprio passato e quello dei suoi antenati. Per il

documentario Caputo si serve di variegati tipi di materiali, tra cui foto, immagini di repertorio e frammenti tratti

dai documentari di Emeric Pressburger, famoso regista e lontano parente di Giorgio Pressburger. Il tutto è

accompagnato da una voce narrante che è quella di Pressburger stesso che legge brani dalla propria raccolta. Nel

documentario di Caputo sono la presenza corporea dell’autore e la ricerca di una dimensione memoriale tangibile

a palesare la fragilità della sua impresa. Più specificamente si analizzeranno la presenza e la rappresentazione di

Giorgio Pressburger in quanto figura autoriale e passeur di memorie transnazionali nell’Orologio di Monaco di

Caputo, confrontando le scelte del documentarista con quelle compiute da Pressburger nella raccolta di racconti.

Durán Manso, Valeriano (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain)

La televisión mira al pasado reciente en España e Italia: Estudio de las series Cuéntame cómo pasó (TVE)

y Raccontami (RAI)

Los lazos culturales entre España e Italia son muy estrechos y se reflejan en el ámbito audiovisual desde el cine

mudo. Las similitudes entre ambos países –incluso políticas, como en la Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939) o la

posguerra-, posibilitaron numerosas colaboraciones y coproducciones que contaron con directores, actores o

guionistas de ambos. Este vínculo se intensificó en el franquismo (1939-1975), especialmente en los años 60. En

la actualidad, se está produciendo en el cine y en la televisión española una revisión de este pasado reciente. En

este contexto, en 2001 se estrenó en TVE Cuéntame cómo pasó –que sigue en emisión en prime time-, serie

centrada en la familia Alcántara, que emigró del pueblo a Madrid. Empieza en 1968 y en sus 21 temporadas

aborda cómo era la familia en el tardofranquismo, el auge turístico y económico, la Universidad, la emancipación

de la mujer, los referentes musicales, el terrorismo, la muerte de Franco o la Transición. Debido a su éxito, RAI

emitió entre 2006 y 2008 la adaptación italiana, Raccontami, centrada en la familia Ferrucci, que vive en un barrio

de Roma en los 60, y que es muy fiel a los personajes, el argumento y el contexto de la original. Desde estas

consideraciones, se evidencia el interés de las cadenas de televisión públicas españolas e italianas por el pasado

reciente mediante la ficción seriada. Este trabajo se enmarca en el proyecto I+d+i ‘Desplazamientos, emergencias

y nuevos sujetos sociales en el cine español (1996-2011)’, financiado por el Gobierno de España.

Errazu, Miguel (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)

Transnational asymmetries: The Italian tale of Óscar Menéndez and Historia de un documento (1971)

In November of 1970, the Mexican filmmaker Óscar Menéndez flew out of Mexico to Europe, carrying with him

Super 8 footage that had been clandestinely shot inside the Prison of Lecumberri in Mexico City. This material

held a precious visual testimony of the political activists that had been illegaly imprisoned by the State in the

aftermath of the 1968 student movement. For the next months, he visited different European cities while trying

to obtain funds to turn the footage into a film. Before convincing the French The Office de Radiodiffusion-

Télévision Française (ORTF) to produce the film (Histoire d’un document, 1971), he travelled to Rome in search

of financial and technical support. In Rome, he was hosted by Renzo Rossellini, who managed to retrieve the

footage that had been seized by the border police at Rome’s airport. For a short period of time, Menéndez was

part of the narrow circle of Latin American political filmmakers working with Rossellini, who helped organize

screenings of the raw footage and invited him to participate in at least one roundtable on counter-informative

cinemas, published in Filmcritica, no. 222 (1972). Histoire d’un document remains one of the most valuable

visual testimonies of the 1968 Mexican student movement and the state repression that followed. The European

journey of Menéndez and the crucial role played by Rossellini are integral parts of the national narrative that have

shaped the political importance of this film, as they help signal the inclusion of Menéndez in the internationalist

currents of the epoch. Nonetheless, the film and this episode of transnational collaboration are almost unknown

outside of Mexico. Based on interviews and archival material, it is my aim to reflect on this case as a priviledged

example of how narratives of transnational mobilities of Latin American political filmmakers may be shaped by

assymetries that serve as national tales for cultural validation.

Fabbri, Lorenzo (University of Minnesota, United States)

Black faces, Italian whiteness: Italian film in the wake of fascism’s racial exceptionalism

At first sight, the Manifesto della Razza from 1938 unequivocally affirmed that Italians are Aryan, i.e. white. Yet,

at closer look, the document that paved the way for Fascism’s racial laws appears fraught with all sort of tensions

in regards to Italy’s relation to whiteness. As Claudio Fogu suggests, at play in the Manifesto is a sort of racial

exceptionalism that simultaneously engrafts Italy onto white Europe and severs the two. The distinction between

“big races and small races” allows in fact the document to posit that although Italians are indeed Aryans

generically speaking, it would be more precise to identify them as Mediterraneans. Through the category of

“Aryanism,” the Manifesto elevated Italians to the rank of white people, drawing Italy closer to Germany and

establishing biological race-lines separating “real” Italians both from Jewish Italians and Black colonial subjects.

But through the reference to the Mediterranean, the document distinguished Italian whiteness from major

whiteness and reconnected Italians with the history of minor races from the global south – a history that was first

one of civilization and culture, and then became a history of subalternity, exploitation, suffering, and subjection.

Superior insofar as biologically white, but historically minoritized as non-white peoples are, on the basis of this

racial exceptionalism Italy could pose as the liberator of all oppressed races and claim a special position in the

Mediterranean region and beyond. Drawing upon the work of Christina Sharpe and Shelleen Greene, in this paper

I pause on how post-war national film staged the relationship between Italianess and Blackness so to highlight

the persisting impact of Fascism’s racial exceptionalism on post-fascist imaginings of national identity and

belonging.

Faccioli, Franca (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

D’Ambrosi, Lucia (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

La comunicazione pubblica e l'emergenza della pandemia in Italia tra criticità e nuove prospettive

The state of emergency imposed by the Covid-19 has highlighted the role of public sector communication in the

distribution of knowledge. This, in turn, has raised awareness of the obligations of state institutions to the citizens.

Regarding Italy, public sector communication performs a challenging role in a context that, alongside the

pandemic, presents several critical issues. First of all, it must be remembered a climate of distrust towards

institutions (Edelman 2018, Biolcati-Rinaldi,, and Segatti 2020), which need to regain credibility in the eyes of

the public and guarantee transparency, correctness and rapidity when information is being provided. A plurality

of voices and different forms of civic participation are emerging that shed light on how is important for the

credibility of the public institutions listening to citizens (Bartoletti and Faccioli 2020). Another crucial aspect is

the difficult coexistence with political communication. The increasing political pressure being placed on the

media intensifies with the constant use of communication by politicians, especially on social media but also with

the “return” of television’s popularity. So political communication overlaps, and often replaces, public sector

communication, promoting the image of the person speaking and the rhetorical narrative of the facts (Sanders

2011, Canel and Sanders 2012). This is often detrimental to communication that is based on a culture of

transparency and public service, which should characterize the purposes and contents of public sector

communication (Faccioli 2015). In this context the process of digitalization and the impact of social media has

crossed and redefined the role of public communication over the last ten years (Luoma-aho, Canel 2020), but this

change appears to have occurred without an adequate strategy. An example of this critical situation is the vibrant

debate surrounding the training system, especially when it comes to recognising professional profiles and the

qualifications of public sector communicators. Given this scenario, what developments must be undertaken to

ensure that public sector communication upgrades its capabilities and plays a significant role in the innovation of

administrations and communication policies? This paper moving from this question and through an analysis of

government’s documents, will define new actors, paths and goals of Italian public communication. A focus will

consider in particular the role of the media in constructing the public discourse.

Falduto, Antonio (UNINT Università di Roma, Italy)

Waldbaum, Roberta (University of Denver, United States)

Writing for cinema: From novel to film -- Translation, transposition and adaptation

In this presentation, we will examine four case studies:

Il giardino dei Finzi Contini written by Giorgio Bassani (1962) and adapted to film by Valerio Zurlini (1970)

Il deserto dei Tartari written by Dino Buzzati (1940) and adapted to film by Valerio Zurlini (1976)

Il conformista written by Alberto Moravia (1951) and adapted to film by Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)

The Third Man film by Carol Reed (1949) and novel by writer and screenwriter Graham Greene (1950)

Adapting a book into film has enjoyed a long tradition, mainly in American cinema and later in Italian cinema.

Best sellers are often optioned by film producers and publishers usually welcome this symbiotic process. A film

based on a best seller is in the limelight from its early stages and a book gets a new exposure if the film itself is

successful. The transposition from the written language to the visual medium involves a combination of various

sciences of communication including linguistics, semiotics, and aesthetics. In this presentation, we will explore

the following: the rules and strategies followed by the screenwriter and the film director in the creative process

of transforming the narrative written language into the written language of a screenplay, and later into the visual

language of a film; the hypothetical boundaries they must not trespass in order not to betray the meaning and

style of the original story and language; and, conversely, the challenges of adaptating a film, or screenplay, into

a narrative book.

Fantoni, Gianluca (Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom)

The PCI, the radical left and militant cinema: Fighting for hegemony (1967-1972)

The paper explores the production of militant cinema (cinema militante) in Italy over the years 1967 – 1974, and

the parallel debate on the artistic and social relevance of this type of productions. Italian militant cinema stands

out from similar experiences happening in the same years in other countries for various reasons: 1) An

exceptionally high number of internationally known artists and intellectuals were involved at some point and in

different capacities in the production of militant films. These include intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, screenwriter

Cesare Zavattini, and acclaimed filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio. 2) Important political

parties were directly involved in the production of militant films, particularly the powerful Italian Communist

Party (PCI). This was consistent with PCI policy, whereby there should be an attempt to engage with, and ideally

dominate, any political or cultural initiative that emerged on the left of the political spectrum. PCI’s involvement

in the production of militant films, however, caused tensions with other groups operating at grassroots levels and

advocating a ‘free from political tutelage’ approach to militant filmmaking. Their inspiration came from the

‘nuova sinistra’ (New Left). This was an expression encompassing a few small but combative fringes of young

intellectuals gathered around journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Quaderni Piacentini, who openly accused the

PCI of being a hindrance rather than a help in advancing the workers’ cause. The debate resulting from these

contrasting tendencies, which unfolded in Ombre Rosse and in other important cinema magazines, reveals the

political tensions running within the Italian Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It also represents one of the

highest points of the reflection on the true nature of cinema in the history of Italian film criticism.

Ferrara, Enrica Maria (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

Posthumanism and the human–animal divide in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema

Placing animal characters in close interaction with humans, Pasolini encouraged viewers to explore and overcome

the human–animal divide. In doing so, he aimed to expose the faulty binary premises of Marxist ideology and

construct a posthumanist identity that recognized the illusory separation between body and mind, and between

the human and its related others. Drawing on concepts such as Marchesini’s ‘mimesis’, Cronin’s ‘tradosphere’,

Nancy’s ‘co-ontology’ and Braidotti’s ‘becoming animal’, and exploring films such as The Hawks and the

Sparrows (1966), Pigsty (1969) and Salò (1975), this paper argues that, in the mid to late 1960s, Pasolini

considered an exit from anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism via trans-species solidarity. The porosity to

the other which posthumanism signifies in the earlier films has a slightly more hopeful connotation compared to

the ‘creatureliness’ of Salò, in which the liminality of humans and animals – grounded in a shared history of

suffering, trauma and violence – generates new posthuman bodies ‘whose lack of corporeal and affective depth

is compensated by a continuing, animal, animated energy’ (Hill 2014). Through analysis of camerawork,

soundscapes and montage in key sequences of these films, this paper illustrates how the intra-action between the

human gaze and technological apparatuses allows Pasolini to renegotiate the boundaries between humans and

animals, and enact a new concept of posthumanist identity.

Figge, Maja (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

Sonali Senroy and India Matri Bhumi

The paper proposes a reconsideration of Roberto Rossellini’s India Matri Bhumi by looking at Sonali Senroy’s

impact and contribution as script writer and consultant for the production. While until now the film has been

conceived as an auteurist work, and every mention of Senroy seems to repeat the anecdotes of her male colleagues’

as well as Rossellini’s, in which she appears mostly as his muse or becomes the great Mother India herself. Both

make it difficult to know anything about the woman, artist and script writer Sonali Senroy, besides their love

affair (and later marriage), which led to public scandal and upended the shoot. I begin the paper by asking how

to develop a perspective on their encounter that does not continue the powerful postcolonial, epistemological and

gendered entanglements that are not only structuring the contemporary statements but also the historical and

theoretical considerations of the film. My aim is to better understand the collaboration between Rossellini and

Senroy as well as her contribution as writer, consultant – or transcultural translator. More importantly, I seek to

propose that traces of their relationship are also inscribed in the film, arguing that India Matri Bhumi should be

considered less as Rossellini’s master piece and more as the result of encounter, collaboration and love for the

world.

Galison, Jacqueline (Wellesley College, United States)

‘Of o toun were they born, that highte Strother’: Dialect and Pasolini in I racconti di Canterbury

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s I Racconti di Canterbury (1972), a reinterpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury

Tales, is undeniably the most controversial – and perplexing – of his “Trilogy of Life.” Marked by a cacophonous

filming process, one in which English and Italian actors attempted to retell a collection of stories written in a form

of English that has been extinct for centuries, the triumphs in the Racconti have seldom been recognized.

Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Chaucerian dialect is especially understudied, despite how Chaucer was the first

English writer to differentiate his characters through written language. My paper focuses on the dialect in

Chaucer’s “General Prologue” and “The Reeve’s Tale” and their reimaginations in Pasolini’s I racconti di

Canterbury. Are Pasolini’s “The Reeve’s Tale” and opening scene (which is meant to substitute for the “General

Prologue”) convincing in their representations of characters with differing accents and origins? How does the

intermixing of the northern Lombard dialect and southern Neapolitan dialect in the Italian dub of this film come

to sonically represent class difference, a predominant theme in the original Canterbury Tales? My research

attempts to address these questions and highlight Pasolini’s commendable fidelity to the source material.

Gaudenzi, Cosetta (University of Memphis, United States)

Producing and consuming Italian cinema in a changing national and global culture: Stephen Amidon’s

Human Capital according to Paolo Virzì and Marc Meyers

My paper offers the case-study of an American novel, Human Capital (Stephen Amidon, 2004), adapted for the

big screen by Paolo Virzì with Il capitale umano in 2013, and later remade by Marc Meyers in 2019 under the

original English title. I suggest that these adaptations testify to the presence of innovative cross-fertilizations

between American and Italian cultures which are reframing Italian cinema and italianità, contributing to a

redrawing of the cultural concept of Italian national borders.

Gaudiosi, Massimiliano (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Italy)

Il cinema italiano di nonfiction e l’emigrazione verso il Sudamerica

Il tema dell’emigrazione, che nel corso del novecento ha interessato a più riprese il nostro paese, ha ottenuto una

particolare copertura in ambito audiovisivo tra il secondo dopoguerra e il boom economico. Non sorprende che

la produzione di nonfiction abbia rivolto una certa attenzione ad un argomento così strategico per l’Italia, nazione

che ha assistito all’esodo di migliaia di persone dirette verso le principali destinazioni in grado di assorbire

manodopera, come il Nord Europa e, soprattutto, l’America Latina. Nel mio intervento proverò a esaminare le

modalità con le quali il cinema documentario e i cinegiornali si siano confrontati con una questione così

dirompente. Da una parte mi riferirò a quei lavori che hanno tentato di mitigare tutte le incertezze derivanti da

un’esperienza drammatica come l’emigrazione; dall’altra prenderò in considerazione quei prodotti che, al

contrario, ne hanno portato allo scoperto gli effetti destabilizzanti.

Gavrila, Mihaela (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Rumi, Camilla (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Il Soft Power è donna. Il ruolo della leadership femminile nelle aziende televisive italiane

L’ultima edizione del Global Soft Power Index (Brand Finance 2021) evidenzia come i governi realmente

intenzionati a gestire al meglio i propri marchi internazionali e a migliorare la propria influenza in termini di Soft

Power debbano puntare in maniera strategica sui giovani (in particolar modo sui millennials), considerati il target

maggiormente recettivo al nation brand, e sulla leadership al femminile, capace di generare pratiche di

governance sul piano politico e mediale, orientate da una agenda pubblica condivisa, che possano garantire una

trasformazione resiliente. Entro questa considerazione si posiziona anche la riflessione proposta attraverso questo

contributo, che intende soffermarsi soprattutto sul secondo aspetto, dimostrando l’incidenza di una leadership

femminile nelle aziende mediali e, in particolare, nel garantire l’innovazione di prodotto in alcuni settori strategici

della televisione italiana, come la serialità/fiction, l’intrattenimento e l’informazione. Con poche eccezioni

(Buonanno 2020), quella delle professionalità “behind the line” è una tematica affrontata ancora con scarsa

costanza dagli studi sulla televisione e le sue professionalità, concentrati soprattutto sugli aspetti relativi ai

contenuti e sui ruoli più visibili all’interno del “centro mediato della società” (Couldry 2003), come le giornaliste

e le conduttrici (Buonanno 2008; Gavrila 2014). In effetti, la ricerca qui proposta, partendo da quanto emerso

attraverso 20 interviste in profondità a produttrici tv, responsabili di produzione, direttrici di alcuni network

televisivi pubblici e privati, responsabili di archivi audiovisivi, mira a restituire un identikit al femminile della

televisione italiana degli ultimi due decenni, provando a delineare il contributo delle donne manager al

miglioramento del prodotto e al posizionamento del contenuto audiovisivo italiano nei mercati nazionali e

internazionali.

Giménez Cavallo, Maria (Columbia University, United States)

Filming the soul: The cinema dell’anima movement in contemporary Italian cinema

In recent years, there has arisen a new wave of Italian filmmakers who independently but consistently develop a

humanist, posthumanist, poetic realist, and magical neorealist, form of cinema, in which they often shoot on

16mm, use a docu-fiction method, explore rural traditions, include non-human (animal) characters, and, above

all, illustrate the invisible nature of the soul. In a previous article, I proposed to name this movement cinema

dell’anima, identifying Michelangelo Frammartino, Pietro Marcello, and Alice Rohrwacher as the forerunner

auteurs who, each in their own individual way, seek to portray the soul onscreen. This talk will analyze how a

posthumanist poetic and anthropological subjectivity can affect the viewer and change perceptions of the outside

world through the cinematic medium. Delving more specifically into the theoretical groundings of this movement,

I will explore its transcendental aspects via the film theories of Cesare Zavattini, Paul Schrader, and André Bazin,

as well as its socio-political underpinnings through the posthumanist biopolitics of Roberto Marchesini and Elena

Past. As Gilles Deleuze stated: “The question is no longer: does cinema give us the illusion of the world? But:

how does cinema restore our belief in the world?” (187). By making the invisible visible, and, more specifically,

by making palpable the intangible soul, cinema dell’anima can thus be considered an expression of faith and an

effort to raise awareness around us in the hopes of making the world a better place.

Gipponi, Elena (Università IULM, Italy)

Il produttore cinematografico nei notiziari RAI (1954-1976)

In questa relazione mi focalizzerò sull’immagine dell’industria cinematografica, e in particolare sulla figura del

produttore, all’interno dei programmi di informazione RAI, segnatamente i notiziari. L’ipotesi alla base della

ricerca è che, mentre i programmi di intrattenimento hanno plasmato un’immagine caricaturale e sempre deforme

del produttore cinematografico (cialtrone, ignorante, disonesto…), i telegiornali garantiscano invece una

maggiore complessità e poliedricità nel racconto di questa figura: in quali occasioni dedicano servizi a produttori

cinematografici? Con che termini li qualificano? Che relazione articolano tra cinema e televisione? Più in

generale, quale immagine dell’industria cinematografica nazionale fanno emergere? Quali i suoi tratti salienti?

González, Jesús Ángel (Universidad de Cantabria, Spain)

National identity in Italian westerns and post-westerns

Since Thomas Schatz defined the Western genre as ‘America’s foundation ritual’, several film critics have

emphasized the role of the Western as a ‘foundational fiction’ similar to European national epics. Interestingly,

just like US Westerns deal with American identity and its foundational myth, we can find Westerns and post-

Westerns made in other countries that also deal with these countries’ identities and foundational myths. Previous

studies have shown the existence of ‘transnational post-Westerns’, that’s to say, films set and made in countries

away from the United States that also deal with issues of national identity, foundational myths and the status of

minorities, such as Into the West (Newell, 1992) in Ireland, 800 balas (De la Iglesia, 2002) in Spain or Adieu

Gary (Amaouche, 2009) in France. Following these examples, this paper will discuss Western and post-Western

films made in Italy that deal with Italian identity and foundational myths, like Pietro Germi’s In nome della

legge (1949) and Il brigante di Tacca di Luppo (1952), and also later films like Bronte, (Vancini, 1971), and

bandit films like Li Chiamarono Briganti! (Squitieri, 1999). These films will be considered from the perspective

of transnational post-Westerns in order to analyze the way they deal with the difficulties of integration of the

North and the South of Italy, and present different perspectives on the Italian foundational myth of Risorgimento.

Grisolia, Raul (Independent Scholar, Italy)

Visioni periferiche fra Pasolini, Caligari e Zerocalcare

Roma, nel suo insieme, si presenta come una stratificazione di spazi temporali e sociali che si sovrappongono in

modo caotico e conflittuale, narrata dal cinema italiano dai più svariati punti di vista: come spazio onirico,

trasfigurato e proiettivo, come spazio storico, come spazio sociale, come spazio esistenziale. Se il caos e il

conflitto caratterizzano, in diversa misura, tutti i grandi agglomerati urbani, le grandi periferie romane si

distinguono per la ridotta compartimentazione sociale, economica ed etnica che è invece ben definita in altre

grandi città europee. Le periferie, in continuo e incessante movimento, luoghi complessi, brutali, ma anche allegri

e malinconici, diventano sempre più frequentemente gli scenari di film, di video, di serie. Non sono molti tuttavia

gli autori che sono riusciti a percorrere questi spazi con uno sguardo puro, tenero, e allo stesso tempo crudele.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (soprattutto con la Trilogia su Roma, 1961-1963) e più di recente Claudio Caligari Non essere

cattivo (2015) e adesso Zerocalcare con il cartoon Strappare lungo i bordi (2021), di generazioni diversissime,

diversi per sensibilità e cultura, sono accomunati dalla stessa empatica passione per la marginalità urbana che

raccontano senza giudicare. Lo scopo di questa riflessione è analizzare le forme e i temi delle opere di questi

autori, individuando gli elementi che, attraverso le immagini audiovisive, restituiscono punti diversi di vista

sullʼevoluzione di uno spazio urbano cosi importante e decisivo per la vita delle città.

Grizzaffi, Chiara (Università IULM, Italy)

L’ ‘officina delle favole’? Discorsi, retoriche e (auto)rappresentazioni dell’industria cinematografica tra il

1949 e il 1976

La relazione si focalizzerà sulla rete di discorsi, di narrazioni e di (auto)rappresentazioni prodotte intorno

all’industria cinematografica fra il 1949 e il 1976 a partire da un regesto dei principali cinegiornali conservati

nell’Archivio Luce. Si analizzerà il modo in cui questa produzione discorsiva concettualizza prassi e politiche

produttive e contribuisce a costruire e a promuovere un sistema di valori condiviso. In primis, verrà presa in esame

l’evoluzione dei modi della rappresentazione del sistema cinema e dei suoi protagonisti all’interno delle principali

testate di cinegiornali del periodo considerato. Successivamente, a partire da alcuni affondi su casi specifici, la

scena costituita da queste testate verrà messa a confronto con il retroscena rappresentato da altre fonti come le

riviste trade press.

Gundle, Stephen (University of Warwick, United Kingdom)

KEYNOTE: Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Changing Shape of Italian Cinema and Media

Studies

This address will explore the way the landscape of Italian film studies has changed in recent decades both in Italy

and abroad. It will consider, among other things, the way in which ideas of a canon have been challenged and

reinterpreted, evolutions in (and displacements of) efforts to interpret Italian film production as a whole, the

impact of the decline of Italian cinema as a commercial and artistic powerhouse on the study of film, and the

growing attention to television and new media. The address will re-visit and assess recent and not-so-recent

attempts to judge the study of Italian cinema as a field or to shift the agenda in some way. It will conclude by

seeking (modestly) to indicate some possible fruitful avenues of future research.

Hanich, Julian (University of Groningen, Netherlands)

Integral beauty. Paolo Sorrentino versus Terrence Malick

In this paper, I will compare two recent films that are strikingly different, and yet so similar: Paolo Sorrentino’s La

grande bellezza (2013) and Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Both films focus on a male urban flaneur;

both concentrate on their blasé protagonists’ soul-searching quest for meaning; both revolve around upper-class

emptiness against the backdrop of breathtaking, sun-flooded splendor, and both employ an episodic narrative

structure and a spellbinding audiovisual style. However, and most importantly for my argument,

both present and negotiate visual and acoustic beauty as an aesthetic category. To be more concrete, beauty is

essential for what these films ultimately try to convey—the beautiful is “integral” to their meaning, to use Arthur

C. Danto’s felicitous term. My paper aims to demonstrate that in Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza beauty serves

an abundant and hedonistic (if you want: ‘Catholic’) end, while Malick’s Knight of Cups strives for an ascetic

and purified (call it: ‘Protestant’) understanding of beauty. This will eventually lead me to a more far-ranging

plea: the field of film studies needs to reckon with and take more seriously the long-neglected, even shunned

aesthetic category of the beautiful. While in recent years various aesthetic categories either received critical

attention in film studies for the first time (the cute, the pretty, the eerie, etc.) or were rediscovered (the sublime,

kitsch), the beautiful still needs more serious attention.

Haworth, Rachel (Independent Scholar, United Kingdom)

An icon of Italy in the making: Raffaella Carrà and Canzonissima (1970-1971)

‘The Queen of Italian television’. ‘A pop icon who made Italy a less narrow-minded place’. ‘An icon of Italy’.

The star status of Raffaella Carrà is clear: as ‘showgirl, cantante, ballerina, attrice, conduttrice televisiva e

radiofonica, autrice televisiva in Italia e in Spagna’ (Intravaia 2021), her activities during her career made her

extremely popular and successful with fans across Europe and Latin America in particular. Yet Carrà’s star

persona is also seen to embody certain significances, shedding light on what type of Italian icon she is, and which

Italy she represents. Indeed, upon her death in July 2021, the Italian press chose to underline her contributions to

Italian television history in particular, in order to explain her significance as a star. In this paper, I will explore

the ways in which Carrà’s early television work shaped her star persona and significance, concentrating

specifically on her appearances on Canzonissima in 1970 and 1971. I will examine how the intermedial and

transmedial nature of the varietà programme informed Carrà’s own transmedial and intermedial stardom, and

created a space within which developed her lasting significance as an open-minded, modern, liberated star.

Heim, Julia (University of Pennsylvania, United States)

‘Da vicino nessuno è normale’: Queer resistance in Italian youth TV

The queerness of the characters in Italian youth television serve to spotlight the limitations and injustices that

exist because of normative social expectation. Performing in-depth case studies of television shows Mental

(Raiplay, 2021) and La compagnia del cigno (Rai1, 2019), this paper will investigate the ways that representations

youth embody a queer resistance to hegemonic heterocentric and neurotypical norms. Their depictions allow for

a challenging of the primacy of tradition and normativity within these programs, and thus call out common social

norms and standards as harmful to the constituency they purport to serve. Highlighting the queer radicality of

these kids points a possible future that allows for a more inclusive “normal,” but, by dissociating this queerness

from members of the queer and LGBT community and non-heterosexual desire more broadly, there are perhaps

unintended consequences for minority viewers seeking to see themselves represented both in these shows and in

larger society.

Hunter, Leonie (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany)

The regressive trajectory of political comedy: How Nanni Moretti's cinema reflects on the neoconservative

appropriation of the comical

From a philosophical perspective, comedy has long been considered a subversive political force, standing not for

order, but for a productive disorder that puts given structures and dynamics of power into question. However,

against the backdrop of major shifts in the global political landscape over the past few years, this has changed

fundamentally; procedures of comical distancing and ridicule no longer seem to automatically serve a progressive

agenda. If nothing else, Trump's rise to power has shown the conservative effects of structurally comical

approaches that ridicule all kind of standpoints and thereby undermine political commitment and responsibility.

Italy has been an infamous vanguard of this political trajectory; here the fragmentation of the left and the rise of

a new right by means of a private appropriation and division of the media landscape had already begun in the late

1980s. Nanni Moretti's so-called "Cinema of Resistance" has been a seismographic reflection of this development.

Consequently, Moretti's approach to political comedy has changed: in Palombella Rossa (1989) he deals with the

collapse of the Italian communist party by using classic comical motifs and strategies that line up with the

progressive tradition of political self-criticism. In his 2006 film Il Caimano, however, which takes Berlusconi's

second term in office to task, he departs from this earlier method. Instead of mocking Berlusconi, the film realizes

a second-order self-criticism of comic reversals as a cinematic method by problematizing their stabilizing effects.

Iozzia, Alberto (University of Pittsburgh, United States)

Fast zombies and social rights: The case of Umberto Lenzi’s Nigthmare City (1980)

In 1981, Italians were called to vote in a referendum regarding a law that had been encated in 1978. Law n. 194,

which legalized abortion, is first and foremost a statement of the emancipation of Italian women and of their right

to self-determination, which Italian citizens are to decide whether to keep or not. The resulting harsh debate

between the radicals and the conservatives takes the shape of a quasi-eschatological clash between two ideological

systems: two worldviews against one another. It is in this atmosphere of social tension and change – roughly one

year before the May 1981 referendum – that Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City is released. This film, originally

titled Incubo sulla città contaminata, is included in several ‘Best Zombie Movies’ lists and tells the story of a

news reporter who tries to survive while his city is attacked by a growing horde of people turned into ravenous

blood-drinking creatures by radiations. Violent and gory, Nightmare City is relevant for at least two reasons: first,

because it inaugurates an important and eventually rather successful variation of the zombie image: the fast

zombie; second, as a reactionary commentary on the most salient social debate of those days. In my paper, I argue

that Lenzi’s film joined the Italian political dispute by openly opposing the emancipation of women and that

despite this – or perhaps because of it – its aesthetic contributions to the genre participated in shaping the zombie

iconography of the following years.

Jansen, Monica (Utrecht University, Netherlands)

Urban, Maria Bonaria (Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, Italy)

The double trauma of Shoah and Desaparecidos: Vera Jarach’s Memory Activism

“My name is Vera Vigevani Jarach and I have two histories: I am an Italian Jew and I arrived in Argentina in

1939 because of the Racial Laws; my grandfather was deported to Auschwitz where he died. There is no

tomb. After many years, another place, in Argentina, and another history: my 18 years old daughter was deported

to a concentration camp and was murdered on the death flights. There is no tomb. These two histories share the

same destiny and make of me a witness and a militant of memory”. With these words, Vera Vigevani Jarach

synthetizes, in a webseries produced by newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, her double trauma as a second-

generation Holocaust survivor and as a mother of a desaparecida. Both left indelible traces in her personal life

and in that of a transnational community, of Italian Jews and of migrants in Argentina. Starting from the concept

of ‘plurimedial constellations of memory’ (Erll 2014), this contribution aims to explore the transmedial narrations

of Jarach’s family memories, which make her in the first place a victim of fascism and antisemitism and, secondly,

of the dictatorial regimes she experienced as an Italian ‘transmigrant’ in Argentina who stayed connected with

her homeland and hometown (she received decorations from the President of the Italian Republic and from the

city of Milan). Jarach’s ongoing plurimedial engagement, as a Madre de Plaza de Mayo, aims to bring the memory

of her daughter to schools, to mainstream media such as television and the Internet, but also to co-edited and co-

written volumes on the history of the desaparecidos. With its focus on Jarach’s double trauma, this contribution

aims to study in particular how her audiovisual and performative engagement in “transnational memory” (De

Cesari & Rigney 2014) intersects with those spaces of traumatic and “divided memory” (Foot 2009) which

connotate contemporary Italy as a “Republic of victimhood” (De Luna 2011), and with the particular forms of

“memory activism” which have shaped Argentina’s cultural memory of violence and genocide since the 1976-

1983 dictatorship (Zaretsky 2020).

Jóźwiak, Karol (University of Lodz, Poland)

The Polish case in post-Second World War Italian cinema

In my paper, I will analyze the figure of Poland and Poles in Italian Post Second World War cinema. Despite a

prominent presence of Polish immigration in Italy after WWII for geopolitical reasons, as well as the Polish

contribution to the liberation of Italy, the Polish case is rarely present in cinematic WWII narratives. The few

examples of such representation that I have identified point to a more general problem. From Michał Waszynski’s

Italian films of the late 1940s, through the cold war remake of fascist film Prigionieri del male (Mario Costa

1955), to Giovanino Guareschi’s part of La Rabbia (1963), all films were confronted in one way or another with

institutional obstacles during their distribution. I suspect this approach, as well as the general omission of the

Polish case in the WWII cinematic narratives, were triggered politically – Poles, generally perceived as anti-

communists, were an inconvenient subject for a left-wing dominated Italian film industry. As a victim of both

Nazi and Soviet ruthless aggression during WWII and as an uncompromised adversary to them throughout the

war, Poland was a challenging case to the dominant simplistic view on the division between good and evil forces

during WWII. It seems Italian cinema is particular in this regard, since the figure of communist partisan fighting

the Nazi oppressor was an indispensable element of its WWII mythology. Thus, references to Poland seem to

bear a political significance relevant to the cold war tensions. On a more general level, the Polish case in Italian

cinema would be a good starting point to revisit the general Italian film studies cliché about the alleged communist

containment in Italian cinema, and to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the relation between ideology,

politics, and the film industry in cold war Italy.

Kilbourn, Russell J. A. (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)

Once upon a time in Naples: Intermediality and Bildung in Sorrentino’s È stata la mano di Dio

This paper considers Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, The Hand of God (È stata la mano di Dio) (2021), as self-

reflexive cinematic Künstlerroman, Sorrentino’s Bildung as filmmaker mediated through that of his avatar,

teenaged Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), conceiving of a film career as he comes of age in 1980s Naples.

Premiering almost simultaneously in cinemas and on streaming platforms, this Netflix-funded feature,

Sorrentino’s “most personal film yet,” while it is a memory-work, is his least Fellinian, lacking Sorrentino’s usual

cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, in a bid to let those “years speak,” as he says, “in the way I remember them—in

the way I experienced them, felt them.” The Hand of God is anticipated in Sorrentino’s contribution to Homemade,

a 2020 Netflix short film series, in which action-figurines of Pope Francesco and Queen Elizabeth engage in a

flirtatious pas de deux. “Voyage Au Bout de la Nuit” begins with a brief shot of Francesco bidding farewell to

the retreating back of a Maradona figurine—“Adios muchachos!”—referencing the real-life meeting between the

Argentine soccer star and Pope Francis during a 2014 Vatican visit. Along with more than one episode in

Sorrentino’s debut novel, Hanno tutti ragione (2011), The Hand of God transmediates several other important

cinematic texts, beginning with its complex thematic intertextualization of Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) and I

Vitelloni (1953). This contrasts with the film’s fictionalization of real-life influence, Neapolitan filmmaker

Antonio Capuano (Polvere di Napoli (1998), co-written by Sorrentino), as well as Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden

(2019)—a transposition of the London novel to postwar Naples—by circuitous way of Sergio Leone’s final film,

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)—the film Fabietto never gets to watch with his parents. Each, in its own

way, a coming of age tale, these stories chart the Bildung of a youthful masculine protagonist, whose artistic

inclinations are tempered by sexual (and sometimes criminal) impulses. Subtly self-reflexive, The Hand of God

transfigures as it transmediates these other heroes and their filmic narratives, refracting Sorrentino’s own

formation in the city that he revisits even as his cinematic avatar overcomes his grief to find the strength to leave.

Labbate, Ilaria (University of Malta)

‘Occultura’ e ‘re-incanto’ nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini

L’attrazione che la magia e l’occulto hanno continuato a suscitare in scienziati, filosofi, artisti e intellettuali in

generale in seguito alla rivoluzione scientifica ha condotto diversi studiosi, quali – più recentemente – Jason Ā.

Josephson-Storm, a riconsiderare l’entità del concetto weberiano di ‘disincantamento’ (Entzauberung) del mondo

occidentale. L’alienazione dell’essere umano, principalmente riconducibile allo sviluppo pervasivo del

capitalismo, non ha decretato la scomparsa di quella che Christopher Partridge ha definito ‘occultura’ (Occulture),

ossia la forte diffusione di uno spiritualismo di natura eclettica e anti-ecclesiastica. Come dimostrano vari studi,

tra cui quelli condotti da Fabio Camilletti e Fabrizio Foni, anche in Italia l’interesse per il fantastico e l’occultismo,

riscontrabile nel panorama editoriale e cinematografico (ma non solo), conferma l’influenza che questa

sottocultura ha esercitato in pieno ventesimo secolo, con un vero e proprio revival tra gli anni del boom economico

e i Settanta. In tale contesto è possibile collocare anche l’attività poetica e registica di Pier Paolo Pasolini,

imperniata sulla reintegrazione del sacro nella società contemporanea. Nel caso di Pasolini, la valorizzazione delle

classi emarginate e la propensione a rivolgere il proprio sguardo al passato (con grande attenzione al mito) sono

state perlopiù concepite da molti studiosi, per dirla con Massimo Fusillo, come una “involuzione estetizzante, di

gusto arcaicistico”. Lo scopo di questo intervento è di offrire un invito a rileggere invece l’opera cinematografica

pasoliniana alla luce della dicotomia disincanto/re-incanto e della coeva, rinnovata attrazione per il mistero e

l’irrazionale, anche in seno a quella borghesia che lo stesso Pasolini identifica come ‘male’ primario della società.

Lamarre, Thomas (University of Chicago, United States)

Travels in the infranational dimension: How Kawaii warps space-time

Accounts of cute often delineate its formal features quite precisely, as if such features were isolable cognitive

universals, evoking the same kind of response in audiences everywhere. Cute implies a singularity, something

about that is not entirely localizable or identifiable in positivistic terms. I propose first to explore this singularity

or dark precursor through examples of kawaii drawn from the realm of Japanese character franchises. At the

same time, Hansen’s articulation of vernacular modernism informs a tentative hypothesis about the global uptake

of kawaii: it is the singularity of kawaii, its warping of space-time, which allows it to travel, instead of positively

identifiable formal features. I propose also to consider then how this warping that provides a kind of supernational

propulsion system for traveling in the infranational dimension, with reference to the role played by anime in

deregulation of Italian television in the 1980s and rise of Italian multimedia corporations in the 1990s and 2000s.

Lauri-Lucente, Gloria (University of Malta)

Hauntologies in cinematic works of mourning: Francesco Munzi’s Anime nere and Abel Ferrara’s The

Funeral

Francesco Munzi’s Anime nere (2014) and its forebear The Funeral (1996) by Abel Ferrara will be read as “works

of mourning” through the lens of the trope of “hauntology”, or “hauntologie”, the word in its French form coined

by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 Spectres of Marx. The Tempio brothers in The Funeral and the Carbone brothers

in Anime nere are afflicted by the traumatic effects of memory, both individual and collective, conscious and

unconscious which, in Derridean terms, “signals the unbidden imposition of parts of the past on the present,” to

the extent that “the future is always already populated with certain possibilities derived from the past” in a sort of

“futur antérieur”, or “future anterior” (Wendy Brown, p. 36). These inheritors of the ghosts of the past, or of the

others who came before them, and to whom they are shackled, are thus relentlessly assailed by what has already

taken place. After having analysed the stylistic echoes and intertextual reminiscences which link Munzi’s film to

Ferrara’s, the paper will focus more specifically on the grim and forsaken Africo, a remote village in the

mountains of the Aspromonte in Southern Italy where most of the narrative of Anime nere unfolds. Within this

phantom-laden landscape inhabited by phantom-laden figures, the Carbone brothers are confronted by an

intergenerational trauma that takes on the cast of a haunting force that can be exorcised – if, indeed it can be

exorcised -- only through the dissolution of the family.

Leotta, Alfio (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

Italian fantasy cinema: Mapping the history of an unpopular genre

Italian genre cinema has had a very rich and successful history as documented by a plethora of recent critical

studies on this subject (Günsberg 2005; Koven 2006; Renga 2011; Bondanella and Pacchioni 2017). However,

while Italian film-makers have embraced and made original contributions to genres such as horror, the western,

and the historical epic, they have often shied away from fantasy. Despite the profusion of fantastical elements in

Italian literature, fantasy has never flourished in Italian cinema (Lavarone, 2021). In the first half of the twentieth

century notable exceptions included the adaptations of The Divine Comedy produced during the silent era, and

The Iron Crown (Blasetti, 1941). In the postwar period fantasy was, again, confined to very few instances of

Italian film history. More specifically, fantasy elements are found in both some of the pepla of the 1960s and in

the brief burst of Italian Conan-clones produced in the early 1980s. Since the 2010s, however, some prominent

Italian auteurs have started engaging more consistently with the fantasy genre. Gabriele Salvatores, for example,

attempted to kickstart the first Italian superhero franchise with The Invisible Boy (2014) and its sequel The

Invisible Boy: Second Generation (2018). Similarly, Matteo Garrone experimented with the stylistic elements of

the fairy tale movie in both Tale of Tales (2015) and Pinocchio (2020). During the same period, emerging

filmmakers such as Grassadonia and Piazza also explored fantasy generic conventions in Sicilian Ghost Story

(2018). After mapping the history of fantasy in Italian cinema, this paper aims to answer the following questions:

why has fantasy been such a neglected and underrepresented genre in the Italian cinema of the twentieth century?

What explains the new popularity of Italian fantasy cinema in the contemporary period?

Lepratto, Livio (Università di Parma, Italy)

‘Dagli Appennini alle Ande’. Il ‘Neorealismo globale’ nel dialogo internazionale tra Zavattini e Márquez

Con l’avvento del terzo millennio, taluni illuminanti studi latinoamericani (Paranaguá 2003) e italiani – tra i quali

il recentissimo lavoro di David Brancaleone (2019), nonché l’altrettanto recentissima mostra curata da Alberto

Ferraboschi (Zavattini oltre i confini, Reggio Emilia, 2019) – hanno avuto il lodevole merito di colmare

finalmente l’ingiustificato “vuoto” di studi sul fondamentale ruolo di Cesare Zavattini nella trasmissione del

Neorealismo in America Latina, indicando inoltre un ulteriore e promettente filone d’indagine ancora da

percorrere: ovvero il fecondo sodalizio culturale e artistico tra Zavattini e Gabriel García Márquez. Filone che il

mio presente intervento intende appunto percorrere e indagare, a partire dal corso di regia tenuto negli anni

Cinquanta al Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma dal maestro italiano, e frequentato dallo scrittore

colombiano. In questo mio intervento analizzerò in particolare le opere letterario-cinematografiche di García

Márquez che meglio testimoniano l’influenza zavattiniana: dal capolavoro márqueziano Cent’anni di solitudine

(1967) alla sceneggiatura di Milagro en Roma (Duque Naranjo 1988), fino al racconto La santa (1992). Opere

márqueziane – queste – tutte e tre particolarmente debitrici del neorealismo zavattiniano di Miracolo a Milano

(De Sica 1951). Il mio intervento si concentra inoltre sull’analisi di numerosi materiali inediti, quali le lettere

private tra i due autori (da me in parte reperite all’Archivio Cesare Zavattini di Reggio Emilia), che ricostruiscono

il ruolo cruciale di Zavattini nella promozione del Neorealismo italiano in America Latina, nonché la paternità

zavattiniana nella nascita e nello sviluppo del realismo magico. Il risultato dello sforzo e della collaborazione di

Zavattini e García Márquez è rappresentato dalla fondazione nel 1986 a Cuba della Escuela Internacional de Cine

y Televisión, istituzione che meglio rappresenta il cosiddetto “neorealismo globale”.

Lombardi, Giancarlo (College of Staten Island/CUNY and The Graduate Center/CUNY, United States)

(Not so) New (and not so) Italian epic? On Romulus and its international forefathers

My discussion of a recent Sky Italia production, Romulus (2020-) traces its genealogical legacy to the so-called

“origin series” that have drawn the attention of countless viewers all over the world: Game of Thrones (2011-

2019), Vikings (2013-2020), Britannia (2018-) and Barbarians (2020-). All the while, however, I maintain that

in formulating its original retelling of the ultimate origin story -- the foundation of Rome -- Romulus tempers its

transnational storytelling with an innovative take on Wu Ming’s New Italian Epic.

Lottini, Irene (The University of Iowa, United States)

L’originale e la copia. Il doppio in Una storia senza nome di Roberto Andò (2018)

Una storia senza nome di Roberto Andò (2018) narra, in un film nel film, la vicenda di un delitto irrisolto ben

noto: il furto della Natività con i santi Lorenzo e Francesco d’Assisi di Caravaggio, sottratta dall’Oratorio di San

Lorenzo di Palermo nel 1969. Il fatto di cronaca, lo stesso che ha ispirato il romanzo breve Una storia semplice

di Leonardo Sciascia (1989), serve da pretesto per una riflessione sul potere investigativo del racconto; un

discorso sull’arte che si sviluppa in una serie di variazioni sul tema del doppio. Motivo caro ad Andò, che in Viva

la libertà (2013) ha narrato la storia di uno scambio di identità tra due gemelli, il topos classico del doppio viene

rielaborato, in Una storia senza nome, attraverso molteplici figure e livelli di lettura: dalla carrellata sulle gemelle

che richiama esplicitamente il tema, alle maschere e ai travestimenti dei personaggi, dai continui giochi di scambio

tra verità e finzione che investono la trama del film alle numerose citazioni e al procedimento di mise en abîme

che trasferiscono il motivo del doppio dall’enunciato all’enunciazione. In un racconto dinamico e complesso, tra

cenni storici e riferimenti alle istituzioni contemporanee, Una storia senza nome si presenta come un film sul

cinema che si interroga sulla duplicità del reale e dell’opera d’arte.

Lowe, Victoria (University of Manchester, United Kingdom)

Participating in the Umbria Film Festival: The piazza, the film festival and civic identity

As Quinn has argued arts festivals provide ‘occasions for expressing collective belonging to a group or place’

(2005:927). This paper will use the example of the Umbria Film Festival to explore how it (re)asserts the

importance of the collective spectator experience through the specific cultural and historical meanings associated

with the town square (piazza), in the period pre and post COVID 19. The festival, which takes place in the

Umbrian hill town of Montone, was set up by director Terry Gilliam and has been held annually in July since

1995. Movies are shown every evening in the main Piazza Fortebraccio and are accompanied by roundtable

discussions and workshops during the day. One of its main strands is the innovative children’s short film

competition where the winner is voted for by the junior audience. Local children as a marginalised audience are

key to the ideology of the festival as they are given agency through their participation in the selection and

evaluation of the films. The central piazza in Montone thus effectively materialises the identity of the festival.

Whilst the screening of films in the square draws from the tradition of open air cinema in Italy during the summer

months, the occupation of civic space is notable because, in Italian social and political history, the ‘piazza’

functions as a site where the civic contestation of state authority can be understood spatially. This paper will

explore how the film festival’s occupation of the public space of the piazza draws upon the ideological

significance of this location and the different meanings generated in both pre COVID and COVID times.

Luciano, Bernadette (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Shaking up the spectator: Archival images and temporal disparity in Pietro Marcello’s adaptation of Jack

London’s Martin Eden and Christian Petzold’s film adaptation of Anna Segher’s Transit

Archival footage was a term once mainly used with documentary film while “found footage” was more closely

associated with experimental film and horror films. These distinctions however have become blurred and the

archival “document” as Jaimie Baron suggests, might better be understood not as an object but as a reflection of

the experience of the viewer. Sounds and images from another time period can be used to achieve a range of

“effects” on the viewer, typically a feeling of loss brought about by the temporal disparity in which an emotional

effect is produced. Petzold and Marcello in contrast, use the archival “document” – much as Brecht used the

gestus – not to appeal to what Benjamin termed the spectator’s capacity for emotional empathy but rather to purge

the emotional attachment of the spectator through the use of interruption and thereby allow the spectator to “learn”

to be astonished by certain real conditions. The shock (Staunen) effect achieved in these two films through the

use of an elastic twentieth century time line, fluid geographic boundaries, and various anachronistic devices

reflects this same didactic aim to present certain historical situations or conditions and prompt the thinking viewer

to reflect on them. Referencing Benjamin’s discussion of Brecht Epic Theater and the role of interruption, this

paper will examine instances of interrupted action in these films, in which certain socio-political realities, rather

than being reproduced, are made “discoverable” to the viewer.

Magistrali, Silvia (Independent Scholar, Italy)

‘Cordiale umanità’ e ‘moderna nevrosi’: percorsi dell’immaginario cinematografico nella stampa

d’informazione Rizzoli (1950-1965)

Nell’ambito della stampa periodica del secondo dopoguerra il cinema riveste una funzione privilegiata, nel

susseguirsi di immagini che attraversano il territorio ibrido dell’attualità settimanale. Oggi e L’Europeo,

settimanali dell’editore e produttore Angelo Rizzoli, si configurano come poli di un sistema d’informazione volto

a soddisfare le esigenze di quella che viene vista come classe media in espansione, destinatario privilegiato in

termini di nuovi consumi. A questo destinatario si rivolge l’antologia editoriale del cinema ‘d’autore’, scaturita

da un complesso sistema di rapporti aziendali che da Federico Fellini si estende fino ai correttori di bozze e alla

tipografia. Le modalità con cui i contenuti cinematografici circolano in ambito editoriale lascia presupporre

l’instaurarsi di occorrenze normative e di nuove strategie di marketing. Nella tensione tra esigenze commerciali

e prestigio culturale, standardizzazione e dinamicità dei processi editoriali, i periodici Rizzoli rivelano un sistema

funzionale alle esigenze promozionali di un’importante sezione del cinema italiano. Prendendo in esame alcuni

rilevanti case-studies, tra cui La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) e Deserto Rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni,

1964), l’intervento guarda alla rete dei rapporti che hanno contribuito a determinare le modalità e l’affermazione

di iconografie diffuse, non di rado ricondotte dai periodici all’esplorazione dei lati oscuri e del glamour dei nuovi

scenari nazionali. La divulgazione di prodotti e brand autoriali a livello internazionale viene esplorata alla luce

delle dinamiche di un microcosmo aziendale profondamente radicato nel tessuto imprenditoriale italiano, nella

commistione di paternalismo, familismo e nella gestione dei network istituzionali.

Maiello, Angela (Università della Calabria, Italy)

Becoming Italians: At the origins of the Italian postcard imagery

The popular imagery linked to Italy, which is conveyed today by media and cinema in an increasingly global

market, is built around the beauty of the landscape and a specific Italian way of life. But how did this imagery

take shape? A fundamental stage of this evolution is represented by the post-war national development, which

coincided with one of the most important periods of Italian cinema. The goal of this talk is to present a path

through non-fiction films which, between 1948 and 1968, represented the reconstruction of post-war Italy (i.e.

newsreels by Remigio Del Grosso, Ubaldo Magnaghi, Ugo Saitta and others). Between the end of WW2 and the

years of the economic boom, Italy, pictured as the golden coast kissed by the sun and the Mediterranean see,

became a mass tourist destination, increasingly recognizable inside and outside the national borders. The main

purpose of these films was to construct, through a specific form of landscape, the idea of a modern Italy, a place

that can welcome a large number of tourists, while preserving its own authenticity. What contradictions emerge

from these films? And what forms of life do they represent and convey? The contribution will mainly focus on

two aspects: the never-completed modernity of Italy and the role of women’s bodies within this landscape.

Mariani, Annachiara (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States)

Historical authenticity and demythologization in Borgia: Faith and Fear

Should we learn history by watching popular television series? There is no easy answer to this question, but since

an average audience would rather binge-watch an entire series, say, about the Tudor family than read books on

the topic, a better question to ask is: what kind of history do we learn by watching popular television series? While

we are undoubtedly learning a great deal about past events when we watch historical series, it is important to keep

a critical eye and discern the facts that have been sensationalized (thus distorted) from those that display an

authentic window into the past. This calls to mind the centuries-long debate between the historical authenticity

that written texts supposedly render and the fictional history that contemporary? media tend to portray. This paper

aims to show how the television series Borgia: Faith and Fear (2011-2013) manages to create a sense of historical

immersion, which I call ‘historicity.’ Even though the creators and writers alter and adapt certain facts, they

successfully manage to make the audience ‘travel through time’ to virtually meet the characters and events that

shaped Italian and European history from 1492-1503. Even if not all of the events that Borgia displays are

historically accurate, they could have conceivably occurred in the context and milieu that the series illustrates. I

intend to show how Borgia succeeds in de-mythologizing the Renaissance as the historical facts it remediates

shatter the mythical depiction of a golden age and focus on the prevailing brutality and violence of the times. The

narrative of Borgia does not shy away from displaying the most atrocious tortures, disfigurements, feminicides

and male rapes. Although these scenes are certainly alienating, shocking, and may leave the audience

uncomfortable and even appalled, they tend to create a unique sense of ‘historicity,’ that is, of something that

‘might have happened’ given the violent milieu of those years. This aspect of ‘historicity’ emphasizes the

importance of rigorously studying and analyzing the plethora of new historical series available on streaming

platforms in order to assist viewers in navigating the intricate interplay between fictional and authentic historical

elements and, thus, crafting a more balanced knowledge of the past.

Marini, Alessandro (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic)

La forma del paesaggio nel cinema di Matteo Garrone. Il caso Terra di mezzo (1996)

Nella filmografia di Matteo Garrone la scelta dei luoghi è sempre determinata da un marcato interesse per la realtà

fisica, avvicinata attraverso un’ottica autoriale volta a rappresentare in essi i tratti fondanti della narrazione, le

coordinate di un complesso sistema di relazioni umane, i segni dell’esercizio del potere, nelle sue molteplici

declinazioni. Solo a partire da un tale atteggiamento, nel cinema garroniano il paesaggio si carica di una

significazione profondamente legata al modo in cui viene osservato e ricostruito, assumendo costantemente uno

spazio di assoluto rilievo. Nella sua prima opera, il film a episodi Terra di mezzo (1996), Garrone indaga lo spazio

già pasoliniano della periferia romana, popolato adesso da prostitute nigeriane e albanesi disoccupati. Lo sguardo

dell’autore rintraccia qui frammenti di esistenza nelle forme di un paesaggio eccessivo, incompiuto e

concentrazionario, “epitome dell’instabilità”: la banalità del sesso mercenario, i ricordi di un benzinaio egiziano,

il mordi e fuggi di clienti, automobilisti e improvvisati datori di lavoro. L’accelerazione verso l’indefinitezza e

l’iteratività assume in questo contesto una chiara valenza allegorica, rimandando esplicitamente alla condizione

di precaria impermanenza vissuta dai protagonisti. Il contributo proposto intende mettere in rilievo i caratteri più

significativi del lavoro autoriale sulle forme del paesaggio di Terra di mezzo: la loro selezione, operata secondo

un’ottica animata da una forte disponibilità ermeneutica, la conseguente tendenza ad una loro sovrasignificazione

allusiva e paradigmatica, la presenza, in esse, della lezione dei modelli, riconoscibile nella costruzione sintetica

delle inquadrature, nel loro montaggio in una struttura diegetica solo apparentemente segnata da impressionismo

e spontaneità.

Marini-Maio, Nicoletta (Dickinson College, United States)

Nerenberg, Ellen (Wesleyan University, United States)

Evolutions of cuteness: Winx Club, figurations and formats

Since their first appearance in 2004, the fairies of the animated television series Winx Club (2004-) aspired to,

and were inspired by, the concept of cute, or kawaii, popularized by Japanese anime from the 1980s and 1990s.

In the case of Winx Club, kawaii synthesizes a number of attributes that are psychological, commercializing, and

aesthetic. Manifestations of kawaii have evolved over the various seasons, formats, and spin-offs of Winx Club.

Tracking the evolutions of cuteness across the series and its formats, allows us to study how the “aesthetic

imperative” (Virginia Postrel) embodied by Winx Club invites the viewer consumer to embrace the “smart and

pretty” in its eroticized and infantilized forms, producing a strong affective pull, and not infrequently, feelings of

protectiveness as much as pleasure. We also propose to consider the recent developments of Winx Club within a

larger process of “survival of the cutest” (Simon May), where vulnerability is accepted as an apparently innocent

and powerless attribute.

Martínez Bonilla, Mariana (Metropolitan Autonomous University Mexico City, Mexico)

The potential reconstruction of memory. Formal strategies and counterhegemonic historical discourse in

Yervant Giankian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s Pays Barbare (2013)

This paper aims to analyze how Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s film Pays Barbare (2013) can be

described as an exercise of potential history that takes form through several formal strategies, such as montage,

reframing, tinting and slowing down the original reproduction speed of the images. The film is composed of

archival footage from the 1920s and 1930s that belonged to several anonymous and private collections, and

examines the role of the images within the rise of Italian fascism. One of the principal claims that I intend to

develop through this conference is that the filmmakers rearrange and manipulate the materials to open a critical

threshold to question the past and its relation to the development of the contemporary racial violence in Europe.To

do so, I will follow the ideas of Ariella Azoulay (2019, 2013), for whom potential history is an exercise that rests

in the inherent contradictions of historical events as the condition under which most of the colonial and war

archives are constituted. Therefore, it reclaims the necessity of a re-construction of memory, through the

imagination of other possible pasts and futures mediated by the montage as a temporal and narrative

rearrangement, in the terms of carrying out a reconfiguration of the hegemonic histories and their relationship

with the present. Finally, this means that the archive should and must be reactivated in several productive ways

to discover what has been erased or left out from the historical construction of collective memory.

Martiniuk, Jill (University at Buffalo, United States)

Italy through Russian eyes: Italy’s evolving imagined geography in Russian cinema

From the paintings of Mateev in the 19

century to Bunin’s and Gorki’s writing in the early 20

century to

Konchalovsky’s 2021 film Sin, Italy has captured the imagination of Russian artists, writers, and filmmakers for

over a century. From Kalatozov’s Red Tent (1969) to Konchalovsky’s Sin (2021), Russian filmmakers have

played with how Russians view Italy, and they offer viewers the opportunity to see Italy through Russian eyes.

Whether in collaboration with Italian filmmakers or on their own, Russian directors have sought to explore Italy:

both its real geography and its imagined one. But what does Italy mean to Russians? How has film shaped

Russians’ understanding of the country, its borders, and its people? How has that meaning changed through the

decades and across changing political landscapes? How have the collaborations with Italian film studios

influenced these depictions of Italy? This paper examines how Russian directors have defined Italy and its

geography in their films and explores those questions through six Russian films: Kalatozov’s Red Tent (1969),

Ryazanov’s The Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia (1974), Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983),

Mikhailkov’s Dark Eyes (1987), Kravchuk’s The Italian (2005) and Konchalovsky’s Sin (2021).

Mecchia, Giuseppina (University of Pittsburgh, United States)

From Naples to the transpersonal spacetime of class struggle: Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden

The cinema of Pietro Marcello has developed in the last 15 years always on the fringes of Italian mainstream

production, distribution, and audience reception. Nonetheless, it has succeeded in becoming increasingly

welcomed on the international scene, thanks to its presence on festival circuits and consistently high critical

interest. My essay, mainly focused on Martin Eden, a 2020 release, shows how Marcello builds an unbounded,

transpersonal spacetime of aesthetic, emotional and even political reception. The viewer is quickly aware that the

movie transposes the eponymous 1909 American novel to an Italian, and more specifically pre-WW1, Neapolitan

historical and affective landscape. But things are not that simple, as Marcello vastly expands the images, the

sounds and ultimately the impact of the movie. Like the original novel a sentimental and political journey,

Marcello’s rendition of the story of Martin Eden transcends personal time, creating a cinematic present made of

archival and original materials coming from the different times and spaces of 20

century class struggle.

Ultimately, Marcello succeeds in mediating a multi-layered cinematic effect that returns to his Neapolitan

grounding while also expanding its references to other spaces and times. The use of archival documentary footage

coming from international anarchist and communist struggles, together with the casting of an international set of

talented actors, allows Marcello to make full use of what Jean Epstein called “the intelligence of a machine”:

cinema as a way to work toward a transpersonal Time that expands the viewer’s ability to feel and think. This

paper is firmly grounded in phenomenological and Deleuzian theory, but is organized around the analysis of

camera work, montage and dialogic structures in three specific scenes.

Menarini, Roy (Università di Bologna, Italy)

Autofiction e post-divismo all’italiana in Vita da Carlo

Il contributo intende analizzare la serie streaming di e con Carlo Verdone (Amazon Prime Video) alla luce della

figura di Verdone, cresciuto dapprima come star comica televisiva poi come celeberrimo autore/attore

cinematografico. Il recente avvicinamento alle piattaforme di Verdone e l’adozione della serialità (per la prima

volta) con un soggetto che gioca con la sua stessa notorietà e su Roma permette di ragionare sul tema della

celebrità cinematografica “localizzata” e sull’eredità del film stardom all’italiana nell’orizzonte della serialità

nazionale.

Miller-Klejsa, Anna (University of Lodz, Poland)

Reception of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Film’s in the People’s Republic of Poland, 1960-1976

The most important feature of the cultural policy of the Polish People’s Republic – an undemocratic state that

existed until 1989 and was politically dependent on the Soviet Union – was the rationing of access to products

made in capitalist countries. Michelangelo Antonioni’s films constituted an important exception – although not

all of his films were released to the Polish public. To be exact, only 8 of his films hit Polish screens by 1989. The

majority of them in 1960s - after the post-Stalinist political Thaw, which had triggered the mass import of films

from the West. As a result, in 1960 Il grido and Le Amiche were released in Poland (Le Amiche was shown only

in the Discussion Film Clubs chain). By 1976, more films were released, such as L’avventura, L’eclisse, La notte,

Il Deserto rosso, Blow-up, and Professione: reporter. However, Antonioni's films that were not shown in Poland

until 1989 include: Zabriskie Point, Il mistero di Oberwald, Identificazione di una donna. This paper consists of

two parts. First, the structure of film distribution in the People’s Republic of Poland during the 1960s and 1970s

is briefly explained. The second part of the paper focuses on the critical reception of Antonioni’s films in the

People’s Republic of Poland – in particular L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and Il Desserto rosso. This second

part will be based on in-depth queries in Polish film magazines as well as archives of the National Audiovisual

Institute in Warsaw.

Miralles, Joan Jordi (Tecnocampus - Pompeu Fabra University, Catalonia-Spain)

El gesto obsceno en la obra de Ciprì y Maresco: el caso específico del escupitajo

The television and cinematographic work of the Sicilian directors Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco is

characterized by the construction of a world of its own. This world is inhabited by singular, unpleasant and, at the

same time, fascinating creatures. These creatures are governed by a wide and heterogeneous repertoire of obscene

gestural expressions, which hardly leave anyone indifferent and reinforce an imposing idiosyncrasy. If we

consider that obscenity is all that puts an end to the gaze, to any representation, and that, instead of being related

to concealment, it is related to extreme and disproportionate visibility (Baudrillard), we can intuit that the obscene

gesture becomes a sensitive gesture that, in case of abuse, can cause the viewer's senses, overexcited, to become

inhibited. Nevertheless, Ciprì and Maresco conceive the obscene gesture not as a superficial, anecdotal,

impressive and spectacular expression, but as a gesture intimately linked to everyday life, it is a permanent

attribute of bodies that have no other resources at their disposal. After outlining the main features of obscenity

and obscene gestures, the main focus will be on the obscene gesture of spitting: a gesture of contempt and offense

(Pitrè) that in the hands of the characters of Ciprì and Maresco takes on new and unusual meanings.

Miyake, Toshio (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy)

The glocalization of cute/kawaii girlhood: Intersecting whiteness, gender and age through Pretty Cure and

Winx Club

Since the global success of the Sailor Moon franchise in the 1990s, the manga and anime subgenre of cute, fighting

and transforming magical girls (mahō shōjo) has inspired an endless chain of adaptations at home and abroad.

Among them, the anime series Pretty Cure (2004-today) in Japan and the animation series Winx Club (2004-) in

Italy, targeted both to female children’s audience, have repeatedly broken records in viewing ratings and

merchandising revenues, becoming in the last two decades arguably the most influential media source of little or

tween girlhood in both countries. This paper aims at exploring how representations of cute or kawaii girlhood has

been extended from animated media to a wider media convergence and life-style practices, by focusing on the

intersection of whiteness, gender and age, and how they may have affected emerging trajectories of femininity in

Japan, in Italy and on the global scale.

Monaci, Sara (Politecnico di Torino, Italy)

Il viaggio social dell’eroe: Espressioni e linguaggi di attivismo in rete

In our contemporary realm dominated by a global awareness of the urgency of climate, humanitarian, health and

economic crises, social movements increasingly become more active on online platforms such as Twitter,

Instagram, Facebook with an unprecedented quest for visibility (Milan, 2018). Along with the global movements

such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, a huge number of young activists in the domain of the LGBT issues

gained, especially in Italy, significant visibility in recent times. Young girls and boys – many of them reporting

their medical treatment to become woman/man – are actively using Instagram to share their individual experience

and to promote a culture of respect toward the diversity of gender-related individual choices. At the same time

they’re significantly remediating storytelling strategies related to cinematic and screen languages such as for

example the Vogler’s “hero’s journey” narrative model (Vogler, 2010). Facing the non-linear, participatory and

open storytelling structure of social media platform, activists develop in fact a conversational storytelling

(Papacharissi, 2016) which could be referred to a number of Vogler’s model such as the “ordinary world”, the

“call to action”, the “main trial” etc., through visual and textual elements (eg. photos, videos, stories, posts etc.)

typical of social media ecologies.Through a qualitative content analysis of more than 30 social media profiles of

Italian young activists in the domain of LGBT issues, the paper will investigate how the narrative model

elaborated for Hollywood cinema could be accommodated to the evolving digital mediascape, and how Italian

young activists exploit their social media storytelling strategies in order to communicate their diverse identities

and to engage with their online audiences.

Mosca, Monica (Wroclaw University, Poland)

Dal romanzo Cipollino al cinema sovietico. Le evoluzioni nel tempo di un personaggio di fantasia, da eroe

ad anti-eroe

Il mio intervento tratta di due adattamenti del romanzo Cipollino dello scrittore italiano Gianni Rodari (1951), un

cartone animato (Boris Dyozhkin, 1962) ed un film musicale (Tamara Lisitsian, 1973), che hanno avuto un ampio

successo nell’Unione Sovietica e in alcuni paesi satelliti del tempo. I due film raccontano la storia di un povero

“ragazzo cipolla” che non sopporta l’arroganza dei nobili e dei potenti che governano il suo paese e, dopo alcuni

episodi di conflitto, finisce col divenire capo di una rivolta popolare. Cipollino è un eroe che combatte per i valori

della vita, come la giustizia e l’amicizia. Entrambi i film russi hanno un contenuto marcato ideologicamente; il

film musicale ha un forte orientamento propagandistico anti-capitalistico e anti-militarista. La posizione

ideologica di entrambi i film è sufficiente a spiegare la scarsa distribuzione che ha avuto nei paesi occidentali,

quindi si analizzeranno alcune scene e alcuni episodi evidenziando il loro peso sociale e propagandistico. Sebbene

il valore artistico dei film, specialmente del cartone animato, non possa esser messo in discussione, solo in tempi

più recenti, con l’avvicinarsi del centenario della nascita di Rodari (2020), l’interesse per Cipollino si è rinnovato

specialmente in alcune scuole dove è divenuto anche argomento di un progetto MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione,

dell’Università e della Ricerca). In Italia, una rete di scuole pugliesi ha creato un laboratorio che ha prodotto una

nuova versione di Cipollino con la tecnica dello stop-motion o animazione a passo uno. Inoltre è interessante

notare che, da una decina di anni, Cipollino, in Russia, è stato bandito da tutte le rappresentazioni, da eroe del

popolo, ad anti eroe.

Natale, Giuseppe (University of Nevada, United States)

Carosello, prodromo e allegoria del modernismo italiano

Come sostiene Remo Ceserani, la zeitgeist del postmoderno ha iniziato a far sentire la propria presenza verso la

fine degli anni cinquanta, al tramontare delle forme espressive della modernità. In realtà, nel panorama culturale

italiano, il postmoderno si è incrociato con i prodromi tardivi della modernità, soprattutto in campo televisivo,

dove, negli anni cinquanta, la programmazione era ancora in parte imbevuta di classicismi e miti passatisti. A

dare una spinta decisiva all'ingresso del moderno ha contribuito certamente Carosello, il programma televisivo

serale andato in onda per vent'anni, tra il 1957 e il 1977, il quale, per la sua lunga durata, può fungere da chiave

di lettura di varie concatenazioni della storia italiana, televisiva e non solo. Nato come nucleo di informazione

pubblicitaria, il programma ha portato un cambio epocale nella percezione e nel comportamento degli

spettatori/consumatori, inculcando in loro un'idea di modernità caratterizzata da una fede quasi utopistica nel

progresso e nel futuro. Grazie alla sua insolita struttura narrativa, Carosello è stato il crocevia di una serie di

discorsi e pratiche sociali diverse: pubblicità e arte, mercato e famiglia, narrazione e slogan, impegno e ironia.

Oltre all'aspetto sociale e culturale, Carosello è stato però determinante anche a livello affabulatorio,

introducendo il concetto di serialità, non solo promozionale ma anche finzionale, coltivando, fra un episodio e

l’altro, l’affezione e l'attesa del pubblico per una serie di personaggi indimenticabili, da Carmencita a Calimero.

In questa nuova produzione di significato, gli sceneggiatori dei vari Caroselli hanno finito col mutuare tecniche

artistiche altamente innovative, anticipando di fatto alcuni tratti del postmoderno, tra cui la parodia (Hutcheon) e

il pastiche (Jameson). Il loro uso della serialità ha trasformato il presente e la storia in un mix di consumo culturale

e affresco decorativo, una forma iterativa senza precedenti nella produzione televisiva italiana.

O’Healy, Áine (Loyola Marymount University, United States)

Manipulating affect: Migrant imaging in video art and experimental film

This paper examines the question of affect as it pertains to audiovisual images of migrant mobilities,

endangerment, and expulsion. As previous studies suggest, the principal emotions elicited by conventional

narratives of contemporary migrations are fear and empathy: fear triggered by a sense of invasion, and empathy

elicited by images of vulnerable migrants (often configured as women and children) in need of humanitarian

support. In their representation of migrant border crossing, Italian feature films can oscillate between these

extremes even within the same narrative. A small number of experimental films and video productions, however,

have challenged these conventional patterns of affective engagement with migrant mobilities by self-reflexively

drawing attention to the lens or screen through which such images are mediated or transmitted and inviting more

complicated responses. Examples are drawn from the video essay Sudeuropa by Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Ionio,

as well a video installation by Adrian Paci and three short films by Carlo Michele Schirinzi. The radical potential

of this work is nonetheless challenged by the predictable restrictions of distribution and exhibition associated with

moving-image art and site-specific installations.

Pacchioni, Federico (Chapman University, United States)

Puppetry aesthetics in Lina Wertmüller’s cinema

This paper investigates the influence of puppetry in the cinema of Lina Wertmüller. Drawing from interviews and

new archival materials, the discussion unveils Wertmüller’s early collaboration with Maria Signorelli, one of the

most original Italian puppeteers of the 20th century. Signorelli’s puppets, which Giorgio De Chirico and Giuseppe

Ungaretti described as being able to uplift humble materials into lyrical plasticity, offer a novel interpretative key

to understanding Wertmüller’s cinematic choices in expressing a compassionate yet satirical portrayal of human

nature. The analysis of several scenes from Wertmüller’s films shows a unique approach to choreography, acting,

and mise-en-scène–which has its ascendant in 20

-century Italian avant-garde puppetry. Such analysis provides

both cultural context and stylistic insight for the opus of a filmmaker who has left a poignant cinematic monument

to human innocence and grace caught in the unruly nature of social life. The account of the aesthetic characteristics

and collaborative history linked to the explicit and implicit presence of puppetry in Wertmüller’s cinema opens

to the assessment of a visual language that is intrinsic to Italian humanistic culture and traditions while also

proving powerfully intermedial and posthuman.

Padovani, Cinzia (Southern Illinois University Carbondale, United States)

Social media regulation, freedom of speech and the ultra-right: A case study of Italian neo-fascist

organizations and Facebook

Social media’s role in the public sphere has been debated since the early 2010s. Although studies have focused

on ultra-right organizations, such as CasaPound Italia (Froio et al 2020), and social media regulatory issues

(Napoli 2014), scarce attention has been given to the discursive implications of freedom of speech, freedom from

hate speech and social media regulations. This case study focuses on the discourse that has developed following

the shutdown, in September 2019, of the Facebook accounts of two neo-fascist organizations, Casa Pound Italia

(CPI) and Forza Nuova (FN) in Italy, for ‘hate speech’. The decision was challenged by both organizations in the

courts. Ultimately, the Rome Tribunal ordered Facebook to re-open the CasaPound account; the same tribunal,

although a different section, instead sentenced that FB had the right to keep Forza Nuova out of its platform. I

draw from Discourse Historical Approach (DHS) to investigate the thematic articulation of the discourse on

freedom of speech and social media regulation surrounding this case study. DHS is particularly suited to unearth

the contradictions between the seemingly democratic elements of these organizations’ pro-freedom of speech

discourses, the sentences of the Tribunal, and the regressive, conspiratorial elements of both CPI and FN’s

ideologies. The data include speeches by CPI representatives (during a conference and on national television),

tweets by the leader of CPI and FN immediately following the shutdown, the two different tribunal’s sentences,

and relevant mainstream media reporting.

Pagello, Federico (Università D’Annunzio Chieti-Pescara, Italy)

Casoli, Sara (Università di Bologna, Italy)

I Manetti Bros e l’ ‘italianità’ delle narrazioni audiovisive italiane di genere crime

From Coliandro (2004-) to Song’e Napule (2014), from Ammore e Malavita (2017) to Diabolik (2021), the films

and TV series directed by Antonio and Marco Manetti have regularly paid homage to classical and contemporary

models of Italian crime fiction, film and comics. The style and themes of their work thus offer a stimulating case

study not only to highlight how Italian crime narratives have been always characterised by a combination of

international influences and an indigenous tradition of crime fiction, but also to reflect on how this mixture is

constantly evolving. This paper builds on the research completed in the frame of the H2020 project DETECt:

Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (2018-2021) and the methodological

framework that will guide the recently funded PRIN project Atlante del giallo: Storia dei media e cultura popolare

in Italia (2021-2024). It will first present an analytical framework to address the issue of the Italianess of

contemporary Italian crime narratives, engaging with scholarly debates about Italian and European crime

narratives (Pieri 2011, Hansen et alii 2018), the role of glocalism in crime fiction (Damrosch et alii 2017) and the

process of the “noirification” of contemporary popular media narratives (Locatelli 2017). Focusing on the work

of the Manetti Bros, and particularly on a few recent Coliandro episodes and the film Diabolik, we will argue that

compared to other recent Italian productions they show an intriguing - and more specifically national - approach

to the increasingly transmedia and transnational dimension of Italian crime narratives. From that perspective, we

will investigate how iconic figures (Rieser 2013) like Coliandro and Diabolik help us to negotiate the boundaries

of Italianness in the contemporary Italian audiovisual landscape.

Palermo, Chiara (École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Limoges, France)

Past as a future expectation. De Martino’s legacy in Pasolini and in the Italian artists of the 1960s to think

about the crises of the present

According to the anthropologist De Martino, "pagan" culture is part of millenary settlements that cross the Roman

era, Magna Graecia, popular culture and the fusion of which has allowed the survival of ancient rites - rituals,

religious festivals, daily gestures are imbued with this culture. The bodies, as well as the affects, act in resonance

with these distant fragments and their survival (De Martino). My intervention proposes to think about the role of

these survivals in Pasolini's cinema and in the plastic arts of the Sixties in Italy (eg Kounellis, Mauri, Penone) to

think about an echo of the respective works and their approaches in contemporary artistic manifestations in light

of the crises that are going through our present. In Pasolini, an investigation into the "magic" of cultural diversity

and its impoverishment in the acceleration of consumption provokes an apocalyptic vision to which only tradition

can respond. As Georges Didi-Huberman writes, "in the Pasolini apocalypse, the Pasolini people become sacred

and archaic"(Didi-Huberman 2012:130). This sacred dimension of existence is full of hope and reveals a

constantly developing force of presence. Similarly, in the first period of the Italian Arte Povera current (1967-

1971), the political commitment was nourished by a critique of the linear vision of history and progress to rethink

tradition as a source of inspiration for the future. Following these reflections, I would like to rethink the objectives

of current art committed to the future (cinema and plastic arts) between sacred and magic, giving some examples

of the current resonances in this field of investigation.

Panarese, Paola (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)

Giganti buoni, raptus e amori non corrisposti. Il racconto giornalistico del femminicidio di Elisa Pomarelli

nella stampa italiana

Sebbene il femminicidio, inteso come uccisione di una donna in quanto donna (Radford, Russel, 1992), sia da

qualche tempo collocato del sistema mediatico italiano all’interno di contesti e dinamiche di matrice patriarcale,

l’estrema attenzione ai numeri, nonché la mancata concezione del fenomeno all’interno di una cornice sistemica,

ha dato vita a un racconto spesso incapace di restituirne la complessità (Abis, Orrù 2016; Corradi et al. 2016;

Violi 2015) e sistematicità (Spaccatini, Pacilli, 2019). Su queste basi, si è scelto di analizzare la narrazione

giornalistica italiana di un caso di femminicidio, quello di Elisa Pomarelli, verificatosi nell’agosto del 2019,

considerato peculiare per via del nutrito dibattito sulla rappresentazione della violenza di genere sulla stampa

nazionale derivata dalla pubblicazione di un articolo de Il Giornale dal titolo “Il gigante buono e quell’amore non

corrisposto”. Un’analisi lessicometrica e un’analisi del contenuto di 159 articoli (135 articoli di cronaca e 24 di

critica) sono state effettuate con l’intento di rilevare il peso, le posizioni, le argomentazioni, le cornici

interpretative e gli stili comunicativi di chi guarda al femminicidio da prospettive diverse, ipotizzando una

distanza tra articoli di cronaca e articoli di critica, tesi a enfatizzare un ordine di genere (Connell 2006) i primi, a

discuterlo ed evidenziarne le distorsioni i secondi. I risultati confermano alcuni elementi di distanza tra le due

narrazioni, ma anche la presenza di comuni “distorsioni prospettiche”: seppure evidenzino maggiore attenzione

alla tematica, gli articoli critici non sono immuni da riferimenti a spazi, modelli e aspettative diversi per donne e

uomini.

Paulicelli, Eugenia (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States)

The catwalk in film: The Cinegiornali, the fashion film of La Settimana Incom between diplomacy, culture

and politics

The crucial role cinema had in Italy’s reconstruction and rehabilitation after the havoc left by WWII, a civil war

and the fascist regime has been studied extensively and continues to be studied today. Fashion too and the launch

of the “made in Italy” on a global scale played a crucial role in this process of rehabilitation. In my book-length

studies, I have delved into fashion and cinema’s contribution to Italy’s post-WWII modernization examining non-

fiction films such as newsreels produced by LUCE (1920s-1930s) or films belonging to the period of the secondo

futurismo. This material is rich and demands to be further studied along with other audiovisual material that is

now available in a number of archives or has been digitized, such as the Cinegiornali of The settimana Incom, the

topic of my presentation. In this paper, I focus on the post-war period and take into consideration archival material

that I had not considered in my previous studies. In particular, my paper will critically examine a selection of

newsreels on fashion that were produced by the “Settimana Incom.” These fashion films created both a discourse

on and an image of the new Italy and italianità. They also document how innovation in design and fashion greatly

contributed to Italy’s rebirth. “La settimana Incom” was distributed in movie theatres from 1946 until 1965. It

was founded after WWII by Sandro Pallavicini, was funded by the State and backed by Christian Democrat

senator Teresio Guglielmone. In all, it comprises 2555 episodes that were screened in movie theatres before the

main feature for two of the most crucial decades in Italy’s process of modernization. My paper will focus on the

Incom episodes related to fashion, textile and fashion shows organized in several Italian cities and venues:

Florence/Palazzo Pitti; Milan; Venice and the International Film Festival; Rome. The Settimana Incom was very

popular and was a widespread source of information for Italian audiences throughout the nation (A. Sainati:

Lindau 2001). For the first ten years, the sole editor was Giacomo De Benedetti (1901-1967), born of a Jewish

family from Biella. I have studied the fashion shows of the Cinegiornali Luce in my previous publications

(Fashion under Fascism (2004) and Italian Style. Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (2016),

but now I would like to extend my critical investigation and assessment of the material included in the Settimana

Incom newsreels and also critically examine these films, along with the publication of La Settimana Incom

Illustrata, the magazine that accompanied the films. I intend to carry out close readings of the short films, the role

of the catwalk, models and objects, of Italian landscape in the narrative of a modern Italian identity and the impact

of continuities and changes with the fascist regime. This material contributes to a deeper articulation and

understanding of the political, cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Italy and the US and the period of

Italy‘s reconstruction and rebuilding.

Pesce, Sara (Università di Bologna, Italy)

Monica Bellucci, vintage italiano e celebrità

Monica Bellucci è la più rappresentativa tra le attrici italiane contemporanee di una tradizione di corpi femminili

procaci, emblema di un’attorialità esportabile all’estero anche grazie alla fotografabilità della modella. Il suo

divismo è radicato nella moda, la diva si mantiene in vetta alle classifiche di bellezza e di sex symbol e richiama

un passato cinematografico celebrato in termini di stile e production design. Analizzando i suoi ruoli di testimonial

e madrina nella scena internazionale e usando il concetto di monumento, si propone di indagare le leve della

celebrità di Monica Bellucci mettendo a fuoco il dialogo che la diva innesca con il passato cinematografico

nazionale attraverso la sua attivazione del gusto vintage della moda.

Petocz, Orsolya Katalin (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)

With regards to the space-off and time-off: The (self-)query of Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura has been considered as slow film; for Karl Schoonover (2016, 153) the

slow film dwells on ‘what it might mean to be productively queer.’ The slow film, based on André Bazin’s

theorisation, involves the spectator: ‘the slower the shot […] the greater the effort required of the spectator’. This

opens up a diegetic-extra-diegetic relationship between film/filmmaker/actor and active spectator echoing a

Barthesian notion of ‘writerly text’, and aligns with an alternative definition of productivity, a concept queried

notably by queer theorists such as J Halberstam. L’Avventura further complicates the notion of the slow film by

a traversal of alternative spaces, offering, based on Siegfried Kracauer, a view onto the street as space of an

alternative to a hegemonic narrative (through Teresa de Lauretis). I propose to further readings of L’Avventura

through contemporary queer theoretical works such as Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005) and

Elizabeth Freeman’s work on ‘Chrononormativity’ (2010). The partly unseen ‘queer’ pathways of Claudia as she

searches for Anna will thus be reconsidered as a queer/feminist practice of care for the other. Indeed, if Sandro’s

journey by conventional means (the train, notably), is included in L’Avventura’s framing, Claudia’s diverging

pathways are left in the ‘space-off’ (De Lauretis 1987). Acknowledging such ‘obscene’, or ‘off-stage’ (Williams,

2004) events as part of L’Avventura allows for a recognition of the eluding of cis-heteropatriarchy throughout the

film – which includes the eluding of the film’s frame by Anna – and the superiority of Claudia in the film’s closing

image.

Pollard, Damien (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)

From hearing to listening: The forms and ethics of sound in Gianfranco Rosi’s documentaries

In my paper I argue that Gianfranco Rosi’s use of sound both subtends the aesthetic schemas of his documentaries,

and grounds their cinematic ethics. Approaching Rosi’s soundtracks as dynamic aural objects which fluidly

interweave sound and silence, word and noise, the mechanical and the natural, the human and the inhuman,

Pollard shows that this sound dynamism in Sacro GRA (2013), Fuocoammare (2016) and Notturno (2020) poses

profound ethical questions about his viewers’ relationships to onscreen bodies and spaces.

Rascaroli, Laura (University College Cork, Ireland)

Saporito, Paolo (University College Cork, Ireland)

Bella e perduta or the (environmental) ethics of the lyric essay film

Bringing theories of the essay film and lyricism to bear on Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015), we

demonstrate that the film problematizes traditional definitions of the essay form by entrusting the delivery of its

argument to a dialectical tension between documentary, fiction and lyrical components. While documentary

elements contextualize this argument in the episodes of environmental injustice vexing the Campania region, the

film’s lyricism counters its narrative organization to extend the account of this injustice to nonhuman

subjectivities and self-reflexively question cinema’s role vis-à-vis representational idealizations of nature.

Rees-Roberts, Nick (Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France)

Fashion and nonbinary aesthetics: Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are (2020)

Existing scholarship on the contribution of fashion to the cinema of Luca Guadagnino (de Pertuis 2012; Gilligan

2017; Rees-Roberts 2018) has to date focused on the director’s incorporation of Raf Simons’s disruptive designs

for actress Tilda Swinton in I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015), films that were given a broader

communications platform across on and off-line media by their fashion sensibility. The director’s own ease in

fashion advertising––making films through his production company, Frenesy, commissioned by luxury brands

such as Armani, Fendi, Ferragamo and Pomellato (again with Swinton)––illustrates the extent to which his

commercial work in advertising acts as the experimental ground for some of the formal ideas, which are more

fully developed through dramatic narrative in his feature films. In this paper, I will explore the conjunction of

fashion and costume design with queer/nonbinary aesthetics in the 2020 part-Italian, part-American coming-of-

age TV mini-series, We Are Who We Are, co-conceived and directed by Guadagnino for HBO and Sky-Atlantic.

Coming three years after the director’s award-winning gay heritage drama Call Me By Your Name (2017), the

series, set on a fictional US military base in Chioggia, uses costume creatively to tell the story of two queer and

nonbinary teenagers. Drawing on contemporary queer affect theory, my analysis will seek to theorize the

importance of fashion and sensibility to the series’ aesthetic mode.

Rey, Ana Lía (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Rodríguez, Fernando Diego (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Noticias, negocios y política. Evita en Italia. Noticiarios y cine en una agenda común de posguerra

El viaje de Eva Duarte de Perón por Europa, durante el verano de 1947, conocido también como la Gira del Arco

Iris, fue un acontecimiento de alta repercusión tanto para la política argentina como para las relaciones de este

país con la Europa de posguerra. Nuestro trabajo se centra en su recorrido por Italia. Los registros documentales

en la prensa gráfica y fílmica argentina e italiana son, además de abundantes, reveladores del significado político

y económico de la travesía de Eva Perón. Ella fue recibida por los medios europeos como una diva del cine

moderno, sin embargo, el registro de sus actividades dio lugar a una modificación de los supuestos que la prensa,

especialmente la escrita, tenía sobre Evita. Su condición de actriz, su juventud y el rol que asumió como primera

dama, excepcional para la época, despertaron curiosidad, intereses y por cierto fascinación por su figura, lo que

quedó plasmado en el celuloide. En simultáneo su viaje fue recuperado por los noticiarios argentinos.Este trabajo

se propone colocar en perspectiva aquellas imágenes de ese viaje atravesado por las necesidades convergentes de

Italia y la Argentina, que tuvo en Eva Perón a una protagonista notable y sobre lo acaecido más tarde en el vínculo

entre ambas industrias cinematográficas.Nuestra hipótesis afirma que, más allá de lo que las cámaras de entonces

registraron, una serie de emprendimientos fílmicos entre ambos países se desarrollaron al calor de esta visita y de

los vínculos políticos y económicos que impulsó. Dos ejemplos de ello son los viajes de Aldo Fabrizi y Amedeo

Nazzari a Buenos Aires y las películas por ellos protagonizados entre 1948 y 1949.

Romanelli, Claudia (The University of Alabama, United States)

‘It’s life and also death’: Federico Fellini’s visions of Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Book of Dreams

In 1960, Federico Fellini was undergoing therapy with the Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard when he started

to keep a notebook where he recorded his dreams, which were the subject of his analytical sessions. These

recordings constitute what is now known as Il libro dei sogni or The Book of Dreams. With its array of colors,

and its many lines and shapes, The Book of Dreams exceeds its mere therapeutic function. It is well known that

Fellini used his dreams as a source of inspiration for his cinematic work. It is also true that his films informed his

psychic life. Fellini’s night-time fantasies include many references to his artistic collaborators, including his

screenwriters, as he sought to express his nostalgic feelings and playful attitude toward them especially during

periods of creative stagnation. Of all his screenwriters, Fellini most often dreams of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who

worked on Le notti di Cabiria, Viaggio con Anita and La dolce vita. Fellini dreamt of Pasolini when he was at a

crossroads in his career and could not make up his mind whether to make Viaggio con Anita or not. This was, in

fact, a film project that preoccupied Fellini until Pasolini’s death. However, Fellini’s dreams also reveal his

fascination with Pasolini’s homosexuality and his idea of death. In other words, the poet had struck a deeper chord

in the director, triggering a strong emotional response to feelings and impressions that could not be otherwise

verbalized.

Sabato, Milena (Università del Salento and Università di Foggia, Italy)

Leggere il cinema storico. Il caso dell’Inquisizione romana moderna nelle recensioni sulla stampa italiana

(1968-2018) e questioni di identità

Mai come in questo momento, nell’era del Web 2.0, il ruolo principe della recensione sembra stia collassando.

Appare spalancato lo iato tra cultura come luogo di un’iniziazione eletta e cultura come arena dei più

incontrollabili narcisismi. E la recensione, che diviene nel tempo e con un valore che cambia notevolmente alla

luce del contesto di pubblicazione, è la pratica che meglio mette in rilievo certe contraddizioni, a conferma della

natura camaleontica e liminare di questo particolarissimo genere. Il cinema storico, in particolare, su cui negli

ultimi decenni si è sviluppata un’ampia riflessione, continua a essere di difficile decifrazione, come varia e

contraddittoria è ancora la valutazione della ricostruzione del fatto storico e degli approcci alla storia e al cinema.

Vale tuttavia la pena di superare la rigidità di analisi epistemologiche e tassonomiche, e considerare invece

questioni concrete, che, nello specifico, hanno a che vedere con i caratteri identitari della storia italiana. Questo

paper considererà il cinema italiano sull’Inquisizione romana moderna negli ultimi cinquant’anni – da Galileo di

Liliana Cavani (1968) a Menocchio di Alberto Fasulo (2018) –, cinema che ha in qualche modo rimediato a una

serie di falsificazioni storiche. Tenendo sullo sfondo il modello della recensione accademica (D. Motta-Roth), al

centro sarà la documentazione recensoria del cinema inquisitoriale italiano in Italia, con i modi diversi di valutare

il tema, dettati da metodi, strumenti e sensibilità diversi. Al di là delle controversie, i film sull’Inquisizione romana

sono capaci di interrogarsi su un trauma cancellato e portare a riflettere sulle conseguenze meno evidenti

dell’Inquisizione romana sul carattere degli italiani, sul rapporto cattolicesimo-identità italiana da una prospettiva

differente.

Salmaso, Nicolò (Indiana University - Bloomington, United States)

From Raffaella Pelloni to Raffaella Carrà: The creation and evolution of an Italian star

I analyse Carrà’s media image and more specifically the ways in which Carrà skillfully crafted her media persona

throughout her career and how, through a skillful communication strategy based on a combination of transgressive

and reassuring traits, Carrà became a star who could reach an extremely broad and varied target audience.

Sannicandro, Joseph (University of Minnesota, United States)

Spaghetti westerns and Eastern mysticism: Disorientalism in Italian soundtrack music

Even in a CFP as detailed as this one, with an expanded view of media and an eye towards the future, there is not

a single mention made of sound nor of music. What might we learn by approaching the history of Italian film

through soundtracks? The circulation and remediation of soundtracks abroad has played an important role in the

construction of the identity of Italian cinema. Italian film soundtracks and library music have become sought after

by record collectors, frequently sampled by hip hop producers. Some have labeled the aesthetic which grew out

of the experimentation of 1960s “Spaghetti Sound,” testifying to film’s historiographic influence. This oeuvre is

a common touchstone for contemporary artists, such as INVERNOMUTO, Heroin in Tahiti, and Toni Cutrone,

whose work explores trans-Mediterranean identity, often articulated through the traditions and history of the

Mezzogiorno. While the most interesting soundtracks tend to be attributed to the filoni of the 1970s, tracing this

genealogy leads back to the ethno-documentary films of directors including Luigi Di Gianni, Cecilia Mangini,

and Mario Gallo. I propose to reconsider these films through an analysis of the soundtracks of Egisto Macchi. In

part due to this association with ethno-documentaries, and the broader interest in “Eastern mysticism” throughout

the countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s, much of this music exhibits a characteristic I term “disorientalism,”

suggesting a trans-Mediterranean identity consonant with left politics and Third Worldism of the era.

Sborgi, Anna Viola (University College Cork, Ireland)

Screening housing precarity in contemporary Italian cinema and television

Increasingly prominent on Italian screens in recent years, the precarity of home has been depicted in

documentaries on the state of public housing and the “case popolari” (Cityzen, Ruggero Gabbai, 2015; Aperti al

Pubblico, Silvia Bellotti, 2018) in addition to the migrant crisis as it interconnects with housing needs (Dove

Bisogna Stare, Gaglianone, 2018) as well as televisual accounts of race, gentrification and the ‘right to the city’

(Zero, Netflix, 2020). COVID-19 further exposed housing inequality in Italian society. As the country was the

first to be hit by the pandemic in Europe, representations of Italian homes in lockdown went viral on YouTube

while also appearing in documentaries (Messages from Quarantine, Niccolò Natali and Nikola Lorenzin, 2020;

Fuori era Primavera, Gabriele Salvatores, 2020). While these productions vary in style and genre, they all share

a focus on the home as a site of instability and inequality, as well as an increased attention to questions of race,

class, gender, and, frequently, citizenship. The contemporary housing crisis has generally been discussed in

relation to countries like the US, Ireland and the UK, while Italy’s largely family-based structure of property

somehow differentiates its housing system from others. However, I argue that questions of housing precarity in

Italian society are increasingly crucial and their screen representations require systematic and in-depth scholarly

attention. Focusing on selected examples from this corpus and adopting an intersectional and sociohistorical

approach to the study of screen spaces, I will set them in conversation with wider, transnational representations

of the European and global housing crisis.

Semenova, Alexandra (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)

Firefly manifesto: Pier Paolo Pasolini through the eyes of Albert Serra

At first glance, it might seem that the themes connecting the two directors, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Albert Serra,

are limited by an interest in the controversial legacy of the Marquis de Sade or a special attention to the aesthetic

component of their work. However, their relationship has a much more subtle structure. Based on the investigation

of Pasolini's texts and poetry as well as some phenomena within them, such as 'fireflies', which became a basis

for Georges Didi-Huberman's enigmatic work, we are longing to rethink and rebuild the connection between these

two artists. It is paradoxical how such an ephemeral, almost mythological question like the ´survival of fireflies´,

as Didi-Huberman titled his essay, becomes the crucial key term leading to a closer understanding of these figures,

as well as of Shakespeare´s and Dante’s work. In addition to the texts of Pasolini and essays by Serra, this

investigation is based on studies by the German contemporary philosopher Alexander García Düttmann and, as

mentioned above, George Didi-Huberman. Boredom, nudity, body, abjection, evil, vulnerability, symbol, allegory,

metaphor, voyeurism, the image of forest, the chaos - all of that absorbs and reflects the complexity of both

cinematic languages. There are various works by both directors to be mentioned, such as Salò, or the 120 Days

of Sodom (1975), the last work of Pasolini, and Liberté (2019) by Albert Serra.

Sforzi, Eleonora (Università di Chieti, Italy)

New raw material for fashion: Divulgation and animation in Polymer's corporate films

Gli utility film (ovvero i film non-entertainment) possono contribuire a tracciare nuovi percorsi nella storia del

cinema (Elsaesser 2016), offrendo inoltre l’occasione per indagarla alla luce dei contesti culturali, delle pratiche

mediali e spettatoriali. Primaria ispirazione, in tal senso, è fornita dai seminali studi anglofoni sui film d’impresa

(Hagener/Vonderau 2009) e sui film pubblicitari (Florin/de Klerk/Vonderau 2016), che hanno portato

all’attenzione critica generi filmici a lungo trascurati, in grado di far emergere inedite traiettorie e molteplici

intersezioni con la cultura visuale e materiale in cui sono stati realizzati. Sulla scia di questo orizzonte di studi, il

presente contributo propone di considerare alcuni film sponsorizzati dalla Montecatini, un’impresa chimica

italiana che ha ricoperto un ruolo centrale nella sperimentazione tecnico-produttiva degli anni sessanta,

influenzando anche l’ambito della moda e il suo consumo. Se la moda in sé costituisce un fenomeno culturale

stratificato e multiforme, denso di incroci con il contesto socio-economico e industriale-tecnologico, i film della

divisione tessile della Montecatini, denominata Polymer, valorizzano la rilevanza delle fibre sintetiche nel

processo di modernizzazione in atto nel settore dell’abbigliamento, sulla scia delle coeve esperienze estere.

Saranno posti al centro della riflessione alcuni materiali filmici d’impresa appartenenti al Fondo Montecatini e

conservati presso l’Archivio Nazionale del Cinema d’Impresa, un archivio audiovisivo di grande rilievo per

indagare il contesto italiano degli utility film. In particolare, saranno considerati una serie di caroselli dedicata al

poliestere, introdotto in Italia da Rhodiatoce (consociata della Montecatini) e commercializzata con la

denominazione “terital” e un film industriale dedicato a una particolare fibra brevettata dalla ditta risultante dalle

sperimentazioni nel campo della petrolchimica. Poiché, sulla scorta di numerose riflessioni nell’ambito dei

fashion studies, considerare la moda significa anche tener conto dei cambiamenti in sede produttiva e di consumo

(Segre Reinach 2008; Scarpellini 2017), il contesto delle materie tessili sintetiche diviene un crocevia di notevole

importanza per indagare le innovazioni che hanno caratterizzato la cultura della moda. Non soltanto la storia delle

fibre artificiali e chimiche si è sempre distinta per la necessità di “educare” la clientela al loro utilizzo (Garofoli

1999), ma i film sponsorizzati dalle aziende produttrici manifestano un esplicito intento illustrativo e formativo

verso gli spettatori-consumatori. Questo aspetto assume particolare rilievo negli anni sessanta, quando i processi

di modernizzazione nazionale che danno forma al “miracolo economico” trovano una notevole cassa di risonanza

nelle produzioni audiovisive, favorendo molteplici dialoghi intermediali. Come le principali aziende di

abbigliamento confezionato, anche il settore dei tessili chimici, rappresentato dal caso della Polymer, si avvale

delle immagini filmiche per orientare gli spettatori verso nuove scelte di acquisto, puntando sui cardini del

comfort e della praticità già alla base della “moda pronta”. Valorizzando materiali filmici d’archivio finora non

studiati in sede critica e assumendo una prospettiva spettatoriale, vedremo come questi contenuti si traducano in

termini rappresentativi sulla base del contesto di fruizione dei film. Inoltre, vedremo come gli inserti animati,

realizzati da figure nazionali di spicco nel settore, abbiano svolto un ruolo centrale nell’intento divulgativo e

formativo, recuperando l’aspetto pedagogico già riconosciuto alle forme d’animazione anche nell’ambito dei film

sponsorizzati e d’impresa (Cowan 2014).

Speranza, Paolo (Liceo statale ‘P. E. Imbriani’ di Avellino, Italy)

La lezione del neorealismo nel cinema di Cuba e del Cile

“Cesare Zavattini: alma del Neorrealismo”, titola la rivista “Cine Cubano” nel primo numero del 1990: da questo

tributo culturale al principale teorico e “poeta” del Neorealismo si intende ripercorrere la storia e i caratteri, la

continuità di ispirazione, la lezione etica, il costante rapporto di relazioni tra il più importante movimento

cinematografico italiano e il Nuevo Cinema Latinoamericano. Sulla base di film, documenti, interviste e di

un’ampia bibliografia si approfondirà il legame col Neorealismo nel contesto più generale del rinnovamento del

cinema d’autore in America Latina, in misura forse anche più rilevante rispetto all’Europa ed agli Usa nel corso

degli anni Sessanta. Lo studio di questo fenomeno sarà condotto attraverso un percorso diacronico sui caratteri e

gli effetti della “nuova onda” cinematografica latinoamericana sia rispetto alla filmografia precedente sia in

relazione al contesto artistico e produttivo attuale. Contestualmente, si svilupperà una comparazione tra la koinè

estetico-ideologica di questa stagione di rinnovamento e ricerca e le specifiche peculiarità dei movimenti nazionali

più importanti: il Nuevo Cinema Cubano e il movimento degli autori di Unidad Popular in Cile, soprattutto, con

riferimenti ineludibili anche al Nuevo Cinema Latinoamericano ispirato dai registi Fernando Birri e Fernando

Solanas ed al Cinema Novo brasiliano. L’analisi delle direttrici storiche procederà in maniera complementare con

l’esame della filmografia dei registi più importanti e il loro specifico linguaggio visivo e sonoro: le tecniche

particolari di ripresa e montaggio, il rilievo della fotografia, l’importanza attribuita a vari generi musicali e alla

canzone popolare, rimarcando la nuova declinazione di quel peculiare carattere del cinema latinoamericano che

è fin dalle origini (si pensi ad esempio alla filmografia brasiliana degli anni Trenta) la diffusa contaminazione tra

documentario e fiction. In particolare, saranno analizzati il film-manifesto del Nuevo Cinema, La hora de los

Hornos (1968); una delle opere più importanti del caposcuola del cinema di Unidad Popular Miguel Littin, La

tierra prometida (1973) e la Cantata de Chile (1975) di Humberto Solas, due film emblematici sia della sinergia

tra i cineasti di Cuba e del Cile in una breve ma intensa stagione politico-culturale sia del comune ancoraggio alla

realtà storica, soprattutto nei suoi eventi ed aspetti in precedenza oscurati dal potere; e Memorias del

subdesarrollo (1968) di Tomas Gutierrez Alea, uno dei risultati più notevoli della “nuova onda” cubana per la

capacità di coniugare la qualità artistica con l’ispirazione letteraria e il richiamo all’attualità politica e sociale.

Nell’ambito di questa analisi sarà delineata, nelle linee salienti, una ricognizione storica dei rapporti tra l’Italia e

le cinematografie dei Paesi latinomericani e dell’interazione tra cinema, letteratura e politiche culturali. Nel

paragrafo conclusivo del saggio si proverà a delineare un bilancio storico di quella stagione cinematografica,

esaminandone anche l’esaurirsi della fase propulsiva ma soprattutto la notevole portata autoriale e gli effetti sul

cinema attuale nel continente sudamericano, segnato dall’emergere di una nuova generazione di registi

(soprattutto in Cile e Argentina) e da importanti riconoscimenti internazionali: un discorso di prospettiva che, di

riflesso, investe l’appeal culturale e produttivo del cinema italiano, indubbiamente attenuatosi rispetto alla

stagione del Neorealismo.

Urrutia Neno, Carolina (Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile)

Actualizaciones (neo)realistas en el cine de ficción latinoamericano contemporáneo. Chile, Argentina y

México

Desde Los olvidados de Luis Buñuel el neorrealismo ha tenido una presencia indiscutible en la producción del

cine de ficción latinoamericano. Tanto los nuevos cines (de las décadas de los sesenta y setenta) como en los

novísimos cines latinoamericanos contemporáneos, se trabaja sobre elementos que fueron instalados en la Italia

de la posguerra, relativos al trabajo con actores no profesionales, al registro de paisajes reales dando cuenta de

interacciones sociales cotidianas, afectos, comunidades. Es interesante constatar que los signos que ahí aparecen

no solo perviven, sino que se acrecientan en la producción cinematográfica actual de Latinoamérica. Me interesa

en esta ponencia explorar los materiales expresivos películas recientemente estrenadas, específicamente de

México, Argentina y Chile, que actualizan de modo novedoso algunos de los principios neorrealista,

complejizando el concepto del realismo que ha subsistido y preponderado en la historia de los cines globales. A

partir de Noche de fuego (México, Tatiana Huezo, 2021); Mis hermanos sueñan despiertos (Chile, Claudia

Huaquimilla, 2020) e Implosión (Argentina, Javier Van de Couter, 2021), quisiera explorar los modos en que

estos filmes se adhieren a lo real y exhiben ciertos tópicos pertenecientes a las contingencias actuales de la región,

y que dan cuenta de un compromiso estético y político con los tiempos actuales.

Vannucci, Alessandra (Università Federale di Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Non voglio più fare la diva. Italia Almirante in Brasile (1936-1941)

Nel campo di ricerca che riguarda la mobilità transnazionale nell’industria cinematografica italiana, risulta poco

indagato il caso del trasferimento in Brasile di Italia Almirante Manzini, nel 1935 e la sua misteriosa morte sei

anni dopo. Interprete di Sofonisba in Cabiria (1914), grazie alle sue pose iconiche e toilettes strabilianti, l’attrice

fu diva incontrastata del cinema muto molto prima che s’imponesse lo star system hollywoodiano: una stella al

femminile, e all’italiana. Era figlia d’arte; perciò calcò i palchi dell’America Latina, prima con la compagnia di

Ruggieri (1916) e poi con la sua compagnia, diretta dal cugino Luigi (1926), tornandovi dieci anni dopo per

risiedere a São Paulo, insieme alla sorella Raffaella Almirante Chenet che là gestiva una boutique. Contrariando

la fama di altera ed inaccessibile, si dedicò alle filodrammatiche locali e diede scandalo, sia per il comportamento

emancipato, sia per i temi che la attraevano – storie di schiavitù in pieno secolo XX – considerati scabrosi in una

Republica che desiderava proiettare di sé un’immagine “civile”, ovvero sbiancata. Ad un giornalista che nel 1936

le rimproverava d’aver perso la statura (e la taglia) da diva, rispose che la colpa era “delle fotografie. Credo che

io sia l’attrice più fotografata del mondo […] in tutte le posizioni. La gente si innamora delle mie pose ed io lascio

fare. Ma ora basta. Non voglio più fare la diva”. La ricerca riporta a galla, attraverso interviste e immagini, l’ultima

tappa della vita di Italia Almirante, fra l’altro sfatando la leggenda che la fece morire a causa della puntura di un

insetto velenoso; morì invece, prosaicamente, di cancro al seno.

Varade, Kristina (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, United States)

La città postumana: Articulating posthuman urban spaces in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza

In Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film La grande bellezza, protagonist Jep Gambardella muses, “In fondo, è solo un

trucco” while referring to his ‘romanzo.’ When related to contemporary stories of the urban spaces of Rome,

however, this trick provides complex layers of meaning that can only find expression in the visual and cinematic,

rather than the human. Sorrentino’s film reconsiders the relationship between the human and the posthuman vis-

à-vis the cinematic gaze and the urban space of Rome; this new posthuman urban horizon supports what Eugenio

Bolongaro has posited as reaching out “not only to other biological beings but also to the inorganic and to the

intersection/mediation of organic with inorganic beings” (2020). Using the work of Bolongaro, Cangiano,

Haraway and others, the following questions will be addressed: How, for example, do protagonists manifest their

own senses of identity in the posthuman urban setting, and what are their primary concerns? How does

Sorrentino’s cinematic gaze foster new posthuman relationships between the nonhuman city and its human

protagonists? How does filmic style support or undermine a posthuman agenda? Finally, what statement does

Sorrentino ultimately wish to propose about the contemporary social milieu of Rome, seen through the

relationship between Sorrentino’s protagonists and the city as a nonhuman protagonist itself? In answering these

questions, I conclude that Sorrentino’s cinematic gaze undermines and redefines traditional approaches to story

and cinema, achieving new levels of complexity and meaning facilitated through the intersection of the human

and the posthuman.

Vargau, Marina (Independent Scholar, Canada)

L’effetto Federico Fellini nel cinema argentino. Il caso di Leonardo Favio

Artista autodidatta formato inizialmente accanto a Leopoldo Torre Nilsson e considerato oggi dalla critica del suo

paese e dai suoi congeneri come il più importante cineasta argentino, Leonardo Favio (1938-2012) si è

pronunciato spesso sul cinema italiano in generale e sul cinema di Federico Fellini in particolare, senza mai

riconoscere apertamente la loro presenza nei suoi film. La mia ipotesi è che, nonostante questo posizionamento,

Favio riprende nei suoi primi film (El amigo, 1960, Crónica de un niño solo, 1965) alcuni temi, soggetti e maniere

di fare del cinema neorealista, mentre che alcuni film ulteriori si trovano sotto l’effetto del cinema di Fellini. Il

mio intervento vuole interrogare appunto la manifestazione di quest’effetto nei alcuni film di Favio tra i quali

spicca Soñar, soñar (1976). Nella mia lettura, l’effetto, opposto all’influenza, suppone un incontro e un dialogo

e in questo senso interpreto questi film di Favio come territori aperti e laboratori che accogliono personaggi,

figure, temi, gesti, atmosfere, musiche del cinema di Fellini. Quest’incontro, senza mai togliere all’originalità e

alla specificità di questi film di Favio che rimangono 100 % argentini, li trasforma in una sorta di casse di

risonanza per gli echi felliniani. Due domande centrali costituiscono gli assi intorno ai quali si articolerà la mia

dimostrazione. Come si appropria Favio i personaggi, le figure, le atmosfere, i temi, le musiche di Fellini,

facendogli suoi ? Come è diventato il controverso Soñar, soñar il film argentino più felliniano che sia ?

Villa, Paolo (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy)

Light diggers: Portraying dams and lanscape in Italian post-war documentaries

Sponsored by Italian government and public institutions, transnational organisations like the ERC Plan, or private

electric companies (AEM, SADE), films about the building and functioning of dams and powerplants were

numerous in post-war Italy. These documentaries present a clear “rhetoric of the dam”, making it a symbol of the

nation’s successful reconstruction while depicting a peculiar relationship to the landscape, both exploited for the

national wealth and (apparently) “improved” by industrial progress and human intervention. Alongside

photographic campaigns, photobooks and postcards, these documentaries create a visual discourse that praises

the dam as the quintessential infrastructure to dominate and use nature, while pretending to establish a harmonious

relationship with the environment. Examining specific cases from this large corpus of more than 40 “dam

documentaries” (sometimes realised by remarkable directors such as Dino Risi, Nelo Risi, Ermanno Olmi,

Francesco Pasinetti), my paper will point out 1) the combined educational, propaganda and celebratory purposes

of these films; 2) the common visual and narrative features of the “rhetoric of the dam” that they share, but also

3) some differences that can be observed within the corpus; 4) the films’ active role in shaping a specific image

of the landscape and the national relationship towards it, in particular referring to the Alps; 5) the end of the “dam

documentary” phenomenon, after the Vajont disaster in 1963. Combining pragmatic, ideological, economic, and

symbolic aspects, these short movies delineate the concept of “utility film” at multiple levels. Meanwhile, they

reveal the “iconem” they portray, the dam, as a crucial element to better understand environmental perception

and landscape transformations in Italian post-war decades.

von Garan, Émilie (University of Toronto, Canada)

The hybrid gaze of the giallo: Point-of-view perspective and the rise of the posthuman

This paper examines early articulations of a posthuman sensibility in the Italian giallo film, surveying the complex

entanglements between Italian formulations of horror and violence, proposing the concept of a “hybrid gaze”

before exploring the terror it engenders. Within these films, which often carry a strong emphasis on visibility (or

lack thereof), the gaze has remained a distinctive feature. This obsession with the gaze and visibility is amplified

by the use of point-of-view perspective cinematography, most poignantly showing that of the killer and their

intended victims. Less explored, however, is how some Italian gialli moved beyond a human gaze altogether.

Establishing an ecology of Italian horror by looking at three films: Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971), Sergio

Martino’s Torso (1973), and Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1984)—featuring insects’ first-‘person’ perspective

shots, this paper carefully traces the formation and subsequent development of a gaze in these films, one that

disrupts the understanding of this gaze as human. This focus enables a consideration of the ways in which this

implementation and evolution of the hybrid gaze is reflective of the context within which it emerged, one that

triggered deep-seated anxieties and also questioned our own humanity.

Zagarrio, Vito (Università di Roma Tre, Italy)

Al ‘Centro del discorso’. Sperimentazioni e battaglie ideologiche al Centro Sperimentale

Partendo dall’esperienza personale del proponente (che è stato allievo di regia nel periodo 1973-75 e docente/tutor

di regia nel periodo 1998-2003), il paper vuole contestualizzare nella Storia italiana due gestioni importanti del

CSC: la presidenza di Roberto Rossellini e quella di Lino Miccichè. Un regista e un critico cinematografico,

entrambi interessati alla sperimentazione e impegnati in una forte battaglia ideologica. Il primo crea un

interessante laboratorio, eliminando i corsi specialistici e puntando a una sinergia tra “umanesimo” e “scienza”

(mentre coinvolge gli allievi nei suoi film televisivi); il secondo si batte per fare del CSC un centro di eccellenza

accademica, coniugando i corsi tecnici con moduli teorici e storici, e investendo nella sperimentazione linguistica

e tecnologica. Sono, d’altra parte, due periodi storici molto importanti per l’Italia (e non solo): il periodo del

cosiddetto “riflusso” del ’68 e il passaggio dal vecchio al nuovo millennio, caratterizzato dal trauma dell’11

settembre e dalla rivoluzione digitale.