1,721,026 research outputs found
Book review of Francesco Pitassio, Neorealist Film Culture 1945-1954: Rome, Open Cinema
No full textBook review of Francesco Pitassio, Neorealist Film Culture 1945-1954: Rome, Open Cinema
Italy on screen: national identity and Italian imaginary
No full textItaly on screen: national identity and Italian imaginary, edited by Lucy Bolton and Christina Siggers Manson, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2010, 217pp., £34 (pbk). ISBN 978-303911416
Chernobyl (Craig Mazin, 2019), Toxic History
No full textThis piece examines the TV miniseries Chernobyl, arguing that it progresses according to a temporality that we might call 'toxic history'. This temporality structures the growing, but retrospective, dread from which its drama builds. It also acts as the opposite of the view of history as one of inevitable progress, a view that has influenced how accidents are understood both in historical thought and in the historical novel. This toxic history is one of continuing and growing relevance to a society heading towards ecological catastrophe
The operatic and the everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama
No full textItalian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself.The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form
Book reviews [The cinema mirror of reality. Cultural models in comparison]
No full textBook review of cinema specchio della realtà. Modelli culturali a confronto, Francesca Borrione (2013) Rome: Aracne, 108 pp., ISBN: 9788854855663, p/bk, €1
Why bad things happen to bad people: Investigating evil in the Italian giallo
No full textScholars generally find little to say about morality in the Italian giallo film, beyond proposing that it must be conservative and then moving on to more interesting topics. At the same time, the genre is often thought to display aspects of modernist radicalism. I explore this potential contradiction by identifying how the genre suggests the presence of evil. This suggestion offers new ways of thinking about the moral and artistic strategies of a genre which I argue represents a break in the history of Italian popular cinema. This break is as violent as it is uncertain, and its uncertainty offers a key to positioning the giallo in relation to its cultural background. To recognise the presence of evil in the giallo thereby helps in understanding the particularities of the modernity, the morality, as well as the pleasures the genre presents
Book Review of The Euro-Western by Lee Broughton
No full textBook Review of The Euro-Western by Lee Broughton
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