1,720,997 research outputs found
Teen Identity, Affect and Sex in Rome. Italian teen girl audiences and the dissonant pleasures of Netflix’s underage prostitution drama Baby
No full textThe controversial Italian Netflix original TV series Baby (2018-2020) is based on the real-life events of an underage female prostitution scandal in Italy. This article examines the significance of this TV series for Italian teen girl audiences in the context of broader transnational discourses of girlhood, questions of «girlpower» and its limits, female friendship, and particularly sexuality and sexualisation. We use audience research to pay particular attention to the ways in which Italian female teens understand the series. Our research shows how for young audiences the dramatic news story acts as a hook and a point of departure to address a much wider range of concerns about the pressures of girlhood in an Italian context. We find that the shifting identities of the two lead characters allow audiences to imagine themselves in permanent «becoming», rather than as progressing towards a fixed goal. Viewers’ responses show how affective and aesthetic strategies used in the series show a series of dissonant viewing pleasures in exploring the often unspoken difficulties of Italian teen female experience, particularly in relation to the expression of sexualit
On Female Collaborations within the Frame of Audience Research. A Girls’ Eye View between Changes, Chances and Challenges
No full textIn this brief piece we discuss the role of collaboration in our research project, A Girls’ Eye View, funded by the
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK in 2021. The project is both the result and the ongoing story
of multiple collaborations, mostly all-female collaborations, between academic scholars of different generations, schools,
teachers, students, and female professionals in the field of Italian media productions. The main objective is to understand
the relationship (if there is one) between Italian TV and cinema content and young female audiences. At the same time,
this research aims to fill the significant gap in girlhood studies in Italy, where public reflection and debate about female
media representations and women’s conditions are needed as fundamental keystones of any feminist project. Finally, the
research aims to create a bridge between the media industry and young female audiences, starting from the shortage of
female gazes behind the camera in the Italian cinema and TV industry and the need for a new pact between producers and
consumers. In our first published written reflection on the project we discuss how it has been shaped by changes, chances,
and challenges, and how we have addressed those as a tea
'Le traviate: suffering heroines and the Italian state between the 19th and 21st centuries'
Full text linkIn this chapter we consider the relationship between what was considered the most successful operatic melodrama in the newly emer ging nation state of nineteenth - century Italy, Verdi’s La traviata , first performed in 1853, and a 2012 film addressing the theme of the suffering female and the doomed romantic relationship in the context of prostitution , Un giorno speciale (Francesca Comencini)
Introduction
Full text linkL’articolo ricostruisce nel dettaglio le ragioni di fondo che hanno portato alla realizzazione del numero monografico di “Comunicazioni sociali” dal titolo “Italian Quality Cinema. Institutions, Taste, Cultural Legitimation”, a cura di Claudio Bisoni, Danielle Hipkins, Paolo Noto. Dopo una breve premessa su “La grande bellezza” e “Fuocoammare”, film appartenenti all’ambito delle pellicole di “interesse culturale”, l’articolo offre uno sfondo per inquadrare la nozione di “qualità” nel cinema italiano contemporaneo, in relazione al contesto istituzionale rappresentato in primo luogo da Mibact e dalle sue politiche di finanziamento. Più in generale è ricostruito il ruolo dell’etichetta di “cinema di qualità” nel discorso pubblico. In seguito, l’analisi si focalizza sul contributo portato dagli interventi che compongono il numero monografico nel verificare la complessità e la produttività della nozione stessa di “qualità” in vari ambiti della produzione cinematografica nazionale e nelle politiche culturali che la accompagnano, in Italia come all’estero
A space of his own?: The male artist, space, and the fantastic in Paola Capriolo's La spettatrice (1995) and Laura Mancinelli's La casa del tempo (1993)
No full textLost in The Art(ifice) of Male Language: Finding the Female Author in Paola Capriolo's Il doppio regno
No full textWith its self-conscious intertextuality and thirty-year-old female narrator, Capriolo's Il doppio regno invites interpretation as a form of `fictitious autobiography'. This reading emphasizes the novel's importance as an exploration of female authorial anxiety in relation to a predominantly male-authored canon. Focusing upon Capriolo's admiration for Gottfried Benn and his privileging of art as absolute, the article shows how women's alienation from language is dramatized through the depiction of a fantastic space. The protagonist's encounter with a labyrinthine hotel is also the author's encounter with a language that claims to speak for the universal subject, but in fact excludes the female
Brothers in Arms: Middlebrow Impegno and Homosocial Relations in the Cinema of Petraglia and Rulli
No full textItalian Cinema's Missing Children
No full textThe aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse the range of resonances surrounding the lost or endangered child (or adolescent) in six Italian films made between 1992 and 2005. By drawing on and expanding Emma Wilson’s proposed understanding of the term ‘missing child’ in Cinema’s Missing Children (a transnational, cinema-based study published in 2003), this thesis will seek to open out new ways of exploring both contemporary Italian cinema and the ‘missing child’ paradigm. To this end, the following research questions are pivotal to the discursive trajectory of this thesis as a whole: What does it mean to ground contemporary Italian works which broadly correspond to the term ‘missing child’ (as proposed in Cinema’s Missing Children) within the specific context of Italian culture and society? How would recourse to a range of specifically Italian filmmaking, socio-cultural, or historical phenomena shape (or reshape) our understanding of this topos?
In order to fully engage these concerns, this thesis will begin by establishing a rigorous interdisciplinary methodology. In Chapter One, I will address questions of critical reception with particular emphasis on the possible pitfalls of conventional recourse to neorealism as a means of reading the missing child in contemporary cinema. In Chapter Two, I will extend this necessary emphasis on critical reception and related notions of possible distortion and oversimplification, to include the dialogic relation between Italian cinematic articulations of (missing) children, childhoods and the experience of (biological and non-biological) parenthood, and clusters of cultural and political concerns and anxieties. In chapters Three, Four, and Five, I will bring this interdisciplinary methodology to bear on three sets of primary sources. Whilst this close textual analysis will contend with the missing male child (in a range of guises), it will also bring to the fore new ways of thinking with and about the critically neglected female child. By moving away from more normative critical frameworks (including neorealism) this thesis will not only attempt to reset and refresh understandings of important works of the last two decades, but will also work towards a recuperation of the critically disavowed gender identity (and concomitant role and status) of ‘missing’ female children.AHR
Practices of Mediation and Phenomena of Contamination in the Films of M. Antonioni and A. Egoyan
No full textBy bringing M. Antonioni and A. Egoyan into dialogue with one another, this thesis sheds light on a significant yet neglected aspect of their cinematic visions: the interactions of practices of technological mediation with phenomena of contamination and dissolution of boundaries. My work is inspired by the recovery of archival material that demonstrates the two auteurs’ intention to collaborate on a filmmaking project, entitled Just to Be Together, between 1997 and 1998. This unfinished film invites us to look retrospectively at Antonioni’s and Egoyan’s oeuvres in a way that transcends established frameworks of analysis based on national, art-house, and diasporic/exilic paradigms.
Focusing on what came before this suspended artistic collaboration, the present study proceeds through a series of paired readings of films, framed within a theoretical context of transnational cinema. The final section includes an expanded, intertextual discussion of the major findings of my research in relation to the screenplay of Just to Be Together. Whilst recognising the directors’ different cultural and historical backgrounds, I argue that there exist strong thematic and stylistic affinities between Antonioni’s ‘art-house’ cinema and Egoyan’s ‘accented’ aesthetics. The corpus I have chosen to concentrate on reflects my view that such similarities are most noticeable in Antonioni’s first colour films and Egoyan’s early features. In particular, the following films are examined in pairs: Il deserto rosso (1964) / The Adjuster (1991) (Chapter One, ‘Reconfiguring Modernity’); Blow-up (1966) / Speaking Parts (1989) (Chapter Two, ‘Capturing What Vanishes’); The Passenger (1974) / Next of Kin (1984) (Chapter Three, ‘Discarding the Unwanted Skin’).
By using different conceptual frameworks developed by scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman, Julia Kristeva, Rosi Braidotti, Roland Barthes, and Richard Dyer, this study explores themes of fluidity, ambivalence, renegotiation of bodily boundaries, media technologies, pollution, and identity. It aims to engage with recent critical efforts to rethink Antonioni’s aesthetics from the perspective of contemporary theoretical frames, whilst opening up a discursive space from which to challenge the validity of diasporic and accented models for Egoyan’s early features
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