Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012

This article examines the role of the transnational star in challenging stable notions of Italian identity, through an analysis of Ksenia Rappoport's performances in four Italian films, La sconosciuta/The Unknown Woman by Tornatore (2006), L'uomo che ama/The Man Who Loves by M.S. Tognazzi (2008), La doppia ora/The Double Hour by Capotondi (2009), Il padre e lo straniero/The Father and the Foreigner by R. Tognazzi (2010). Rappoport's characters display ambiguous moral identities that correspond, on the level of plot, to their uncertain national identities: they are foreign-born, yet they 'don't look' foreign and appear integrated in Italian society. Through Rappoport's 'Italian' appearance the directors destabilize firm definitions of italianitá and express the contemporary 'panic over national identity'. This apprehension encompasses the characters' subversion of gender roles and exposes the overlap between gender identity and concepts of otherness. Rappoport remains an outsider in The Father and the Foreigner, where she is the mother of a child with severe disabilities – the ultimate other in a society obsessed with physical perfection. Rappoport's work as a transnational performer thus exposes and explores the anxieties of Italian society at large about new definitions of national identity and culture in an age of global mobility and transnational migration.

In this article, I analyse the representational strategies in key texts across the media that concern the protest in Milan's Chinatown in April 2007 and Chinese immigration to Italy during 2007–2009. My focus is to analyse the rhetorical presentation and ethnocultural approach in these media. The protest is the first major violent one by a single ethnic minority group against the police authorities in contemporary Italy. Following the protest, in April 2007 a sequential order that links violence, gender bias, racism, ethnicity, illegality and incommunicability was quickly constructed in mainstream and alternative Italian media. Chinese immigrant and pro-immigrant Italian media questioned its interpretive validity to varying degrees. Moreover, an ethnocultural approach was widely applied to represent the Chinese immigrant community in Italy, whether from the perspective of Italian outsiders or that of Chinese insiders. I focus on how the processes of ethnogenesis and ethnocentrism were employed to educate Italian viewers about the Chinese immigrant culture. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the media have functioned as means of politico-cultural persuasion, intercultural pedagogy, and actual and imagined socialization between Italians and Chinese immigrants during 2007–2009.

This article analyses Donatella Maiorca's films Viol@ (1998) and Viola di mare/ Sea Purple (2009) in the context of contemporary Italian and transcultural debate about cinema and sexual and gendered identities, with reference to cinematic devices and gender theory. It places Maiorca's film-making in the broader context of national cinema and illustrates her films' common themes and stylistic traits, in spite of their numerous differences. It focuses specifically on the construction, deconstruction and metamorphoses of gendered identities and bodies in both films. Viol@ and Sea Purple present provocative explorations of transgressive sexual practices: they engage critically with the interconnection between society, power and gendered identities in the eras they depict and in modern Italy. I argue that the protagonists are simultaneously subjected to powerful normative gazes and act as subjects of the gaze and desire. By embracing unstable gender identities and non-normative sexualities, these characters acquire a degree of agency and self-determination and thereby the future possibility of becoming. This article aims to contribute to current transnational conversations on Italian women's cinema and cultural representations of gender and sexuality in Italy.

This article considers the representation of gender in three recent films that treat three different Mafias of Italy. Edoardo Winspeare's Galantuomini/Brave Men (2008) is a woman's film that focuses on Lucia Rizzo, a female mob boss of the Sacra Corona Unita, the Mafia of Apulia. Marco Amenta's La siciliana ribelle/ The Sicilian Girl (2009) tells the story of Rita Atria who testified against the Cosa Nostra, the Mafia of Sicily. The plot of Claudio Cupellini's Una vita tranquilla/A Quiet Life (2010) revolves around Rosario Russo, a former member of the Camorra, the Mafia of Naples and the Campania region, who fled Italy and now resides in Germany. In these three films, women are raped (Lucia), commit suicide (Rita) or are marginalized and silenced (Rosario's wife Renate). I argue that the physical and emotional violence done to these women is downplayed and/or normalized, and ultimately male perspective is privileged and mafia values remain intact.

The Mediterranean basin is a transnational, multicultural and multilingual region that, because of its unique geography, has long facilitated social and economic interconnections. This remains true today, even as the world struggles with division and conflict. The Mediterranean stands as a fluid, aqua-centric example of pacific coexistence. In this article I consider three films by the actor-director Sergio Rubini – L'anima gemella/Soul Mate (2001), La terra/The Land (2005), and L'uomo nero/Bogeyman (2009) – that offer viewers examples of postmodern nostalgia and Mediterraneanism as manifested in southern Italian culture. By taking into account studies of the use of magic in the Italian south, Meridian philosophy, and the unique combination of irony and nostalgia, I investigate how Rubini's oeuvre expresses intrinsic Mediterraneanism. In each of these films, metamorphosis (physical and psychological) denotes modes of cultural integration and reintegration, spiritualmoral hybridization (between paganism and Catholicism, between family loyalty and criminal tribalism) and reinterpretations of the past.

This article describes the trajectory of Italian women in the age of Berlusconismo, as they moved from silence to being vocal in the streets. Within the horizon of the unique Italian media landscape, almost all previously controlled by former Prime Minister Berlusconi, I examine the circularity of gender politics on Berlusconi's television networks and the broader gender gap in Italy, framing the condition of Italian women between Berlusconi's sexcapades and the general socio-economic conditions of contemporary Italy as documented in the 44th Censis Report (Centro Studi Investimenti Sociali). After describing the initial climate of acquiescence towards gender inequality in Italy, the article explores Lorella Zanardo's documentary Il corpo delle donne/The Body of Women (2009), investigating the Italian media's treatment of women as merely sexual bodies. Symptomatic of the porno-graphication of the public sphere and typical of 'a postfeminist sensibility' diffused all over the western world, these mediatic aspects are also uniquely Italian because of Berlusconi's media control and his attempt to apply the exploitation of beauty to the realm of politics. Finally, the article focuses on the success of the 13 February 2011 protests and of the appeal of the women's organization Di Nuovo as the possible beginning of a new women's movement in Italy.

ITALIAN FILM DIRECTORS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, WILLIAM HOPE (ED.) (2010) New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 208 pp., ISBN (10) 144382075X, h/bk, £39.99 | $59.99

FROM TERRONE TO EXTRACOMUNITARIO: NEW MANIFESTATIONS OF RACISM IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CINEMA. SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHICS & CHANGING IMAGES IN A MULTI-CULTURAL GLOBALIZED SOCIETY, GRACE RUSSO BULLARO (ED.) (2010) Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing Ltd., 456 pp., ISBN 9781848761766, p/bk, £15.95 | $24.95

CONFLICTS OF MEMORY. THE RECEPTION OF HOLOCAUST FILMS AND TV PROGRAMMES IN ITALY, 1945 TO THE PRESENT, EMILIANO PERRA (2010) Oxford: Peter Lang, 291 pp., ISBN 9783039118809, p/bk, $71.95

TRAGEDIA ALL’ITALIANA. ITALIAN CINEMA AND ITALIAN TERRORISMS, 1970–2008, ALAN O’LEARY (2011) Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 284 pp., ISBN 9783039115747, p/bk, £36.00 | $58.95

ENTERING THE FRAME: CINEMA AND HISTORY IN THE FILMS OF YERVANT GIANIKIAN AND ANGELA RICCI LUCCHI, ROBERT LUMLEY (2011) New York: Peter Lang, 192 pp., ISBN 9783034301138, p/bk, $55.95

A TALE OF TWO MAFIAS: A REVIEW ESSAY MAFIA MOVIES: A READER, DANA RENGA (ED.) (2011) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 398 pp., ISBN 978-0802096654, p/bk, $37.95

THE ITALIANIST: FILM ISSUE