Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2013

The intersection between the Italian high-fashion industry and its relationship to national identity is explored in two 2008 films, Valentino: The Last Emperor (Tyrnauer, 2008) and Gomorrah (Garrone, 2008). The decline of high fashion problematizes Italy’s projection on a global stage of a national identity closely linked to its ‘Made in Italy’ brands and superiority in design. Both films conceptualize fashion as a salient cultural institution that is at the apex of pressing social, political and economic issues facing Italy as the country re-evaluates its construction of national identity. By visually exploiting the tension between the perfect exterior presentation of the fashion industry and the less appealing underlying realities, the directors challenge cinematically the boundaries between fiction and reality in identity construction at both national and global levels. The films showcase the performative creation of national symbols and in both the illusory quality of narratives of national identity emerges in the directors’ generically divergent yet topically convergent emphasis on the fiction of the constructed image.

Italian cinema has often been a battle-ground between national government and local administrations. Since 1975 many laws have been passed in order to find a compromise between centralized control of filmic activities and a collective management that involving the State and local institutions. Despite the controversy, in the past two decades local administrations have become aware of the economic benefits from supporting film productions. Therefore they have been implementing film-friendly measures (film commissions, film funds, film incentives and tax revenues). At the same time the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities is reconsidering its mission by moving from financing films to becoming a promoter, financier and regulator of the Italian cinema industry as a whole. This article analyses how in the past 35 years the Italian state and regions have negotiated their powers regarding cinematographic activities. It also examines the development of film commissions and film funds introduced by local administrations for supporting film production. The final part of the article suggests that financing and regulation of film production in Italy is experiencing a decentralization process.

The article demonstrates the power of sociopolitical and cultural contexts that dictated the interpretations of fascist imperialism in the two most important films dealing with the wartime occupation of Greece. Analysis of both films is positioned in relation to the history of the wartime occupation, when Italian soldiers were moved by racist assumptions, rejected Greek culture and willingly perpetrated crimes against the Greek people. From war’s end to the early 1960s, official memory of brutal fascist imperialism had been obscured by a powerful myth that the Italian people had been good anti-fascists and sympathetic victims during World War II. But events of the early 1960s created a political crisis that demanded re-evaluation of the power and dangers posed by Italian fascism. The article explores the means by which Valerio Zurlini’s 1965 Le soldatesse/The Camp Followers attempted to awaken national memory of imperial exploitation and inspire in audiences both a powerful collective guilt and consciousness of the urgent necessity to combat neo-fascism. The article also exposes the influence of the sexual revolution on this film’s depiction of consensual heterosexual sex as the primary mechanism for peaceful Italo–Greek relations. It was this sensual approach to empire and not the anti-neo-fascist political mission that tied The Camp Followers to Gabriele Salvatores’ 1991 Mediterraneo. Inspired by the new political apathy and consumer culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, Mediterraneo created an imaginary fascist empire devoid of racism and the ideological commitments that divided Italian from Greek. The new film created the possibility of an Italian imperialism defined by leisure, an alteration of history that could only seem reasonable in a world redefined by sensual consumerism. The stark differences between these two films’ depictions of Italians in the fascist empire reflects a larger transformation of Italian national identity.

In this article I discuss journalist Fabrizio Gatti’s undercover reporting across a variety of multimedia narratives about undocumented immigration, including news articles, illustrated reportages, literary travelogues and digital documentaries. Over the arc of his career Gatti has moved from an aesthetic of camouflage to one of the sceneggiata, which has allowed him to create a migrant stardom revolving around his racialized aliases, the Bilal character in particular. Camouflage is a strategy of racial passing that emerged in Gatti’s early articles for the Corriere della Sera/The Evening Paper. In these articles the subject goes unnoticed and dissolves into the environment that the journalist intends to explore. When Gatti moved to the weekly l’Espresso/The Express in the mid-2000s, his earlier strategies were replaced by exaggerated stagings of his impersonations, that is, by strategies of racial posing. Among his reportages for l’Espresso, the journalist’s undercover work as the Kurdish Bilal in Lampedusa has become so popular that it has marked the birth of a migrant star, Gatti as Bilal, who parodies celebrity culture while criticizing the process of identity building in Italian media. With his travelogue Bilal, his strategies reached such levels of theatricality that the use of sceneggiata, which Gatti himself employs in the travelogue, to examine it becomes invaluable. In the last part of the article, I analyse Gatti’s documentary Sulla via di Agadez/On the Route to Agadez (2009), available through l’Espresso website, and discuss the way it combines the sceneggiata with the sobriety of documentary journalism.

This article focuses on contemporary documentaries about social change in Italy. In particular, I examine the Rome-based ZaLab initiative, an association of media professionals and activists whose video work aims at narrating the stories of marginal social actors. This analysis reflects on the role of ZaLab in current visions of migration in/to Italy, focusing specifically on three documentaries produced by ZaLab: Come un uomo sulla terra/Like a Man on Earth (Segre and Yimer, 2008), Il sangue verde/Green Blood (Segre, 2010) and Mare chiuso/Closed Sea (Liberti and Segre, 2012). Based on a careful film analysis and a series of conversations with the directors, Andrea Segre and Stefano Liberti, I discuss the composition and film-making strategies in these documentaries and assess the significance of such choices in the context of Italian documentary production. The analysis of the documentaries is followed by an investigation of the horizontal practices of communication (both in the production and distribution stages) embraced by ZaLab and their innovative approach to the changes in Italian contemporary communities. Clearly, the notion of citizenship presented in these videos defies the flattening, pejorative images found in mainstream programming and acknowledges the central role played by those social actors who are often silenced or marginalized in the audience-seeking productions of television channels.

Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Eight Reflections on Cinema, Murray Pomerance (2011) Berkeley: University of California Press, 300 pp., ISBN: 9780520258709, h/bk, $65, ISBN: 9780520266865, p/bk, $29.95

Pavese e il cinema. Primo e ultimo amore, Franco Prono (2011) Acireale: Bonanno, 117 pp., ISBN: 978-8-87796-844-9, p/bk, €10

Italian TV Drama & Beyond, Milly Buonanno (2012) Bristol, UK: Intellect, 264 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84150-459-9, p/bk, $30

Terrorism, Italian Style. Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Glynn Ruth, Giancarlo Lombardi and Alan O’Leary (2012) London : IGRS books, ISBN: 978-0-85457-228-1, p/bk, £25

Italian Neorealist Cinema, Torunn Haaland (2012) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, xii–235 pp., ISBN: 0748636110, h/bk, $105/£65

Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa: Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema, Shelleen Greene (2012) London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4411-9043-7, h/bk, $120

The Great Black Spider on its Knock-Kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy, Michael Syrimis (2012) Toronto: Toronto University Press, Xiv–357 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4426-4401-4, h/bk, $85

Ciak, si Puglia. Cinema di frontiera 1989–2012, Oscar Iarussi (2012) Bari: Laterza Edizioni della Libreria, v–xx, 3–92 pp., ISBN 978-8-84204-986-9, p/bk, €9

Incontri cinematografici e culturali tra due mondi, Antonio Vitti (ed.) (2012) Pesaro: Metauro Edizioni, 670 pp., ISBN 978-88-6156-091-8, p/bk €25

Sisters in Cinema: Generations of Italian female filmmakers in dialogue Report of the roundtable, Cinema Farnese Persol, Campo de’ Fiori, Rome, 12 June 2013

CRC Coproduction Meetings, Salon des Ambassadeurs, Palais des Festivals, Cannes – 29th Edition, 21 May 2013

Osservatorio GEMMA – Gender and Media Matter and Magistri Sine Registro Program on Cultural, Gender and Media Processes

Spaghetti Cinema: Incorporating Spaghetti Westerns in Transit: AN International Film Conference on Transculturation and Liminality, Luton Library Theatre, University of Bedfordshire, 11–13 April 2013

Cineroma: an International Summer Seminar on the Cinema and the City, Rome, 11–28 June 2012

Moviement

Comunicazionepuntodoc: Communication between research and profession

The many forms of writing for cinema

Alice and the Other women