Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2024

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s encounter with India is well known, but India’s engagement with Pasolini’s work is much less considered. This article puts the work of Pasolini in dialogue with the work of Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most important figures in Indian parallel cinema. Ghatak discussed the Italian director’s work on several occasions. More importantly, Ghatak’s intellectual path and films have notable similarities with Pasolini’s. Both directors, Ghatak and Pasolini, pursued a ‘heretical’ approach to Marxist ideology by contaminating it with a passionate identification with the marginalized communities of today’s Bangladesh and southern Italy, respectively. Drawing from film critic Bhaskar Sarkar’s notion of epic melodrama, I suggest an analysis of two coeval films, Mamma Roma (Pasolini 1962) and Meghe dhaka tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (Ghatak 1960), in order to expose the directors’ complex location between Brechtian aesthetic, epic-religious vision and melodramatic motives. This article argues that these epic-melodramatic films suspend a final interpretation, providing an aesthetic correlative to the unreconciled position of the people the directors aimed to represent.

Since Schatz defined the western genre as America’s foundation ritual, several film critics have emphasized the role of the western as a foundational fiction. Interestingly enough, just like American westerns deal with American identity and its foundational myth, one can find westerns and post-westerns made in other countries that are also concerned with these countries’ national identities. This article analyses how spaghetti westerns set in the United States deal metaphorically with Italian identity and foundational myths, and how post-western films set in Italy approach similar topics more directly. The article considers several films, by directors like Pietro Germi, Sergio Sollima, Florestano Vancini or Pasquale Squitieri, from the perspective of transnational post-westerns in order to scrutinize 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.

The article explores the influence of cinema on Italo Calvino’s writing. Critics and even Calvino himself have tended to construe visibility in his works as purely abstract, pictorial and geometric. However, the article shows that the writer’s style includes references to film form and culture. Precise transmediations of cinematic temporality, techniques and characterization are found in his literary production from Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests) (1947) to Palomar (Mr Palomar) (1983). Drawing on narratology and semiotics, the analysis retraces various para-cinematic techniques in Calvino’s literary corpus, pointing to the 1958 short story La signora Paulatim (Mrs Paulatim) as a prime example of full cinematization. Moreover, it points out that the characterization in Marcovaldo (1963) draws on classical slapstick comedies and anticipates some of the features found in the Fantozzi series. Finally, the article frames the contribution of film culture through the concept of ‘cinematic mode in fiction’.

This article aims to help fill a quasi-void in Italian film scholarship regarding media representations of Italian teen gender identities. It explores the role of Italian performers belonging to the so-called ‘Generation Z’, in terms of their emerging professional trajectories – with a focus on the post-pandemic context – and representations of gender, finding that the ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ played by Italian teen actors in movies and media outlets negotiate emerging cultural and social trends in representing gendered identities. Through a close analysis of filmic and media texts, as well as a trove of data acquired via ten in-person interviews conducted with carefully selected Italian actors, the article also examines how their characters and media personas negotiate traditional gender stereotypes and the cultural status of their profession.

Prominent scholarship on the Italian South has reflected on the otherized, inferiorized and racialized positionality of the region’s territories, cultures and populations within the national Italian debate, with the North functioning as an allegedly virtuous norm that the South constantly fails to conform to. The gendered imagery that inscribes this type of ethnic and territorial subordination permits, in this context, the visualization of anomalous, recalcitrant and undomesticated Southern women that function as a metaphor of the irredeemable otherness of the South. In this article, I use as a starting point three films starring and directed by Leonardo Pieraccioni, namely I laureati (The Graduates) (1995), Il ciclone (The Cyclone) (1996) and Il paradiso all’improvviso (Suddenly Paradise) (2003). I consider these films in order to analyse the screen personas of Tosca D’Aquino and Anna Maria Barbera, both of whom embody, in different ways, the encounter between Southern identity, eccentricity and non-normative corporalities.

In this article, I analyse the narratives of Tre metri sopra il cielo (Three Steps Over Heaven) (Lucini 2004) and its sequel, Ho voglia di te (‘I desire you’) (Prieto 2007) through the gendered paradigm of the spectatorial gaze theorized by Laura Mulvey. These films, I argue, subtly shift the active/male, passive/female paradigm of looking by displacing Step (Riccardo Scamarcio) as the focalizing subject, thereby empowering the films’ female protagonists – Babi (in Three Steps Over Heaven) and Gin (in Ho voglia di te) and female viewers. By subverting norms associated with the gendered gaze, I contend that these films reimagine heteronormative gender roles in Italy in a way that resonated primarily with its female audience. By focusing on women who transgress traditional gender norms, and by presenting a damaged form of masculinity, these films successfully create a space for the female spectator.

Review of: Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema: Legacies and Transformations into the Twenty-first Century, Anthony Cristiano and Carlo Coen (eds) (2020)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 332 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47447-403-0, p/bk, $19.99/$90.00

Review of: Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World, Massimo Riva (2022)

Stanford: Stanford University Press

ISBN 978-1-50362-987-5, e-book

Review of: Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema: Archives from a Film Culture, Dalila Missero (2022)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47446-324-9, p/bk, £19.99

Review of: The Many Meanings of Mina: Popular Music Stardom in Post-war Italy, Rachel Haworth (2022)

Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 272 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-560-1, h/bk, GBP 85.00

Review of: L’Italia che Guarda: Geografie del Consumo Audiovisivo, Giorgio Avezzù (2022)

Rome: Carocci Editore, 201 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-82901-536-8, p/bk, €25.00

Review of: Los Condenados de la Tierra: Un film entre Europa y el Tercer Mundo, Alberto Filippi and Mariano Mestman (2022)

Buenos Aires: Ediciones Akal, 509 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-87836-739-2, p/bk, e-book, €7.99

Review of: Orienting Italy: China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers, Mary Ann Mcdonald Carolan (2022)

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 184 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-43849-060-1, p/bk, $95

ISBN 978-1-43849-062-5, kindle

Review of: Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV, Francesco Buscemi (2022)

Bristol: Intellect, 170 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-406-2, h/bk, £85.00

Review of: Il libro bianco di Pasolini: La raccolta dei processi a Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Aliberti, Alessandro Di Nuzzo and Enzo Lavagnini (2022)

Reggio Emilia: Compagnia editoriale Aliberti, 378 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-89323-464-1, p/bk, €19.00

Review of: Fare storia del cinema: Metodi, oggetti, temi, Fabio Andreazza (ed.) (2022)

Roma: Carocci, 239 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-82901-716-4, p/bk, €26.00