Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 12, Issue 4, 2024

This article explores the treatment of the face in the work of Palermo filmmakers Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco and proposes several considerations regarding the stark nudity of the face, its rawness and strength, and the relationships that the two filmmakers establish between face and mask. Through an analysis of the cinematic fiction of Maresco and Ciprì – Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn) (1995), Totò che visse due volte (Totò Who Lived Twice) (1998) and Il ritorno di Cagliostro (The Return of Cagliostro) (2003) – as well as their television work on Cinico TV (1989–96), this article demonstrates how the face emerges as a powerful tool that combats aesthetic homogeneity and narrative indoctrination of the media, as well as outlines a grotesquely attractive world.

As a pervasive term in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, ‘nostalgia’ remains theoretically enigmatic and often politically contradictory. This article argues for the critical potential of nostalgia in Pasolini’s political aesthetics through a seemingly unlikely subject: his 1968 film and novel Teorema (Theorem). Set in post-war Milan, Theorem depicts the transformative encounter between a godlike visitor and five archetypes of the bourgeois household. After he leaves, they must reckon with his departure. I suggest that Pasolini’s formal and theoretical interest in nostalgia is crucial to understanding Theorem’s aesthetic invocation of the sacred, which the film stages through an interplay of presence and absence in bodies, spaces and temporalities. Unpacking the etymological roots algos (‘pain’) and nostos (‘return’), my reading forges intertextual connections within Pasolini’s oeuvre while also suggesting that Pasolini’s oblique, materially rooted nostalgia encourages a re-evaluation of the critical productivity of this term more broadly.

The People’s Republic of Poland, an undemocratic state that existed from 1947 to 1989, was politically dependent on the Soviet Union. It relied on its cultural policy of heavily rationing access to products made in capitalist countries; few exceptions were made to this policy, but of them, Italian director and filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s filmography was one of the most important, even though not all of his films were released to the Polish public until 1989. This article focuses on the critical reception of Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘tetralogy of alienation’ in the People’s Republic of Poland during the 1960s and 1970s. Antonioni’s tetralogy comprises L’avventura (The Adventure), La notte (The Night), L’eclisse (The Eclipse) and Deserto Rosso (Red Desert). In this article, I examine how Polish critics grappled with the differences between the cinematic world depicted in these films and the realities of the ‘people’s democracy’ in Poland. I focus on the cultural reception of these films, utilizing reviews published in film magazines, cultural magazines and the daily press from the period.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales) (1972), a reinterpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is undeniably the most controversial – and perplexing – film in his Trilogy of Life. Marked by a cacophonous filming process, one in which English and Italian actors attempted to retell a collection of stories written in a form of English that has been extinct for centuries, the triumphs of I racconti di Canterbury have seldom been recognized. Pasolini’s reinterpretation of Chaucerian dialect is especially understudied, despite how Chaucer was the first English writer to differentiate his characters through written language. My article first focuses on the dialect in Chaucer’s ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ (c.1400) and then, its reimagination in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film I racconti di Canterbury. My research highlights Pasolini’s commendable fidelity to his source material and his success in replicating Chaucer’s representations of class difference.

In Matteo Garrone’s filmography, the choice of locations is always determined by a marked interest in physical reality, approached through an authorial perspective aimed at representing the coordinates of a complex system of human relations and the signs of the exercise of power, in its multiple declinations. In Terra di mezzo (1996) Garrone investigates the Pasolinian space of the Roman suburbs, now populated by Nigerian prostitutes and unemployed Albanians. The filmmaker’s gaze here traces fragments of existence in the forms of an excessive, unfinished and oppressive landscape. In this context, the acceleration towards indefiniteness takes on a clear allegorical value, explicitly referring to the condition of precarious impermanence experienced by the protagonists. This article intends to highlight the most significant characteristics of the authorial work on the forms of the natural and human landscape: their selection, the tendency to their allusive and paradigmatic over-signification, the presence, in them, of the lesson of the models.

In this interview, filmmaker and scholar Simone Brioni talks about the two most recent documentaries which he wrote, Maka (Moutamid 2023) and Oltre i bordi (Beyond the Frame) (Brioni and Sandrini 2023), which share reflections about the visual representation of Africans in media and Italy’s colonial legacy. He discusses the similarities and differences between these films and the documentaries he made in 2012 with/about writers Kaha Mohamed Aden and Ribka Sibhatu, respectively, called La quarta via (The Fourth Road) (Brioni et al. 2012b) and Aulò (Brioni et al. 2012a). In particular, Brioni focuses on the collaborative process with director Elia Moutamid and protagonist Geneviève Makaping to make the documentary Maka. Brioni also talks about how the dialogue from which the documentaries have emerged has progressively become the theme of the film themselves. Other topics of the interview include the use of the documentary to produce academic research, the impact of COVID-19 on the making of the films and the circulation and distribution of the films.

This interview with Monica Guerritore reports on her project of making a film about Italian actress Anna Magnani (1908–73). In the interview, Guerritore talks about the film’s screenplay and her ideas about the construction of the character. The text also entails, through a thorough analysis of the development of Magnani’s career, important reflections on the transformations of Italian cinema, with references to Guerritore’s own experiences as an actress (both for the stage and the screen), stage director, playwright and literary author.

Liliana Cavani accepted the invitation to participate in the fourth edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media (JICMS) studies conference, held at the American University of Rome from 13–15 June 2024. Cavani attended a panel dedicated to her depictions of St Francis before taking the podium for an interview that was moderated by Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College), the co-organizer of the conference and principal editor of JICMS, and Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton University), a leading scholar on Cavani’s body of work from Princeton University. Cavani reflected on her enduring fascination with St Francis despite her upbringing in a secular household, discussed many of her other films, and shared her opinions on the current state of affairs in Italy and beyond. At the end of the session, after Cavani hinted at her plans for the future, the moderators and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome), who co-organized the conference with Laviosa, presented the director with a plaque in recognition of her Inimitable Contribution to World Cinema.