Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016

Much contemporary images of black women in Italian media are marked by the legacy of colonialist propaganda and tend to perpetuate a representation of black women as passive eroticized objects of the white male gaze. In this sense, Ponzanesi’s call for ‘new and less biased representations, which could help to assess the multiple subject positions that black identities now occupy’ is still relevant. This article responds to this call by analysing two Nigerian video films that thematize migration and prostitution trafficking in Italy. By highlighting the complexity of the processes of ‘subjectivation’ taking place throughout the migratory process, these videos invite their viewers to look at the postcolonial subject’s responsibility in shaping the world in which she lives, and offer a representation of the black female subject that is able to go beyond the voyeuristic attitude that characterizes much of the existing contemporary Italian visual culture surrounding this topic.

This article revisits the concept of transnational cinema in light of the laws concerning French and Italian co-productions since the end of World War II, in an attempt to demonstrate how transnational modes of production negotiate with national modes at the level of financial resources and cultural exchange. It is generally assumed that, unlike national cinema, transnational cinema does not erect any boundaries between films produced in different nation states. However, the basic concern that co-production agreements promote is to assimilate co-produced films into a national culture under the direct tutelage of the nation state. Co-production treaties are made in the interest of domestic film markets and are revealing of a notion of cinema that reaches across borders while positing nationality as an imagined community. A definition of transnational cinema that is above and beyond the limits of the national is ultimately at odds with the limitations embedded in co-productions.

This article aims to bring together two major directors, Michelangelo Antonioni and Atom Egoyan, in a way that sheds new light upon their oeuvres. It is inspired by an unrealized venture, a screen adaptation that the two auteurs were supposed to film together in the late 1990s, provisionally entitled Just to Be Together. Focusing on what came before this suspended artistic collaboration, the present study proposes a comparative reading of Professione: Reporter/The Passenger and Next of Kin, developed through the theoretical work of Rosi Braidotti and Richard Dyer. It attempts to rethink the ‘auteur of modernist alienation’ from the perspective of contemporary theoretical frameworks, and beyond the specific context of Italian film culture. At the same time, it argues for a repositioning of Egoyan’s debut feature film in a non-strictly diasporic context, entering debates around accented and transnational models in film studies.

Since the new millennium, approximately 30 Italian documentaries have focused on the Roma, Sinti and other more tendentially nomadic groups. Drawing on writings by theorists including Spivak and Parati, this article contends that many documentaries have successfully articulated counter-hegemonic representations of the Roma, elucidated the counter-histories of second- and third-generation Italian Roma, and denounced the dual subalternity of Roma women, a condition caused by their own patriarchal communities and by the social marginalization of the Roma within Italian society. However, because of limited resources and access, directors have been unable to depict disturbing phenomena affecting the Roma such as forced adoptions and their exposure to health hazards. While cinema’s effectiveness as an informational tool within society’s changing public sphere is increasingly limited, the article outlines ways in which an emancipatory impetus can be developed – via film projects – to reverse the subaltern position of Italian and European Roma.

In this article I discuss Giuseppe Gagliardi’s La vera leggenda di Tony Vilar/The True Legend of Tony Vilar (2006) and Andrea Zambelli’s Di madre in figlia/ From Mother to Daughter (2008) as crossover and transnational documentaries engaging with both internal and international histories of Italian migration that also illuminate Italy’s current postcolonial condition. I claim that both films encourage a reflection on the ability of music and film to travel across national boundaries, engender cultural collaborations and contaminations, and create meaning and identification for different communities and generations. The directors’ and protagonists’ deliberate emphasis on performance and performativity in the construction of the characters on and off stage and the numerous self-reflexive and meta-cinematic elements of the two films, from mockumentary to found footage, disrupt the perceived objective truths often assigned to documentary and point towards more productive ways of representing and interpreting reality.

In 1937, the state-funded Istituto LUCE realized Cronache dell’Impero/Chronicles of the Empire, a short-lived series of documentaries aimed at attesting the activities the Regime was carrying out in the recently conquered East-Italian African territories. Attempting to go beyond the exoticism and clichéd representations usually employed in colonial documentaries, the series resorts to modernist strategies in order to highlight the value of the so-called civilizing mission. By tracing how these strategies were configured, this article looks specifically at the rhetorical use of sound and technology as a means for contributing to the propaganda purposes of the series, primarily the formation of a colonial consciousness. In this respect, technology and sound operate within a symbolic domain in which modernization and other colonial outcomes hinge on the allegedly transformative power of the Regime. Their visual and aural representations belong to the tradition of the political, avant-garde and documentary film practice.

Festival and anti-festival: The Udine Far East Film Festival

River to River Florence Indian Film Festival: An upsurge of affe ctive spaces

Sardinia on the Screen: The Construction of the Sardinian Character in Italian Cinema, Maria Bonaria Urban (2013) Amsterdam: Rodopi (Studia Imagologica), 579 pp., ISBN: 9789042037502, h/bk $149.69

The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film, Barbara Alfano (2013) Toronto: Toronto University Press, 190 pp., ISBN: 9781442644052, p/bk, £36.20

PIERRE SORLIN. MEMORIA NARRAZIONE AUDIOVISIVO, SILVIA LEONZI (ED.) (2013) Roma: Armando Editore, 143 pp., ISBN: 9788866773474, p/bk, 10.00

Commedia nell’Italia contemporanea, I. A. De Pascalis (2012) Milan: Il Castoro, 175 pp., ISBN: 9788880336167, p/bk, 13.18

Zoom d’oltreoceano: Is tantanee sui registi italiani e sull’Italia, Daniela De Pau and Simone Dub rovic (eds ) (2010) Manziana, Rome: Vecchiarelli Editore, 351 pp., ISBN: 9788882472719, p/bk, 30.00