Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017

This article presents a history of the rise and fall of adult cinemas in Rome. Primarily through research of the newspaper L’Unità’s digitized archive and an interview with Rome’s leading adult film exhibitor, I discuss the proliferation of adult cinemas, patterns in programming at each cinema, as well as their locations and audiences. I argue that adult film exhibition in Rome was not a marginal or peripheral phenomenon and that audiences, even if mostly male, were rather diverse. Beyond the videocassette boom, this article identifies government-led raids as a main catalyst in closing many adult cinemas. I argue that Mayor Francesco Rutelli’s administration forced the closures of six adult cinemas near the Termini train station in the mid-1990s as part of an urban renewal campaign. This case exhibits many parallels with the campaign, piloted by leaders in New York City, to close adult cinemas near Times Square.

In a 2003 interview, Silvio Berlusconi attempted to revise fascism through explaining that Mussolini did not kill anyone, and instead sent people on island holiday. This article interrogates the formula of internal exile (confino) as vacation through examining nine films, documentaries, and made-for-television movies that depict the exile experience of four prominent Italian intellectuals (Cesare Pavese, Carlo Rosselli, Giorgio Amendola and Carlo Levi). In these texts, all of which fall under the generic classification of male melodrama, the confino event serves as a convenient backdrop to narrate stories that are more pleasant and conform to the traditional logic of desire that dominates the classical cinema. As follows, and in line with Berlusconi’s problematic statement, the distressing events surrounding the practice of confino are disavowed and political confinement is reimagined as holiday.

Although directed by a Francophone Québécois film-maker, Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992) presents a cinematic treatment of Italy that foregrounds exile as theorized by Hamid Naficy’s concept of ‘accented cinema’. Léolo also recasts the family romance trope, which Heinz Weinmann highlights as central to Quebec cinema. Meanwhile, commentators have stressed the deeply political dimensions of Léolo despite Lauzon’s disavowal of any nationalist intent. This film consequently provides insights into the ambivalent role of Italians in Quebec’s struggle to confront the challenges posed by immigration and by its own colonial history. The current article therefore explores Léolo through a framework combining accented cinema and the family romance, and juxtaposes this text with Caffè Italia Montréal, a film which epitomizes accentedness in the context of Quebec’s Italian community. This analysis thus reveals how, in Léolo, a cinematically unasserted Indigenous influence intertwines with overtly fantasized Italianness to complicate Lauzon’s position on national identity. In so doing, this article comes to affirm the centrality of Indigenous concerns for grasping intercultural relationships whether formed through colonialism or contemporary immigration.

This article represents the outcome of a round table organized and conducted by Giacomo Tagliani about the Lessico del cinema Italiano/Lexicon of Italian Cinema (2014–2016). This research and editorial project comprises three volumes and 21 entries that address the history of Italian cinema through an original and challenging approach, namely to detect a list of conceptual clusters able to provide new perspectives over the heritage of Italian films. In this refined version, the authors who took part in that round table, that is, Roberto De Gaetano (also editor of the volumes), Massimiliano Coviello, Luca Venzi and Francesco Zucconi, outline their involvement in the research project, their specific methodological references, their peculiar vision of the history of Italian cinema and eventually their point of view onto its current situation. This written conversation offers a broad survey of Lessico’s key aspects and addresses important methodological, theoretical and critical issues, trying to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among different fields of studies.

REVIEW OF STUDENT FILMS 2014 – SCUOLA NAZIONALE DEL CINEMA

SCHOOLING IN MODERNITY. THE POLITICS OF SPONSORED FILMS IN POSTWAR ITALY, PAOLA BONIFAZIO (2014) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781442615984, p/bk, $34.95

NEW VISIONS OF THE CHILD IN ITALIAN CINEMA, DANIELLE HIPKINS AND ROGER PITT (EDS) (2014) Bern: Peter Lang, 342 pp., ISBN: 9783034302692, p/bk, £40.00

UNFINISHED BUSINESS. SCREENING THE ITALIAN MAFIA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, DANA RENGA (2014) Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 264 pp., ISBN: 9781442615588, p/bk, £19.75

OSSERVATORIO TV, BARBARA MAIO (2014) Creative Commons Public License (http://www.osservatoriotv.it/Benvenuto.html), 228 pp.

SGUARDO, CORPO, VIOLENZA. SADE E IL CINEMA, ALBERTO BRODESCO (2014) Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 366 pp., ISBN-13: 9788857523057, h/bk, €24

SO DEADLY, SO PERVERSE: 50 YEARS OF ITALIAN GIALLO FILMS, VOLUME 1: 1963–1973, TROY HOWARTH (2014) Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press Inc., 233 pp., ISBN: 9781936168507, p/bk, $49.95

STORIA DEI MEDIA DIGITALI: RIVOLUZIONI E CONTINUITÀ, GABRIELE BALBI AND PAOLO MAGAUDDA (2014) Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 182 pp., ISBN: 9788858116272, p/bk, €20

FILM SOUND IN ITALY: LISTENING TO THE SCREEN, ANTONELLA C. SISTO (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp., ISBN: 9781137387707, h/bk, $95

FINIRAI: I RETROSCENA DELLA RIFORMA E IL FUTURO DELLA TELEVISIONE, ROBERTO FAENZA (2015) N. P.: Privately published, 224 pp., ISBN: 9788891091321, e-book, €4.99, p/bk, €17

PALINSESTO: STORIA E TECNICA DELLA PROGRAMMAZIONE TELEVISIVA, LUCA BARRA (2015) Roma-Bari: Laterza, 202 pp., ISBN: 9788858117316, p/bk, €20,00

CINEMA, GENDER, AND EVERYDAY SPACE: COMEDY, ITALIAN STYLE, NATALIE FULLWOOD (2015) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pp., ISBN: 9781137403568, h/c/e-book, $95.00