Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2017

Rapsodia satanica (‘Satanic rhapsody)’ by Oxilia (1917) and Addio giovinezza! (‘Goodbye youth!’) by Genina (1918) constitute a cinematographic diptych on the theme of lost youth. While the former is a reinvention of Faust’s deal with the devil with a feminine protagonist, the latter is a homage to the carefree college years. Filmed in an era in which the dream of the Belle Époque clashed with the trauma of World War I, the two films epitomize the challenges of depicting the precariousness of modernity, while experiencing the crisis of Italian silent cinema. Analysing these interrelated questions, the first section of the article compares the marketing strategies through which Rapsodia satanica and Addio giovinezza! affirmed cinema as the catalyst of modernity. The second section examines how the two films adopted different techniques to represent parallel issues, such as the dichotomy of youth– adulthood and the ageing of the diva-model.

This essay analyses Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo celeste (2011) and Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) and considers the relation between the two films. Attending to the films’ shared interest in ‘miracles’ that are as minor and apparently inconsequential as they are elusive, I show that such miracles, reminiscent of others in recent critical theory, figure in both films as means of exiting or altering a present that otherwise appears foreclosed. Miracles become means of restoring what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘belief in the world’, however minimally. In this way, both Corpo celeste and La ciénaga point to the continued salience of Deleuze’s account in Cinema 2 of suspended action and subsequent ‘learning to see’. But both films also foreground, differently and in ways that Deleuze could not have foreseen, the difficulties of such learning in contexts of impasse, economic crisis, austerity and abandonment.

The setting of the TV series Gomorrah – The Series (2014–present) is the Neapolitan district of Scampia, around and inside a large urban housing project called ‘Le Vele’. This setting is where the narrated events (the Camorra’s wars and drug trafficking) find their real-life existence. This article focuses on the element of space, with the streets, the buildings and their surroundings also acting as protagonists of the series. This produces an immersive identification not with a single point of view but with a film context that mimetically represents a social milieu. The TV series takes the viewer inside the miserable corridors of Le Vele, creating a feeling of empathy that relies on space, on the scary pleasure of ‘being there’, witnessing the Camorristi’s wretched lives. Gomorrah – The Series acts as a kind of horror– melodrama–documentary, where space sustains these three components with its indexicality and its charge of uncanny and grief.

The article explores some recurring features found in Pathé’s Italian-French co-productions in the 1950s and 1960s, addressing this corpus of films as a representative sample of the larger co-production trends between the two countries in the period under discussion. The analysis is based on the examination of unpublished documents as well as press material from the archives of the Fondation Seydoux-Pathé (Seydoux-Pathé Foundation) and the Cinémathèque française (French Film Library). As the article evidences, co-productions served as a powerful instrument of transnational cultural exchange, modern marketing practices, and the rethinking and revisiting of country-specific genres. They also paved the way for the exportation and popularization of Italian actors, directors and cinematic style across France. Great attention is paid to how the French specialist and popular press received such co-productions, whether the films’ dual nationality affected their reception and to what extent co-productions contributed to the image of Italian cinema in post-war France.

The concept of feminicide (‘femminicidio’) has been recently introduced to the Italian socio-political context and since 2012 a prolific theoretical debate on the topic has begun, both on traditional media and on the Internet. This article aims at analysing the current online discussion on feminicide and, in particular, the synergy of dialogue and activism which has appeared within the domain of feminist blogs. Drawing from the theoretical and methodological framework of Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), my objective is to investigate the bloggers’ ability to promote existing theories on sexist murders for a larger readership (popularization) and to redefine the notion of feminicide with new socially relevant meanings capable of extending the discursive perimeter of existing feminist theories on the phenomenon (politicization).

The Office Catholique International du Cinéma (OCIC), founded in 1928, established itself as an influential institution that played an important role in setting the Catholic agenda with regards to cinema during an existence that spanned more than 70 years (1928–2001). OCIC derived its influence primarily by maintaining an intermediate position between its national member organizations and the Vatican. This intermediary position, however, was not built overnight. This article looks into the late 1940s and 1950s, when OCIC had to reassert its relevance in the post-war field of Catholic cinema and rebuilding its relationship with the Vatican was crucial to this endeavour. This article investigates this process, making use of the OCIC archives (KADOC, Leuven University) as well as documents related to the Italian Catholic Action, made available through the project ‘I cattolici e il cinema in Italia tra gli anni ‘40 e gli anni ‘70’ of the Università degli Studi di Milano.

Review of student films, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Rome, CSC-Milan, and DARvipem, University of Bologna

1.200 km di bellezza, Italo Moscati (2016), Roma: Luce/Cinecittà

Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Catherine O’Rawe (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 230 pp., ISBN: 978113738146, h/bk, $95.00

A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film, Joseph Luzzi (2014) Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 232 pp., ISBN: 9781421411668, p/bk, $29.95

Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh, Stefania Benini (2015) Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 9781442648067, h/bk, $65.00

Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2015) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 393 pp., ISBN: 9780253015662, p/bk, $35, h/bk, $85

Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film, Monica Seger (2015) Toronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto University Press, 196 pp., ISBN: 9781442649194, h/bk, $55

Il cinema di Marco Tullio Giordana: Interventi Critici, Federica Colleoni, Elena Dalla Torre AND Inge Lanslots (eds) (2015) Rome: Vecchiarelli Editore, 317 pp., ISBN: 9788882473693, p/bk, €30.00

Michelangelo Antonioni. Prospettive, Culture, Politiche, Spazi, Alberto Boschi AND Francesco Di Chiara (eds) (2015) Milan: Il Castoro, 320 pp., ISBN: 9788880339557, p/bk, €18.00

Problemi dell’ informazione: Questioni di genere nel giornalismo italiano, Milly Buonanno (ed.) (2015) 3, vol. XL; pp. 244 (433-677); ISBN 978-88-15-25617-1; ISSN 0390-5195; Il Mulino

Visual Anthropology in Sardinia, Silvio Carta (2015) Bern: Peter Lang AG, 209 pp., ISBN: 9783034309981, p/bk, £45

The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema, Jacqueline Reich (2015) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 414 pp., ISBN: 9780253017451, p/bk, $35

Morte a Venezia: Thomas Mann/Luchino Visconti: Un Confronto, Fancesco Bono, Luigi Cimmino and Giorgio Pangaro (eds) (2014) Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 238 pp., ISBN: 9788849839371, p/bk, €14.00

L’immagine politica: Forme del contropotere tra cinema, video e fotografia nell’Italia degli anni Settanta, Christian Uva (2015) Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 284 pp., ISBN: 9788857518879, p/bk, €24.00