- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies
- Previous Issues
- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018
-
-
‘Queer Italian migrations’: Tonino De Bernardi’s Rosatigre (Tiger Rose) (2000) and the reconfiguring of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, Land of God) (1950)
By Oliver BrettAbstractThe documentary film focusing on queer identities in post-Millennial Italy reveals interesting key features, including the often intense collaboration of filmmakers and their subjects, the hybridity of genre and interrogation of those representations and identities being explored, and the increased agency and performance of participants. While, respectively, requiring further research, these features reflect what appears to be a propensity towards the ‘intertextual’. I approach this aspect here through Tonino De Bernardi’s sensory challenging ‘docu-fiction’ film Rosatigre (Tiger Rose) in 2000, which exploits, alongside the more general conventions of cinema, Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, Land of God) in 1950. Positioned in relation to a corpus of other texts, I consider how these two films explore the issue of ‘migration’ beyond fixed categories. In talking of queers who migrate but also of queering migration, an interconnection of various narratives can be seen to broaden our understanding of the migrant figure in the Italian context.
-
-
-
Discourses of impegno and Italian colonial legacies: Reassessing times, spaces and voices in documentaries on (post)colonial mobility
More LessAbstractThis article examines how Hotel Abyssinie (Plattner, 1996), Aulò. Roma Postcoloniale (Brioni, Guida and Chiscuzzu 2012) and Asmarina (Maglio and Paolos, 2015) explore the entangled relationship between colonial memories, migrations and belongings in contemporary Italy. Since each film addresses the temporality and spatiality of colonial legacies, the assessment of the use of old materials (mainly pictures and found footage) will enable the reflection on the complicated Italian colonial memories; this strand also deals with the analysis of the spaces of (post)colonial interaction through the concept of heterotopia. These artistic strategies, together with some other stylistic choices, will be regarded as aiming to engender either narratives or counter-narratives within the discourse of civic engagement, or postmodern impegno, that each documentary unfolds, and to which it conforms. In so doing, these documentaries stand as representative of an artistic production that is challenging the surreptitiously monolithic image of Italian identity.
-
-
-
From exclusion to expression in A Sud di Lampedusa and Come un uomo sulla terra: Visualizing detention centres along Italy-bound migrant routes
By Teresa FioreAbstractThe article analyses two Italian documentaries – A sud di Lampedusa (South of Lampedusa) by Andrea Segre et al. (2006) and Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth) by Andrea Segre et al. (2008) – whose novelty lies in their focus on the Sahara Desert crossing of undocumented migrants instead of the more common Mediterranean crossing, and in the latter film, the recollection of the traumatic experience of the detention in Africa once they arrive in Italy. The films reverse the effacement typical of news reportages by giving direct voice and agency to the migrants through interviews, or also including the migrants in the filmmaking process. In denouncing the trans-national government-assisted control and exclusion of migrants, the two documentaries visualize through silence, storytelling, and props what remains otherwise ‘undocumentable’ – the detention centres – of which the article offers a brief history as places of ‘legal exception’ both in Africa and Italy.
-
-
-
Continuity and change in Italian discourse on migration: A focus on mainstream television documentaries
By Paolo OrrùAbstractThe goal of this article is to employ the means of critical discourse analysis to verify the contribution made by news documentaries to the discussion on the topic of migration in Italian journalism. My case studies include three documentaries screened on the national broadcaster (RAI): La neve la prima volta (Snow for the First Time) (Cataldi, 2014), Quando Youssef si mise in cammino (When Youssef Started His Walk) (Cataldi, 2015) and La lunga Marcia (The Long Route) (Ricucci, 2015). The documentaries deal with a range of issues regarding migration in the European Union, such as the construction of European external borders; policies of migrant management; human rights; prejudice towards foreigners. The article will take a closer look at lexical terms, metaphors and other rhetorical forms. Linguistic evidence has been jointly analysed with the visual construction on-screen since they both participate in the meaning-making process of the documentary as a whole.
-
-
-
In the eye of the beholder: The Orientalist representation of Chinese migrants in Italian documentaries
More LessAbstractBeginning in the mid-2000s, a number of documentaries about Chinese migration to Italy have been produced both by professional directors and by amateurs, all with no Chinese background, that are mainly aimed at revealing the hidden ‘reality’ of the Chinese immigration population on one hand and, on the other hand, at discarding some of the wide spread prejudices about this group. I selected five of the professionally shot documentaries in order to analyse how they portray the Chinese migrant presence in Italy. While all of these documentaries make an important effort to present Chinese migration to Italy as a positive phenomenon, Orientalism as well as elements of cultural essentialism can still persist. My analysis focuses on the points of view that different directors adopt in depicting Chinese life in Italy, stressing if, where, and how their narratives emphasize cultural distance, otherness and essentialism.
-
-
-
Film Review
More LessAbstractBlaxploitalian: 100 Years of Blackness in Italian Cinema, Director Fred Kudjo Kuwornu (2016), Blue Rose Films/Do the Right Films
-
-
-
Book Reviews
Authors: Gaetana Marrone, Sole Anatrone, Julia Heim, Jacopo Benci, Mikel J. Koven and Roberta TabanelliAbstractIl giovane Fellini nello splendente fulgore della vita, Enzo Lavagnini (2011) Roma: Palombi Editori, 191 pp., ISBN: 9788860603944, p/bk, €15.00
Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative, Emma Bond, Guido Bonsaver and Federico Faloppa (eds) (2015) (Italian Modernities; vol. 21), Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York and Wien: Peter Lang, 467 pp., ISBN: 9783035395136, p/bk, $72.95
A Very Seductive Body Politic: Silvio Berlusconi in Cinema, Nicoletta Marini-Maio (2015) Italy: Mimesis International, 118 pp., ISBN: 9788857526683, p/bk, $14.00
Rewind Italia: Early Video Art in Italy/I primi anni della videoarte in Italia, Laura Leuzzi and Stephen Partridge (eds) (2016) New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey Publishing, 350 pp., ISBN: 9780861967216, h/bk, £30.00
Italian Horror Cinema, Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter (eds) (2016) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 228 pp., ISBN: 9781474419680, £24.99 (trade paper)
S/Murare il Mediterraneo (Un/Walling the Mediterranean). Pensieri critici e attivismo al tempo delle migrazioni (‘Critical thoughts and activism in a time of migrations’), Luigi Cazzato and Filippo Silvestri (eds) (2016) Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 256 pp., ISBN: 9788867603817, p/bk, €18.00
-