Download or read book Post War Italian Cinema written by Daniela Treveri Gennari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a comparative approach of current theories developed on ideology and an analysis of official documents from the Vatican and the United States Department of State, the book investigates the decisive role that American production companies played in the development of the Italian film industry and their links to the Vatican. This analysis evaluates how the Italian production and distribution industries satisfied the American political and economic interests. American political and cultural ideology of the post-1945 era, is compared with the Roman Catholic ideology in order to assess their cultural propaganda. This is followed by studies of the roles played by key individuals, such as Giulio Andreotti, and institutions such as ANICA and A.G.I.S. involved in formulating the policies and regulations that affected the production and distribution of American and Italian films in the post-1945 era, as well as the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in this process.

Download or read book Italian Neorealist Cinema written by Christopher Wagstaff and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The end of the Second World War saw the emergence in Italy of the neorealism movement, which produced a number of films characterized by stories set among the poor and working class, often shot on location using non-professional actors. In this study Christopher Wagstaff provides an in-depth analysis of neorealist film, focusing on three films that have had a major impact on filmmakers and audiences around the world: Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette. Indeed, these films are still, more than half a century after they were made, among the most highly regarded works in the history of cinema. In this insightful and carefully researched work, Wagstaff suggests that the importance of these films is largely due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled sounds and images rather than, as commonly thought, their particular representations of historical reality.The author begins by situating neorealist cinema in its historical, industrial, commercial, and cultural context. He goes on to provide a theoretical discussion of realism and the merits of neorealist films, individually and collectively, as aesthetic artefacts. He follows with a detailed analysis of the three films, focusing on technical and production aspects as well as on the significance of the films as cinematic works of art.While providing a wealth of information and analysis previously unavailable to an English-speaking audience, Italian Neorealist Cinema offers a radically new perspective on neorealist cinema and the Italian art cinema that followed it."

Download or read book Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism written by Millicent Marcus and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar directors had to come to terms with it, whether in seeming imitation (the early Olmi), in commercial exploitation (the middle Comencini) or in ostensible rejection (the recent Tavianis). Despite the reactionary pressures of the marketplace and the highly personalized visions of Fellini, Antonioni. And Visconti, Italian cinema has maintained its moral commitment to use the medium in socially responsible ways--if not to change the world, as the first neorealists hoped, then at least to move filmgoers to face the pressing economic, political, and human problems in their midst. From Rossellini's Open City (1945) to the Taviani brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982). The author does close readings of seventeen films that tell the story of neorealism's evolving influence on Italian postwar cinematic expression. Other films discussed are De Sica's Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. De Santis's Bitter Rice, Comencini's Bread, Love, and Fantasy, Fellini's La strada, Visconti's Senso, Antonioni's Red Desert, Olmi's Il Posto, Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, Pasolini's Teorema, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, Bertolucci's The Conformist, Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy, Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much provides the occasion for the author's own retrospective consideration of how Italian cinema has fulfilled, or disappointed, the promise of neorealism.

Download or read book Global Neorealism written by Saverio Giovacchini and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Nathaniel Brennan, Luca Caminati, Silvia Carlorosi, Caroline Eades, Saverio Giovacchini, Paula Halperin, Neepa Majumdar, Mariano Mestman, Hamid Naficy, Sada Niang, Masha Salazkina, Sarah Sarzynski, Robert Sklar, and Vito Zagarrio Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period and aimed at recovering the reality of Italy after the sugarcoated moving images of fascism. Lasting from 1945 to the early 1950s, neorealism produced world-renowned masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1947). These films won some of the most prestigious film awards of the immediate postwar period and influenced world cinema. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism. The traditional story notwithstanding, the meaning and the origins of the term are problematic. What does neorealism really mean, and how Italian is it? Italian filmmakers were wary of using the term and Rossellini preferred "realism." Many filmmakers confessed to having greatly borrowed from other cinemas, including French, Soviet, and American. Divided into three sections, Global Neorealism examines the history of this film style from the 1930s to the 1970s using a global and international perspective. The first section examines the origins of neorealism in the international debate about realist esthetics in the 1930s. The second section discusses how this debate about realism was “Italianized” and coalesced into Italian “neorealism” and explores how critics and film distributors participated in coining the term. Finally, the third section looks at neorealism’s success outside of Italy and examines how film cultures in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States adjusted the style to their national and regional situations.

Download or read book Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema written by Laura E. Ruberto and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the influence of Italian neorealist films on world cinema well beyond the post-World War II period associated with the movement. Despite its lack of organization and relatively short life span, the Italian neorealist movement deeply influenced directors and film traditions around the world. This collection examines the impact of Italian neorealism beyond the period of 1945-52, the years conventionally connected to the movement, and beyond the postwar Italian film industry where the movement originated. Providing a refreshing aesthetic and ideological contrast to mainstream Hollywood films, neorealist filmmakers demonstrated not only how an engaging narrative technique could be brought to bear upon social issues but also how cinema could shape and redefine national identity. The fourteen essays in Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema consider films from Italy, India, Brazil, Africa, the Czech Republic, postwar Germany, Hong Kong, the United States, France, Belgium, Colombia, and Great Britain. Each essay explores neorealism's complex relationship to a different national film tradition, style, or historical period, illustrating the profound impact of neorealism and the ways it continues to complicate the relationship between ideas of nation, national cinema, and national identity. Many of the essays identify similar themes or motifs adapted from neorealism, and several essays address a politicized national film tradition that developed in opposition to a monolithic Western aesthetic. In all, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema provides a novel critical understanding of the wide-ranging international impact of a short period in Italian cultural history. Film scholars and students of film history will appreciate this insightful text.

Download or read book Italian Fascism s Empire Cinema written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini’s government that took as their subjects or settings Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship.

Download or read book Italian Cinema Audiences written by Daniela Treveri Gennari and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema's heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project 'Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60', Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema's role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.

Download or read book Re viewing Fascism written by Jacqueline Reich and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-07 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.

Download or read book Fame Amid the Ruins written by Stephen Gundle and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-11-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian cinema gave rise to a number of the best-known films of the postwar years, from Rome Open City to Bicycle Thieves. Although some neorealist film-makers would have preferred to abolish stars altogether, the public adored them and producers needed their help in relaunching the national film industry. This book explores the many conflicts that arose in Italy between 1945 and 1953 over stars and stardom, offering intimate studies of the careers of both well-known and less familiar figures, shedding new light on the close relationship forged between cinema and society during a time of political transition and shifting national identities.

Download or read book Cinema and Fascism written by Steven Ricci and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study considers Italian filmmaking during the Fascist era and offers an original and revealing approach to the interwar years. Steven Ricci directly confronts a long-standing dilemma faced by cultural historians: while made during a period of totalitarian government, these films are neither propagandistic nor openly "Fascist." Instead, the Italian Fascist regime attempted to build ideological consensus by erasing markers of class and regional difference and by circulating terms for an imaginary national identity. Cinema and Fascism investigates the complex relationship between the totalitarian regime and Italian cinema. It looks at the films themselves, the industry, and the role of cinema in daily life, and offers new insights into this important but neglected period in cinema history." -- Book cover.

Download or read book Landscape and Memory in Post Fascist Italian Film written by Giuliana Minghelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study argues that neorealism’s visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism’s complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema and memory. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943) Paisà (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).

Download or read book Giuseppe De Santis written by Antonio Vitti and published by . This book was released on 1996-03-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the founding fathers of the Neo-realist movement and a Communist dedicated to populist filmmaking, Guiseppe De Santis (b. 1917) has been a significant force in Italian cinema. In spite of his crucial contribution De Santis has received little critical recognition and his work has been largely excluded from the canon of traditional cinematic teaching. In this first book-length study of De Santis, Antonio Vitti explores the filmmaker's life and work, and addresses why he has been marginalized as a result of the politics of critical reception in Italian cinema and within the academy. Through critical analysis of such films as Riso amaro (Bitter Rice), Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi ( No Peace Among the Olives), and Cesta Duga Godinu Dana (The One-Year-Long Road), Vitti offers an informative profile of a director who refused to compromise what were often unpopular political and aesthetic principles. De Santis emerged as a strong opponent of government censorship in Fascist Italy and strove throughout his career to remain faithful to his political objectives: to create a genuine popular narrative voice, and to offer, through filmmaking, a form of entertainment for the masses and a means of promoting social and political change. At the same time, possessed of considerable technical abilities and a passion for formalized beauty and sensuality, De Santis resisted the rigid rules for socio-realistic representation dictated by the Soviet Union. He conformed neither to the mainstream nor to the leftist critical expectations of his day. He anticipated, in his own critical approach, the direction of contemporary film theory, and focused on the role of the medium itself as a means of mass communication and a repository of collective imagination. Vitti draws on his extensive personal interviews with De Santis as well as on the latter's previously unpublished writings. This volume captures the intelligence, passion, aesthetic flair, and occasionally fiery temperament of this important filmmaker.

Download or read book The History of Italian Cinema written by Gian Piero Brunetta and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses renowned masters including Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, as well as directors lesser known outside Italy like Dino Risi and Ettore Scola. The author examines overlooked Italian genre films such as horror movies, comedies, and Westerns, and he also devotes attention to neglected periods like the Fascist era. He illuminates the epic scope of Italian filmmaking, showing it to be a powerful cultural force in Italy and leaving no doubt about its enduring influence abroad. Encompassing the social, political, and technical aspects of the craft, the author recreates the world of Italian cinema.

Download or read book Italian Neorealism written by Mark Shiel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-17 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City is a valuable introduction to one of the most influential of film movements. Exploring the roots and causes of neorealism, particularly the effects of the Second World War, as well as its politics and style, Mark Shiel examines the portrayal of the city and the legacy left by filmmakers such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. Films studied include Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Umberto D. (1952).

Download or read book A History of Italian Cinema written by Peter Bondanella and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

Download or read book The Cinema of Franceso Rosi written by Gaetana Marrone and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Francesco Rosi (1922-2015) occupies a unique place in postwar Italian, indeed postwar world cinema. His films show a consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national identity. This important body of work, which has made a vital mark on the works of directors like Martin Scorsese remains to be examined for the English-speaking audience. This study addresses Rosi's films as mosaics fashioned out of "clips" collected from the various stages of production, most specifically from the director's own archival materials. My approach situates each film in its artistic and cultural context, but also attends to the specific forms and ethical commitment that characterize each film"--

Download or read book The Italian Cinema Book written by Peter Bondanella and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ITALIAN CINEMA BOOK is an essential guide to the most important historical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of Italian cinema, from 1895 to the present day. With contributions from 39 leading international scholars, the book is structured around six chronologically organised sections: THE SILENT ERA (1895–22) THE BIRTH OF THE TALKIES AND THE FASCIST ERA (1922–45) POSTWAR CINEMATIC CULTURE (1945–59) THE GOLDEN AGE OF ITALIAN CINEMA (1960–80) AN AGE OF CRISIS, TRANSITION AND CONSOLIDATION (1981 TO THE PRESENT) NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ITALIAN CINEMA Acutely aware of the contemporary 'rethinking' of Italian cinema history, Peter Bondanella has brought together a diverse range of essays which represent the cutting edge of Italian film theory and criticism. This provocative collection will provide the film student, scholar or enthusiast with a comprehensive understanding of the major developments in what might be called twentieth-century Italy's greatest and most original art form.