Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies Conference

Keynote Address

Prof. Milly Buonanno
Sapienza Università di Roma

Intersections of local and global: transnational influences on the Italian road to serial TV storytelling                                    

The beginnings and the development of domestic TV storytelling are inextricably interwoven with the national culture, identity and heritage with which Italian broadcasting since its inception in the mid-1950s has established and entertained a close dialogue. It would however be impossible to comprehensively account for the history and the peculiarities of Italian TV drama within the framework of a territorial essentialism, without bringing into the picture the presence and impact of what might be called ‘the transnational factor’. Television storytelling in Italy has in fact developed within a cultural space that was tipically porous and open to the influence of foreign art forms and media creative productions. National and non-national or transnational elements have met, co-existed and interacted frequently, albeit differently, within the television environment, helping to shape, maintain or modify the ‘italian-ness’ of the home-grown television fiction. This holds especially true for what concerns narrative serialization – long considered a lowbrow form of popular storytelling to be resisted and rejected. Based on these premises, the speech will address the intersection of national and transnational along, in particular, the difficult road to serialization traveled by the Italian TV drama. Narratives that epitomize key moments in the history of television (La piovra, 1980s; Un posto al sole, 1990s; Gomorra - La serie, 2000s) will be explored to discern how this intersection has affected, without de-nationalizing it, TV storytelling in Italy.
 
Milly Buonanno is Professor of Television Studies in the Department of Communication and Social Research at la Sapienza University of Rome. She is the head of the Observatory of Italian TV Drama (1988–present), the co-chair of the research unit GEMMA-GEnder and Media MAtters (2010-present), and has been the coordinator of the Eurofiction Project (1996-2004) on the European television industry. She sits in the editorial board of several international journals and is associate editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. M.B. has extensively researched and written on television theory and history, television drama, journalism and has pioneered gender and media studies in Italy. Her main book-length publications over the last decade include:  The Age of Television (Intellect, 2008); Italian TV Drama and Beyond (Intellect, 2012); The Sage Handbook of Television Studies (Sage, 2014, co-edited with Manuel Alvarado, Herman Gray, Toby Miller); the edited collections Il prisma dei generi (Franco Angeli, 2014) and Television Antiheroines. Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama (Intellect, 2017).
Intersezioni tra locale e globale: influenze transnazionali
sulla via italiana alla serialità televisiva
 
La nascita e l’evoluzione dello storytelling televisivo domestico sono inestricabilmente intrecciate con la cultura, l’identità e la tradizionale nazionale, con cui la televisione fin dalle sue origini negli anni cinquanta del 900 ha intrattenuto un dialogo costante. Non sarebbe tuttavia possibile ricostruire la storia e cogliere le peculiarità del TV drama italiano senza tener conto dell’influenza di quello che si potrebbe definire ‘il fattore transnazionale’. Di fatto, lo storytelling televisivo italiano si è sviluppato entro uno spazio culturale tipicamente poroso e interattivo nei confronti di formule, modelli, contenuti provenienti da contesti geo-culturali extra-nazionali. È accaduto pertanto che elementi nativi e non nativi si siano mescolati, e abbiano in vario modo interagito, contribuendo a modellare e rimodellare la ‘italianità’ del racconto televisivo. Questa considerazione si applica in particolare ai momenti-chiave delle fasi di cambiamento che hanno dato impulso al processo di serializzazione del TV drama italiano. Coerentemente con tali premesse, l’intervento intende esplorare l’intersezione tra nazionale e transnazionale, locale e globale nella fiction TV italiana, attraverso i casi di tre narrative seriali - La piovra (anni 80), Un posto al sole (anni 90), Gomorra - La serie (anni 2000) - che epitomizzano importanti fasi di svolta nella storia della televisione e testimoniano come il ‘fattore transnazionale’ abbia contribuito alla creazione e alla popolarità di prodotti inconfondibilmente nazionali.
 
Milly Buonanno è stata Professore di Television Studies nel Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale dell’Università di Roma La Sapienza.  Ha fondato e dirige l’Osservatorio sulla Fiction Italiana ed è co-chair dell’Unità di Ricerca GEMMA-Gender and Media MAtters. È membro dell’editorial board di numerose riviste internazionali ed è associate editor del Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. M. B. ha scritto estensivamente su teoria e storia della televisione, serialità televisiva, giornalismo, ed è stata la pioniera degli studi su genere e media in Italia. Le sue principali pubblicazioni nell’ultimo decennio includono, oltre a numerosi articoli e capitoli in riviste e collections internazionali, le monografie The age of television (Intellect, 2008) e Italian TV Drama and Beyond (Intellect, 2012); il manual The Sage Handbook of Television Studies (Sage, 2014, con Manuel Alvarado, Herman Gray, Toby Miller); le curatele Il prisma dei generi  (Franco Angeli, 2014) e Television antiheroines. Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama (Intellect, 2017).
 

Panels

Panel 1: New directions in Fellini studies (I)

Organizers: Frank Burke (Queens University, Canada, Emeritus) and Marguerite Waller (University of California Riverside, United States, Emerita)
 
Chair: Marguerite Waller (University of California Riverside, United States, Emerita)
 
This panel will offer a cultural studies, a postcolonial, and a new philological approach to Fellini.
 
1. Shelleen Greene (University of California Los Angeles, United States)

Racial difference and the postcolonial imaginary in the films of Federico Fellini
 
This essay examines Federico Fellini’s engagement with racial difference and Italys colonial legacy, from his early screenplay and directorial collaborations with Alberto Lattuada and writer Ennio Flaiano, to his final films produced in the postmodern era of the 1980s and early 1990s. Rather than suggest a specific political position or ideology on the part of the director, I argue that Fellini’s films incorporate racial difference as part of his broader representation of Italys postwar era.
 
Shelleen Greene is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include Italian cinema, Black European Studies, and postcolonial studies. Her book, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Racial and National Identities in the Italian Cinema (Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2012), examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in the Italian cinema. Her work has also been published in Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and is forthcoming in California Italian Studies.
 
 
2. Rebecca Bauman (Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, United States)
 
Marketing Fellini: The name as international brand
 
Throughout the world a wide variety of establishments, products and services bear the name of Federico Fellini, so much so that the director’s name has become an international brand. This presentation seeks to explicate why Federico Fellini in particular, more than any other Italian cultural figure, has been adopted for the marketing of Italian-themed products and services. My discussion focuses on the impact of individual Fellini films on marketing strategies and the prevalence of terms such as ‘la dolce vita’ that have become synonymous with the director’s artistic excellence as well as slogans for an aspirational Italian lifestyle. Through a combination of branding theory and cultural criticism I investigate the impact of the iconography associated with “Fellinian” aesthetics that are applied in various marketing strategies around the globe. This analysis of the nuances embodied in the Fellini brand illuminates the international impact of a director whose very name is a metonym for Italian cinema in particular and for Italy at large; a legacy that occupies a complicated space between cultural memory and international commodity.
 
Rebecca Bauman is Assistant Professor of Italian at Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, where she also teaches in the Department of Film, Media and Performing Arts. She received her doctorate from Columbia University and has published essays and book chapters on Italian melodrama, masculinity in Italian cinema, and mafia movies in such publications as the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and Italian Studies, and she is Film and Digital Media Reviews editor for the journal Italian American Review. Her research interests include representations of Italian and Italian American organized crime, fashion studies, and film genre.
 
 
3. Marita Gubareva (Independent scholar and editor, Roma, Italia)
 
Il Casanova di Fellini in relation to the text and reception of Histoire de ma Vie
 
Marita Gubareva will address will address Il Casanova di Fellini in a new light. Although the film has been addressed largely from the perspective of Fellini’s oeuvre—his treatment of gender (masculinity, in particular), the lavishness of his mise-en-scène, the emphasis on the grotesque, and the artifice and postmodernity of his later work, little has been written about the relationship between the film and its source, Casanova’s Histoire de ma Vie. This contribution will demonstrate how Fellini’s film provides a subtle reading of Casanova’s memoirs and reveals numerous parallels to the literary reception of that text.  
 
Marita Gubareva is a free-lance journalist and researcher, based in Rome. She received her first doctorate from Moscow State University with a dissertation on Decadent aesthetics in French and English literature, and her second doctorate from the European University Institute (Florence), with a dissertation on the adaptation of Giacomo Casanovas Histoire de ma Vie for the cinema. She is currently co-editing The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini with Frank Burke and Marguerite Waller. Her research interests include cultural studies (in particular, seventeenth-century and late nineteenth-century aesthetics), Casanova studies, Italian film studies, history of collecting and connoisseurship.

Panel 2: LGBTQIA+  cinema and television

Chair: Alessandro Giammei (Bryn Mawr College, United States)

1. Gaoheng Zhang (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Border crossing and queerness in Call Me by Your Name, Gods Own Country, and Moonlight

Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017, Italy, France, Brazil, USA), Gods Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017, UK), and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016, USA) feature border crossing and queerness in their narratives. Guadagnino depicts Americans living in Italy and a couple with significant age gap, Lee examines a Romanian immigrant working on an English farm where he meets his local love interest, and Jenkins portrays a black drug dealer in Atlanta who eventually reunites with a childhood friend who works as the chef of a diner in Miami. In addition to queer and romantic desires, the filmmakers highlight other points of mutual recognition: Guadagnino features intellectual “wandering” Jews, Lee anchors the storyline in a farm in the countryside, and Jenkins underscores the protagonist’s blackness. Guadagninos concern for representing gay romances is shared by other Western directors: a highlight of cinematic border crossings and contact zones as a backdrop for negotiating gender and race in professional and personal lives. But compared to the other films, Call Me By Your Name lacks a critique of class-based social inequality, revealing the limits of Guadagnino and possibly Italian fiction cinema on gay-themed subjects.

Gaoheng Zhang is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is a leading cultural critic of Chinese migration to Italy, which is the subject of his first book titled Migration and the Media: Debating Chinese Migration to Italy, 1992-2012 (Toronto UP, 2019). He broadly researches on migration, mobilities, multiculturalism, media, rhetoric, ethics, masculinity, and meaning-making.
 
2. Julia Heim (Baruch College in New York, Unites States)
 
Queer specificity in Italian transnational TV
 
Within this age of global political and technological media convergence, what becomes of the specificity of Italian minority experience? My interest, and the focus of this paper, will be to explore whether contemporary transnational productions that have global distribution erase local specificity when making their LGBT characters legible to global audiences. This paper seeks to investigate the kinds of cultural codes being used to represent these Italian LGBT identities. As online LGBT websites and magazines predominantly showcase the supremacy of American made television programing with LGBT content, and the Diversity Media Awards almost exclusively include American programing in their “foreign” award category, it begs the question: is American the only way to be gay? Through content analyses of contemporary “quality” transnational Italian co-productions, we may come to understand what political economies are determining the visual cultural codes of a community fighting for legitimacy.
 
Julia Heim is a Communications Fellow at Baruch College in New York, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Brooklyn College.  Julia is a co-founder of the Queer Italia Network and the Queer Studies Caucus of the American Association of Italian Studies. Her research interests focus on representations of LGBTQ people on Italian contemporary television fictions. She is currently working on a co-edited volume on Queer Italian Media.
 
 
3. Giovanna Maina (Università di Sassari, Italia) and Federico Zecca (Università ‘Aldo Moro’ di Bari, Italia)
 
LGBTQ+ characters in Italian quality television
 
At the beginning of February 2017, a huge controversy has been raised after the airing of the 4th episode of the first season of I bastardi di Pizzofalcone – containing a sex scene between the lesbian cop Alex Di Nardo (Simona Tabasco) and the head of the forensic team Rosaria Martone (Serena Iansiti) – a controversy that also led to a Parliamentary question by a few representatives of the Catholic right. This event can be seen as emblematic of the strong restrictions that still characterize the Italian context when it comes to the representation of LGBTQ+ subjectivities and sexualities, which have been, on the other hand, traditionally ghettoized (when not neglected at all) in Italian television. Nevertheless, in the last few years Italian audiences have witnessed a “small revolution” in terms of queer televisibility, with the increasing presence of LGBTQ+ characters in the context of the so-called new wave of Italian quality television. Through the analysis of specific case studies – including Suburra: Blood on Rome, Gomorrah, Il Miracolo [The Miracle] – this paper will focus on the ways in which queer characters are represented, the discourses that circulate around them in the public sphere, as well as their apparent or mediated political potential.
 
Giovanna Maina is post-doc research fellow at the University of Sassari (Italy). She has worked on a Marie Curie IEF funded research project titled Degradation or Empowerment? Challenging Stereotypes About Women in Porn at the University of Sunderland (UK). She is member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Porn Studies, and member of the editorial staff of Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies. She has recently authored the book Corpi che si sfogliano. Cinema, generi e sessualità su «Cinesex» (1969- 1974). Her main research interests are contemporary alternative pornographies and Italian popular cinema.
 
Federico Zecca is senior lecturer at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro” (Italy). He has published widely on intertextuality, intermediality, media convergence, Italian popular cinema, and US pornography. He is co-editor of the journals Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies and Cinergie: Il cinema e le altre arti; and member of the editorial board of the journal Porn Studies. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Udine/Gorizia FilmForum. Among his books: Gli estremi dell’hard. Due saggi sul porno contemporaneo (2013, with Stephen Maddison) and Cinema e intermedialità. Modelli di traduzione (2013).
 

Panel 3: Cinema and political activism (I)

Chair: Bernadette Luciano (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
 
1. Susanna Scarparo (The Australian National University, Australia)
 
Documentaries for social change: Activism, citizenship and border-crossing in Io sto con la sposa and 18 Ius Soli
 
It has been claimed that the power of documentary to change the world “has become impossible to ignore” (quoted in Winston, Vanstone, and Chi, The Act of Documenting, 1). Can this claim be taken seriously at a time of increased polarisation of public opinion, the rise of so-called ‘fake news’, and the growing reliance on social media to source and distribute world news? Are documentary films able to make a difference and surge above the fragmented, confusing, and noisy voices claiming our attention in the many social and digital spheres of our lives? In other words, how can documentary films contribute meaningfully to social change? In this paper, I attempt to engage with these complex questions through a discussion of two films which are self-declared examples of documentaries for social change: Io sto con la sposa (2014) and 18 Ius Soli. Il diritto di essere italiani (2012). Both films address contested issues of citizenship, national identity, belonging, and mobility. These are matters which, arguably, rate highly among the most pressing concerns of our time. 
 
Susanna Scarparo is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at The Australian National University. She is co-author of Reggae and Hip Hop in Southern Italy: Politics, Language and Multiple Marginalities (Palgrave, with Mathias Stevenson, 2018), Reframing Italy: New trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking (Purdue UP, with Bernadette Luciano, 2013), author of Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction (Troubador, 2005) and has co-edited Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures (Cambridge Scholars Press, with Sarah McDonald, 2006), Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (University of Delaware Press, with Rita Wilson, 2005) and Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Italian Culture: Representations and Critical debates (Special issue of the journal Italian Studies, with Charlotte Ross, 2010). She has also published numerous articles on Italian cinema, women’s life writing, migration, and historical fiction.
 
 
2. Gianluca Fantoni (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
 
Global intersections and artistic interconnections in the cinema of the Italian Communist Party (1946 - 1966)
 
This paper discusses the transnational and artistic influences that can be observed in the documentaries and propaganda films produced by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1946 to the mid-1960s. As far as the early production is concerned, the paper argues that the aesthetic of PCIs films was consequent to the subject of the film, and ultimately the outcome of a cultural and political elaboration carried out by the Party leadership and willingly adopted by Party filmmakers. Communism, modernity and the left-wing North were associated with Socialist realism, in accordance with the Zhdanov Doctrine. Neorealism was the style of choice to represent backwardness and misery, and therefore the South of the country. The lesson of the Russian avant-garde was known, and references to it can be found in the PCI’s early productions. In the 1960s, however, PCI productions changed markedly, especially due to the influence of American Direct Cinema and Jean Rouchs Cinéma vérité. The improvements in PCI film propaganda were also a consequence of the work by a new generation of professionals. The presentation will be using both conventional tools and a video-essay commentary.
 
Gianluca Fantoni is Lecturer in Italian Language and History at Nottingham Trent University. His research interests revolve principally around the history of the Italian Left, cinematic propaganda, cinema and history, and the public and political use of history. His book Italy through the Red Lens: Italian Politics, Society and Culture in Communist Propaganda Films (1946–79), is on the cinematographic production of the Italian Communist Party (Berghahn, forthcoming in 2020). 
 
 
3. Marina Guglielmi (Università di Cagliari, Italia)
 
Italia anni Settanta: il ruolo di film e documentari nella ‘rivoluzione psichiatrica’
 
Una “rivoluzione psichiatrica” investe l’Italia fra gli anni Sessanta e il 1978, anno dell’approvazione della Legge 180 per la chiusura dei manicomi, più nota come Legge Basaglia. Il movimento dell’antipsichiatria investe l’Europa e in Italia si diffonde tramite la politica, la stampa, la televisione e il cinema. In quegli anni vengono prodotti dei documentari e dei film-verità con cui si offre al grande pubblico un materiale documentario visivo sui manicomi la cui originalità riguarda soprattutto la fruizione “cinematografica”. La divulgazione popolare dei temi della psichiatria fa sì che i documentari psichiatrici inizino a essere proiettati in serate speciali nei cinema. Ai primi due documentari d’inchiesta prodotti dall’Istituto Luce - Lavorano e sorridono gli ospiti di Cogoleto (1951) e Visita al manicomio criminale di Aversa (1952) – segue nel 1969 il documentario di Sergio Zavoli dedicato ai manicomi e a Franco Basaglia, I giardini di Abele. Lo guarderanno circa dieci milioni di persone. Del 1975 è il film-verità Nessuno o tutti, di Marco Bellocchio. La storia dei documentari negli anni che precedono la Legge 180 può essere letta oggi per rivalutare il loro ruolo svolto nella costruzione dell’identità nazionale. Essi hanno costituito uno strumento di formazione dell’opinione pubblica ancora tutto da rivalutare.
 
Marina Guglielmi insegna Teoria della letteratura all’Università di Cagliari. Fondatrice della rivista online «Between». Aree di studio: Media studies (graphic novel, serie televisive), Geocritica, Women studies, Psicanalisi e Letteratura. Fra le pubblicazioni: Piani sul mondo. Le mappe nell’immaginazione letteraria, eds. Marina Guglielmi - Giulio Iacoli (Quodlibet, 2012), Adaptation. The Transformations of Stories Through Code-Switching, eds. Marina Guglielmi - Linda Htcheon - Massimo Fusillo, («Between», online, 2012); Le Grandi Parodie ovvero i Classici fra le nuvole (NPE, 2013); Sorelle e sorellanza, eds. Marina Guglielmi – Claudia Cao (Cesati, 2017); Raccontare il manicomio. Franco Basaglia fra parole e immagini (Cesati, 2018).
 

Panel 4: Italian crime film: cognition, anxiety and emotion (I)

Chair: Massimiliano Pistonesi (Istituto Europeo di Design, Roma, Italia)
 
1. Massimiliano L. Delfino (Columbia University, United States)
 
Children and Catharsis in Italian Crime Films of the 1970s
 
Contemporary scholarship holds that during the anni di piombo Italian crime films—polizieschi—allowed spectators to reach an emotional catharsis in the face of the pervasive violence plaguing Italy. During this period of political violence and organized as well as unorganized crime spreading uncontrollably through Italian streets, these films allegedly enabled viewers to purge themselves of the fear and intimidation they were subjected to in real life. In this paper, I show the limits of the established understanding of catharsis in this context and delineate better the cultural function of the specific cathartic dynamic at play in this filone of films. Central to this re-evaluation of the category of catharsis is the retracing of the genre’s moral and experiential core to the on-screen victimization of underage individuals. This investigation thus not only provides new tools for understanding the emotional mechanism at play in Italian crime films; it more importantly also shows how these films’ aesthetics of violence can help us reach a deeper understanding of the cultural dimension of 1970s genre cinema, and the vital role that popular media played in provoking an affective political response to one of the bloodiest periods in Italian history. 
 
Massimiliano L. Delfino is a PhD Candidate in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from La Sapienza University in Rome and a MA in Italian Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. His research interests include post-war Italian political cinema and literature, and experimental cinematic and literary works of the twentieth century. His dissertation focuses on Italian representations of political violence during the anni di piombo in film and literature. His article on Mafia and contemporary Italian film titled “A Cinematic Anti-Monument against Mafia Violence: P. Diliberto’s La mafia uccide solo d’estate” has appeared in Annali d’Italianistica (2017).
 
 
2. Massimo Locatelli (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italia)
 
(Dis-)engaging bodies: riflessività ed emozionalità nel giallo all’italiana
 
Tra gli anni Sessanta e gli anni Settanta, lo spostamento del dibattito politico e culturale sui temi della partecipazione personale e del coinvolgimento fisico contribuì a spingere il sistema dei media verso lesplorazione di linguaggi sperimentali, “espansi” e/o “incarnati”.  Molti registi in Europa e negli Stati Uniti allargarono i limiti dello stile classico di regia cinematografica, iscrivendosi in quella logica produttiva che David Bordwell ha descritto come intensified continuity . Da allora, molte convenzioni stilistiche “intensificate” fanno uso di trigger percettivi visivi e sonori per attivare forti risposte emotive, non solo nella produzione di genere, ma anche nel cinema dautore o – oggi – nella televisione di qualità. Il Giallo allitaliana, con la sua insistenza selvaggia su marche di genere e convenzioni “fear-relevant”, è un risultato esemplare di quellansia di provocare ed esplorare nuove forme di coinvolgimento fisico. Nel mio contributo analizzerò alcune scene esemplari dei principali titoli dellepoca (Argento, Di Leo, Fulci, Petri, Rosi), per stabilire un parallelo con la contemporanea evoluzione internazionale, e cercherò di mostrare infine come lesperienza di fruizione offerta da quella filmografia abbia contribuito a riconfigurare i modelli pubblici di relazione sociale e politica – la nostra coscienza riflessiva – come individualizzati ed emozionalizzati.
 
Massimo Locatelli, Associate Professor at the Catholic University in Milan, is Founding member of NECS, the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies; member of the editorial board of Cinéma&Cie and of the scientific committee of Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies; former co-editor of Bianco&Nero. On topics related to his paper, he recently published ‘The Never Ending Zoom: Italian Giallo in the Era of Emotions’, Bianco&Nero, 587, 2017, ‘The Psychological Construction of Emotion. A Filmological Approach’, Comunicazioni Sociali, 2, 2017 and two volumes on genre theory and the thriller: Perché Noir. Come funziona un genere cinematografico (Vita e Pensiero, 2011); Psicologia di unemozione. Thriller e noir nelletà dellansia (Vita e Pensiero, 2017).

 
3. Marco Paoli (University of Liverpool, UK) 
 
Creating an Italian noir cues framework to test the manipulations and measurements of the viewer’s identification process with narrative characters
 
This paper will contribute to research into film analysis related to the manipulations and measurements of the viewers identification process with narrative characters. The central hypothesis of a potential cues framework is that identification with a narrative character is a multidimensional experience for which different dimensions are evoked by different audio-visual cues. The conceptualization of identification distinguishes six dimensions: a spatiotemporal, a perceptual, a cognitive, a moral, an emotional, and an embodied dimension. Each of these dimensions is influenced by specific audio-visual cues, which represent various aspects of the narrative characters perspective and spatial experience and their impact on the viewers’ identification process. Through a stylistic analysis of the cinematic techniques used in a selection of post-war Italian noir films (such as for example Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo) this paper aims at detecting specific audio-visual cues which have an influence on the abovementioned six dimensions of the conceptualization of the viewers identification with certain characters. It will be argued that from a cognitive perspective, a non-empirical approach and an empirical approach could be implemented in order to test the propositions.
 
Marco Paoli is Lecturer in Italian and Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. His main areas of research are Italian crime fiction and Italian cinema. He is particularly interested in the Italian economic miracle and its influence on crime as reflected in Italian literature and cinema of the post war period. He has published studies on, among others, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Carlo Lizzani, Fernando Di Leo and Paolo Virzì. He is currently working on the concept of noir in the Italian context from a gender, cognitive and narratological theoretical approach.  

Panel 5: Representations of Rome

Chair: Annachiara Mariani (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States)
 
1. Leoni Schmidt (Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand)
 
Filmic drawing: Rome’s Triumphs and Laments in an expanded field of practice
 
William Kentridge pioneered filmic drawing in the late twentieth century. His early films used low-tech photographic methods to animate drawings as narratives in apartheid South Africa. Using techniques of the pentimento and the slowness of time-lapse photography, his practice positioned itself between media, later expanded into projections for opera and transnational statements, for example in response to the trauma of the current global refugee crisis. Rome: Triumphs and Laments is a 550-metre drawing on the walls of the Tiber, a public communication about the history of the city. Mimicking the film strip on a massive scale, this work takes drawing far beyond its once subservient role as preparation for the main event of painting, sculpture, or architecture. It is partly due to the confluence with film that drawing has been salvaged from its erstwhile prefatory role. Film and drawing together enables the expansion of the latter while contributing critically to the interruption of suture in the former. This paper also presents a glimpse of New Zealander Kurt Adams 39-minute Greyscale Drawing and Chinese Sun Xun’s 40-metre Maniac Universe installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
 
Leoni Schmidt is the Director: Research & Postgraduate Studies at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand. She holds a doctorate in Art History on the structural correlation between form and meaning in studio practices at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an MA (Fine Arts) and a BA (Fine Arts). Her recent research focuses on the expanded field of drawing, particularly in relation to history and political trauma in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
 
 
2. Valeriano Durán Manso (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain)
 
TPrincipio del formulario
he image of Italy in the classic cinema. Spaces and characters from Hollywood melodramas in Cinecittà (1951-1967)
 
Italy is very attractive country for the film industry. Its history, landscapes, monuments, cultural elements and the character of its people have captivated the filmmakers and spectators from all over the world. With a very developed cinematography since the silent period, directors of many countries decided to shoot there during the sound period, especially United States. Thus, when the World War II ended, Cinecittà Studios became an Italian Hollywood where the American stars collaborated with the Italian actors. Peplum, historical films, comedy and melodrama were the genres most developed in these years, especially between 1951 and 1967. Thus, the melodrama had an important development in films such as Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife) (Vittorio De Sica, 1953), The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954), Summertime (David Lean, 1955), The Roman spring of Mrs. Stone (José Quintero, 1961), Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minnelli, 1952) or Rome Adventure (Delmer Daves, 1962), that were filmed in cities such as Rome, Venice or Verona. The objectives of this work are to reflect on the tourist image that showed these Hollywood films shot in Italy, to observe which spaces are represented and to know which male and female characters are prototypes.
 
Valeriano Durán Manso is a Professor in the Department of Marketing and Communication at the University of Cadiz (Spain) and Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Seville. He is a researcher at the Research Group on Media Analysis, Images and Audiovisual Stories (AdMIRA) of the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the University of Seville. His lines of research are articulated around the film adaptations of Tennessee Williams, the construction and analysis of the audiovisual character, the classical, Spanish and Italian cinema, and the film representation of the History of Education.  
 
 
3. Carla Molinari (Leeds Beckett University, UK)
 
The urban dimension as film character. Rome in The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino
 
Beside the several prizes won, as the Acadamy Awards in 2014, and the well-deserved international celebrity that the film gave to its director, Paolo Sorrentino, La grande bellezza (2013) is a powerful example of how cinema can be useful for architectural studies. In particular, the urban scenarios designed for depicting a Roman upper-class group of bored intellectuals, have a pivotal role in the film: the city is indeed one of the main characters. This paper focuses on the analysis of how Rome is presented and critical interpreted in La grande bellezza, arguing that the urban context is threated and conceived as key, active element of the film. More specifically, it will be studied how, through the use of montage, music and dialogues, Sorrentino is creating two different urban dimensions, based on two different kinds of Rome: one dark, contemporary and brutal, and the other sublime and beautiful, but trapped in the past. The final aim is to understand the relevance of Rome and its fictional representation in La grande bellezza, underlining the power of cinema in narrating and transforming the urban context.
 
Carla Molinari is currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Leeds Beckett University and Honorary Associate of the University of Liverpool, conducting research on innovative interpretation of sequences and montage in architecture. She has a PhD in Theory and Critic of Architecture (University Sapienza of Rome) and has published on cinema and architecture, on the conception of architectural space and on cultural regeneration. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious British Academy Fellowship by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and in 2014 she was the recipient of the Best Young Critic of Architecture Prize (presS/Tletter, Venice).

Panel 6: Filmmaking in Fellini: From the ontology of film to the aesthetics of painting (II)

Chair: Moira Di Mauro-Jackson (Texas State University, United States)
 
1. Sandra Meiri (The Open University of Israel)
 
2. Odeya Kohen-Raz (The Open University of Israel)
 
Dreams, guilt, and casting: Fellini 8½ and the ontology of film
 
8½ is a meta-film in which Fellini tackles the freedom of cinematic creation by describing the challenges and demands of pre-production, especially casting. The successful casting of a leading role is a realization of collective desire (of audiences, as well as directors and producers) that answers the question of fantasy—“What does the Other want?” Thus, the actor/character becomes a fantasy object engaging spectators with film. In life, attempting to answer the question of fantasy always entails faulty imagined scenarios. Such a scenario underlies Guido’s dreams, memories and fantasies: He believes that his mother wanted and still wants him to remain chaste and pure; being unable to live up to this scenario results in guilt feelings—causing stagnation and endless indecisiveness. This becomes evident in the screen-tests scene (a “textual mise-en-abyme”/“metaphor of origin”), when Guido cannot decide which actresses will play the roles of the characters duplicating the women in his life. Involving guilt in the process of casting suggests that it is an inherent part of the cinematographic image, as well as the process of creation—its translation from fantasy to film. Setting free the filmmaker’s imagination and creative forces thus depends on ridding oneself of guilt.
 
Sandra Meiri is Senior Lecturer and academic supervisor of film studies in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts, The Open University of Israel. Her research focuses on film and: psychoanalysis; theory; gender and gender-crossing; holocaust representations; ethics and aesthetics. Her articles have appeared in international refereed journals. She is the author of Any Sex I Can Do You Can Do Better: Gender-Crossing in Narrative Film (2011), co-author of two text books on film theory and is presently finishing a book (accepted for publication by Bloomsbury Academic) on narrative film and the ethics of psychoanalysis, co-authored with Odeya Kohen Raz.    
 
Odeya Kohen Raz is Lecturer in the School of Audio & Visual Arts, Sapir Academic College. She also teaches in the Steve Tisch School for Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, and is a teaching coordinator in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts, The Open University of Israel. Her research deals with ethics in Israeli cinema and Holocaust representations, historical space in films, reflexivity, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. Her articles have been published in international refereed journals, and she is currently co-authoring a book (accepted for publication by Bloomsbury Academic) on narrative film and the ethics of psychoanalysis with Sandra Meiri.
 
 
3. Hava Aldouby (Open University of Israel)
 
Ekphrastic fear/ekphrastic hope: On border crossings and Fellini’s film-painting hybrids
 
In Fare un film (1974), Fellini toyed with the idea of transforming film into (a) painting: “riuscire … a fare di una pellicola un quadro.” His painterly turn has bred intriguing visual events, which this paper highlights through Mitchell’s concept of ekphrastic fear and hope. Ekphrastic fear meets intermediality with a drive to “regulate the borders,” whereas ekphrastic hope optimistically aspires to “overcom[e] otherness.”  While ekphrastic fear is manifest in Pasolini‘s La Ricotta (1963), or Godard‘s Passion (1982), Mitchell‘s “hope” is applicable to Fellini‘s film/painting hybrids. Steering away from his contemporaries’ alienating devices, Fellini smoothly weaves painting into his films. He thus signals the “post-medium condition,” almost four decades before its acknowledged emergence. The collapse of medium-specific borders easily maps onto 1960s political hopes. But is ekphrastic hope still imaginable today, when border crossings are a matter of profound anxiety? I will conclude with this question by looking at contemporary video-art’s engagement with painting.
 
Hava Aldouby is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts, the Open University of Israel. Her research focuses on moving-image art: video, experimental cinema, and new media. She is the author of Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film (U Toronto Press, 2013), contributed to Ori Gersht: History Reflecting (MFA Boston, 2014), and is currently editing the collection Shifting Interfaces: Presence and Relationality in New Media Arts of the Early 21st Century (Leuven University Press, forthcoming 2019). She is currently preparing a monograph on contemporary video art and painting: Old Masters in a Moving Mirror. Her paper “Fellini‘s Visual Style(s): A Phenomenological Account” is forthcoming in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Fellini, edited by Frank Burke and Marguerite Waller.

Panel 7: A transnational perspective of TV series

Chair: Carmen Spanò (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
 
1. Anna Manzato (Università IULM, Milano, Italia)
 
Terapie adattate: la traduzione culturale di In Treatment in Italia
 
L’intervento intende discutere, nel più ampio contesto del dibattito globale/locale, la versione italiana di BeTipul (2005-2008), serie israeliana che ha avuto largo successo con la versione statunitense (In Treatment, 2008-2010) ed è approdata anche in Italia con lo stesso titolo (2013-2017). L’obiettivo è quello di discutere le modalità di traduzione culturale, secondo due direzioni parallele e complementari:

• Analisi testuale degli episodi, con specifica attenzione alle dimensioni tematiche e narrative oltre che al linguaggio televisivo;
• Analisi della ricezione della serie, in senso ampio; saranno considerati un campione qualitativo di stampa e pagine Facebook dedicate. Questo consentirà di individuare da un lato la posizione critica verso il prodotto e l’eventuale tematizzazione del formato transnazionale, dall’altro la ricezione da parte del pubblico della serie, considerando anche il grado di consapevolezza degli elementi globali/locali.

Si potrà quindi rispondere alle seguenti questioni, nel contesto del tema della televisione transnazionale:

• Quali sono le specificità tematiche nazionali introdotte nella serie italiana? Esiste un’attenzione al contesto socio-culturale nazionale nella scelta di personaggi e storylines?
• Che tipo di risonanza si è sviluppata intorno alla serie?
• Che tipo di appropriazione si è sviluppata da parte del pubblico?

 
Anna Manzato è Ricercatore universitario in Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi presso l’Università IULM di Milano. Ha partecipato a ricerche sui media per la RAI-VQPT, l’OssCom dell’Università Cattolica di Milano, l’Istituto Gemelli-Musatti di Milano e l’Associazione Interessi Metropolitani di Milano. In diversi saggi si è occupata della trasformazione del consumo e dei contenuti mediali, soprattutto televisivi. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni, ‘The canon of style: fashion in factual entertainment’ Comunicazioni Sociali, 1, 2017; The Young Pope: an Italian celevision case study (con Antonella Mascio), Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies Vol. 7:3, 2019.
 
 
2. Carmen Spanò (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
 
 
Audience engagement with multi-level fictional universes: the case of Game of Thrones and its Italian fans
 
My analysis focuses on the relationship between national audiences and the trans-media structure of the popular television series Game of Thrones. The shows imaginary universe has been conceived in a way that allows complex and diverse forms of audience responses and engagement. Instead of following the genre rules, “Game of Thrones articulates a striking refusal of the hopeful mythologies of high epic fantasy” (Tasker and Steenberg 189) by focusing on the brutal, the extreme, and the overall injustice and chaos that permeate a society in which war and death appear to be inescapable. Through offering up this systematic subversion of the rules, the show manages to generate contradictory feelings in audiences, ranging from fervent appreciation to agonized discomfort. In this paper, the textual schematic of Game of Thrones is examined through the emotional reactions of Italian fans to themes and events of the show. In particular, the analysis of Italian followers comments on Game of Thrones, as reported in their own words, will be instrumental to illustrating the reasons for their passion for the series as well as the main concerns that arise during the viewing of this TV program.
 
Carmen Spanò holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communication from the University of Auckland (New Zealand). She graduated in Humanities (MA) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy). She has been nominated for a Teaching Fellowship at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include trans-national and international production and distribution of TV programmes, trans-media/cross-media storytelling, and trans-national television consumption and reception. She writes film and TV series reviews for the Italian sites Mediacritica, Leitmovie and Nocturno, and she worked as content curator for the popular Italian movie magazine FilmTV.
 
 
3. Eleonora Sammartino (Kings College London, UK)
 
Remaking national identity. Postcolonial discourses at the intersection of gender and race in Tutto può succedere
 
At the centre of migratory flows for the past 30 years, Italy has been reconfigured as a multicultural society increasingly characterised by racial tensions, as also demonstrated by a small group of serials aired on Rai 1 that recognise the presence of afrodescendant subjects in the country. Among them, Tutto può succedere (Rai 1, 2015-2018) stands out as a rare remake of an American TV series, Parenthood (NBC, 2010-2015). I argue that this process of cultural translation significantly reveals anxieties that underlie contemporary Italian society, due to recent migrations and its long-unacknowledged colonial past. With reference to Parenthood, in this paper I will highlight how postracial discourses are superseded by postcolonial ones in Tutto può succedere. Through the adoption of an intersectional approach, I will examine the interracial relationship between Feven, an Eritrean-born woman, and Carlo, demonstrating that racial discourses are displaced onto gender preoccupations in a retreatist narrative that leaves race directly unaddressed. However, I claim that the characterisation as exotic Other of Feven, who crucially hails from one of Italy’s former colonies, reveals the persistence of colonial stereotypes in Italian society and media, creating a friction between progressive impulses and reactionary attitudes.
 
Eleonora Sammartino holds a PhD in Film Studies from Kings College London, with a thesis on the relationship between gender identity and the contemporary American film musical. She is a Teaching Associate in Film Studies at Kings College London and Reading University, and convenes film history courses at Imperial College London and the BFI. Her research interests include American film and theatre musical, feminist theories and popular media, star studies, and identity politics in Italian media. She has published articles in EJAS, Film Studies, and has contributed to edited collections in Italian.

Panel 8: Cinema and political activism (II)

Chair: Bernadette Luciano (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

1. Anna Botta (Smith College, United States)
 
Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Gianni Celati’s Visions of Crumbling Houses: Cinema of slowness as resistance to modernity
 
Jia Zhangke’s “slow cinema” (De Luca and Barradas) can be understood as an act of resistance to the speed of transformations imposed on China by post-Mao socialist market economy.  In particular, his Still Life shows the impact that the Three Gorges state-run hydro-electric dam project had on the social fabric of the local population. The entire city of Fengjie had to be evacuated before disappearing under the waters of an artificially created lake. Jia Zhanghe’s original aesthetics focus on ruins and the demolition process. Gianni Celati’s 2003 documentary, Visioni di case che crollano also focuses on farmhouses made obsolete by Northern Italy post-war industrialization.  His traveling camera lingers with exceptionally slow long takes on the ruins scattered across the Po River delta region. The film is punctuated by interventions of the art critic John Berger who reads passages reflecting on the new aesthetics that those ruins impose to our gaze.  He views them as “pockets of resistance” to “the great defeat” of our globalized world. Using Marc Augé’s theorization of ruins and Walter Benjamin’s notion of objet enfoui, I will examine the two films as examples of a new international cinematographic aesthetics which presents a particular sense of cinematic time and duration.
 
Anna Botta is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Language and Literature at Smith College. She teaches literary theory, modern and postmodern literatures, and Italian literature and cinema. She has published two co-authored books, Calvino newyorkese (Avagliano, 2002) and Le eccentriche (Tre lune, 2003). Together with Michel Moushabeck, she has recently co-edited a special issue of the Massachusetts Review on “Mediterraneans” (2014). She has also published articles on both the literature and the cinema of Gianni Celati and Luigi Ghirri’s photography.
 
 
2. Bernadette Luciano (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Irene Dionisio’s Le ultime cose: Landscapes of economic crisis and moral debt
Dario Zonta’s 2017 book L’invenzione del reale features conversations with ten contemporary filmmakers whose innovative hybrid works, Zonta argues, have contributed to a renewal of Italian cinema. While Zonta’s discussion on hybridity and the blurred boundary between fiction and documentary is not in itself new, it is not surprising that many of today’s most pioneering filmmakers bring to their feature films an approach, aesthetic and language that emerge from their experiences in documentary filmmaking. Central to many of these films is the exploration of previously unfamiliar or marginalized spaces that become central to the films’ narrative. Irene Dionisio, though not included in Zonta’s decalogue, can be said to belong to this company of filmmakers.  Her first feature film, Le ultime cose, set in a pawnshop in Torino scrutinizes the space of the pawnshop itself, the people who work there and those who go there to pawn their “last things”. Dionisio’s re-invention of this space that becomes a metaphor for debt-ridden contemporary Italy offers a re-reading of a compromised and corrupt social and emotional landscape through three intersecting stories drawn from experiences the director had witnessed in her months inside the pawnshop. 
Bernadette Luciano, Professor of Italian at the University of Auckland, specializes in Italian cinema and cultural studies. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Italian cinema, film adaptation, Italian women’s historical novels, women’s autobiographical writing, and literary translation. She is co-author (with Susanna Scarparo) of Reframing Italy New Trends in Italian Women's Filmmaking (Purdue UP, 2013), author of The Cinema of Silvio Soldini: Dream, Image, Voyage (Troubador, 2008) and co-editor (with David G. Mayes) of an interdisciplinary book  New Zealand and Europe: Connections and Comparisons (Rodopi, 2005).
3. Leonardo De Franceschi (Università di Roma Tre, Italia)
 
Conflicting visual citizenship. New voices from the audiovisual Italian arena
 
Ius soli, ius culturae, second generations. Italy in 2017 split up for months on the destiny of over 800.000 minors raised and for the most part born in this country. In 2018 a new law promoted by Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, set up even harder conditions for the approval of applications for citizenship and enables the loss of citizenship for people sentenced for terrorism. It is more and more urgent to re-launch a conversation on the state of visual citizenship and on what we mean by Italianness, problematizing the perception of Italian ‘color of the nation’ as something self-evident. In the last few years, this need for rights and new narratives is beginning to be expressed in films and series also through the experiences of second-generation performers and directors. This paper aims at offering a reasoned look at the image of this generation in transit as promoted by Italian films, documentaries, TV and web series.
 
Leonardo De Franceschi teaches Film history and Postcolonial film and media studies at Roma Tre University. He’s interested in audiovisual productions expression of subaltern subjects and groups and of modes of negotiation of dominant national narratives in Italy. He runs the website Cinemafrica and the blog Cinemafrodiscendente. His latest publications include La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta. Le seconde generazioni in Italia fra cinema e serialità (Aracne, 2018), Lo specchio e lo schermo. Sguardi postcoloniali su Africa e afrodiscendenti (2017) and L’Africa in Italia. Per una controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano (Aracne, 2013).

Panel 9: Contemporaneity and sociopolitical representation: Reflections on the classical auteur in Italian cinema

 
Chair: Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton University, United States)
 
The goal of this session is to trace the development of postwar Italian filmmakers and their artistic influence on the national cinema of the New Millennium. The primary focus is on social, political, and gender issues and how they have come to shape the visual culture of our times.
 
                                                                                               
1. Alessandro Giammei (Bryn Mawr College, United States)
 
Reviving a cult: Suspiria
 
Suspiria is, by far, the most acclaimed and influential work by Dario Argento: the one film that turned him into an international master of the horror genre. While his Italian audience, both in terms of moviegoers and film critics, largely preferred Argento’s gialli (and in particular Profondo rosso), the rest of the world discovered Argento through his mother’s trilogy and granted Suspiria the status of cult. My paper interrogates this cultural phenomenon under the lens of reception theory, considering the ways in which, for the recent 40th anniversary of the films release, Suspiria has been the object of a popular and technical revival (which included a restoration, a new theatrical release, and of course Luca Guadagnino’s Hollywood re-make).
 
Alessandro Giammei is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Africana Studies. He has taught at NYU, Princeton University. His publications address interdisciplinary topics at the crossway of the Renaissance and later modernity. His first book, Nell’officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja (Il Verri, 2014) won the Harvard Edition of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2015. He then published a collection of essays titled Una serie ininterrotta di gesti riusciti (Marsilio, 2018) and is now completing a book manuscript on Ariosto in the Machine Age.
 
 
2. Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton University, United States)
 
L’attualità di Francesco nella trilogia di Liliana Cavani
 
Al contrario di altri artisti che si sono confrontati con la vita Francesco di Assisi in uno o due film, Liliana Cavani gliene ha dedicati ben tre: Francesco di Assisi (1966), Francesco (1989), e Francesco (2014). In questo giovane, per condizione di nascita destinato ad essere un ricco mercante, che partecipa malvolentieri alle strutture gerarchiche del suo tempo e che dedica la sua esistenza agli emarginati, Cavani intravede una meta precisa, non pretesto ma esperienza da emulare: una figura del tutto particolare che viene prima della contestazione del ‘68; la funereità della confusione e del dubbio degli Anni Ottanta traslati nel personaggio interpretato da Mickey Rourke; un diverso trasgressivo del terzo millennio che accoglie nuove istanze “globali” (l’attenzione ai deseredati, la tutela dell’ambiente, l’impegno per la pace, il rapporto con l’Islam). Per Francesco, la regista si rimette in gioco da artista, riproponendo una visione del mondo sempre attuale.
 
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia è ordinaria di Letteratura italiana moderna all’Università di Princeton. È autrice di molte opere, tra cui La drammatica di Ugo Betti (AAIS Presidential Award), New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema (1999), The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The cinema of Liliana Cavani (MLA Scaglione Prize), Lo sguardo e il labirinto (ed. italiana riveduta), ed ha curato l’Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies (International Prize Rubettino). Ha prodotto film e documentari e collabora a riviste specializzate. Sta completando uno studio critico sul cinema di Francesco Rosi per Oxford University Press.
 
 
3. Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta)
 
The contemporaneity of a classic: Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano
                                                        
Taking its cue from the Deleuzian concept of the “out-of-field,” which is “neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless present,” the paper focuses on the interplay in Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano between long shots of the bandit and close-ups of his face, between shots taken from sources which are seen and those that remain unseen, between the visible and the invisible. This interplay will be examined in the light of Leonardo Sciascia’s observation that the primitive Sicilian peasant did not apprehend the same film that Rosi actually wanted his audience to see because of a disjunction between the eye that perceives images with immediacy and the mind that receives and deciphers them at a slower pace. Drawing on both Gérard Genette’s formulations on the function of analepses and ellipses within narrative textuality and Deleuze’s notions of the time-image, I argue that Rosi’s use of the flashback exemplifies the ability of the cinematic recollection image to convey  “a deeper memory, a memory of the world directly exploring time, reaching in the past that which conceals itself from memory.”                                                                             
 
Gloria Lauri-Lucente is Professor of Italian and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta.  She is Head of the Department of Italian and Director of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies. She coordinates the MA programme in Film Studies. She is co-editor of a number of critical collections, the most recent of which are Jane Austen’s Emma: Revisitations and Critical Contexts (Aracne, 2011), Style in Theory. Between Philosophy and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2013), and E.M. Forster Revisited (Solfanelli, 2015). She is currently completing a monograph on the filmic adaptations of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Literature.

Panel 10: Transnational cinematic representations

Chair: Jörg Helbig (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
 
1. Jörg Helbig (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
 
Vedi Venezia e poi muori. The role of Venice in British and American movies
 
The film composer Ennio Morricone once famously declared his love for Italy by contrasting his native country to Americas dream factory: "I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said no thank you. I prefer to live in Italy." Morricones statement speaks volumes about the great appeal of the Italian way of life not only for Italian citizens but also – and especially so – for foreigners. For many people in the English-speaking world, Italy stands for beauty, passion and romance, and this is reflected in a long list of British and American movies. David Leans film Summer Madness (1955) perfectly illustrates this attitude. Set in Venice, the film recounts the love affair between an inexperienced American spinster (Katherine Hepburn) and her passionate Italian lover (Rossano Brazzi). Here, like in numerous other British and American movies (which were often Italian co-productions), La Serenissima serves as a backdrop and inspiration for a romantic love story. In my paper, I will analyse the role of Venice in several anglophone films from Adrian Brunels silent movie The Man Without Desire (UK 1923) to Paul Schraders thriller The Comfort of Strangers (USA/Italy/UK 1990). Special attention will be paid to the citys function as a catalyst for erotic encounters. The films discussed can thus be seen as contributions to Italian erotic cinema, a chapter of Italian film history that still has to be written.
 
Jörg Helbig  received his PhD at the Free University of Berlin. Since 2004 he is a Full Professor for English and American Culture Studies at the Alpe-Adria-University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He has published widely on film history, intermediality, narratology and visual culture. Among his most recent publications are edited volumes on Horror Cult Movies (Schüren, 2017 with A. Fabris), Science-Fiction Cult Movies (Schüren, 2016 with A. Fabris), Digital Games (Halem, 2016 with R. Schallegger) and Visual Media (Halem, 2016). He has also written an Encyclopedia of Beatles Movies (Schüren, 2016). He has also authored a volume on Eroticism in Italian and British Cinema (Trier: WVT 2019).
 
 
2. Luca Bandirali (Università del Salento, Italia)
 
Transnazionale/territoriale: il paesaggio cinematografico del Salento
 
Sebbene una produzione episodica di film nell’area geografica del Salento (nella regione Puglia, Italia meridionale) si possa registrare fin dagli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso, è soltanto dal 1996, con il primo finanziamento pubblico locale a una produzione cinematografica (Pizzicata di Edoardo Winspeare), che si creano i presupposti per la creazione e lo sviluppo di un cinema territoriale. Nei venti anni successivi, la nascita e il consolidamento della Film Commission pugliese, unitamente alla residenza sul territorio di un discreto numero di cineasti, hanno gettato le basi di una filmografia locale con spiccati tratti distintivi, il più evidente fra i quali è il rapporto con il paesaggio. Contestualmente la Film Commission ha generato un forte potere di attrazione sulle produzioni internazionali (Europa, Stati Uniti, India), che hanno utilizzato il Salento come set codificando un altro tipo di paesaggio. Questo intervento intende presentare alcuni casi di studio in grado di esemplificare gli approcci locali e transnazionali al paesaggio, sia in ambito documentaristico che finzionale.
 
Luca Bandirali è dottorando presso il Dipartimento di Beni Culturali dell’Università del Salento; è abilitato per la II fascia nel settore concorsuale 10/C1. Fa parte del comitato di redazione di Segnocinema. È membro del Consiglio di Amministrazione della Fondazione Apulia Film Commission. Ha pubblicato su riviste peer reviewed come Comunicazioni sociali, Cinergie, Imago, Fata morgana, Lavventura, Mediascapes, H-ermes. Fra le sue pubblicazioni in volume: Nellocchio, nel cielo. Teoria e storia del cinema di fantascienza (Lindau, 2008); Il sistema sceneggiatura (Lindau, 2009), Filosofia delle serie tv (Mimesis, 2012).
 
3. Saverio Giovacchini (University of Maryland, United States)
 
The sense and sensibility of the transnational Italian western: The spaghetti western as Atlantic sensibility
 
 Building on Lino Miccichè’s famous attempt to end the critical impasse concerning the definition of Neorealism, I propose that the spaghetti westernwas part of a specific kind of historically contingent sensibility with its own set of political goals as well as its own linguistic topoi, and tropes that was broader in scope than cinema. At the center of the spaghetti sensibility was not the reconstruction of Italy after Fascism, but the reformulation of the Euro-American West at the end of colonialism. As the West was forced to confront the rise of the former colonial, or economically colonized, world, a revolution occurred also at the level of language. It is this cultural and political revolution that the spaghettis represented. I shall argue that the Italian and American spaghettis are an Atlantic intellectual and aesthetic response to the re-articulation of the Euro-American West in the face of the rise of the so-called Third World. To this rise and to these historical responsibilities the spaghettis responded with a multiplicity of narrative strategies, at times engaging critically and directly Euro-American colonialism and its responsibilities, other times turning the Western genre into a cinema of masks and camouflage.
 
Saverio Giovacchini is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies. He is the author of Hollywood Modernism (Temple UP) and, with Robert Sklar, the editor of Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Mississippi, UP ). His most recent essays on two cosmopolitan filmmakers, actor John Kitzmiller, in Black Camera (Spring 2015) and producer Joseph Levine, in Jon Lewis, ed., Producers (Rutgers UP, 2015), are both part of his current monographic project, The Celluloid Atlantic: Cultural Co-Production and the Creation of the Cinema of the West, 1945-1975. 

Panel 11: Roundtable Genere e media in Italia: soggetti, politiche, rappresentazioni

L’intento della tavola rotonda è quello di presentare e discutere i nuovi orientamenti di indagine dell’Unità di ricerca GEMMA (acronimo di GEnder and Media MAtters) istituita presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza-Università di Roma. GEMMA nasce dalla consapevolezza della crescente rilevanza e complessità del nesso ‘genere e media’ nella società contemporanea, in cui si osserva e si sperimenta sia una espansione senza precedenti dello scenario mediale, sia una diffusa problematizzazione dell’assunto a lungo indiscusso del ‘binarismo di genere’. Dalla sua costituzione nel 2010, GEMMA si è impegnata nella ricerca e nell’analisi delle politiche di rappresentazione di genere nell’ambiente mediale ipersaturato in cui viviamo, privilegiando approcci analitici e interpretativi volti a esplorare continuità e cambiamento nella costruzione mediale di identità e modelli di genere. Senza rinunciare all’approccio rappresentazionale, i più recenti orientamenti di ricerca di GEMMA individuano nuovi oggetti e nuovi percorsi di ricerca. Prendendo in esame una varietà di media - dalla televisione alla pubblicità, alle campagne di comunicazione pubblica, dai periodici per adolescenti ai social networks e alle piattaforme di dating – i lavori presentati nel corso della tavola rotonda mettono prevalentemente a fuoco le forme di agency dispiegate da individui, gruppi, istituzioni, coinvolti nella creazione, produzione, consumo di testi mediali sul genere. 
 
 
Introduce e coordina: Milly Buonanno (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
1. Milly Buonanno (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
Processo per stupro e il suo doppio: televisione, femminismo, cambiamento sociale
 
Nel 1978, per la prima volta nella storia della televisione italiana (nonché del sistema giudiziario nazionale) una troupe della Rai composta da sei attiviste femministe fu autorizzata ad accedere a un’aula di tribunale per registrare un processo per stupro. La trasmissione del documentario ebbe enorme risonanza nell’opinione pubblica, messa di fronte alla ‘violenza simbolica’ (Bourdieu)   perpetrata in un’aula di giustizia sulla vittima di una violenza sessuale. Il mio intervento si focalizza su questo caso senza precedenti, per argomentare come “Processo per stupro” – peculiare esempio di processo ‘issue-oriented’ (Cucklanz) – si sia efficacemente trasformato in un testimone d’accusa contro i pregiudizi sessisti della cultura giuridica italiana. Altrettanto importante, il documentario ottenne che la visione femminista dello stupro entrasse nella consapevolezza collettiva e nel dibattito nazionale sulla legge di riforma del delitto della violenza sessuale. Ipotizzo in conclusione che l’inedita alleanza tra la televisione e il femminismo, insieme a una serie di fattori contestuali, abbia consentito a Processo per stupro di realizzare una ‘rivoluzione simbolica’ (Bourdieu) di forte e prolungato impatto.
 
Milly Buonanno è stata Professore di Television Studies nel Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale dell’Università di Roma La Sapienza.  Ha fondato e dirige l’Osservatorio sulla Fiction Italiana ed è co-chair dell’Unità di Ricerca GEMMA-Gender and Media MAtters. È membro dell’editorial board di numerose riviste internazionali ed è associate editor del Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. M. B. ha scritto estensivamente su teoria e storia della televisione, serialità televisiva, giornalismo, ed è stata la pioniera degli studi su genere e media in Italia. Le sue principali pubblicazioni nell’ultimo decennio includono, oltre a numerosi articoli e capitoli in riviste e  collections internazionali, le monografie The age of television (Intellect, 2008) e Italian TV Drama and Beyond (Iintellect, 2012); il manualeThe Sage Handbook of Television Studies (Sage, 2014, con Manuel Alvarado, Herman Gray, Toby Miller); le curatele  Il prisma dei generi  (Franco Angeli, 2014) e Television antiheroines. Women behaving badly in crime and prison drama (Intellect, 2017).
 
 
2. Franca Faccioli (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
Come parlano le istituzioni. Sguardi di genere nella comunicazione pubblica
 
Il mio paper prende in esame, con un approccio di genere, un percorso della comunicazione pubblica italiana in relazione  al  tema delle politiche e delle campagne di comunicazione sulla violenza contro le donne. Il caso di studio è il Dipartimento delle Pari Opportunità che dal 2006 affronta con continuità di contenuti e di approcci, anche in legislature diverse, il problema della violenza contro le donne e realizza alcune campagne di comunicazione. Obiettivo dell’analisi qui proposta è delineare i tratti più significativi di un percorso di comunicazione pubblica su un tema complesso e difficile quale quello della violenza contro le donne, allo scopo di ricostruirne punti di forza e criticità sia nella definizione delle politiche da adottare,  sia nella rappresentazione che di queste e della definizione del problema viene proposta attraverso le campagne di comunicazione.
 
Franca Faccioli è Professore Ordinario di Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale di Sapienza Università di Roma, dove insegna Comunicazione Pubblica e  Comunicazione Sociale e Istituzionale. Suoi campi di studio sono: il rapporto tra comunicazione, governance e civic engagement; la comunicazione pubblica e la rappresentazione sociale dei problemi pubblici. Tra i suoi lavori: Public engagement e civic agency: percorsi di educazione alla cittadinanza, in Serpieri R., Tota A.  (a cura di) Quali culture per altre educazioni possibili?, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2018; Public Engagement, Local Policies and Citizens' Participation:  An Italian Case Study of Civic Collaboration, in Social Media + Society July-December 2016 (con Roberta Bartoletti); Comunicare nel pubblico: itinerari di un percorso complesso, in Sociologia della comunicazione, 50, 2015 Anno XXVI; Il gioco dei ruoli, in Il prisma dei generi (a cura di Milly Buonanno), Franco Angeli, Milano (con S. Fabrizio), 2014.
 
 
3. Paola Panarese (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
L’ inevitabile clichè. I processi produttivi delle immagini di genere nella pubblicità italiana
 
Il contributo analizza la produzione delle immagini pubblicitarie di genere, per comprendere in che modo i professionisti italiani percepiscono e contribuiscono a costruire le rappresentazioni di maschilità e femminilità. L’ipotesi è che il peso degli obiettivi di marketing e le caratteristiche strutturali della pubblicità (la brevità, l’ampio utilizzo di immagini iconiche, il diffuso ricorso ai media di massa) limitino la possibilità di innovazione e sperimentazione. Il metodo è l’intervista in profondità, sottoposta a pubblicitari in ruoli dirigenziali che lavorano in agenzie nazionali e internazionali con sede in Italia, dividendo equamente il gruppo di testimoni privilegiati per genere e ruoli. L’analisi rivela l’esistenza di schemi cognitivi ricorrenti e processi produttivi condivisi: a una posizione estremamente critica nei confronti delle immagini di genere della pubblicità italiana, si accompagna la percezione che i limiti riconosciuti siano in larga misura inevitabili e le responsabili individuali ridotte.
 
Paola Panarese  è Professore Associato di Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi (SPS-08) presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza, Università di Roma, dove insegna Pubblicità e strategie di comunicazione integrata. Svolge attività di docenza e di ricerca, occupandosi in particolare di media studies, giovani, pratiche e consumi culturali, etica, genere, pubblicità e comunicazione d’impresa. È autrice di numerosi articoli, saggi e monografie, tra cui, negli ultimi anni: con J.C Suárez Villegas e M. Marín Conejo (eds.), Comunicación, género y educación. Representaciones y (de)construcciones, Dickinson, Madrid, 2019; con V. Giordano e S. Parisi (eds.), Rischio, trasgressione, avventura. Esperienza e percezione del limite tra gli adolescenti, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2017; con L.A. Guadarrama Rico, J. Vilchis Valero., J.C. Suarez Villegas (eds.), La desigualdad de género invisibilizada en la comunicación, Dickinson, Madrid, 2017; con F. D’Amato, Pubblicità e comunicazione integrata. Modelli, processi, contenuti, Carocci, Roma, 2016.
 
4. Francesca Comunello (LUMSA, Roma, Italia) e Francesca Ieracitano (LUMSA, Roma, Italia)
 
Oltre gli stereotipi di genere? Processi di self-presentation nel dating online: il caso AdottaUnRagazzo
 
In contrasto con la retorica argomentativa propria di parte del cyberfeminism degli anni Novanta, che attribuiva potenzialità liberatorie all’ICT, ricerche recenti hanno mostrato come negli ambienti digitali mainstream continuino a prevalere rappresentazioni di genere stereotipate.  Il nostro contributo si sofferma su AdottaUnRagazzo, una piattaforma di dating online che adotta esplicitamente un frame distante dall’attribuzione di ruoli tradizionale, in cui la metafora prevalente è quella del negozio, nel quale le donne possono “fare shopping”.  Abbiamo analizzato 123 profili appartenenti a utenti donne, di età compresa tra i 30 e i 35 anni, considerando: le pratiche di self-presentation e impression management messe in atto dalle utenti; la presenza e il ruolo di stereotipi di genere nell’ambito della self-presentation delle utenti; le forme di negoziazione con il frame proposto dalla piattaforma (in termini di adesione, capovolgimento, ecc.).
 
Francesca Comunello (PhD) è Professore Associato di sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi alla LUMSA (Roma), dove insegna Internet studies e social media management; Società, globalizzazione e nuovi media; Sociologia dei processi culturali. Presso lo stesso Ateneo è presidente del corso di laurea in Marketing & Digital Communication. La sua ricerca si concentra sulla comunicazione e i media digitali: relazioni sociali mediate dalle tecnologie digitali, social network site, comunicazione mobile, social media e comunicazione d’emergenza; ageism e media digitali. Ha pubblicato su riviste quali Media Culture and Society, The Sociological Review, Semiotica, Games and Culture.
 
Francesca Ieracitano (PhD) è ricercatrice in sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Umane della LUMSA (Roma), dove insegna Sociologia della comunicazione e teorie dei media; Generi e storytelling. Le sue ricerche recenti si sono concentrate sul processo di costruzione dei frame nelle notizie e sugli effetti della rappresentazione mediale dell’immigrazione sui policy marker dell’Unione Europea; sulla rappresentazione degli stereotipi di genere negli anime; sui comportamenti a rischio online e sulla webreputation degli adolescenti.
 
 
5. Silvia Leonzi (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
All you need is star. La ‘vetrinizzazione del sé’ ai tempi di Instagram
 
La navigazione attraverso diversi media consente di identificare l'esistenza di linee narrative coinvolte nei processi di vetrinizzazione del sé delle celebrità. Adottando un approccio transmediale, è possibile analizzare il modo in cui star, vip o celebrities mirano a ottenere, da un lato, un numero significativo di fan e follower negli ambienti dei social media e, dall'altro, di capitalizzare la loro "visibilità sociale". Nella mia discussione focalizzerò l'attenzione sull'evoluzione del concetto di divismo e celebrità nel corso del tempo, in relazione ai cambiamenti sociali e culturali, alle innovazioni tecnologiche e alla creazione di nuovi pubblici. Farò inoltre riferimento ai principali risultati di un’indagine condotta sulle modalità di autopromozione delle celebrities all’interno di Instagram, in relazione al contesto italiano.
 
Silvia Leonzi è Professore Associato in Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma. Insegna Industria Culturale e Media Studies e Transmedia Studies. I suoi interessi scientifici sono relativi al campo della comunicazione, del transmedia storytelling e dei consumi culturali. Tra le sue principali pubblicazioni, Homo Communicans (2013), Transmedia Storytelling e Audience Engagement (con R. Andò, 2014), Power and Communication: Media, Politics and Institutions in Times of Crisis (2015).
 
6. Mihaela Gavrila (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
Adolescenti. Il prisma dei generi tra comportamenti mediali e rivolta contro le istituzioni
 
La “complessità non intenzionale” (Thompson, 1995) dei testi culturali incorpora inevitabilmente anche i modelli maschili o femminili che andranno a incidere sui gusti, sugli atteggiamenti e sui comportamenti - in altre parole sulla definizione identitaria - dei ragazzi e delle ragazze (Kara Chan 2014; Jamieson & Romer 2008). In un’età «vulnerabile e meravigliosa» (Doito, 2014), quale è quella dell’adolescenza, le diverse esperienze di cambiamento legate alla pubertà, alla maturazione cognitiva, alla modifica della rete dei rapporti sociali che si susseguono in rapida successione, influiscono, spesso in modo conflittuale e contraddittorio, sulla relazione con sé stessi e con gli altri e comportano inevitabilmente una ridefinizione, da parte dell’adolescente, dell’immagine di sé.
Sulla scorta di queste considerazioni, è stata condotta una ricerca su adolescenti, stili di fruizione e contenuti della tv e dei rotocalchi per ragazzi e ragazze, allo scopo di indagare i consumi mediali dei giovani italiani e i modi in cui questi impattano sulle dinamiche di self presentation e sullo sviluppo dell’identità, andando a creare una “coscienza di genere”.
 
Mihaela Gavrila insegna Culture e Industrie della Tv presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma. Presso lo stesso Dipartimento è Responsabile Scientifico del MediaLab. Laboratorio di Arti Visive, Radiofonia e Produzione Multimediale e Componente del Collegio dei Docenti del Dottorato di ricerca in Comunicazione, Ricerca Sociale e Marketing. Dal 2017 è componente del Comitato Media e Minori del Ministero per lo Sviluppo Economico, in rappresentanza delle Istituzioni.  Collabora da anni con la Scuola Superiore di Polizia e con la Scuola Interforze di Polizia e, dal 2015, e componente del Comitato Scientifico e Academic Coordinator per l’European Joint Master Programme Cepol (European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training).
 
 
7. Anna Lucia Natale (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
Raccontare la maternità. Le madri nella fiction televisiva
 
Studi recenti, italiani e internazionali, hanno rilevato un più equilibrato orientamento dei media nella rappresentazione delle identità e delle relazioni di genere, in particolare nella fiction televisiva. Questo contributo esplora le capacità di rinnovamento della fiction su un terreno che, nel contesto di una cultura patriarcale e familista come quella italiana, si presta particolarmente alla reiterazione di modelli stereotipati di donna: il racconto della maternità. Attraverso alcuni studi di caso, si mette in luce il tentativo della fiction italiana di coniugare tradizione e modernità nella costruzione dei profili materni, di rielaborare i contenuti simbolici della tradizione culturale e narrativa italiana per renderli più sintonici con le trasformazioni del nostro tempo.
 
Anna Lucia Natale è Professore Associato presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma, dove insegna “Storia della radio e della televisione”. Si occupa inoltre di rappresentazioni televisive, con particolare riferimento alla fiction. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni: Non più e non ancora. Il protagonismo femminile nella fiction italiana, in M. Buonanno (a cura di), Il prisma dei generi (Angeli 2014); Sulle onde sonore. Strategie e usi sociali della musica alla radio (1924-1940), in A. I. De Benedictis e F. Monteleone (a cura di), La musica alla radio: 1924-1954 (Bulzoni 2015); In the Beginning There Was the Radio… Contexts and Genres of Radio Entertainment, in F. Corsini (a cura di), Italian Pop Culture: Media, Products, Imageries (Viella 2018).
 
 
8. Giovanni Ciofalo (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
‘Cooking show’. I generi in cucina
 
Il cooking show costituisce un format peculiare, originato da una complessiva risemantizzazione culturale del cibo (Brost 2000) e basato sull’ibridazione tra la spettacolarizzazione delle pratiche culinarie e le logiche di gamification. Genere onnivoro per eccellenza, in quanto capace di nutrirsi di ogni “cibo” (dai dessert al cibo di strada, dalla cucina stellata a quella casalinga) e di ogni pubblico (dai più tradizionali ai più sofisticati), il cooking show si basa su una formula dinamica (Leer, Povlsen 2016), prevedendo sempre una specifica struttura narrativa, determinata dalla differente tipologia di format di riferimento (traditional cooking show, gourmet cooking show, cooking game show, etc). Il mio contributo si concentrerà sull’analisi delle modalità di rappresentazione del gender, attraverso un’indagine condotta in relazione ai più famosi cooking show trasmessi in Italia, distinti in funzione sia del contesto di produzione (italiano o straniero), sia in funzione di altre variabili, riconducibili alla dimensione del setting, dei temi affrontati, della scelta del conduttore/dei conduttori, della presenza di esperti e di concorrenti.

Giovanni Ciofalo è Professore Associato in Sociologia dei processi culturali e comunicativi presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma. Insegna Sociologia della comunicazione, Teorie dei media e Internet e Social Media Studies. I suoi principali interessi scientifici sono relativi al campo della comunicazione, dei social media e dei consumi culturali. Tra le sue principali pubblicazioni, Infiniti Anni Ottanta (2011), Homo Communicans (2013), Potere e comunicazione: Media, politica e istituzioni in tempi di crisi (2015).
 

Panel 12: Undoing/Redoing Fellini (III)

Chair: Frank Burke (Queens University, Canada, Emeritus)
 
This panel will provide re-readings of the director’s work intended to unsettle assumptions about that work and its relationship to signification.
           
1. Antonella Sisto (Providence College, United States)
 
Sounding out Fellini
 
Antonella Sisto will be “Sounding Out Fellini,” attending to and tuning into the aural spaces of his films, their multi-textured, complex, resounding. Her essay will explore how Fellini’s cinema is replete with musics and sound as cultural expressivity that chart social and cultural times, tastes, and ideologies, from the popular canzonette, tantalizing jazz a la mode, to nationalist and political tunes. At the same time in a more complex sense—in an epistemological turn—sound becomes a tool for a sonic exploration of ideas: a cinema that thinks with/through sound. She will address La dolce vita as a musical continuum that fills up the vacuity of precarious existence, thus pointing (as an idea) to the ways in which sound as created artifact, through its own surplus, has the power to undermine subjectivity, while in the breaks of the continuum, sounds of nature become vehicles for an appeal to intimacy, interiority, and relational being. 
 
Antonella Sisto teaches Italian at Providence College and Rhode Island College. She received her PhD from Brown. A recipient of a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, she has taught at Smith College and UMass Amherst. Her first book is Film Sound in Italy Listening to the Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and she is currently working on a trans-disciplinary project on sound and modernity, using film, visual and sound art, and everyday sonic interaction to explore how sound, in its cross-cultural affective significance can work as an aesthetic, ethic, and eco-critical acoustic proposition to better understand and relate to the world around us.  
 
 
2. Marguerite Waller (University of California Riverside, United States)
 
Il Maestro Dismantles the Master’s House:  Fellini’s Undoing of Gender and Sexuality
 
Marguerite Waller reads Fellini’s iconography of gender as it plays out in the fluid and precise rhizomatic relations suggested by Fellinis images. Fellini’s decidedly “discomforting” stagings of the Western patriarchal sex/gender system as well as the “wonder” of the felliniesque that spectators regularly, if ambivalently, respond to, link in surprising and mutually illuminating ways with twenty-first century feminist, gender, sexuality, queer, and decolonial efforts to move beyond, or away from gender. This essay sketches just a few of the possibilities generated by reading Fellini in relation to Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Sylvia Federici, Donna Haraway, Maria Lugones, among others.
 
Marguerite Waller is Professor Emerita of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.  She is the author of Petrarchs Poetics and Literary History and essays in European medieval and Renaissance literature, European cinema studies, transnational feminist media studies, new media, border art, and eco-cinema. With Frank Burke she co-edited the volume Contemporary Perspectives on Federico Fellini and with Sandra Ponzanesi Postcolonial Cinema Studies. Currently she is collaborating with Frank Burke and Marita Gubareva on the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini (2019).
 
 
3. Amy Hough-Dugdale (University of California, Riverside, United States)
 
The liquid hyperfilm: Fellini, Deleuze, and the sea as forza generatrice
 
Amy Hough-Dugdale will address “The Liquid Hyperfilm: Fellini, Deleuze, and the Sea as forza generatrice.” Fellini has stated that the sea “appears again and again in almost all [his] films,” working “not only as a place of memory” but “rather like a force generative of ghosts, invaders, hallucinations, motionless magic.” Hough-Dugdale will suggest that the recurring motif of the sea in Fellini’s films, dreams, drawings, and interviews materializes the directors fluid and rhizomatic creative process. Reimagining Millicent Marcuss notion of the hyperfilm as a Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage, she will show how the sea (and other “echoes” of water), when interpreted within this metamorphosing “intertext” of Fellini’s work, act as the forza generatrice of Fellini’s cinema, while also calling upon and shaping film-viewers liquid and generative vision.
 
Amy Hough-Dugdale recently received her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, with a dissertation entitled The Liquid Eye: A Deleuzian Poetics of Water in Film. Her areas of interest include Italian cinema, Deleuzian theory, cinema of poetry, intermediality, literary translation, lyric essay and creative writing. A poet and creative nonfiction writer, as well as a scholar, her lyric essay Marathon Meditation was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and her untitled short poem recently won the Santa Clarita Sidewalk Poetry Contest. Her scholarly essay ‘The Liquid Hyperfilm: Fellini, Deleuze, and the Sea as forza generatrice’ is forthcoming this year in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini. 
 
                       
Frank Burke is Professor emeritus at Queens University, Canada. He has published on American, Italian-American, and Italian cinema. He edited the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema (2017) and is currently editing, along with Marguerite Waller and Marita Gubareva, the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini (2019). With publication of the Companion, his work on Fellini will comprise four books in English, as well as book and journal contributions in English and Italian. He provided the audio commentary with Peter Brunette for The Criterion Collection release of Amarcord and the sole commentary for Criterion’s Roma.

Panel 13: Creative screens. Towards an archeology of Italian media arts

Chair:  Clodagh Brook (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
 
The projection of moving images on screens dates back to centuries ago. Phantasmagoria, the Magic Lantern, the Moving Panorama, and then the cinematographic screens are just some of its most typical expressions. From the immersive experiences of 3D, wide-screen cinema and the multi-media installations of world exhibitions (such as the Eames’s Think! for the IBM Pavilion at the NY World Fair of 1964), to the domestic intrusions of television and the first diffusion of video cameras, the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s saw an expansion and proliferation of screens of various kinds and sizes which anticipates, and still informs, their ubiquity in the digital present. The digital revolution has intensified and multiplied our exposure to new screens, such as computer monitors, mobile phones, GPS devices, video games consoles, augmented reality, necessarily involving us in new experiences of mobility, tactility, interactivity, connectivity and immersion. This panel aims to explore how the Italian arts have creatively responded to the concept and materiality of screens in various forms of intermediality across cinema, video art, video installations, theatre, architecture and urban spaces across the decades. Our papers will concentrate on three periods: 1950s-1970s, 1980s-2000 and the New Millennium.
 
 
1. Matilde Nardelli (University of West London, UK)
 
From vetrini to environments. Screens and theatricality in Italian art, c. 1955-1975
 
From the immersive experiences of 3D, wide-screen cinema and the multi-media installations of world exhibition, to the domestic intrusions of television and the first diffusion of video cameras, the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s saw an expansion and proliferations of screens of various kinds and sizes which anticipates their ubiquity in the digital present. This talk will consider this historical proliferation through the lens of art, by looking at various manifestations of – and takes on – the screen in Italian art of the period, focusing on the vetrini of Bruno Munari (1950s-1960s), the schermi and projections of Fabio Mauri (1960s-1970s), and the Environmental Screen of Marinella Pirelli (1969). Revisiting, among others, Michael Frieds well-known notion of theatricality or theatre (1967), and Stanley Cavells conception of the screen as a barrier (1971), I will consider how a significant number of artists in these decades sought to engage both cinema and theatre, and to challenge the barrier of the screen. The engagement of the screen in the works of Munari, Mauri and Pirelli, where screens envelop ordinary objects, or become props or even stages for the viewer, are exemplary of such attempt to articulate cinema theatrically, so to speak, as an intermedial force which may undo, or at least re-draw, the boundaries of art and its disciplines. 
 
Matilde Nardelli is Senior Lecturer at the University of West London. Her research explores the interrelations between art and cinema, film and photography, live and recorded media, with a focus on post-1960 practices. She co-edited the volume Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017) and is completing a monograph titled Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Re-Making the Image (EUP, 2020). Her essays on topics including Antonioni, contemporary art, photography, waste and obsolescence have appeared in Tate Papers, NECSUS, The Journal of Visual Culture, Photographies, The Soundtrack, The Oxford Art Journal, as well as in a number of edited collections.
2. Emanuela Patti (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Beyond computer screens: projecting digital moving images in public spaces
In this paper, I will explore creative practices which experimented with the projection of computer-generated images beyond their original setting, namely the computer monitor. I will look at early Italian computer and multimedia artists such as Ida Gerosa and Mario Sasso, in order to explore different forms of “digital painting”, “light painting”, “live drawing”, “projection mapping live performance”, “projection installation”, “holographic projection”. I am particularly interested in examining how these avant-garde works set the ground for what we call today “augmented space”, “virtual reality” and “videomapping” in different public spaces (theatre stage, public buildings, museums) and how they gave rise to multiple forms of interaction between computers-artists-audiences-public environments. I will particularly emphasise and compare the purpose and reception of these practices in the period 1980s-2000s and today, as well as the role they have had in our perception of space.
 
Emanuela Patti Dott. Lett. Urbino, MA UCL, PhD University of Birmingham – Senior Research Fellow at Royal Holloway for the projectInterdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: interart/intermedia. Her research interests range across a variety of areas, including modern and contemporary Italian culture, digital screen cultures, intermediality. She is the author of Pasolini After Dante: the ‘Divine Mimesis’ and the Politics of Representation (Routledge/Legenda, 2016), two special issues on experimental narratives (2016), the co-edited book Transmedia: Storia, memoria e narrazioni attraverso i media (Mimesis, 2014) and the edited book La nuova gioventù? L’eredità intellettuale di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Joker, 2009). 
 
3. Mirko Lino (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italia)
L’instabilità dello schermo: videomapping e spazi urbani
 
Mirko Lino explores the intersections between early Italian video-art works (especially Munari and Studio Azzurro) and the contemporary experimentations of urban videomapping as post-cinematic format, with the aim to analyze the augmentation of  space (Manovich 2006) through digital projections on historical buildings and architectural facades of Italian cities.
 
Mirko Lino  è assegnista di ricerca presso l’Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, dove è anche docente a contratto di Storia del Cinema e di Cinema e Media. Ha pubblicato il libro L'apocalisse postmoderna tra letteratura e cinema (Le Lettere, 2014), curato il volume Imaginary Films in Literature (Rodopi, 2016) assieme a S. Ercolino, M. Fusillo e L. Zenobi. Ha pubblicato articoli e saggi su cinema e letteratura, sul digital storytelling e i nuovi media. Collabora con diversi FilmFest e WebFest. È associate editor e principal contact di “EmergingSeries Journal: Inside New Media & Digital Technologies”. Di prossima uscita il volume co-curato con Silvia Antosa, Sex(t)ualities. Morfologie del corpo tra visioni e narrazioni (Mimesis, 2018).

Panel 14: Representations of changes in Italian society

Chair: Colleen M. Ryan (Indiana University, United States)
 
1. Francesca Calamita (University of Virginia, United States)
 
The Handmaid’s Tale from the United States to Italy: When women’s rights debate goes on screen
 
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a feminist dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood; in 2017 a TV series based on this narrative work was created by Bruce Miller and watched by many fans in the United States. At the same time, Atwood’s novel became the most sold book on Amazon and the third season of the series will be available on Hulu from June. In Italy the series is available on TimVision and, similarly to the American context, followed by large audience. With my presentation I would like to explore the links between fiction and present-day socio-cultural contexts in Italy and the United States and how the current governments’ ideologies are discussed in the Handmaids Tale. At a time when women’s rights, including reproductive rights, are at stake, what can a TV series teach us? How recent debates on women’s rights to access safe abortions are depicted by the series and how these issues are approached by the current administrations on both sides of the Atlantic? Building on intersectional feminist theories, this paper will discuss women’s socio-cultural issues represented in the TV series in the context of the current political debates in the United States and Italy.
 
Francesca Calamita is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Virginia where she also teaches Women, Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of the monograph Linguaggi dell’esperienza femminile: disturbi alimentari, donne e scrittura dall’Unità al Miracolo Economico (Il Poligrafo, 2015) and the edited volume Starvation, Food Obsession and Identity (Peter Lang, 2017) on Italian, French and German women’s writing. Francesca is currently working a new edited collection on women and food in Italian literature, cinema and other forms of visual arts.
 
 
2. Andrea Bini (The American University of Rome, Italia)
 
L’evoluzione della famiglia mononucleare borghese nel cinema italiano
 
La famiglia italiana come noi la conosciamo adesso è, come sappiamo, un prodotto storico molto recente. Possiamo dire che si è affermata definitivamente solo intorno agli anni ’70-‘80 del secolo scorso, quando ha raggiunto anche i piccoli paesi e le zone della campagna profonda. Questo risultato è dovuto senza dubbio al boom economico ed al predominio di questo modello familiare nei programmi televisivi, come i caroselli e gli sceneggiati. Basti pensare a Marcovaldo di Nanni Loy (1970) o La famiglia Benvenuti (1968-70), con Enrico Maria Salerno e il giovanissimo Giusva Fioravanti (futuro terrorista nero). Nella mia presentazione mi soffermerò soprattutto su come il cinema ha affrontato un aspetto considerato fondamentale del nostro modo di concepire la famiglia – caratteristico cioè della famiglia borghese novecentesca “moderna” - e cioè l’importanza della presenza attiva , della “cura” dei genitori verso i figli, ed in particolare del padre, mentre le cure materne – pur importanti - erano già in qualche modo date per scontate in quanto naturali, e comunque meno cruciali in una visione sempre più Freudiana della maturazione psicologica dei figli. A tal fine analizzerò brevemente alcuni film, tra cui I bambini ci guardano (De Sica, 1943), Domenica d’agosto (Emmer, 1950), Guardie e ladri (Monicelli/Steno 1951), La voglia matta (Salce, 1962), Scusi, lei è favorevole o contrario? (Sordi, 1966).
 
Andrea Bini studied Italian literature and Philosophy at the University “La Sapienza”. He earned an MA in Film and Media Studies at UT Austin in 2006, and a Ph.D. at UCLA in 2011. He has published two books: Kant e Carabellese, and Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film. Comedy Italian Style (Springer, 2016). He has also published several articles on Italian cinema, literature, and culture, including two chapters in the book Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society, edited by Flavia Brizio-Skov (Tauris, 2011). He is adjunct professor at The American University of Rome and Temple University-Rome.
 
 
3. Lisa Dolasinski (Dickinson College, United States)
 
A new direction for Italian screen studies. On representations of old age in Italian cinema
 
Italian films assign to elderly characters minor roles, or they treat them as devices of comedy. Such perceptions of aging may result from the generally limited presence of senesce onscreen. Recent estimates calculate that a mere 3% of Italian films from 2000-2010 feature characters aged 70 years and beyond, which should elicit pause since these figures do not reflect the country’s current demographic landscape. Present-day Italy has seen some of the lowest birthrates since the 1861 Unification, young people are emigrating in mass numbers, and the nation’s aging population continues to increase rapidly—all factors demographers have in mind when they refer to Italy as a dying country. A monograph-length study on the topic of senescence in Italian cinema has yet to be carried out. Scholarship is limited in scope and follows a decidedly gendered division. Working towards the closure of this lacuna, this paper proposes five avenues for future research on aging in Italian film studies: 1. The synecdocal relation of the national Italian body and onscreen representations of death and decline in old age; 2. The mature male body as symbol of Italy’s gerontocratic political system; 3. Sexuality in the silver years; 4. Tradition, transition, and generational conflict; and 5. More meaningful images of old age.
Lisa Dolasinski is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Dickinson College. She holds a PhD in Italian Studies and a minor in Gender Studies from Indiana University. Lisa works primarily on contemporary Italian cinema and culture, and is particularly interested in the topics of migration, aging, and masculinity. Her refereed journal articles interrogate the fluid sexual and racial identities of migrant protagonists onscreen. Along with preparing a monograph for publication, tentatively titled Screening Sterile Masculinity: On Male Migrants, Italian Men, and the Future of Italy, she is working on a project that investigates representations of aging in Italian cinema.

Panel 15: The Italian diaspora: cinema and arts

Chair: Inge Lanslots (KU Leuven, Belgium)
 
1. Natalie Dupré (KU Leuven, Belgium) and Inge Lanslots (KU Leuven, Belgium)
 
Claudio Pazienza’s transnational documentary depiction on the Italian diaspora
 
Since his early film work in the 1980s, critics have welcomed Claudio Pazienza (Roccascalegna, 1962) as an original, experimental (documentary) filmmaker. Critics praise his work for its subtle intertextual ramifications, its original editing, its combination of a distant, burlesque and intimistic tone (Curnier 2011). However, little research has been done on how these characteristics relate to the transnational character of his work (Angelone & Clò 2011: 84). The present paper proposes to fill this gap with an in-depth analysis of Pazienza’s Tableau avec chutes, the 1997 documentary film which re-explores the nexus between immigration and Belgium’s history of coal mining. At first sight, Tableau avec chutes mainly portrays different sites and types of footage related to immigration showing how migrants can reconnect to their roots. To that purpose, Pazienza interviews a variety of people asking them to interpret Pieter Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1958), the iconic painting that revolves around search, identity and loss. A further reading of the documentary makes the audience understand how Pazienza embeds this storytelling on the Italian diaspora in a broader narrative on today’s reality, which in its turn has a clear metatextual and surrealistic component.
 
Natalie Dupré is Assistant Professor in Italian at KU Leuven. Her main area of research is Italian border literature. She is the author of Per un’epica del quotidiano. La frontiera in Danubio di Claudio Magris (Franco Cesati, 2009) and of several articles on other border authors (Fulvio Tomizza, Giuliana Morandini, Anna Maria Mori). Her most recent research interests focus on trauma literature, cultural memory and Jewish-Italian literature (Liana Millu, Giuliana Tedeschi, Luciana Nissim, Aldo Zargani) and on the new Italian documentary of the Italian diaspora.
 
Inge Lanslots is Associate Professor in Italian Culture and Translation Studies at KU Leuven.  She  is  specialized  in  cultural  memory  and  genre  studies.  Her  research  deals  with migration, the  representation  of  discourse  on  mafia-like  organizations, Italy’s 1968, the G8 2001 (Genova).  She is also the supervisor of the ÉXODOCS project, dedicated to the representation of migration from Latin America to the United States (éxodocs.com).
 
Natalie Dupré and Inge Lanslots are both members of the directory board of the book series ‘Moving texts’ (Peter Lang) and of the editorial team of Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani.
 
 
2. Camilo Martín-Flórez (Università di Bologna, Italia)
 
Italians in Colombian silent cinema (1912-1927)

From the late 1890s to the early 1930s, the contribution of Italian filmmakers to the development of South American cinema was monumental. Three countries that specifically benefited from the contribution of Italian filmmakers were Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. Famous examples are that of the Italian Alfonso and Pasquale Segreto opening the first Brazilian cinema and recording the first Brazilian view between 1897 and 1898, or Eugenio Cardini making the first Argentinean fiction film Escenas callejeras/Street Scenes in 1902. Moreover, little is known about the contribution of Italian artists to Colombia's silent cinema in which Italian filmmakers have had the biggest involvement. The objective of this presentation is to enrich Italy's filmography by introducing all the Italians artists (known to date) who significantly influenced the foundation of Colombia's national cinema. Works of Italian exhibitors, distributors, and filmmakers like Francesco and Vincenzo di Domenico, Camillo Cantinazzi, Cesare Guerrini, Arnaldo Ricotti, Arrigo Cinotti, Floro Manco and Silvio Cavazzoni, names mainly unknown up to know, will be presented in great detail.

Camilo Martín-Flórez is a filmmaker and film-researcher from Colombia/Canada. He holds a BFA and an MA in Film Studies from Concordia University, Canada, as well as an MFA in Documentary Cinema from the University of Barcelona, Spain. Martín-Flórez has worked in various academic research centers worldwide and his productions have been selected in various film festivals in Latin America, North America, and Europe. Last year he was an invited professor at Tecnologico de Monterrey University, Mexico. Currently, Camilo is conducting research on Colombian silent cinema for his Ph.D. degree in Film Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy.
 
 
3. María Fernanda Martino Avila (Istituto di Lingua e Cultura Spaanit, The Netherlands)
 
‘Esa rara mezcla de Museta y de Mimí’: i rapporti nascosti tra il tango canción e l’opera verista nella formazione dellidentità culturale rioplatense
 
L'opera lirica è da sempre considerata musica colta, tipica dell'ambiente dell'alta borghesia. Il tango, invece, a causa delle sue origini e del modo in cui si é diffuso, è sempre stato identificato come musica appartenente ai modi di divulgazione culturale tipici delle classi popolari della regione rioplatense del primo Novecento. Il tango, nel corso della storia, ha ricevuto influenze da altri stili musicali ma pochissimi sono i riferimenti che collegano il tango canción, nato nel 1916, con l’opera lirica. Ancora oggi, l'attenzione su questa presunta dicotomia rimane non priva di discussioni. Il presente lavoro intende analizzare l’operazione narrativa del tango canción e quella lirica verista, identificandone i punti di incontro e mettendo in evidenza come il rapporto tra musica e testo possa essere usato come risorsa per creare l'esperienza umana, e come modellatore d’identità.  Il contributo culturale italiano nella regione rioplatense e il suo ruolo nella diffusione dell'operistica italiana tra la popolazione, fu importantissimo perché ispirò, in qualche misura, le narrazioni sociali che rapprasentò il tango canción. Esso, infatti, è  nato come prodotto locale e si è occupato di descrivere l'immagine che alcuni gruppi sociali avevano di loro stessi, oltre a nutrire l'immaginario collettivo con un modello di uomo urbano.
 
Fernanda Martino è italo-argentina nata a Buenos Aires. Si è laureata in Arte Musicali con specializzazione in canto lirico all’Istituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colón di Buenos Aires e in Lingua e Letteratura Italiana alla Dante Alighieri della stessa città. Dal 2000 vive nei Paesi Bassi dove dirige l’istituto di lingue e cultura SpaanIt e lavora come docente presso diverse istituzioni e ditte. Nel 2018 ha completato il Master in Studi Latino-americani all’Università di Leiden (Paessi Bassi) specializzandosi in analisi culturale. Ha pubblicato diversi articoli sull’insegnamento di una lingua straniera in contesti multimediali e sull’importanza della musica nel processo d’apprendimento linguistico. 

Panel 16: Mobile bodies: The migrant subject in film and media

Chair: Eleonora Sammartino (Kings College London, UK)
 
 
This panels aims to explore the representation of embodied migrant subjectivities in film, focusing on women’s bodies. We intend migration primarily as the movement of people across national borders, as it is represented in film and media, but also the movement of performers, directors, and scripts across different movie industries.
 
1. Elena D’Amelio (Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino, Repubblica di San Marino)
 
Transatlantic stardom and performance of migrant motherhood: Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman
 
This paper aims to explore the relationship between stardom, motherhood, and the transnational through the analysis of Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman, two stars who interpreted iconic characters of migrant or foreign mothers, problematizing concepts of performance, displacement, and transatlanticism in postwar cinema. Moreover, the maternal bodies represented on the screen interacted with off-screen images of the divas circulating on the magazines of the time, often represented within domestic and family environments, which contribute to define the social meaning of the stars as "mediated texts" and to narrate specific iconographies of the maternal. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary theoretical basis of stardom studies and gender studies, this paper seeks to historicize specific discourses on female divismo and transnational motherhood in postwar Italian and Hollywood cinema.
 
Maria Elena D’Amelio (Doctorare, UNIRSM; PhD, State University of New York - Stony Brook) is Ajunct Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Marino, where she is also the coordinator of the Research Center for Internationl Relations. She has written widely on film genres and gender representation is postwar Italian cinema and is the author of Ercole, il divo (AIEP, 2013). She was also co-editor of Italian Motherhood on Screen (Palgrave, 2017) with Giovanna Faleschini-Lerner and is currently working on motherhood and media representantions.
 
 
2. Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra (Virginia Commonwealth University, United States)
 
Framing the postcolonial Italy. Cinematic encounters between local musicians and displaced migrants
 
This paper discusses the Italian comedy film Taranta on the Road (2017), which recounts the story of a pizzica music group and their encounter with two illegal migrants from Tunisia during the band’s concert tour in 2011.  This encounter testifies to the emergence of an “on-the-road” film genre narrating constructive encounters between local Italians, migrants, and refugees, as already announced by the film On The Bride’s Side (2014). I argue that these encounters not only illustrate the role played by Italian cinema within current migration discourses in Italy and Europe, but also help us reflect on the post-1990s Southern Italian folk music and dance revival as a promoter of social change through grassroots and locally-engaged efforts. Indeed, the current Southern Italian folk music and dance revival has encouraged a re-thinking of Southern Italian identity from a postcolonial perspective and as part of a larger, Mediterranean identity. This paper intends to illustrate the ways that Taranta on Road consciously frames a postcolonial ideological framework through the lens of the Italian comedy genre. 
 
Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra received her PhD in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and is currently an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she conducts research in transnational Italian and Mediterranean cultural studies, migration studies, film and digital studies. She is the author of Global Tarantella: Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances (University of Illinois Press, 2017).
 
 
3. Giovanna Faleschini Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College, United States)
 
Maternal bodies, maternal gazes: The case of Andrea Segre’s Ibi

“Maternal Bodies, Maternal Gazes: The Case of Andrea Segre’s Ibi” focuses on the story of Ibitocho Sehounbiatou, as told by ZaLab director Andrea Segre. Segre met Ibi in July 2014 in Castel Volturno, home of the largest African diasporic community in Italy. Originally from Benin, Ibi had started recording her life in Italy through photography and videography, which allowed her to share her experience of displacement with her children and her mother in Africa, where--as an undocumented immigrant--she could not hope to return without risking permanent deportation. Photography was also her business--she worked as a wedding and event photographer and videographer within the African communities of Castel Volturno, as well as for the Cultural Center where the Movement for Migrants and Refugees of Caserta met. When she died in 2015, Segre decided to tell her story through her images, thus producing the first film almost entirely based on visual self-narration by a migrant woman. This paper analyzes both the film techniques and strategies that Segre adopts to integrate archival materials, photos, and other footage and create an innovative and original filmic narration that moves away from more traditional realist—and often objectifying—narratives of female migration. 
 
Giovanna Faleschini Lerner is Associate Professor of Italian and Chair of the Program in
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of Carlo Levi’s Visual Poetics (Palgrave, 2012) and numerous articles and book chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian cinema and literature. She has coedited Italian Motherhood on Screen (Palgrave, 2017), as well as the 2018 issue of gender/sexuality/Italy and a special issue of Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in honor of Millicent Marcus (2019). She is currently at work on a book-length project on the Italian cinema of migration.

Panel 17: Media and political activism

Chair: Gianluca Fantoni (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
 
1. Cinzia Padovani (Southern Illinois University, United States & Loughborough University, UK)
 
The ultra-right and mainstream media: A historical analysis
 
Ultra-right political actors have become increasingly more visible in the public sphere since the early 1990s. Access to the Internet and social media has been a necessary condition for this growth. Likewise, “mainstream media” have played a key role in representing them, perhaps providing the working templates for many citizens to interpret the dangers—or reasonableness—of ultra-right ideologies. What has that role been? According to Mazzoleni (2008), the media have been complicit in legitimizing “issues, key-words and communication styles” of ultra-right leaders (2008, 50). For Cammaerts (2018), media attention to “extreme right populist actors” has had the effect of “amplifying their false claims” (17) thus normalizing their ideologies. The topic is controversial: should the media give a platform to the ultra-right and, if so, how? Or should they ignore it, thus taking the chance of reinforcing the accusation of being elitist and aloof? My research addresses this on-going debate by presenting a comparative and historical analysis of media coverage in the United Kingdom and Italy. It implements quantitative measurements of content analysis as well as qualitative methodologies for in-depth investigation.
 
Cinzia Padovani (PhD, Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, 1999) is Associate Professor at the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University. In 2018 she won a prestigious Marie S. Curie Experienced Fellowship to study ultra-right media and communication at the University of Loughborough, with a Secondment at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Florence. Her publications have appeared on numerous international peer-reviewed journals such as The International Journal of Communication, The Journal of Language and Politics, Discourse and Communication, Television and New Media, among others. She is the author of A Fatal Attraction, Public Television and the Political System in Italy. Her research interests are in the field of media and politics, alternative/radical media, Italian and European media, public service media, media and social theories.
 
2. Patrizia La Trecchia (University of South Florida, United States)
 
Digital food culture and Made in Italy: Activism and resistance in the visual representation of food
 
The multitude of food images that are circulating in the pervasive digitization of our world influence the ways in which we eat, cook and, at the same time, share and document our food experiences. If it is true that we also eat with our eyes, these days our smartphones’ cameras eat before we can actually consume our food. This presentation will discuss the role of digital technologies in promoting and marketing the Made in Italy as well as in contrasting the widespread phenomenon of counterfeiting of Italian food known as Italian sounding, which refers to the marketing of food and beverages produced worldwide and labeled with Italian names and misleading words and images.
 
Patrizia La Trecchia received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Associate Professor at the University of South Florida, where she directs the Italian program and is Affiliated Faculty at the Patel College of Global Sustainability. Her research includes film, media, globalization, migration, citizenship, the Italian South, digital food culture, ecocinema, sustainable food movement, food security, and food waste. She is a TED speaker on food waste.
 
 
3. Sole Anatrone (Vassar College, United States)
 
#metoo all’italiana
 
The current face of the women’s movement—#metoo—got its start in the United States, with allegations against Harvey Weinstein bringing public attention to the sexual abuse of women. Weinstein’s position as a major Hollywood producer brought this conversation to the global stage. Although #metoo was born in the United States, women in different places were met with different socio-political responses. In the Italian context, the most prominent voice was that of director/actress Asia Argento, who told of the abuse she endured at Weinstein’s hand. Argento’s revelations were met with a variety of responses; while she received a great deal of public support, she was also subjected to such violent vitriol that she felt she needed to leave the country. Her decision to leave added another layer to the public debate, bringing in the question of migration.  Recent allegations of Argento sexually abusing a younger actor further complicate things. Beginning with Argento and moving to a broader socio-cultural analysis, this paper will look at how the #metoo conversation has been deployed in the Italian context, and the uneasy way feminist and nationalist discourses overlap.
 
Sole Anatrone is Assistant Professor of Italian at Vassar College. She has a PhD in Italian Studies and Women and Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and publications focus on questions of gender, race, migration, textuality and social activism. She is a co-founder of the Asterisk taskforce for inclusive pedagogy, and a translator of fiction and journalism; recent pieces include works by Italian authors Dacia Maraini and Laila Wadia, as well as English-language articles about gender and politics in the United States. She is currently translating a text on digital technology and gender, and co-editing a volume on queer Italian media. 

Panel 18: Women in cinema and media

Chair: Giovanna Summerfield (Auburn University, United States)
 
1. Emanuela Piovano (Kitchenfilm, Roma, Italia)
 
Del rammendo e altre visioni. il mio percorso di cine-autora
 
Mi sono formata in Storia e Critica del cinema, pertanto faccio parte della prima generazione ad aver approcciato il cinema non sul set, ma sui banchi di scuola e imparare un mestiere dai libri ha i suoi pro e i contro. Ho fatto la gavetta, in un’ Italia segnata dagli anni di piombo e in una città che ne era stato l’epicentro: la Torino degli anni Ottanta. In questo periodo di apprendistato il filone “femminista” ha preso il sopravvento. Come assistente e autore testi di Gabriella Rosaleva arrivai a teorizzare che la mia missione sarebbe stata quella di “liberare la prima donna”, come evidenziai in un saggino per l’allora rivista di tendenza Fluttuaria diretta da Lea Melandri. Risale a questo periodo la fondazione di Camera Woman con altre compagne. Culmine di questo periodo la fondazione di KITCHENFILM. Questo filone serve per collegare tra loro i miei sei film, dedicati a sei donne da liberare: Laura Betti, Iolanda Insana, Anna Rita Sidoti, Simone Weil, Sonia Bergamasco e Laura Morante. Nel mio intervento parlerò anche dei miei maestri, importanti per gli sviluppi futuri della nostra arte-mestiere: Gianni Vattimo, Gianni Rondolino, Paolo Gobetti, Adriano Aprà e  Morando Morandini. Seguendo la loro lezione sono diventata una “ricamatrice operaia”, o, meglio, una “rammendatrice”.  Spiegherò perché trovo questa figura molto pregnante per il mio fare cinema. Inoltre, con la Kitchenfilm ho aperto dal 2006 il filone della distribuzione, ennesima sfida al mercato agonizzante con piccoli gioielli pluripremiati. L’ho fatto perché riconoscendomi principalmente in chi produce testi, non potevo fare a meno di impegnarmi a favorirne il contesto, pena la dispersione o ineleggibilità! Infine accennerò il mio settimo testo di cui darò un’indicazione di metodo.
 
Emanuela Piovano si è formata presso la Facoltà di lettere e filosofia con una tesi in Storia e Critica del cinema sull’intervista filmata, ipotesi sperimentali e teoriche. Allieva di Vattimo e Rondolino, ha approcciato il tema del cinema sperimentale antenato del docu-fiction attraverso le analisi di Bachtin e Genette. Per tutti gli anni Ottanta ha lavorato come ricercatrice presso l’Archivio nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza, come autore testi a aiuto regista al Centro di Produzione RAI di Torino, come critico ha collaborato alla rivista Il nuovo spettatore cinematografico diretto da Paolo Gobetti. Nel 1988 ha fondato la Kitchenfilm, società di produzione con cui ha prodotto 5 dei suoi film e svariati lavori di altre autrici (Gabriella Rosaleva, Annabella Miscuglio, Adele Cambria, Franca Fossati…) e che dal 2006 contribuisce a diffondere e a fare conoscere in Italia il cinema di qualità non solo femminile (Alain Gomis, Thierry de Peretti, oltre a Aida Begic, Dominique Cabrera…).
 
 
2.  Silvia Angeli (University of Westminster, UK)
 
Adolescence and moral resistance in the films of Alice Rohrwacher
 
To date, teenagers occupy a prominent position in all of Alice Rohrwacher’s films, from her debut Corpo celeste (2011), to the critically acclaimed Le Meraviglie (2014), to her most recent work Lazzaro felice (2018). Rohrwacher (dis)places her teenage protagonists at the margins of Italian society: Corpo celeste’s Marta gravitates around a small parish situated at the outskirts of Reggio Calabria, while Le Meraviglie’s Gelsomina and Lazzaro felice’s eponymous character live in remote rural locations, outside of the comforts and excesses of capitalist society. Their naïve attitude contrasts deeply with the harsh reality in which they are immersed, characterized by corruption, exploitation of the weak, and a marked obsession with television culture and profit-making logic. However, far from being simply grim critiques of contemporary Italian society, Rohrwacher’s works are pervaded by humor as well as a certain dreamlike, fantastic atmosphere. This quality, already pronounced in Corpo celeste, grows exponentially in Le Meraviglie and particularly in Lazzaro felice, where the border between social drama and magical realism becomes blurred, turning the films young protagonists into messianic, redemptive figures, thereby making them symbols of moral resistance.
 
Silvia Angeli holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Westminster, where she currently works as a Visiting Lecturer. Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and film, Italian cinema, American cinema, films reception and practices of censorship. She has published journal articles on the cinema of Liliana Cavani, Marco Bellocchio, and Kenneth Lonergan. Since 2018, she has been acting as peer reviewer for the Journal of Religion and Film and Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. She has collaborated with the British Film Institute and the Barbican introducing screenings of the work of Italian directors.

Panel 19: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Chair: Alessandro Giammei (Bryn Mawr College, United States)
 
1. Jeremy Meckler (University of Minnesota, United States)
 
Irreconcilable positions. Marxist and Romantic impulses in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini
 
I am against Hegel. Thesis? Antithesis? Synthesis? It seems too convenient. My dialectic is no more ternary but binary. There are only irreconcilable positions.
–Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971
 
This quote will serve as our starting point for an inquiry into the structures that shape the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. These “irreconcilable positions” crop up throughout Pasolini’s work and are central to his philosophical and political perspective. Pasolini’s world is inherently self-contradictory and oxymoronic, drawn simultaneously in two impossible directions. There can be no existence without contradiction, no action without dialectical conflict. Such a philosophy could also characterize many readings of Marx, perhaps most quintessentially Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of dialectics as the base structures of both art and meaning. Yet while Marx and Eisenstein see these dialectics as mobile and mutable, Pasolini’s quote emphasizes the opposite. There is no synthesis, no self-consciousness, no moving beyond the dialectical opposition because the position is irreconcilable. The purpose of this paper will be to argue that Pasolini’s own primary irreconcilable position lies between two ideologies: Gramscian marxism and cosmopolitan romanticism.
 
Jeremy Meckler is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota. His work centers on the relationship between avant garde film and video and mass culture. Along with collaborator Matt Levine he is the co-author of Still Dots, a micro-analysis of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (Colpa Press, 2013); a contributor to World Film Locations: Cleveland ( University of Chicago Press, 2016); and a founding editor of the film journal Joyless Creatures.   
 
 
2. Giampaolo Molisina (Universidad del Pacifico di Lima, Perú)
 
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. Pasolini e la perdita della dimensione sacra nell’uomo moderno
 
Dall’analisi del film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo di Pier Paolo Pasolini, partendo dall’identificazione della coscienza dell’autore con il destino tragico del mito di Cristo, si esaminano i fondamenti metafisici del suo singolare progetto umanista-esistenzialista: una concezione sacra dell’uomo in quanto volontà creatrice del mondo. Questo studio intende valorizzare e interpretare il Vangelo pasoliniano in quanto espressione poetica di un universo tragico in cui è implicita la riflessione nietzschiana che innesca la critica contro la Modernità. In esso si presenta, secondo la proposta formulata dallo stesso Pasolini, la possibilità di sviluppare un dialogo e una riflessione nei confronti della tragedia dell’uomo contemporaneo occidentale: la trasmutazione della sua condizione umana in artificio meccanico, la perdita della dimensione sacra come soggettività creatrice della sua natura e responsabile della sua esistenza. L’espressione della coscienza tragica pasoliniana si incarna, quindi, nella sua disperata vitalità, nel desiderio irrefrenabile di sperimentare liberamente la vita, con piena intensità, nella proiezione della nostalgia per la perdita del senso sacralizzato e misterico dell’uomo, e nell’espressione del suo pessimismo rispetto al dispiegarsi di una Modernità irrimediabilmente slegata dalla cultura umanista.
 
Giampaolo Molisina si è laureato con lode in Lingua e Cultura Italiana all’Università di Pisa e ha conseguito un Master in Didattica della Letteratura Italiana all’Università per Stranieri di Siena. Vive in Perù dal 2008 e insegna letteratura e cinema all’Universidad del Pacifico di Lima. È stato coordinatore didattico e docente di letteratura italiana contemporanea presso l’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Lima. Collabora con la rivista di cinema Ventana Indiscreta dell’Universidad de Lima e con il bollettino culturale El Chasqui. Recentemente, ha tenuto alcune conferenze sulla poetica di Tarkovskij, Bergman e Kieślowski per conto della Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú e dell’Universidad del Pacifico.
 
 
3. Davi Pessoa C. Barbosa (UERJ – Università dello Stato del Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
 
“Paolo è qui, oggi, tra noi”
 
"Abandoned Italian adaptations and screenplays"
 
Nel 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini ha cominciato ad elaborare il progetto di un film su San Paolo, il quale non viene concluso per vicende personali e difficoltà di produzione. Nel 1974, lo riprende però di nuovo non lo porta a termine. Pasolini voleva trasporre le vicende di Paolo al suo tempo, con lo scopo di rendere cinematograficamente, “nel modo più diretto e violento”, l’attualità dell’apostolato di Paolo. Come lo stesso Pasolini presenta il progetto: “Qual’è la ragione per cui vorrei trasporre la sua vicenda terrena ai nostri giorni? È molto semplice: per dire insomma esplicitamente, e senza neanche costringerlo a pensare, allo spettatore, che ‘San Paolo è qui, oggi, tra noi’. In ultima analisi, la sceneggiatura per un film su San Paolo, anche se non apparsa sullo schermo, traduce il suo modo di pensare la società italiana e il suo modo di fare cinema.
 
Davi Pessoa è docente  di lingua e letteratura italiana presso L’Università dello Stato del Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Autore di Terza sponda: testimonio, traduzione (2008), Dante: poeta di tutta la vita (2015). Traduttore in lingua portoghese dei libri Georges Bataille: filosofo (2010), di Franco Rella e Susanna Mati, Disgusti (2010) e Presa Diretta (2011), di Mario Perniola, e dei libri Nudità, Il tempo che resta, Mezzi senza fine, di Giorgio Agamben. Attualmente sta traducendo il Petrolio, di Pasolini.

Panel 20: Cinematic Rome 2.0

Organizers: Carolina Ciampaglia and Federica Capoferri
 
Chair: Massimiliano Pistonesi (Istituto Europeo di Design, Roma, Italia)
 
L‘obiettivo di questo panel è avviare una riflessione sulle modalità di rappresentazione della Capitale nel cinema italiano degli ultimi venti anni, con particolare attenzione all‘intrecciarsi di vecchi e nuovi paradigmi visuali di articolazione del dialogo tra real and imagined city. Forte di una corposa storia novecentesca di rappresentazioni cinematografiche, Roma offre anche al Terzo Millennio ambienti e scenari ad alto gradiente di riconoscibilità mediatica nazionale e ad alto potenziale di seduzione estetica internazionale.
 
 
1. Federica Capoferri (John Cabot University, Roma, Italia)
 
BAD LANDS. Topografie del tragico
 
Questi due interventi puntano ad allargare la tradizionale nozione di centro e periferia alla luce della dilatazione postmoderna del concetto stesso di paesaggio. Maturati entro una stessa cornice teorica, i due interventi si divaricano nel prediligere rispettivamente gli scenari del tragico e quelli del comico.
 
2. Carolina Ciampaglia (Cornell University/Italiaidea, Roma, Italia)
 
BAD LANDS. Topografie del comico
 
 
Federica Capoferri teaches Italian Literature, Italian Language, and History of Italian Cinema at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. She holds a laurea in Materie Letterarie (University of Parma), an M.A. in Italian (University of Virginia), and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Italian (Columbia University). Her research interests include modern and postmodern Italian literature, critical and theoretical intersections between literature and cinema, and cinematic screenplays as a literary genre. Her publications include I romanzi in vetrina dal barbiere. Le scritture alla prova del film (La Finestra, 2008) and La Roma di “Mamma Roma” (Palombi: 2017). 
 
Carolina Ciampaglia received her degree in modern languages and literature from the Università La Sapienza Roma, Laurea in 1984. She has taught Italian as a foreign and second language, as well as Italian literature courses for the Rome-based programs of Cornell University, RISD, Dartmouth College, University of Washington, and the American Academy in Rome. She currently teaches Italian cinema for both Cornell in Rome and DePaul University in Rome. Since 2006 Ciampaglia is the director of academic programs of Italiaidea (Italian language and culture center in Rome). 
 
 
3. Flaminio Di Biagi (Loyola University Chicago, United States)
 
Schermi e scherni vaticani
 
Questo intervento muove dal riposizionamento del Vaticano nel cinema più recente e dal suo dialogare tanto con riflessioni autoriali sulla Capitale contemporanea quanto con il nutrito filone della Roma noir.
 
Flaminio Di Biagi holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature (University of Rome), an MA in Romance languages (University of Washington), and a PhD in Italian literature (New York University). He teaches at Loyola University Chicago, and his publications are Sotto l’Arco di Tito: le “Farfalle” di Gozzano, Il cinema a Roma, La Roma di Fellini, Italo-americani tra Hollywood a Cinecittà, La Roma di Roma città aperta. He translated classic authors, such as Conrad and Lawrence, into Italian and has edited critical editions (Herman Melvilles Billy Budd, Gozzano’s Tutti i racconti). 

Panel 21: Federico Fellini (IV)

Chair: Biagio Aulino (University of Toronto, Canada)
 
1. Daniela Bini (University of Texas, Austin, United States)
 
Il libro dei sogni: Fellini's dreams and nightmares
 
Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina, was clearly a woman very different from the voluptuous, erotic types that populates Fellii’s fims. She became a maternal figure and his artistic muse. With her constantly at his side, I argue, Federico could continue to dream and pursue figuratively and literally the erotic femme fatales. This appears clearly both in films where he directs her (La strada, Le notti di Cabiria, Giulietta degli spriti and Ginger and Fred), as well as in those without her. This essay examines parts of Il libro dei sogni, where Fellini’s desires, fears, phobias, and weaknesses are revealed. He started writing down and illustrating his dreams after the encounter with Jungian psychoanalyst Ernst Berhnard. Jung, infact, became a strong influence in Fellini’s work. In Federico’s dreams, Giulietta often appears as a suffering, saintly creature, always dressed, at times close to death, while the over endowed females he craved, always naked, offer themselves to him. The essays also touches briefly on Fellini’s attitude toward homoeroticism, as homoerotic desires appeared in some dreams, and are compared with scenes in Casanova and Satyricon that reveal his fascination with the subject.
 
Daniela Bini is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. She was Chair of the French and Italian Department from 2003 to 2011. She is the authors of books on Leopardi, Michelstaedter and Pirandello, over 70 articles on literature, opera and film, and is co-author of two textbooks. She has just completed a book entitled Portrait of the Artist and His Mother. She received several university fellowships, two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and three teaching awards. She was the President of the AAIS and Vice-president of the International Association of Italian Language and Literature Studies. In 2007 she received the title of Cavaliere by the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.
 
 
2. Esha Niyogi De (University of California Los Angeles, United States)
 
Fellini, faith, and the individual in South Asian cinemas: Bangladesh and India
 
Diverse strands of South Asian cinematic theory and practice share a love for Federico Fellini’s aesthetic because Fellinian codes appeal to the tensions over religious nationalism and individualist modernity across postcolonial South Asia.  Theorizing Fellini’s relevance to Muslim-majority Bangladesh, art filmmaker Tanvir Mokammel extols Fellini’s satires on religious hypocrisy, in reference to Islamic bigotry, while he finds an ambivalent attitude towards patriarchal individualism in Fellini’s portrayals of women in Catholic contexts.  Ritwik Ghatak, the leftist trailblazer of experimental cinema in Hindu-majority India, delineates a complex politics of spirituality in Fellini’s critique of the atomistic individual in La Dolce Vita. Contrarily, a popular Indian road melodrama (Marutitha Hinglaj, 1959) resignifies the moral narrative in La Strada, pitting an eccentric individual against hegemonic faith.  Discussing these works, my paper attempts to account for the wide appeal of Fellini’s cinema across South Asian filmic traditions (as against Antonioni’s appeal to elite cineaste circles, for example).  My argument is that Fellini’s religious images speak to the conflicts over communal faith and modern personhood in South Asia. Yet if South Asian filmmakers embrace Fellini’s reflexive figurations of individuality in relation to communal dominance, they talk back to the humanist teleology in Fellini’s vision.
 
Esha Niyogi De teaches at the University of California LA.  Her interests lie in the fields of cinema, gender, and Postcolonial Studies.  Based on research funded by the Fulbright Foundation, she is currently working on two books: a monograph on women authors in the film industries of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and a co-edited scholarly volume on cross-border cinemas in South Asia.  Her previous publications include the monograph Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought (Oxford UP, 2011) and the volume Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia, co-edited with Sonita Sarker (Duke UP, 2002).  Her articles have appeared in such journals as Screen and Diacritics, and other scholarly venues.
 
3. Angela Dalle Vacche (Georgia Institute of Technology, United States)
Andre Bazin, Giulietta Masina and Charlie Chaplin
 
Eminent French critic and theorist Andre Bazin (1918-1958) devoted some of his most powerful essays to Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) with Giulietta Masina. Besides paying attention to the evolution of her acting style, he argued that the comparison between Masina and Charlot was facile. Whereas Chaplin relies on a centripetal acting style, Masina’s centrifugal approach is much more comparable to Vittorio De Sica’s ethos as an actor and as the director of Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952).  On the grounds of Bazin’s insight, I shall focus on how this Italian actress deepens her screen persona not only in her films, but especially in Fortunella (1958). Scripted by Fellini, directed by Eduardo De Filippo, scored by Nino Rota and set in Rome, this film was highly praised by Bazin right before he died of leukemia. Starring Alberto Sordi and Paul Douglas Fleischer, Fortunella stands out as a treasure trove of insights about the role of women in society and the importance of imagination in the history of Italian cinema. The purpose of my paper is to do justice to this little-known and valuable film in historiographical and aesthetic terms.
 
Angela Dalle Vacche is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of 3 books: The Body in The Mirror (1992); Cinema and Painting (1996), Diva (2008); she has also edited 3 anthologies The Visual Turn (2002); Color: A Film Reader (2006); Film, Art, New Media (2012). Her new book Andre Bazin’s Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion is forthcoming.

 Panel 22: Italian crime narratives (II)

Chair: Annachiara Mariani (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States)
 
1. Massimiliano Pistonesi (Istituto Europeo di Design, Roma, Italia)
 
The Italian bad guys. L’Ispettore Coliandro e Rocco Schiavone, le maschere della commedia sono anche poliziotti
 
Il presente lavoro vuole analizzare il linguaggio delle serie televisiva de L’Ispettore Coliandro (2003 – in corso)  e Rocco Schiavone (2016 – in corso) contestualizzandolo all’interno della produzione della fiction di genere poliziesco della Rai, per evidenziare le peculiarità di questa serie tv. L’esposizione si comporrà di due parti: nella prima verranno evidenziati i codice del genere che le due serie condividono; la seconda parte, invece, mostrerà le sostanziali differenze. In tutte è due le serie le convergenze si fanno divergenze: ogni puntata è a tema, ma mentre in Coliandro ogni episodio è una citazione del cinema di genere anni Settanta/Ottanta; in Schiavone le storie sono più vicine alla cronaca nera. Costante, nelle due serie, è il poliziottesco italiano e la commedia, ma con un ribaltamento di prospettiva rispetto al cinema di genere italiano. In fine si vuole concludere dimostrando come L’Ispettore Coliandro e Rocco Schiavone, tra convergenze e divergenze, attraverso la irregolarità del loro essere poliziotti, altro non siano un recupero della grande tradizione della cultura popolare italiana, ossia i due personaggi sono maschere moderne della commedia dell’arte, che irridono un ruolo e la sua funzione esaltandola.
 
Massimiliano Pistonesi è Dottore di Ricerca in “Comunicazione Tecnologie Società” presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e ricerca sociale dell’Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’. Si occupa di critica cinematografica e letteraria e ha curato programmi radiofonici e televisivi. È stato consulente editoriale per la Fanucci Editore e la Fazi Editore. Attualmente è consulente editoriale per il gruppo DeA Planeta Libri, ed è docente presso lo IED. Come ricercatore si occupa di audience studies, nuovi media, nuova serialità e cinema, pubblicando articoli sulle riviste accademiche Comunicazionepuntodoc, Fata Morgana, Comunicazioni sociali.
 
 
2. Flavia Brizio-Skov (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States)
 
Ammore e Malavita: musica, amore e pallottole
 
La mafia è come tutti sanno un problema endemico dellItalia, difficile da classificarsi come trauma culturale per via della sua natura permanente. Il trauma infatti, fa notare Alexander, esiste “quando membri della collettività diventano consapevoli di essere stati sottoposti a un evento orrifico che ha lasciato segni indelebili nellinconscio di ognuno, accompagnato da ricordi incancellabili che hanno cambiato lidentità futura dei singoli in modi irrevocabili…. Ma affinché i traumi emergano a livello della collettività bisogna che la crisi sociale diventi una crisi culturale.” Alexander sottolinea che  il trauma deve diventare un fenomeno culturale al fine di assicurarsi un posto permanente nell’immaginario collettivo, e che un certo linguaggio deve essere trovato per comunicare tale crisi culturale, come Dana Renga fa notare. Tuttavia, poiché il cinema ha un ruolo cruciale su come gli eventi traumatici collettivi vengono ricordati e articolati nella cultura e nell’immaginazione del pubblico anche quando tali eventi non assurgono al livello di crisi culturale estesa come, per esempio nel caso dell’Olocausto, nel presente articolo sosteniamo che un modo per potersi distanziare da un evento permanente come la Mafia,  per cominciare a lavorare sulle ferite da essa inflitte,  sia attraverso il linguaggio della commedia.
 
Flavia Brizio-Skov is Professor of Italian at the University of Tennessee where she teaches modern literature and cinema. She has written numerous articles that appeared in Italian, American, French, Spanish and Portuguese journals. She has published the book La scrittura e la memoria: Lalla Romano (Selene Edizioni, 1993), the critical monograph Antonio Tabucchi: navigazioni in un universo narrativ (Pellegrini Editore, 2002), and has edited a collection of articles entitled Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation (Bordighera Press, 2004). In 2011 she published a volume, Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society (I.B. Tauris). She has recently submitted for publication a manuscript entitled Filling the Gap: The Film Western.
 
 
3. Barbara Pezzotti (Monash University, Australia)
 
Localism and globalisation in La Mafia uccide solo d’estate TV series
 
This paper analyses the representation of the Mafia and Sicily in the series 1 of La Mafia uccide solo d’estate (2016). This is a series written by Pif, directed by Luca Ribuoli, produced and broadcast by RAI and based on the homonym 2013 film, also directed by Pif. The series is set mainly in Palermo, and various cultural heritage sites are shown, as well as typical cuisine products or popular suburban boroughs as Mondello. Some episodes are also set in various locations of the province as Partinico, Isola delle Femmine, and Ficuzza. It also shows Corleone, a village made famous by the popular US franchise The Godfather. Through an analysis of the representation of the Mafia and the mis-en scène, this paper will address the following questions: how does this home-grown television fiction maintain or modify the idea of ‘Italian-ness’? In what way does this TV series alter and change the discourse on the representation of crime in the Italian context? By investigating if and how La mafia uccide solo d’estate dispels stereotypes about Italy, and Sicily in particular, as the quintessential ‘place of crime’, this paper will ultimately analyse how localism, regionalism and globalisation are represented in this series.
 
Barbara Pezzotti is a Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University, Australia.  Her research interests are popular culture and crime fiction. She is the author of The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction. A Bloody Journey (FDU Press, 2012); Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction. An Historical Overview (McFarland, 2014); and Investigating Italy’s Past through Crime Fiction, Films and TV Series: Murder in the Age of Chaos (Palgrave McMillan, 2016). She is the co-editor (with Marco Paoli) of a special issue dedicated to the Italian film noir that will be published with Studies in European Cinema in 2020.

Panel 23: Film, fashion, costume from the silent era to the present (I)

Chair: Catherine Ramsey-Portolano (The American University of Rome, Italia)

1. John Champagne (Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, United States)

Queering costume in Ferzan Özpetek’s Mine vaganti
 
How does an "out," married (to another man) Italian-Turkish director employ costumes to define his characters' sexuality and gender? Given its plot device of requiring a group of gay men to butch it up and pose as straight, Ferzan Özpetek's Mine Vaganti provides a rich occasion to explore contemporary cinematic queer self-definition via fashion. What makes Mine Vaganti a particularly rich case study is not simply its plot device of having multiple gay male characters pose (and attempt to dress) as straight. Its hybrid generic construction -- comedy/melodrama -- is at odds with a gay politics that would banish effeminacy as stereotypical -- and indeed, some of the director's critics accused the film of reanimating homophobic stereotypes. But casting a queer eye on the film allows us to see the way in which Özpetek's film seeks to deconstruct binaries of sexuality and gender -- not only in terms of the self-identified gay male characters, but via a variety of sexual "deviants," including the film's female characters. An analysis of costuming choices in Mine Vaganti suggests the complexities of using costuming to propose a queer -- rather than simply gay -- aesthetic.
 
John Champagne is Professor of English at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. He is the author of two novels, The Blue Lady‘s Hands (Lyle Stuart, 1988) and When the Parrot Boy Sings (Meadowlands, 1990). He is also the author of The Ethics of Marginality (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (Routledge, 2013) and Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, Caravaggio, Puccini, and Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave, 2015). His most recent manuscript is on Filippo de Pisis, Giovanni Comisso, and Corrado Cagli (Peter Lang, forthcoming).
 
 
2. Rebecca Bauman (Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, United States)
 
Dressed down and mobbed up: Fashion and gangster identities in the Italian crime series
 
In bringing the urban gangster to the small screen the television series Gomorra and Suburra offer viewers a privileged entrée to the dangerous worlds of the Camorra and Mafia Capitale. Yet while recent scholarship has seized upon the cultural implications of this phenomenon, the extent to which costuming is integral to these series has yet to be explored. This presentation analyzes the role of fashion in recent Italian crime series to analyze the ways clothing reflects these shows’ preoccupation with male emotionality, sexual and ethnic marginalization, and violence. Secondly, I look at how costuming is integrated into a larger aesthetic framework, including set design and soundtrack, to become a visual metaphor for organized crime and its relationship to contemporary Italian society. Finally, I meditate on the transnational dimensions of the ‘gangster style’ and its complicated relationship to viewer identification, Italian identity, and the sociopolitical critiques that frame these series. This discussion will add further context to these series’ significant role in re-articulating Italian visual culture and to issues of fashion and masculine identity.
 
Rebecca Bauman is Assistant Professor of Italian at Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, where she also teaches in the Department of Film, Media and Performing Arts. She received her doctorate from Columbia University and has published essays and book chapters on Italian melodrama, masculinity in Italian cinema, and mafia movies in such publications as the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and Italian Studies, and she is Film and Digital Media Reviews editor for the journal Italian American Review. Her research interests include representations of Italian and Italian American organized crime, fashion studies, and film genre.
 
 
3. Giulia Po DeLisle (University of Massachuttes, Lowell, United States)
 
Billo il grande Dakhaar: Dreams of success in the Italian fashion industry
 
Billo il grande Dakhaar (2008), Laura Muscardin’s second feature film, fictionalizes the story of Thierno Thiam, a now well-known Hip-Hop stylist and actor from Senegal. In the film, Thierno is a young tailor who decides to leave his native country and move to Rome to pursue his dream of becoming a fashion designer. The film offers several reflections on questions that concern integration and assimilation, while addressing a multifaceted discourse on identity through fashion. Garments become a narrative tool and a performative ethical act. Colors, shapes, and patterns acquire a specific meaning and purpose and, by creating a connection between the fabrics that the people in the African village dye, manufacture, and wear with the hardships the protagonist has to face in his daily life, the director discloses the constant negotiations between the two cultures. This paper aims to analyze the insightful role that fabrics have in the construction of the protagonist’s identity, and the discourse on fashion: the gap between Rome as a city of Italian style and Rome as a suburban space where skillful migrant designers struggle to emerge; the roots of African style and its westernization.
 
Giulia Po DeLisle is Assistant Teaching Professor and Coordinator of Italian Language and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she teaches classes of Italian language, cinema and literature. She earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Italian Literature from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Her fields of interest include Women’s Studies, Life Writing, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, and Italian Cinema. Her latest article “Representing Postpartum Depression in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Cristina Comenicini’s Quando la notte and Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te” was published in March 2018, in Forum Italicum.

Panel 24: Youth and performance in contemporary Italian cinema and television

Organizer: Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter, UK)
 
Chair: Russell J. A. Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)
 
Italian cinema is renowned for its extensive depiction of children and young people, yet scholarship has only just begun to explore what their experience of film-making processes might be (Pierini, 2015). With this panel we explore the methodological challenges in the study of such performances, considering in particular the ways in which associated discourses of risk and responsibility are mediated by the industry and the press, and how these might be inflected differently by questions of gender, class, regional and ethnic identity.
 
 
1. Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter, UK)
 
Underwater girls: Fantasies of resilience and resistance in contemporary Italian cinema
 
Danielle Hipkins will show how in Italian cinema, the use of the underwater girls performance conducts affect, namely fantasies of resilience. In the films she examines, including Cloro (Sanfelice, 2014), Bellas mariposas (Mereu, 2016), Indivisibili (De Angelis, 2016), the girl becomes the affective conductor for the human relationship with capital, a liquid, deeply uncertain one. She puts this idea in dialogue with work by Eva Hayward on the ideologies of aquarium display, showing how these underwater portrayals of girlhood inflect performance in contemporary Italian cinema.
 
Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter. She has written widely on gender representation in postwar Italian cinema, and has recently published Italys Other Women: Gender and prostitution in postwar Italian cinema, 1940-1965 (Peter Lang, 2016). She was also co-editor of Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema (Palgrave, 2017) with Kate Taylor-Jones, and is currently working on girlhood and Italian culture. She was a Co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Italian Cinema Audiences project, a study of memories of cinema-going in Italy of the 1950s with the Universities of Bristol and Oxford Brookes (2013-2016).
 
 
2. Dana Renga (The Ohio State University, United States)
 
‘Tra il sogno di Hollywood e l’ombra di Gomorra’: L’amica geniale’s ‘Authentic’ casting
 
Dana Renga focuses on the casting, performance, and publicity of the child and adolescent female actors in the RAI-HBO co-production L’amica geniale (2018). In particular, her presentation engages with the difficult negotiations and performances of feminine adolescence (Driscoll 2014) as these performances relate to the productions desire for a representation of an authentic experience of youth. She examines how the child actor’s self-presentation in interviews, premieres, and festivals is conditioned by a transnational film/television industry which places young actors in situations that are profitable for the product, and precarious for the girl.
 
Dana Renga is Associate Professor and Chair of The Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) and Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium (Toronto UP, 2013), the co-author of Internal Exile in Fascist Italy: History and Representation of Confino (Manchester UP, 2019), and the editor of Mafia Movies: A Reader (Toronto UP, 2^nd edition forthcoming).
 
 
3. Catherine O’Rawe (University of Bristol, UK)
 
Bodies, faces, and (neorealist) children: Non-professional child performers in Fuocoammare and A Ciambra
 
Catherine O’Rawe considers the child performers of two recent acclaimed Italian films, the documentary Fuocoammare (Rosi, 2016) and the docudrama A Ciambra (Carpignano, 2017). Both films protagonists have been compared to Enzo Staiola in Ladri di biciclette (De Sica, 1948), the iconic face of neorealism. Seeing the child as heir to neorealism and a notional witness to the ongoing migration crisis in Southern Italy is one way of reading these films. However, looking more closely at the figure of the child as non-professional actor, and the mechanics of performance, can open the broader ideological function of the Italian child in these narratives.
 
Catherine ORawe is Professor of Italian Film and Cutlure at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and co-author (with Jaqueline Reich) of Divi: la mascolinità nel cinema italiano (Donzelli, 2015). She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences, 1945-1960 (2013-16), from which a book is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

Panel 25: Screening Sicily

Organizer: Giovanna Summerfield (Auburn University, United States)
 
Chair: Veronica Vegna (University of Chicago, United States)
 
With all its physical beauties and intriguing cultural background, Sicily has been a source of endless inspiration to innumerable artists and the perfect setting for cinematic stories narrated by national and international directors, spanning all genres and epochs.  From literary renditions during the silent film era by small local production companies like Morgana Film (founded by Nino Martoglio) to quintessential films like Il gattopardo, Lavventura, Divorzio allitaliana, Salvatore Giuliano, La terra trema, Stromboli, Kaos, Nuovo cinema Paradiso and remarkable worldwide works like The Godfather, Palermo Shooting, The Sicilian, The Big Blue as well as innovative cinematography by Roberta Torre and Cipri and Maresco, the island has been at the center not only of the large screen but of impactful cinematographic discussions and events such as the Taormina Film Festival and the SalinaDocFest.  The chair and panelists of this session here included will present from the upcoming volume, Screening Sicily, edited by Giovanna Summerfield and published to offset the near-absence of scholarship that focuses on the relationship between the Mediterranean gem and cinema.
 
Giovanna Summerfield is Professor of Italian and French as well as associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts, at Auburn University.  She received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures, with a Minor in European and Mediterranean Studies from the University of Florida. She has published and presented extensively on the long eighteenth-century (1660-1830) French and Italian literature (emphasis on Sicilian writers), religious and philosophical movements, film studies, Mediterranean studies, and women’s studies.
 
1. Elgin Eckert (Umbra Institute, Italia)
 
Landscapes of Mafia and nostalgia on Italian TV

The first paper will focus on the analysis of landscape and recent made-for-TV productions on Sicily, arguing that Italian TV productions (especially those produced for one of the state-owned RAI channels) perform what literary critic Francesco Erspamer calls a “nostalgic and reassuring function“ and that this is accomplished through the strategic use of Sicilian “locations”. 
Elgin K. Eckert is Assistant Professor for Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the Umbra Institute in Perugia. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Language and Literature from Harvard University and has published mainly on the topics of cultural memory and the works of Andrea Camilleri. Eckert is the co-editor of the recent volume Representing Italy Through Food (Bloomsbury, 2017). More recently, her research has geared toward narrative and technical aspects in Italian film and television series.
 
2. Claudia Karagoz (Saint Louis University, United States)
 
Of miracles and madonnas: Roberta Torre’s women on the verge in I baci mai dati
 
This paper will present Roberta Torres I baci mai dati. Engaging with gender theory, this paper analyzes the ways in which the film’s protagonists Manuela and Rita inhabit, and simultaneously contest, normative constructions of gender, and the processes through which Manuela acquires the ability to recognize and express her desires, and effect change in herself and others.
 
Claudia Karagoz is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Saint Louis University. Her research interests are in contemporary Italian literature and cinema, gender studies, motherhood studies, and Sicilian culture. She has published numerous essays on Italian women writers and directors such as Elsa Morante, Rosetta Loy, Francesca Comencini, and Alina Marazzi, and on Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia.
 
 
3. Veronica Vegna (University of Chicago, United States)
 
A satirical gaze on Sicily: Ficarra and Picone’s L’ora legale
 
This paper will identify and deconstruct some of the stereotypical representations skillfully used in L’ora legale (Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone) in order to raise awareness on social issues and criminal phenomena commonly associated with Sicily and, more generally, with Southern Italy.
 
Veronica is a Senior Lecturer, Director of the Italian Language Program, and Coordinator of the Languages Across the Curriculum Program at the University of Chicago. She holds two Lauree (in Journalism and in Foreign Languages and Literatures) from the Università di Palermo, Italy, a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Cumbria, UK, and a Doctorate in Modern Languages from Middlebury College, USA.
Her publications focus primarily on gender and representations of the mafia in contemporary Italian cinema. She is the author of Donne, mafia e cinema: una prospettiva interdisciplinare (Longo Editore, 2017).

Panel 26: Masculinity in Italian political dramas

Chair: Nicoletta Marini-Maio (Dickinson College, United States)
 
This panel explores contemporary Italian media productions representing Italian politics through male centered narratives of success, decline, and rebirth. It examines films and television series branding artists (directors, actors, writers) to gain international scope, while storytelling national political crisis, scandals, and intrigues. Assessing media products from a variety of approaches, including discourse and reception analyses, panelists investigate the relationship between masculinity and politics in Italian media at a crucial juncture in both national and global histories. 
 
 
1. Paola Bonifazio (The University of Texas at Austin, United States)
 
Masculinity and politics in 1992 La Serie
 
My presentation argues for a postfeminist reading of 1992 La Serie, in the context of Sky Cinemas other successful TV productions, Romanzo Criminale-La serie and Gomorra-La serie, and in light of it national and global reception. 1992 share with these other series common practices of branding artists to gain international scope (in its case, actor Stefano Accorsi), while storytelling national political crisis, scandals, and intrigues, more specifically, the so-called criminal investigation of Tangentopoli and the entrance of Silvio Berlusconi “in the field” (of politics). Similarly to Rosalind Gills discursive analysis of "lad-flicks," my reading claims that 1992 (as Romanzo Criminale and Gomorra) not only feature male-centered narratives in homosocial contexts but also take masculinity itself as central object. In particular, narratives of political ascent/descent in 1992 speak of what it means to be a man in a society that is aware of its sexism and exploitative of a dominant discourse of masculinity in crisis. 
 
Paola Bonifazio is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in Italian Studies from New York University (2008) and her M.A. in Italian and Film Studies from the University of Pittsburgh (2003). In 2011-12, she was National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew Mellon Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Her research interests focus on Italian cinema, including documentary, film theory and history, gender studies, and feminist and postfeminist theories. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the culture of fotoromanzo. 
 
 
2. Ellen Nerenberg (Wesleyan University, United States)
 
Wasted on the Young: Nostalgia, Reform, and Masculinity in The Young Pope, Young Montalbano, and Youth
 
I examine nostalgia and reform in three contemporary Italian audiovisual texts in which youth, reform, and purity are filtered through varied stages and ages of masculinity. Principal focus trains on the dynamism and vigor of the “young” male protagonists of two serial dramas, Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) in The Young Pope (Sky) and Salvo Montalbano (Michele Riondino) in Il giovane Montalbano (RAI), prequel to the long-running Il Commissario Montalbano (1999-  ), whose dozen episodes aired over two seasons (2012 and 2015). The Young Pope is catalyzed by Belardo’s zealot’s drive for purity, purge, and restoration. Young Salvo, on the other hand, arrives at a finer appreciation of the force of law a ritroso. The May 1992 assassination of Giovanni Falcone, the series’ culminating note, occurs as the young Montalbano prepares to leave behind Sicilian anomie for other pursuits and offers the urtext compelling Salvo (nomen omen) to remain on the island. Moving from vigor to Viagra, the once-young lions’ nostalgic paeans in Sorrentino’s film Youth (2015), which triangulate the televisual texts. For its relentless meditation on the stamina and appeal of audiovisual forms both venerated and emerging, Youth thickens our understanding of the series’ industrial, social, and political contexts.
 
Ellen Nerenberg is Hollis Professor at Wesleyan University. She is author of Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (2001) awarded the Marraro Prize from the MLA, and Murder Made in Italy: Homicide, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture (2012). She is the co-editor of Writing Beyond Fascism (2000) and Body of State (2012). She is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Publications include essays on serial television in Italy and North America. She is currently working on Winx Nation: educare la futura consumista with Nicoletta Marini-Maio.
 
 
3. Nicoletta Marini-Maio (Dickinson College, United States)
 
‘Ha l’alito di un vecchio’: Young Female Bodies, Aging Masculinity, and the Mask of Impotence in Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro 1 and Loro 2 (2018)
 
“‘È solo l’alito di un vecchio’: Corpi di donne, mascolinità senile e maschere dell’impotenza in Loro 1 e Loro 2 (2018) di Paolo Sorrentino.”
 
Questo studio analizza l’ultimo film in due parti di Paolo Sorrentino, Loro 1 e Loro 2 (2018), sulla figura di Silvio Berlusconi. Partendo da una prospettiva postfemminista, il saggio esamina come il film contestualizzi nelle pratiche edonistiche del berlusconismo il discorso postfemminista dell’empowerment delle giovani donne inteso come internalizzazione del desiderio sessuale maschile (Rosalind Gill). La narrazione sorrentiniana del godimento proietta questo discorso e queste pratiche sullo sfondo delle figurazioni della mascolinità senile del cosiddetto “Viagra cinema” di marca hollywoodiana (da “Viagra Literature,” John Sutherland), che il cinema di Sorrentino trasforma in maschere dell’impotenza. Il livello estetico, in particolare il “deadpan framing” o estetica dell’impassibilità, le connessioni con la realtà politica e la cronaca, e la mini-serializzazione sono funzionali alla messa in scena della contro-epica della decadenza, già esplorata in La grande bellezza e in Youth, che in Loro 1 e Loro 2 declina il conflitto fra sessualità e potere al centro della società contemporanea.
 
Nicoletta Marini-Maio is Associate Professor of Italian and Film Studies at Dickinson College. She is co-founder and Editor in Chief of the international journal g/s/i—gender/sexuality/italy. She is the author of A Very Seductive Body Politic: Silvio Berlusconi in Cinema (Milan: Mimesis, 2015) and co-editor and co-translator of Body Of State: A Nation Divided (Fairleigh- Dickinson, 2011). Her publications include articles on film and theater in the years of lead (1970s), coming-of-age film, and auteur cinema, and two pedagogical volumes. With Ellen Nerenberg, she is co-author of the collaborative project entitled Winx Nation: educare la futura consumista.

Panel 27: Paolo Sorrentino’s eclectic aestheticism

Organizers: Annachiara Mariani (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States) and Russell J. A. Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)
 
Chair: Daniela Bini (University of Texas, Austin, United States)
 
 
As many critics have pointed out, all of Paolo Sorrentino’s films as well as his television series feature individual shots or whole scenes that may or may not further the narrative but whose sheer beauty arrests the eye. Sorrentino’s filmmaking combines a melodramatic approach with an eclectic aestheticism that has been known to alienate when it does not enchant. Accusations of style over substance persist, although arguably, in Sorrentino, they are two sides of the same coin. His excessive film style highlights, on the one hand, the director’s desire to be ironic, self-reflexive, and non-transparent (see Marcus’ notion of post-realism in Il Divo, 2010). On the other hand, Sorrentino seems to be invested in his own brand of political impegno for a postmodern, post-millennial era (see Antonello and Mussgnug, 2012), complicating any easy interpretation of his often parodic portrayal of political conflicts, gender issues and (masculine) identity crises. Sorrentino’s masterful combination of a captivating visual style with an at times penetrating psychological insight makes him one of the most intriguing auteurs in contemporary Italian cinema. This panel explores the different aspects of Paolo Sorrentino’s eclectic style and visionary aesthetics in his films and television series.
 
 
1. Annachiara Mariani (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States)

Megalomaniac: The obsession with power in Sorrentino’s diptych Loro
 
Peter Bernsteins book The Power of Gold recounts with remarkable bravura “how people have become intoxicated and obsessed over pieces of metal called gold.” In his prologue, he explains, “Gold has motivated entire societies, torn economies to shreds, provoked horrible acts by one people against another.” Assuming gold is a metonymy and corollary for power, Bernsteins assertions perfectly fit Sorrentinos 2018 diptych on Silvio Berlusconi, Loro 1 and Loro 2. As allegorical tales, Sorrentinos films are the depiction of the moral degradation of a society physically and mentally consumed by the pursuit for power. My paper examines how male and female characters in Loro 1 and Loro 2 become obsessed with reaching the personification of their ultimate ideal, Berlusconi as archetype of gold and power. I also argue that obsession with power takes possession of the characters body and mind, turning it into a real mental disorder. The characters seem willing to do anything to reach their ultimate idol and get to power, even if involves using others, selling ones body and soul, becoming corrupted, traitors and felons. My claim is that Sorrentinos choice of Berlusconi as a paragon of power and gold and as an exemplification of moral corruption is perfectly fitting and telling of contemporary Italian society. 
 
Annachiara Mariani is an Assistant Professor of Italian at the Department of Modern and Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests are on Italian Cinema, National and Trans National Media Studies and Italian Theatre. She has authored a book on Italian Grotesque Theatre and Pirandello, Il teatro frammentato. Luigi Pirandello, Luigi Antonelli e i grotteschi (Cassandra, 2013) and published numerous articles, essays and book reviews on Italian Theatre, Cinema and the interrelation between Cinema and Literature. Her forthcoming publications include a special issueof the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies on Paolo Sorrentino’s films and TV series. She is currently working on a book-length project on representation of trauma and power in contemporary Italian and American TV series. 
 
 
2. Michela Barisonzi (Monash University, Australia)
 
Searching for La grande bellezza
 
Form over substance is a recurring accusation levelled at Paolo Sorrentino’s films. La grande bellezza, while being no exception, is in itself a reflection on this binary, exploring the endless search for true beauty. The movies openness to diverging aesthetic and social contexts and its search for contrast introduces the viewer to a procession of characters whose superficially beautiful lives hide endless dissatisfaction and social degeneration. Sorrentino presents elements of aesthetic beauty, before promptly revealing their emptiness. Even the postcard-like symbols of Rome do not escape this process of tearing a real image from clichés (Deleuze, 1989, p. 21). However, while Sorrentino exposes the fallacy of appearance that surrounds materiality, he also seeks to reveal the true meaning of beauty. Mecchia points to the concept of sublime, symbolised by the shots of the sky, as the answer to this quest. While agreeing with the idea of beauty escaping materiality, this paper argues that true beauty emerges from relationships: love, true friendship, the bound between a father and a son. Sorrentino does not preference form over substance, but rather explores the very idea of what it means to have substance, finding true beauty in unconventional places.
 
Michela Barisonzi is Teaching Associate at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) where she obtained her PhD. She has a BA in Translation and Interpretation, a MA in Foreign Literatures and Cultures and a MA in International Relations. She has published several works on the fin-de-siècle nationalist ideology and female representation in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s works. She is currently working on the representations of sexual violence in nineteenth-century Italian authors, and D’Annunzio and the Great War. Other areas of her research included the juridical language of migration and political discourse. She has presented papers based on nineteenth-century Italian literature and contemporary Italian cinema at various international conferences.
 
 
3. Russell J. A. Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)
 
The Young Popes credit sequence: A postsecular allegory in ten paintings
 
In an article for the online Daily Art, Zusanna Stanka claims that the 10 paintings reproduced in The Young Pope’s opening credits hold the key to deciphering the series 10 episodes. In this paper I argue that Sorrentino’s ironic transmediation of these medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, nineteenth- and twentieth-century artworks allegorizes the series’ engagement with the contradictions of the current postsecular era. I invoke allegory not least because of the series’ subject matter, which recounts the fictional story of the first American pope in the Vatican’s history, exploring the personal and political behind-the-scenes machinations in the papal palace. In what is without doubt the most divisive point in its critical reception, the series critically analyzes the current state of the Catholic Church, examining the nature and value of religious faith in the twenty-first century. In a final irony it appears to come down on the side of the validity of faith, insofar as the titular pope performs more than one miracle and, in the end, having proven his sainthood, is granted a vision of the redeeming Christ in the clouds above Venice’s Piazza San Marco.
 
Russell J. A. Kilbourn is Associate Professor in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, specializing in film theory, memory studies, and adaptation. He is the author of Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (Routledge, 2010), co-editor, with Eleanor Ty, of The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (WLU Press, 2013), and W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator (Northwestern UP, 2018). His current book project is on Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (under contract with Wallflower Press (Columbia UP).

Panel 28: Italian crime narratives (III)

Chair: Angela Fabris (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
 
1. Angela Fabris (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
 
Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria: The first foreign remake of a giallo
 
The genre of the Italian giallo emerged in the 1960s and had its heyday in the 1970s. Its popular blend of gruesome murders, gore and eroticism inspired numerous Hollywood productions such as Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) and William Friedkin's Jade (1995), to name just a few. Thus, it comes as a surprise that before 2018 no fully-fledged remake of a giallo has been produced outside of Italy. Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018) can be considered to be the first remake of Dario Argento‘s 1977 cult movie. Set in 1977 – the year when the original film was released –Guadagnino’s American-Italian co-production basically follows the plot of Argento's film, but also deviates from the pretext in several significant ways. My paper explores these differences and focuses in particular on Guadagnino’s all-female cast and the political background of the divided city of Berlin. In a more general sense, the paper also raises theoretical questions about the nature of a remake. In other words, what is the difference between a remake and a homage, an imitation, an inspiration or, as Guadagnino once described his Suspiria - which premiered in September 2018 at the Venice Film Festival – a cover version?
Angela Fabris is Associate Professor for Spanish and Italian Literature and Culture Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. Her current areas of research include: Spanish and Italian literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish literature, intermediality, visual culture and Italian film history. Recent book publications: Horror Cult Movies (Schüren, 2017 with J. Helbig), Science-Fiction Cult Movies (Schüren, 2016 with J. helbig), Nuevos enfoques sobre la novela corta barroca (Peter Lang, 2016 with M. Albert, U. Becker, R. Cerezo), ‘Gazzetta Veneta’, 1760-1762 – L’architettura della ‘Gazzetta Veneta’: dialogo tra generi e forme (Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2015). She has also authored a volume on Eroticism in Italian and British Cinema (Trier: WVT 2019).
 
2. Stefania Antonioni (Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italia)
 
L’horror per famiglie: Le serie TV italiane e il genere horror
 
L’horror è tra i generi che hanno segnato la nascita del cinema ed è diventato un genere per famiglie e teenager anche grazie alle serie di fantascienza e del mistero degli anni 60. In Italia questo genere si è svilupato solo più tardi, negli anni 70, decennio che ha visto l’addomesticamento del genere horror e gotico a favore del pubblico televisivo proprio mentre nello stesso periodo questo stesso genere stava diventando una cifra distintiva della produzione cinematografica italiana. L’obiettivo del paper è quello di rintracciare le origini del genere horror nella produzione televisiva italiana, riflettendo sul “naturale” processo di addomesticamento reso necessario dalla messa in onda sui canali della TV pubblica. Questo processo ha portato alla creazione di un genere peculiare che può essere definito “horror per famiglie”, costituito da una ibridazione tra il genere mistery, quello sovrannaturale e le storie di fantasmi, il cui obiettivo era quello di creare dell’inquietudine ma in maniera soft. L’intento è anche quello di ravvisare eventuali schemi narrativi riprodotti e condivisi da alcune di queste serie, anche nel corso del tempo. Per questo motivo, l’analisi si concentrerà in particolare su 3 prodotti, di successo e a loro modo innovativi, ovvero L’amaro caso della Baronessa di Carini (1975), sceneggiato e diretto da Daniele DAnza, autore anche dello storico Il segno del commando (1971); Voci notturne (1995), sceneggiato e diretto da Pupi Avati e Sorelle (2017).
 
Stefania Antonioni è rtd di tipo B e insegna Cinema e Fotografia presso il Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali dell’Università di Urbino Carlo Bo. I suoi interessi di ricerca riguardano i Television e i Media Studies, le forme promozionali e i Visual Studies. Tra le sue pubblicazioni Imagining. Serialità, narrazioni cinematografiche e fotografia nella pubblicità contemporanea (FrancoAngeli, 2016) e diversi articoli, tra i quali ‘Post-millennial spectatorship and horror films: the case of It’ (2017), in Comunicazioni sociali, n.2, 2018 (con M. Farci).
 
 
3. Elgin Eckert (Umbra Institute, Italia)
 
Netflix, nostalgia, and neo-noir

This conference paper will investigate the elements of noir in the first Italian original television series produced for Netflix, Suburra: Blood on Rome (Suburra – La serie), which premiered worldwide in 2017 and which has been marketed not only towards a younger, but also an international audience that. The aesthetic features and thematic issues which significantly distinguish it from more traditional, RAI-produced series will be discussed. It will be shown that its success has been achieved by producing a noir that consciously breaks away from Italian small-screen traditions, which tend to be provincial and nostalgic self-appreciation reduced to banality and predictability. Noir and nostalgia are at opposite ends of an aesthetic and ideological spectrum, and I will show that Suburra can be firmly placed within the tradition of Neo-noir crime fiction.

Elgin K. Eckert is Assistant Professor for Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the Umbra Institute in Perugia. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Language and Literature from Harvard University and has published mainly on the topics of cultural memory and the works of Andrea Camilleri. Eckert is the co-editor of the recent volume Representing Italy Through Food (Bloomsbury, 2017). More recently, her research has geared toward narrative and technical aspects in Italian film and television series.

Panel 29: Film, fashion, costume from the silent era to the present (II)

Chair: David Ward (Wellesley College, United States)
 
1. Chiara Pompa (Università di Bologna, Italia)
 
Fiabe made in Gucci. Un caso di studio sulla costruzione dell’immaginario attraverso i fashion film
 
Una storia di incroci e innesti quella che lega il cinema e la moda. Una storia di contaminazioni reciproche che nel panorama aperto dalle nuove tecnologie va riscrivendo i termini di una relazione tanto consolidata quanto in perenne divenire: affermatosi solo di recente ma prontamente sfruttato dalle case di moda nei processi di branding, il genere digitale del fashion film offre un’inedita prospettiva da cui osservare le interazioni tra i due campi. Nel caso specifico di tali audiovisivi brevi, la moda, infatti, si appropria del linguaggio del cinema per poi servirsene strategicamente nelle proprie pratiche comunicative e di coinvolgimento emotivo del pubblico, in virtù della sua peculiare capacità di generare e solidificare immaginari. Veicolate anzitutto dai Social Media attraverso i nuovi dispositivi digitali, le esperienze tipicamente cinematografiche del racconto di finzione, di proiezione in situazioni immaginarie e di identificazione con personaggi fittizi – che in passato la moda aveva cercato di rendere possibili soprattutto attraverso il medium fotografico – migrano, in definitiva, verso nuovi spazi e nuovi contesti. Ed è proprio questa nuova vicenda del rapporto tra moda e cinema che ci si propone di approfondire, partendo dall’analisi della vasta casistica di fashion film commissionati da Gucci, assurti a caso di studio.
 
Chiara Pompa è dottoranda in Arti visive, performative, mediali presso l’Università di Bologna. I suoi principali interessi di ricerca vertono sul fotografico e, in particolare, sulle interazioni tra arte contemporanea, moda e social media. È, inoltre, responsabile di redazione della rivista scientifica piano b. Arti e culture visive, coordinatore scientifico (Area Moda) del Master in “Design and Technology for Fashion Communication”, membro del centro di ricerca internazionale “Culture Fashion Communication” e membro del comitato di redazione della collana scientifica “Culture moda e società” (Bruno Mondadori).
 
 
2. Eugenia Paulicelli (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States) and Felicia Caponigri (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Lucca, Italia)
 
Italian cultural heritage: the case of Salvatore Ferragamo
 
Salvatore Ferragamo’s life and work is one of the most compelling stories in the history of both the Italian and the global fashion industry. It is also one of the most significant case studies that embodies the tangible and intangible features of Italy’s cultural. The success Ferragamo enjoyed and the creativity he displayed were closely tied to his involvement as a shoe designer for Hollywood and, later, to Italian film.  Since Ferragamo’s death in 1960, his family and eponymous fashion house have continued to build on his legacy and connections to film. Founded in 1995, the Museo Ferragamo has greatly contributed to the contextualization of Salvatore’s design in the larger historical context of art, culture and film. The emphasis on the relationship between Ferragamo’s fashion and film leads us to ask where the cultural interest and the cultural value of Ferragamo’s designs rest. Examining Ferragamo’s iconic shoes, within the context of their relationship to film, the paper will address questions that are at the heart of today’s conversation about how to preserve Italy’s cultural heritage. 
 
Eugenia Paulicelli, is Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY). Among her latest books are Italian Style. Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (2016 and 2017); Film, Fashion and the 1960s (co-editor 2017). She edited a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies dedicated to Italian Fashion (January 2015). She created and directs a research and pedagogic project and digital platform exploring craft, design, technology, sustainability and social responsibility based at CUNY: http://fabricofcultures.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu. Her book, Moda, Cinema, Identità nel cinema italiano is forthcoming (2019) and will be published by Pearson Mondadori.
 
Felicia Caponigri is an American lawyer and Ph.D. student in Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Lucca, Italy. A member of the Indiana bar, Felicia received her Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from The University of Notre Dame Law School in 2015 and her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in Art History from The University of Notre Dame in 2012.  Her dissertation research, under the direction of Professor Lorenzo Casini, comparatively examines how modern and contemporary Italian Fashion may be legally classified as cultural property under Italian law and under U.S. law. 
 
 
3. Laura Ceccarelli (Centro Sperimentale Cinematografia, CSC, Roma, Italia)
 
Film, fashion, costume and the Roman based archives
L’intervento presenta una mappatura delle fonti archivistiche, pubbliche e private, connesse alle attività delle sartorie cine-teatrali e dei costumisti, al fine di ricostruire una realtà produttiva e culturale di assoluta eccellenza che, a partire dal secolo scorso, si è sviluppata a Roma, vera e propria  "città dello spettacolo". The paper presents a mapping of the archival sources, public and private, connected to the activities of the cine-theatrical tailors and costume designers, in order to reconstruct a productive and cultural reality of absolute excellence that, starting from the last century, developed in Rome, a real "city of entertainment".

Laura Ceccarelli archivista al Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, ha coordinato il gruppo di lavoro Sceneggiature; ha trattato vari archivi: Bini, Aristarco, Berselli, Mariani, Lavagnino, Mida Puccini, Quilici, Rossellini, Savina. Ha redatto il Soggettario di cinema e precinema, in partnership con la Biblioteca della Cineteca di Bologna e la Biblioteca del Museo del Cinema di Torino. È stata Vice-Presidente della Sezione ANAI Lazio, promuovendo attività come il Seminario Gli audiovisivi negli archivi e nelle biblioteche (ottobre 2017); ha collaborato al volume “Adriana Berselli. L'avventura del costume” (Artdigiland); ha inoltre collaborato con la rivista digitale Officina della storia. 

Panel 30: Italian television shows and story-writing

Chair: Colleen M. Ryan (Indiana University, United States) 
 
1. Laura Treglia (Independent Scholar, Qatar) and Paolo d’Urbano (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar)

High montage: gender ideologies and the commodification of emotions in Italian daytime TV
This paper presents preliminary research on Uomini&Donne, a popular love reality in Italian commercial TV.  The show is slotted in the early afternoon hours for a private network and is hosted by popular presenter Maria De Filippi. By hybridising several TV genres, Uomini&Donne is a unique product that attracts a diverse spectatorship in terms of age, gender-sexual and class identities. The goal of the show is to help people find a partner, while filming their dates outside the studios. Much of the show time is devoted to watching and commenting clips of such dates, thereby sparking heated in-studio discussions. Moreover, Uomini&Donne creates its own celebrity system and claims to maintain a close connection to its TV audience “made of ordinary people.” Finally, its trans-media character is testified by a host of fanzines, websites, blogs, social media accounts, and on-line forums dedicated to the latest gossips about dating couples and studio rows. Through a combination of feminist media theory and cultural studies lenses, the paper will flesh out several threads for analysis, while focusing on how the show is grounded on a pornography and commodification of emotions, the interweaving of ideological (gendered) discourses and the reproduction of heterosexist norms.
 
Laura Treglia is an Independent Scholar in gender studies and has lectured ­in the UK (University of Chester) and Qatar (Hamad bin Khalifa University). She holds a PhD in Gender Studies and MA in Japanese Studies (both SOAS, University of London) and her main research interests include gender, global feminisms, film studies, world and cult cinema. Book contributions and articles on Japanese 1970s exploitation cinema are published for the University of Chester Press, Wiley and the Film Studies Journal.
Paolo d’Urbano (PhD Media Studies, SOAS, University of London) is Assistant Professor in media and cultural studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. He has been teaching courses on global media, political economy of communication and media and cultural studies in the UK and Qatar. His research interests include social movements, media and cultural studies, critical political economy, digital media. His research work appeared in Branca and Demichelis eds. (Narcissus, 2013) Memorie con-divise, and forthcoming articles are due to be published by the Journal of Alternative and Community Media and the Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research.
 
 
2. Cecilia Brioni (University of Bristol, UK)
 
Speciale per Voi: Italian youth television, 1962-1972
 
This paper provides an overview of the emergence and development of television programmes specifically aimed at an audience of young people in Italian national television during the period 1962-1972. In particular, it analyses how Italian young people’s age identity was represented in the musical television shows Alta Pressione (Siena, 1962), Stasera Rita (Falqui, 1965), Diamoci del Tu (Siena, 1967), Speciale per Voi (Ragionieri, 1969; Siena, 1970), and Tutto è Pop (Moretti, 1972). Previous studies have argued that in the early 1960s a strategia aziendale was used by RAI to decrease anxieties connected to the emergence of young people as social and political subjects in Italian society (Morbidelli, 1998). By looking at specific aspects of the mise-en-scène of the above programmes, such as the content, the set design, the role of hosts, and the space and role reserved to the studio audience, this paper demonstrates that representations of youth in Italian television adapted to the changing social and political role of young people in Italy during the 1960s, provoking an increasing circulation of subversive discourses around youth. Youth-oriented TV shows featured original approaches – like comedy – to the discussion of the ongoing generational struggle in Italian society. Moreover, media narratives increasingly facilitated the creation of a distinctively Italian youth culture by endorsing the popularity of young Italian stars.
 
Cecilia Brioni is Research Associate at the University of Bristol, where she is working on the AHRC-funded Leadership Fellowship project ‘Naples and the Nation: Image, Media and Culture in the Second Republic’. Her research explores the social construction of age as an identity feature and its intersectional dynamics in Italian popular culture. She has worked on representations of Italian young people’s style and bodily practices in youth-oriented television programmes, films and magazines from 1958 to 1975. She published the articles ‘Between two Stages: Rita Pavone and i giovani on Studio Uno (1961–1966)’ (2017) and ‘Transnational “Italian” Stardom: Lara Saint Paul and the Performativity of Race’ (with Simone Brioni, 2018) in the journal Italian Studies.
 
 
3. Alessandro Carpin (Brown University, Providence, United States)
 
 Learning the right tools for the job: Training writers for Italian television
 
In recent years, Italian television series – e.g. Romanzo Criminale. La serie (2008-2010, Gomorra. La serie (2013-), and My Brilliant Friend (2018-) - have achieved unprecedented critical and commercial success. Scholars have investigated the rise of Italian complex televisual storytelling from various perspectives: domestic and non-domestic televisual storytelling traditions (Buonanno, 2012), adoption of American-style production models, changes in viewing practices (Scaglioni, Barra, 2013). However, scholar writing on “practitioners agency” (Hjort, 2010) has been very limited. My analysis attends indeed to what John Caldwell called “cultures of production”, meaning the lived practices, beliefs, rituals and discourses of those working in the industry. I will focus on the training of the professional screenwriters and on the institutions devoted to the practice-oriented film and television education that in the last decades contributed to form talent for writing and producing television in Italy. Do these schools teach a certain approach to television? How does this approach impact visual and narrative style, as well as working practices and collaborative process? Is this approach different from the one of the previous generations of writers who were not trained within a film school framework? What are the differences and similarities between Italian, European and American screenwriting schools?
 
Alessandro Carpin is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Brown University. He graduated in Italian Studies from CUNY – College of Staten Island. He studied storytelling and screenwriting at Scuola Holden in Turin and digital filmmaking at the Digital Film Academy in NYC. His current research interests are in televisual storytelling, transnational television drama, world building narrative practices, transmedia production, cinema and comics. In addition to his scholarly work, he works as script consultant, story editor and screenwriter for the Italian television industry.

Panel 31: The ‘fabrication’ of post-secular spirituality: Transmedial storytelling in religiously plural Italy

Chair: Nicoletta Marini-Maio (Dickinson College, United States)
 
This panel starts from a material approach to religion and from the assumption that religious ‘fabrication’ and religious ‘mediation’ are key to the genesis of a sense of spiritual presence (Birgit Meyer 2012). In this view audiovisual media are privileged to analyse religious mediation as a ‘sensational form’, that is “a configuration of religious media, acts, imaginations and bodily sensations in the context of a religious tradition or group presence” (Meyer 2012). Being considered as a practice of mediation, the ‘fabrication’ of religion can be studied with the help of aesthetic categories, but it can also be analysed in terms of agency, being part of the public sphere (Habermas 2006). As is stated by Rosi Braidotti, the postsecular turn has made manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality (Braidotti 2009).
The papers presented in this panel will focus in particular on the ‘fabrication’ of religiosity in different media from several points of view.
 
 
1. Giancarlo Lombardi (The Graduate Center/CUNY, United States)
 
Screening (dis)belief in Il miracolo
 
Part of a larger investigation on the uses and functions of religion in quality television drama from the Global North, this paper seeks to explore the treatment of questions of belief in Il miracolo (Sky Atlantic). Secular concerns are central to this series, written and directed by Nicolò Ammanniti in his first TV foray. The empty pool where the statue of a bleeding Madonna lies, upon being found by a squad of carabinieri during the capture of a mafia boss, speaks directly to key themes discussed in this series. Rather than tackling any interactions between the Church and its followers, Ammanniti chooses to situate his discussion of a miraculous event in a secular universe wholly deprived of faith, presenting its most dramatic ripple effects as effectively hidden from the world at large. The miracle thus becomes a personal engagement with something that is unexplicable, something that lack of faith, portrayed across different walks of life, prevents from providing hope or consolation.
 
Giancarlo Lombardi is Professor of Italian, French and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, where he teaches Screen Studies and chairs the PhD program in Comparative Literature. He is the author of Rooms with a View: Feminist Diary Fiction and co-editor of Terrorism Italian Style and Remembering Aldo Moro, dedicated to cultural representations of political terrorism, and of Italian political cinema. He is finishing a monograph on the rhetoric of fear in Italian television drama from the 1960s and 1970s, while working on a new project on uses and functions of religion in prestige television drama from the Global North.    
 
 
2. Monica Jansen (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and Maria Bonaria Urban (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
 
La ‘fabrication’ della religione in The Young Pope: L’ironia di un’iconicità post-secolare
 
Della serie The Young Pope è stata analizzata la doppia ironia dell’oggetto rappresentato e parodiato e allo stesso tempo la copresenza di due modalità antitetiche, quella dell’ironia e della magia. Questo contributo intende esaminare con quali simboli estetici Paolo Sorrentino riesce a “fabbricare” il senso rituale e mistico della religione cattolica nella serie e in che modo egli contemporaneamente riesce a decostruire la dimensione pubblica del culto postsecolare. A tale scopo si studieranno con particolare attenzione le tensioni tra iconologia e iconoclastia (“iconoclash” nella terminologia di Latour) nelle rappresentazioni del sacro nella serie, a livello intermediale e di genere. L’intertestualità “postmoderna” di Sorrentino, spesso associata a Fellini, entra in dialogo con iconologie postsecolari, tra cui “La nona ora” di Maurizio Catellan, o con icone della tradizione cristiana inserite in una narrazione dissacrante. La “contraddizione” incarnata da Lenny Belardo, papa non credente e orfano, si concretizza anche nel rapporto stabilito con diverse figure femminili dell’iconologia cristologica che al contempo incorporano la contestazione femminista nei confronti di una chiesa conservatrice. Ci si chiede a quale interpretazione del postsecolare giunge la serie che, in bilico tra ironia e magia, si muove continuamente sul confine tra l’autoreferenzialità e l’apertura verso una religione senza religione.
 
Monica Jansen insegna al Dipartimento di Italiano dell’Università di Utrecht. Si occupa di letteratura e cultura contemporanea, modernismo e postmodernismo, memoria culturale e precariato. Ha pubblicato: la monografia Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia: In bilico tra dialettica e ambiguità (Franco Cesati, 2002), vari volumi collettanei, fra cui Televisionismo: narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica (2015, con Maria Bonaria Urban), numeri tematici e saggi. È membro di redazione della rivista Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies ed è redattore dell’“Italian Bookshelf” di Annali d’Italianistica.
 
Maria Bonaria Urban insegna al Dipartimento di Studi italiani dell’Università di Amsterdam. Si occupa di letteratura e cultura contemporanea, memoria culturale, postcolonialismo, cinema italiano, Imagologia e scrittura di genere. Ha pubblicato la monografia Sardinia on Screen: National Characters and Images in Italian Cinema (Rodopi, 2013), volumi collettanei e numeri tematici, tra cui ‘Raccontare la giustizia’ (Forum Italicum, 2017, con Monica Jansen), e numerosi saggi e articoli.
 
 
3. Clodagh Brook (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
 
Mobilizing minority filmmaking: Islam in the contemporary Italian film industry
 
Contemporary filmmaking is an important site of a struggle over the control of public images and narratives. Religious organisations or individuals typically engage in tactics through which they strain for the visibility, or even supremacy, of their vision in a crowded media environment. While Catholicism is overwhelmingly the religion on the Italian peninsula, Italy is nonetheless becoming religiously plural. Islam is now Italy’s second religion, with approximately 2,870,000 followers (Hackett 2017). In this paper I explore how the filmmaking industry has mobilised to resist the decline of religious filmmaking in the public sphere. My paper focuses on Islam as an instance of minority religious filmmaking, investigating whether this growing faith has any meaningful access to the media in Italy, a question which is key to post-secular debates forwarded by Jürgen Habermas, as well as by Rosi Braidotti and her colleagues (2014). To answer this question, I provide an overview of tactics used both by Islamic religious organisations and by individuals for controlling media messages. I investigate whether minority religions have mobilised and been able to enter the public arena, assessing what support both the Italian state and their own religious institutions and infrastructures have provided.   
 
Clodagh Brook is Associate Professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. Educated at UCD and Oxford, she is author of three monographs: Marco Bellocchio (UTP 2010), Contemporary Italian Cinema and Television in the Post-secular Public Sphere (UTP, 2019) and a monograph on Eugenio Montale for (OUP, 2002). She has published edited books on transmedia (2014) and Berlusconi (2009). She leads a large AHRC-funded grant, Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia. She has written widely on Italian cinema, interart/intermedia and poetry, as well as holding leadership positions (Head of Modern Languages; Co-Director of the Centre for Film at University of Birmingham). 

Panel 32: Italian crime narratives (IV)

Chair: Gianluca Fantoni (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
 
1. Anna Bisogno (Università di Roma Tre, Italia)
 
Reality del dolore e messa in scena. Da Chi l’ha visto? a Quarto Grado la narrazione del dolore nei talk della televisione italiana
 
Trent’anni fa venne sdoganata in Italia la cosiddetta tv del dolore. Anzi, in quell’occasione, il Paese fece scuola. Il 13 giugno del 1981 milioni di telespettatori italiani assisterono impotenti alla morte di Alfredino Rampi, un bambino di 6 anni caduto in un pozzo alle porte di Roma. Fu la tragedia di Vermicino. La RAI trasmise in diretta e a reti unificate per ben 18 ore la lenta agonia del povero bambino. Dal punto di vista narrativo con Vermicino si assiste alla definitiva commistione tra generi televisivi differenti, in particolare tra l’informazione e la fiction, tra le istanze della conoscenza e dell’informazione e quelle alla partecipazione emotiva. L’obiettivo del contributo è quello di ricostruire le fasi storiche che hanno portato a trasformare le vicende di cronaca nera in eventi mediatici di portata nazionale e/o in narrazioni melodrammatiche. I casi presi in esame sono Chi l’ha visto? (Raitre), il programma condotto da Federica Sciarelli che nella puntata del 7 ottobre 2010 fu annunciato in diretta alla madre di Sarah Scazzi il ritrovamento del corpo della figlia e Quarto Grado (Rete 4) con Gianluigi Nuzzi, che approfondisce attraverso ricostruzioni funzionali e interviste i misteri (“i gialli”) irrisolti della cronaca nera attuale e del passato.
 
Anna Bisogno insegna Storia e linguaggi della radio e della televisione presso l’Università di Roma Tre nel corso di laurea in Scienze della Comunicazione. I suoi interessi di ricerca riguardano la storia della televisione e i suoi intrecci con le culture visuali. Ha pubblicato, tra l’altro: La TV invadente. Il reality del dolore da Vermicino ad Avetrana (Carocci, 2015); Questioni di post televisione. Modelli, convergenza e archivi digitali (Aracne, 2011); La storia in tv. Immagine e memoria collettiva (Carocci, 2009). E’ station manager della comunicazione di Roma Tre Radio, la web radio dell’Ateneo.
 
 
2. Emilia Lacroce (Università di Pisa, Italia)
 
Il Mondo di Mezzo e la sua rappresentazione: cortocircuiti narrativi e definizione di identità
 
Nel punto di intersezione tra locale e globale nel mondo cinematografico e televisivo è pressoché inevitabile incontrare i fenomeni criminali. Gomorra e, in misura diversa, Romanzo Criminale, rappresentano due interessanti casi studio, due “ecosistemi narrativi” complessi, che tanto devono, anche nella primissima versione sotto forma di libro, all’immaginario cinematografico. Si tratta di intersezioni complesse su temi complessi: le mafie e più in generale le organizzazioni criminali, sono fenomeni che storicamente caratterizzano l’Italia nella percezione interna ed esterna e nella sua stereotipizzazione. All’interno di tale complessità, considerando l’eccedenza simbolica dell’etichetta “mafia” e il rischio di un’eccessiva enfatizzazione in chiave performativa di tale concetto, in rapporto ai diversi contesti culturali locali a cui viene applicata, il mio intervento si concentrerà sulla costruzione dell’identità nel gruppo criminale protagonista del caso romano Mondo di Mezzo. Cercherò di delineare alcuni esempi esplicativi del cortocircuito narrativo in cui, dal momento degli arresti (dicembre 2014), la narrazione epica di Romanzo Criminale è andata a sovrapporsi nell’immaginario collettivo alle narrazioni dei giornalisti e alla ritualità complessa di un processo penale. L’incontro/scontro tra la fiction e la cronaca ha contribuito alla complessità analitica del fenomeno, influenzando l’autorappresentazione del gruppo criminale, in particolare dei suoi leader.
 
Emilia Lacroce, dottoranda in Scienze Politiche presso l’Università di Pisa, si occupa di strategie comunicative dei gruppi criminali. Fa parte dell’équipe di gestione del Master in Analisi, prevenzione e contrasto della criminalità organizzata e della corruzione, attivo presso l’Università di Pisa. Si è laureata con lode in Lingue e Letterature Moderne Euroamericane presso la stessa università, con una tesi sul potere della parola nel contrasto ai fenomeni mafiosi e corruttivi. Nel 2012-2013 ha ottenuto una borsa di ricerca della Fondazione Frammartino per il progetto “L’impegno per la legalità: quando la lotta contro la ‘ndrangheta ha il volto di donna”.
 
 
3. Antonella Mascio (Università di Bologna, Italia)
 
1992, 1993 e House of Cards.  Il racconto della degradazione politica attraverso la cornice della fiction
 
Nei primi anni ’90 Milano sale agli onori delle cronache per via dell’inchiesta “Mani Pulite”, inchiesta che determinerà in Italia il passaggio dalla prima alla seconda Repubblica. Alle vicende che emersero dalle investigazioni e che sfociarono nello scandalo chiamato Tangentopoli è stata dedicata una serie televisiva che pur mutando titolo nelle sue due stagioni di programmazione - 1992 nel 2015 e 1993 nel 2017 (Italia, Wildside, in collaborazione con Sky e LA7) - si riferisce agli stessi eventi, seguendoli nel loro progredire cronologico.Il discorso del degrado politico viene sapientemente utilizzato anche in House of Cards (Sky Atlantic 2013 - 2018). Ambientata negli Stati Uniti di oggi, racconta una storia finzionale che sfrutta una serie di luoghi simbolici, emblemi e segni tipici del potere americano, per dare forza ad una narrazione basata su dinamiche di manipolazione ed intrighi politici. La riflessione che vogliamo proporre riguarda il modo in cui i processi di degradazione e delegittimazione vengono raccontati nelle due diverse serie televisive. Per 1992 e 1993 la realtà del passato viene costantemente evocata attraverso frammenti di Tg e pagine di giornali. Al contrario, in House of Cards il mondo reale di riferimento viene abilmente sfruttato, in modo parassitario, per costruire una storia di finzione.

Antonella Mascio is Assistant Professor in Sociology of Cultural and Communication Processes at University of Bologna. She teaches in the Communication Program of Humanities at University of Bologna. In recent years she focused her research on online social relations and on relationships between the Internet and Tv Drama.  She has recently published Fashion Convergence (with Junji Tsuchiya, ZMJ, 2015), and Virtuali Comunità (Guerini e Associati, 2008).​
 

Panel 33: Film, fashion, costume from the silent era to the present (III)

Co-organizers:  Eugenia Paulicelli (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States) and Giuliana Muscio (Università di Padova, Emerita, Italia)
Chair: David Ward (Wellesley College, United States)

David Ward is Professor of Italian Studies and Chair in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College. He is author of five books, four in Enlgish and one in Italian. His latest book, published in 2017, is Contemorary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism: Stranger than Fact. He has also co-edited a volume with Sciltian Gastaldi, published in 2018, entitled Era mio padre:  Italian Terrorism of the Anni di piombo in the Postmemorials of Victims’ Relatives.

1. Giuliana Muscio (University of Padua, Emerita, Italia)
 
Fashion and costumes in the work of an Italian filmmaker in silent Hollywood: Marion Davies in Robert Vignola's films
 
Robert Vignola (born in Italy in 1882) emigrated with his family to the US when he was three. Between 1915 and 1927 he became an important director, working with the most popular actresses of the time. At Hearst’s Cosmopolitan studios, he directed Marion Davies in several of the most spectacular pictures of the time (Enchantment, Beauty’s Worth, When Knighthood Was in Flower, Yolanda), with the collaboration of Joseph Urban. After WWI Hollywood moved to conquer the world’s screens, it proposed itself as a model of style. A fan magazine proclaimed: “Wide interest in movies causes actresses’ gowns to be considered smartest in design.” Vignola’s involvement with fashion emerges from the publicity of his films, often focused on the lavishness of the costumes (“Lovely Silks Are Used in Yolanda”). Presenting costume film, the ads insisted on historical accuracy. (Actually while Hollywood costume design boasted historical research, it found inspiration in contemporary fashion.)
Vignola even believed in a “product placement” ante litteram, encouraging costumes exhibition in department stores. Vignola’s work is an interesting case study of the relation fashion-cinema, in that it pre-dated the Classical period (1930s), and focused on the women in the audience in the very moment in which they became the majority of the public.
 
 
Giuliana Muscio, Emeritus Professor of Cinema, Università di Padova, Italy; Visiting Professor at UCLA, and University of Minnesota. PhD in film at UCLA. Author of Hollywood's New Deal and of Napoli/New York/Hollywood, and of works both in Italian and English on film relations between USA and Italy, film historiography, American film, women screenwriters in American silent cinema. Member of the European program Changing Media, Changing Europe, and of the Women and Silent Film program, and co-curator of the exhibit "Italy in Hollywood at the Museo Ferragamo (Florence).
 
 
2. Angela Bianca Saponari (University “Aldo Moro”, Bari, Italia)
 
 ‘La vetrina della moda’. Forms and models of femininity on the pages of fascist movie magazines
 
The Fascism of 1930s Italy dominated more than just politics; it spilled over into modes of dressing (Paulicelli, 2004). Despite the manipulative ideology of Fascism, women found other ways to affirm their femininity. The American fashion and costumes conveyed through the movie magazines of the 1930s are evidence of new cultural models that stand out in opposition to the Duce and his family and domestic ideals (Gundle). Magazines such as Cinemio, Stelle, Cinema Illustration proposed an image of the new woman built through exotic and sensual clothes and looks. Alongside Hollywood news articles, film reviews, columns dedicated to building a direct relationship between the audience and the entertainment industry, more and more advertisements and fashion columns have accumulated, promoting new ways of dressing, putting on make-up and acting. Myths and habits have therefore been passed through the glittering universe of Hollywood, to the dreamy everyday life of Italian spectators-consumers. This cultural orientation represented a historical contradiction on which I want to reflect on. With this intervention, therefore, it will be possible to investigate the ways in which the bodies of women have begun to change through the influence of fashion and, altogether, the functions absolved by cinematographic culture in the discursive economy of the advertising message.
 
Angela Bianca Saponari teaches Cinema Studies and Cultural Industry at University “Aldo Moro” of Bari. Her research interests include intertextuality, adaptation and the transformations of film culture, media industries studies, audiovisual archive and paratextuality. She published many essays in journals and miscellaneous books. She is the author of Il cinema di Leonardo Sciascia. Luci e immagini di una vita (2010) and Il corpo esiliato. Cinema italiano della migrazione (2012). She also authored Il desiderio del cinema. Ferdinando Maria Poggioli (Mimesis, 2017). She is member of the editorial staff of Cinergie and she collaborates with the Apulia Film Commission.
 
 
3. Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén (University of Stockholm, Sweden)
 
Italy on the red-carpet: The postwar presence of Italian designers at the Academy Awards
 
The Academy Awards red-carpet is one of the most awaited platforms for fashion brands’ global media exposure. The idea that the Oscars turned into a fashion event in the 1990s looms large in popular culture. However, historical research shows that it was in 1953, when Edith Head was assigned as the event’s first Fashion Consultant, that the Oscars became an international fashion show free-for-all (Castaldo Lundén, 2018). This paper looks into the association between Italian designers and Hollywood actresses by exploring their presence at the Academy Awards ceremony during the postwar era. The end of WWII marked a new horizon in the commercial and cultural interaction between Europe and the United States. The reactivation of transatlantic trade and the increasing mobility of Hollywood personalities between continents, enabled by the so-called runaway productions after the demise of the studio system, called for an increasing presence of European designers in America. This turned the actresses’ global exposure into appealing “display windows” for international designers. The emergence of celebrity culture was the stepping-stone for this phenomenon. By tracing historical sources, this presentation will shed light on the circulation of media discourses around Italian designers in the context of Hollywood’s biggest night. 
 
Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén holds a Ph.D. in Fashion Studies from Stockholm University, an MA in Cinema Studies from the same institution, and a BA. in Public Relations from Universidad Argentina de la Empresa. Her dissertation, Oscar Night in Hollywood: Fashioning the Red-Carpet from the Roosevelt Hotel to International Media is a historical study of the Academy Awards red-carpet phenomenon. She currently teaches at the Media Department of Stockholm University. Her research interests include Hollywood History, celebrity culture, archival research, fashion, and costume design. 

Panel 34: Cinema and migration

Chair: Paola Servino (Brandeis University, United States)
 
1. Moira Di Mauro-Jackson (Texas State University, United States)
 
In search for ‘ Terraferma’.  The tragic transnational mobility of Italy’s migration dilemma through film and documentary
 
In today's Europe, the cosmopolitanism and openness to the world that are at the basis of the project of European art cinema are linked to profound anxieties, as a result of the marginalization of the old continent on the global stage, and of an economic recession that generates grave doubts about the sustainability of the post-­‐ 1989 supranational project. The concomitant loss of identity and centrality of European art film, once a major cinematic form, calls for a new modality of reading, which, I argue, is well served by a modified conception of the minor. Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma (2013) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (2016) are both explicitly reflective about what I term becoming-­‐minor and becoming-­‐sustainable in relation to European art cinema and the new im/migration dilemma. Deploying Deleuze and Guattari's theory of minor literature and Deleuze's concept of minor cinema, while also evaluating the films’ situatedness and its critiques of the sustainability of contemporary immigration fluxes in Europe, this presentation explores the connections between Rosi’s and Crialese’s representation of the Mythical, while both deterritorializing/reterritorializing themes on filmic language as the two key components of Fuocoammare and Terraferma’s geopolitical aesthetics – and as a tool for rethinking the European art film of today.
 
Moira Di Mauro-Jackson received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in Comparative Literature. Her field of study revolves around French, Italian, and English Narrative and Drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her field of interest is meta-­‐textuality, that is the tension between art, life, art, artifice, and the use of masks and masquerade in modern works. Her major focus lies in the French decadent period, those works following D’Annunzio’s time in Italian Literature, as well as various Irish writers of the turn of the century such as Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Yeats. Since 1989, she has been teaching French and Italian and directs a Summer Abroad Program to Italy every summer.

2. Abdelhaleem Solaiman (Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Italia & University of Aswan, Egypt)
 
La letteratura migrante nel cinema italiano. Il caso di Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio     
 
Il condominio come luogo privilegiato di narrazione compare spesso al centro della produzione di molti scrittori della letteratura migrante. Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio è un film diretto da Isotta Toso nel 2010, tratto dall’omonimo romanzo dello scrittore algerino Amara Lakhous, pubblicato nel 2006. Al centro del film (e del romanzo) ricorrono i temi del trauma migratorio in Italia, del razzismo, dell'assenza di dialogo, della convivenza multiculturale e delle contraddizioni della modernità multietnica. Lo scrittore riflette ampiamente sulla domanda: come convivere insieme, anche se provenienti da ambienti e contesti diversi culturalmente e socialmente? Due sono le tesi di fondo del presente intervento. In primo luogo, vorrei mettere in risalto l’influenza del cinema italiano sul testo narrativo di Lakhous, e come la commedia all’italiana è una chiave interpretativa di questo romanzo in cui lo scrittore riesce a mettere in evidenza i paradossi, unendo tragedia e commedia, ironia e critica seria. In secondo luogo, vorrei evidenziare come Isotta Toso ha diretto l'adattamento cinematografico di questo testo narrativo ‘cosmopolita’.
 
Abdelhaleem Solaiman si è laureato, nel 2007, con ottimo e lode in lingua e letteratura italiana all'Università di Minia in Egitto con una tesi di laurea intitolata ‘Attesa e Ricerca di identità nel Deserto dei Tartari di Dino Buzzati’. All'Università di Ain Shams al Cairo ha conseguito la laurea magistrale con una tesi intitolata ‘Il Fantastico nell'opera di Antonio Tabucchi’. Attualmente è al terzo e ultimo anno di dottorato di ricerca in Studi comparati: lingue, letterature e formazione, XXXI ciclo, indirizzo di Italianistica, Università degli Studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, con un progetto di ricerca intitolato ‘La Resistenza come dimensione esistenziale e intellettuale: Beppe Fenoglio e Ghassan Kanafani’.
 
2. Ambra Benvenuto (Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Italia)
 
Il cinema italiano e una scatola magica: L’ascensore
 
Sebbene concettualmente l’ascensore esista sin dai tempi del Colosseo, la progettazione di questo spazio in movimento che conosciamo e utilizziamo quotidianamente affonda le sue radici nell’800, momento in cui è stato possibile automatizzarlo grazie alle tecnologie post seconda rivoluzione industriale. La scatola magica che permette di spostarci da un livello all’altro degli edifici ha esercitato ed esercita tutt’ora un certo fascino per registi teatrali e cinematografici. Il presente contributo intende evidenziare la potenza narrativa di questo esiguo spazio in alcuni momenti del cinema italiano. In Cronache di un amore (Antonioni, 1950), l’ascensore è scenario di una morte misteriosa; lo stesso ambiente è protagonista in Il vedovo (Risi, 1959), laddove si pianifica la morte della moglie del protagonista grazie a una disfunzione tecnica, e in Profondo rosso (Argento, 1975), quando l’impigliarsi di una collana nella porta dell’ascensore costa la vita dell’assassina seriale. Dagli anni 80 in poi, l’ascensore e la possibilità che si guasti sono possibilità sfruttate per creare una situazione di intimità - come in Io e lei (Tognazzi, 2015) - o per acuire scene comiche di alcune commedie, come nei casi di Così parlò Bellavista (De Crescenzo, 1984) e Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (Toso, 2010).
 
Ambra Benvenuto è iscritta al Corso di Laurea magistrale in Musicologia presso l’Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’. È laureata alla triennale e alla magistrale di Filosofia presso l’Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Successivamente si è laureata in Scienze dellArchitettura presso lo stesso ateneo. Ha conseguito un master in Counseling presso lINPEF di Roma e ha vinto borse di formazione presso l’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici di Napoli. Giornalista pubblicista, è autrice di articoli e saggi per testate online e cartacee ed è membro del comitato di redazione della rivista d.a.t. [divulgazioneaudiotestuale]. Ha scritto Filosofia e letteratura distopica (Aracne, 2015).  

Panel 35: Cinema, media and hypertexts (II)

Chair: Moira Di Mauro-Jackson (Texas State University, United States)
 
1. Linda Matheson (University of California at Davis, United States)
 
A discussion of Sophia Loren’s costumes in Marriage Italian Style
 
In keeping with the focus of the conference, this presentation examines how Sophia Loren’s costumes in Marriage Italian Style (De Sica, 1964), promote character, theme and plot development, while simultaneously blurring established sociocultural class lines. Building on recent research by Aoife Monks (2010), and Helen Warner (2014), as well as foundational work by Jane Gaines, Charlotte Herzog, Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, I interject cultural, performance and celebrity studies into visual theory to create a framework for discussion. Historically and hegemonically costume is framed as that which clothes actors’ bodies to represent character. This examination argues that more crucially, costume feeds visual perception, which allows an alternative cognitive system of understanding external realities. Simultaneously, it embodies, enacts and enables performance. Visual theory, with a cultural studies/performance approach, showcases costume as a site where class, gender, sex, age, and other subject positions intersect. These overlapping spheres represent aspects of character that are embodied and grounded by costume. This provides an alternative perspective for costume analysis, a new paradigm with multiple vantage points from which to consider meaning.
 
Linda Matheson holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis where she is a continuing lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature. Prior to returning to academia, she enjoyed a career as a costume designer for film, television and theatre, for more than two decades, on more than two continents. She worked on the classics for the London Stage and Vienna’s English Theatre, as well as in Hollywood where she contracted with Disney, Tristar, Fox, Hallmark, ABC, NBC, CBS, and others, for numerous feature films and television productions. Sophia Loren is among the many international stars she has costumed.
 
 
2. Anna Lucia Natale (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia)
 
La radio per l’empowerment femminile. Un contributo di studio
 
Istituzioni internazionali riconoscono alla radio, il mezzo di comunicazione più diffuso al mondo, un ruolo centrale nel “promuovere l’accesso all’informazione, la libertà di espressione e luguaglianza di genere” (Unesco, 2018), soprattutto nelle aree del mondo culturalmente ed economicamente svantaggiate. È questo il punto di partenza per una ricerca che indaghi l’agire della radio specificamente orientato all’empowerment femminile nella comunicazione, in diversi paesi e sulla base di diversi livelli di analisi: i contenuti radiofonici sulla donna o rivolti alle donne; la presenza professionale delle donne nella radio; le attività delle radio gestite dalle e per le donne in varie parti del mondo. Il paper, primo contributo di studio di questo più ampio progetto, focalizza il caso della radio italiana ed esamina alcuni programmi significativi di un certo modo di comunicare la condizione femminile. Attraverso di essi, si potrà leggere in filigrana l’evoluzione del ruolo e dellimmagine della donna nel percorso di trasformazione della società italiana: dalle “rubriche per le signore” degli anni Venti-Trenta del Novecento, che affermano l’ideale di donna “angelo del focolare” voluto dal fascismo; ai tentativi di tematizzazione dei cambiamenti che investono l’universo femminile negli anni Settanta-Ottanta (come in Sala F o Ora D); fino alla nascita di radio al femminile come ‘Radio Incontro Donna’ (2016).
 
Anna Lucia Natale è Professore Associato presso il Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale della Sapienza Università di Roma, dove insegna Storia della radio e della televisione. Si occupa inoltre di rappresentazioni televisive, con particolare riferimento alla fiction. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni: Non più e non ancora. Il protagonismo femminile nella fiction italiana, in M. Buonanno (a cura di), Il prisma dei generi (Angeli, 2014); Sulle onde sonore. Strategie e usi sociali della musica alla radio (1924-1940), in A. I. De Benedictis e F. Monteleone (a cura di), La musica alla radio: 1924-1954 (Bulzoni, 2015); In the Beginning There Was the Radio… Contexts and Genres of Radio Entertainment, in F. Corsini (a cura di), Italian Pop Culture: Media, Products, Imageries (Viella, 2018).
 
 
3. Antonio Mastrogiacomo (Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Italia)
 
20temporanea14
 
20temporanea14 è un ipertesto in cui Antonio Mastrogiacomo raccoglie alcuni dei suoi lavori composti - per composizione si intenda tanto la scrittura di un testo quanto un montaggio di immagini o suoni o un montaggio di immagini e suoni - dal 2013 al 2018 e racconta alcune delle sue esperienze performative. Oltre alla sezione testuale, utile contrappunto per avere una visione totale della produzione di Mastrogiacomo, 20temporanea14 è corredato di diverse pagine tramite cui poter accedere facilmente montaggi audiovisivi (tra i quali alcuni estratti di Glicine, pubblicato da Setola di maiale 2018; Accidente - finalista al premio Grenzgänger dell’Università delle Arti Folkwang di Essen; Migrapoli - finalista al Festival Internazionale del Cinema Laceno d’Oro, edizione 2018), dischi (Suonerie – Setola di maiale, 2017); (Disco rotto - Manyfeetunder, 2018) e documentazioni di attività performative e installative.
 
Antonio Mastrogiacomo è iscritto alla laurea magistrale in Musica e Spettacolo (Musicologia) presso l’Università degli studi di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’. Nel minimo comune multiplo della tecnologia piegata a spazio di gioco, sviluppa una discutibile ricerca attraverso pratica di montaggio - come nel disco Suonerie (2017) e nel lungomontaggio Glicine (2018) presenti nel catalogo Setola di Maiale. Si è esibito in musei e spazi pubblici e collabora con diverse riviste, come artapartofcult(ure), Exibart, Napolimonitor, PASSPARnous, scrivendo saggi e contributi critici. Dal 2017 cura la rivista d.a.t. [divulgazioneaudiotestuale].

Panel 36: Transnational manifestations of Italian crime film (V)

Chair: Flavia Brizio-Skov (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States)
 
1. Alex Marlow-Mann (University of Kent, UK)
 
Indagine su un genere al di sopra di ogni nazione. The influence of the cinema d’impegno on the political thriller genre
 
The Political Thriller emerged in Europe in the late-1960s before eventually developing into a global phenomenon, with examples being produced in countries as diverse as North America, India, South Korea, Brazil and Serbia. The codification of the genres conventions has traditionally been attributed to Costa-Gavras Z; however, this paper will argue that their roots can actually be traced back to Italy and to the films of Francesco Rosi, Elio Petri and Gillo Pontecorvo. Although unified by their shared commitment to a politically engaged cinema, these three filmmakers are actually remarkably different from one another; yet each of them provided one piece of the jigsaw that would eventually constitute the political thriller genre. The narrative innovations of Rosi’s film dindagine, the aesthetics of Petri’s cinema of paranoia, and the shifts in emotional engagement of Pontecorvo’s cinema of revolution combined to create a formula that proved remarkably adaptable. This paper will explore the way in which these innovations, undoubtedly the product of a very specific moment in Italian political and cinematic history, would eventually be adapted to other geo-political contexts.
 
Alex Marlow-Mann is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Kent. He is one of the founding members of BAFTSS (the British Association of Film, Television and Film Studies) and is on the editorial boards of Film Studies, JICMS and Cine-Excess. He has published extensively on Italian cinema and is the author of The New Neapolitan Cinema (EUP, 2011), the editor of Archival Film Festivals (StAFS, 2013) and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (Routledge, 2017). He is currently preparing a monograph entitled The Political Thriller in Its Global Context: Genre, Emotion, Ideology (forthcoming from EUP).
 
 
2. Damien Pollard (University of Cambridge, UK)
 
Can’t you hear me? Dubbing, transnationalism and uncanny politics in giallo cinema
 
This paper will analyse Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971) which is revelatory of giallo cinemas reliance on voice dubbing to facilitate its transnational business model (a trend evident, more widely, in much of 1970s Italian cinema). The film centres on a paralysed political dissident whose internal monologue is paired with images of his immobile face in a profound avowal of the technique, and this paper will address both Lado’s allusion to Italian dubbings Fascist legacy in the context of the film’s politics and dubbings centrality to the film’s production as a three-country collaboration, filmed in Prague using actors from eight countries. This transnationalism has historicist significance: if not for the PCIs narrow electoral defeat in 1948, Czechoslovakias Euro-communism could have reached Italy and the films Italianate mise-en-scène suggests that Czechoslovakia represents that which Italy had repressed in itself. The films dubbing encourages a sense of transnational homogeneity – part of a wider contemporary move towards integration in European politics and media – that sutured Italian spectators into the Czech setting and reframed the national-political other as uncannily familiar. The paper will discuss how, in this uneasy homogeneity, the repressed returns to suggest an alternative imagining of Italian political history.
 
Damien Pollard is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Film and Screen. His research focuses on sound in Italian horror and giallo cinema of the 1960s to 1980s, and is particularly interested in attending to the voice in these films as a way of rethinking their historicity. He has published on the soundscapes of Dario Argento’s supernatural films in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 7:1 (2019). Before starting his doctoral project, Damien was a practicing documentary filmmaker.
 
 
3. Lorenzo Marmo (Università Roma Tre, Italia)
 
The landscape of masculinity: Jacques Sernas and the transnational family romances of postwar Italian noir
 
My paper investigates 1940s Italian film noir through a focus on the star persona of Jacques Sernas. The Lithuanian-born French actor, who had been interned in Buchenwald, seems to be the very embodiment of those transnational dynamics that are crucial to a thorough examination of both the postwar moment in Italy and the noir cycle at large. During his brief stint as a matinee idol in Italy – starring in such films as Gioventù perduta (Germi 1947); Una lettera allalba (Bianchi 1948); Il cielo è rosso (Gora 1949); Il lupo della Sila (Coletti 1949) – Sernas invariably played characters associated to a perverted oedipal trajectory and to some form of intergenerational conflict. The success of his performances can thus be seen as symptomatic of the crisis of patriarchal institutions and the shifting perceptions of masculinity in post-fascist Italy. Set against the astounding spectacle of war rubble, a hazy urban scenario, or the proto-western environment of Southern Italy, these contorted family romances are greatly enhanced by their use of landscape. External to the neorealist canon, the employment of location shooting in these film noirs enacts an intricate mediation between the local and cosmopolitan elements at play in the melodramatic imagination of the time.
 
Lorenzo Marmo is Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Roma Tre and Napoli ‘L’Orientale’. He obtained his PhD from Roma Tre University in 2014, and was Lauro de Bosis postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in 2017. He is the author of Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo melodrama noir (Bulzoni, 2018). He has published essays on a vast array of topics: theories of space and landscape in narrative cinema; film noir and melodrama in Italian and American cinema; Iraq-set war films; Mary Ann Doane’s theory of media; the Animated GIF, Instagram and contemporary social media.
 

Panel 37: L’altra Roma. La periferia romana fra locale e globale

Organizer: Giacomo Ravesi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia)
 
Il panel intendere offrire una panoramica delle modalità rappresentative prevalenti della periferia romana contemporanea nel cinema di finzione e nella serialità televisiva. L’analisi persegue un’indagine iconografica sullo spazio urbano combinandola con la disamina delle costruzioni identitarie individuali e collettive incarnate dai protagonisti dei film.
 
1. Giacomo Ravesi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia)
 
Accattoni e imperatori. Persistenze e spettri contemporanei della borgata
 
Nella nostra contemporaneità gli immaginari connessi con la borgata romana storica subiscono un aggiornamento complessivo. La rappresentazione della periferia oscilla fra due estremi concettuali e formali: da un lato, rappresenta un’avanguardia del mutamento complessivo della società contemporanea, dall’altro, mantiene intatto il fascino metaforico delle rovine: il suo essere figura simbolica di esistenze e zone marginali, degradate e isolate. Così facendo, la periferia romana contemporanea aggiorna e rilancia metafore concettuali e figurative legate alla rappresentazione del mondo delle borgate, intrise di passato e affacciate in un panorama globale. L’intervento intende indagare gli “spettri” del passato – dal cinema di Pasolini dei primi anni Sessanta a quello di Sergio Citti, Nico D’Alessandria e Claudio Caligari – rintracciando quei tratti caratteristici e quelle “persistenze” che alimentano, ancor oggi, un corposo immaginario figurativo, concettuale e culturale.
 
Giacomo Ravesi è assegnista di ricerca presso il Dipartimento Filosofia Comunicazione e Spettacolo dell’Università degli Studi Roma Tre. È autore dei volumi: La città delle immagini. Cinema, video, architettura e arti visive (Rubbettino, 2011) e L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934). Immagini del desiderio (Mimesis, 2016). Ha curato, con Stefania Parigi, il numero monografico della rivista Imago. Studi di cinema e media dedicato al tema Il paesaggio nel cinema contemporaneo (Bulzoni, 2014). Ha pubblicato articoli e saggi in riviste e volumi italiani e internazionali. I suoi ambiti di ricerca prevalenti riguardano il cinema e il video d’avanguardia e sperimentale, le relazioni fra cinema e arti visive, il video musicale, il documentario contemporaneo e il cinema d’animazione italiano.
 
 
2. Mattia Cinquegrani (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia)
 
Il crimine e il sacro. La periferia romana nella serialità televisiva
 
Dimensione emblematica dell'identità occidentale, la periferia urbana domina da diversi anni l’universo della serialità televisiva. In forza della sua marginalità topografica e culturale, è qui che sembra avverarsi una sopravvivenza dell’arcaico e una profonda compenetrazione di quest'ultimo con i modelli della contemporaneità. Specialmente la periferia romana ha acquisito, attraverso prodotti quali ad esempio Romanzo criminale – La serie e Suburra – La serie, un ruolo centrale nella serialità televisiva, fino a diventare un elemento sostanziale, un nuovo tipo di personaggio contemporaneo. Entro i confini della periferia romana, le dinamiche istituzionali del potere politico e religioso si intersecano con forme di criminalità ancora inestricabilmente legate a sistemi culturali e valoriali ben più arcaici, seppure profondamente deformati dai modelli del consumismo. La periferia romana rappresenta, così, il luogo di quella convivenza non ancora risolta fra passato e presente, fra tradizione e sviluppo, che definisce in buona parte lidentità italiana contemporanea.
 
Mattia Cinquegrani ha conseguito il titolo di dottore di ricerca in studi visuali, presso l‘Università degli Studi Roma Tre, con una tesi sulle iconografie della morte. Ha scritto saggi sul cinema italiano e di studi visuali, che rappresentato i suoi principali ambiti di ricerca. Nel 2018 ha collaborato alla nuova edizione italiana del volume di K. Thompson e D. Bordwell Storia del cinema. Un‘introduzione (McGraw-Hill), per il quale ha curato la produzione dei materiali digitali.
 
 
3. Tommaso Di Giulio (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia)
 
Supereroi, freaks e samurai. Il nuovo romanzo popolare tra Roma e il Nord America
 
Film come Senza nessuna pietà, Suburra, Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot, Sporchi e Cattivi, Dogman o La terra dellabbastanza nascono nella periferia romana o da una diversa articolazione del rapporto tra il centro e le arterie della città. Si tratta di opere in cui la periferia è spesso la vera protagonista e il cui stile rispecchia una forte tensione internazionalista unita ad un rinnovamento, talvolta radicale, delle forme e dei modi di messa in scena tipicamente italiani. I titoli presi in esame tendono a mettere da parte o a riconfigurare l’immaginario ereditato dal Neorealismo in funzione di una proposta eccessiva che attinge in buona parte anche dall’immaginario popolare nordamericano. Parliamo di lavori che riaffermano un profondo senso di connessione identitaria con il territorio che raccontano, sia dal punto di vista archetipico che da quello narratologico. I film che verranno presi in oggetto, al netto delle loro rispettive differenze e specificità, propongono allo spettatore un’estetica personale e contaminata, pur esprimendo la volontà di ricondurre la varietà ad un insieme coerente, fatto di nuovi segni da decifrare, di relazioni con il cinema nordamericano e i serial tv dell’ultimo decennio.
 
Tommaso Di Giulio è dottorando in studi visuali e paesaggi della città contemporanea presso l’Università degli Studi Roma Tre con un progetto di ricerca incentrato su Roma e la sua messa in scena nel cinema italiano contemporaneo. Ha pubblicato un saggio sul rapporto tra l’eroe e gli oggetti transizionali contenuto nel volume Michel Gondry – L’eterno dodicenne (Eif, 2012), e numerosi articoli sui Quaderni di Barcellona, Il Mucchio Selvaggio e altre riviste di settore. Tra la fine del 2018 e linizio del 2019 sono previste altre due pubblicazioni in volume dedicate al cinema italiano contemporaneo. I suoi ambiti di ricerca riguardano principalmente il cinema italiano contemporaneo, il rapporto tra cinema e spazio urbano, il metalinguaggio e la musica per le immagini.

Panel 38: Auteurs: M. Garrone, Taviani Brothers and G. Tornatore

Chair: Biagio Aulino (University of Toronto, Canada)
 
1. Luciana d'Arcangeli (Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia)
 
Nel cinema di Matteo Garrone i costumi (s)coprono i desideri dell’anima
 
In Gomorra (2008) Marco e Ciro hanno camicie che li fanno sentire nella Florida di Scarface, gli immigrati portano maglie dell’Italia mentre quelle dei ragazzi di Scampia richiamano squadre di basket, brande sogni statunitensi. Questo è solo un esempio di come nel cinema di Matteo Garrone i costumi di fatto “facciano il monaco”. D’altronde il regista è un ex-pittore, come ha ricordato in occasione dell’ingresso de Il racconto dei racconti/Tale of Tales (2015) nella collezione cinematografica permanente del MoMA di New York, e lo abbia reputato “il mio film più di tutti gli altri in cui la mia anima di pittore e la mia stessa formazione sono venute allo scoperto […] per me sono quadri in movimento”. Anche l’estetica di Dogman (2018) non si sofferma sulla violenza in sé ma sulle emozioni che la generano − e che sottilmente traspaiono con maestria nel film. Questo intervento analizzerà costumi, proporzioni, dettagli e colori dei film di Garrone per mostrare come le scelte del regista rispecchino e rendano palese allo spettatore attento le ansie, le motivazioni intime e i segreti nascosti dei personaggi, siano essi contemporanei o di fantasia.
 
Luciana d'Arcangeli insegna Teatro, Cinema, Traduzione, e Lingua e Letteratura Italiana. È autrice della monografia I personaggi femminili nel teatro di Dario Fo e Franca Rame (Firenze, Cesati, 2008), e di saggi pubblicati in Europa, Nord America, Africa e Australia. Ultimamente è stata curatrice di diversi libri e numeri speciali di riviste sul teatro  e sul cinema italiano ("Italian Cinema", FULGOR, 2016, e "An Eye on Italy", FULGOR, 2018, con Sally Hill e Claire Kennedy). Per l’Australasian Centre for Italian Studies coordina il Visual and Performance Studies Research Group ed il progetto triennale “Indelible (Eng) / Indelebile (It): The representation of (in)visible violence against women and their resistance”.
 
2. Alessandro Marini (University of Olomouc, Czech Republic)
 
Organizzare e mancare la rivoluzione: San Michele aveva un gallo, di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani
 
Il contributo prende in esame San Michele aveva un gallo, un film del 1972 di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, adattato da Il divino e lumano, un racconto di Tolstoj. Al centro della riflessione di entrambi i testi sta un discorso sulla possibile trasformazione della società in cui essi sono collocati: nel film, la vicenda di Giulio Manieri, un anarchico internazionalista dell’Ottocento, è allegoricamente allusiva della temperie contemporanea – le lotte popolari degli ultimi anni Sessanta – e esprime il processo di marginalizzazione delle istanze rivoluzionarie che la caratterizzarono. Il tragico percorso di Giulio – insurrezione, detenzione e suicidio – rappresenta così una sorta di epitaffio sulla fine delle speranze in una profonda trasformazione della società italiana, suscitate dalla Resistenza e ormai definitivamente perdute. Attraverso l’analisi di una sequenza esemplare, il contributo intende mettere in rilievo il rapporto che il film stabilisce con l’antecedente letterario, il ruolo della sceneggiatura, la costruzione dello spazio scenico, i riferimenti extratestuali.
 
Alessandro Marini  insegna letteratura italiana e cinema presso l‘Università di Olomouc nella Repubblica Ceca. Si occupa prevalentemente di cinema italiano e di adattamento cinematografico; in questo ambito sono usciti vari suoi saggi sulle opere di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Matteo Garrone, Bernardo Bertolucci. Recentemente, ha pubblicato due studi sul cinema di Boris Gerrets e sui documentari di Alexander Seiler.  
 
 
3. Glen Bonnici (University of Malta)
 
Metacinematic reality in Giuseppe Tornatore’s filmography
 
This paper discusses Giuseppe Tornatore's inward look into the language and ethos of his own craft in his metacinematic films. Tornatore's use self-reflexive discourse deserves a more systematic and in-depth analysis because it is one of the distinguishing features which set him apart as a contemporary Italian filmmaker.Unlike many other directors who inject metacinematic motifs in their work rather sporadically, Tornatore displays a serious and consistent elaboration of this theme throughout his filmography, so much so that it is not unreasonable to classify self-reflexivity as a defining characteristic of his signature style as an auteur. By covering in his oeuvre the whole filmmaking process, from the inception of a script to film production (The Star Maker [1995], Correspondence [2016]) to film distribution and film watching (Cinema Paradiso [1988], Malèna [2000]), Tornatore shows how artificiality lies at the heart not only of cinema but also of real life. Reality is depicted as a man-made spectacle with porous confines and unstable definitions, an idea clearly highlighted in other films of his, such as The Best Offer (2013), The Unknown Woman (2006), A Pure Formality (1994), and The Legend of 1900 (1998).
 
 
Glen Bonnici joined the Department of Italian at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Malta as an Assistant Lecturer in September 2018 after having graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Italian degree in 2013 and the Master of Arts in Literary Tradition and Popular Culture degree in 2017. By adopting a transnational and cross-disciplinary method of inquiry, he researches Italian literature and cinema, literary theory, Anglo-Italian studies, comparative literature, film and cultural studies. Topics of interest include metadiscursive techniques in narrative works, the ever-increasing occurrence of film and television works adapted from literature, and spatial representation in fiction, amongst others.