A Companion to Italian Cinema

By Frank Burke

Written by leading figures in the field, A Companion to Italian Cinema re-maps Italian cinema studies, employing new perspectives on traditional issues, and fresh theoretical approaches to the exciting history and field of Italian cinema.

• Offers new approaches to Italian cinema, whose importance in the post-war period was unrivalled
• Presents a theory based approach to historical and archival material
• Includes work by both established and more recent scholars, with new takes on traditional critical issues, and new theoretical approaches to the exciting history and field of Italian cinema
• Covers recent issues such as feminism, stardom, queer cinema, immigration and postcolonialism, self-reflexivity and postmodernism, popular genre cinema, and digitalization
• A comprehensive collection of essays addressing the prominent films, directors and cinematic forms of Italian cinema, which will become a standard resource for academic and non-academic purposes alike

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781119006176

Book preview

Preface and In Memoriam

In a sense, this project initiated for me in January 2009, when I received a request from Jayne Fargnoli, executive editor at Wiley‐Blackwell, to referee a proposal by Peter Brunette for a Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Italian Cinema. The request precipitated a pleasant exchange of emails with Jayne. Peter, being Peter, had written a stunning proposal, and I responded to it enthusiastically. However, I referred to the volume as a Cambridge, rather than Wiley‐Blackwell, Companion, an error I repeated even when I first took the project on myself: the first of my many challenges to Jayne’s boundless patience and good humor.

Then came the shock of Peter’s death on June 16, 2010. He was in Sicily, and I was in Lucca (Tuscany), which echoed the distance/closeness dynamic of our relationship noted below. Once some of the shock wore off—a good part of it never will—I remembered his proposal and my enjoyable correspondence with Jayne. I contacted her and asked if there was anything I could do to help keep the project alive. Bringing the Companion to fruition seemed an appropriate way to honor the companion whom I and so many others had just lost. Jayne and I both had quite similar responses to Peter’s death and a similar desire to make the volume happen, so I ended up taking on the editorial responsibility.

Peter had made numerous initial contacts, and the participation of many of the contributors is his doing. Over time, there were sufficient changes in the composition of the volume that its organization and foci became my doing. For this reason, it has made sense to designate it the work of a single editor, rather than a coedited project. But it is, to me, very much a shared enterprise, infused with Peter’s spirit. Most important, without his initiative it would not have come to be. And, of course, the time‐honored disclaimer in these instances applies: the virtues of the volume lie with him, its failings with me.

Peter was a great friend whom I encountered in mid career and hardly ever saw. Paradoxical. We first met at an American Association for Italian Studies conference in Utah in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In conjunction with the publication and presentation of his book on Roberto Rossellini, Peter brought to the event Ingrid Rossellini, daughter of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, twin sister of Isabella Rossellini, and an Italian scholar in her own right. A small group, including Peter and Ingrid, convened in my hotel room till late at night. The memory is so vivid that I relive it, as I write, with startling concreteness. I remember Peter making a very kind comment in response to my presentation on Fellini, despite the fact that he considered il maestro a wanker. His generosity of spirit and choice of words stayed with me.

The next time we met, he and I sat next to each other as we were being bussed from one conference venue to another, and our relatively brief conversation formed a bond that endured till his passing. We found ourselves talking about deeply personal matters in a context of complete trust.

We didn't see each other again or even communicate until 2003, when we both attended the Felliniana conference at the University of Washington. As we dined together one evening, it became clear there that our bonding had much to do with similar backgrounds. We were both of US urban east‐coast origin and both the product of Catholic upbringing and education. We also shared an interest in sports as well as European cinema.

In 2006, Peter brought me on board to do the commentary with him for the Criterion release of Fellini’s Amarcord. The commentary confirmed our seamless compatibility; we spent many enjoyable hours in New York City, and we talked of writing a book together on 1960s Italian film. I was happy when Peter mentioned that our work on the commentary tempted him to rethink his opinion of Fellini.

After that, it was occasional emailing, because he was so often on the move at film festivals and similar events, and I was in Canada. But by then, losing touch with Peter seemed like a foreign concept: we didn’t need incidental communication to sustain our camaraderie.

Little did I know that a radical losing of touch was on the horizon. Fortunately, Peter left behind a legacy of wonderful work to keep him perennially present. And this Companion has been a vital means for me to maintain a strong sense of connection and continuity. Still, his loss will always be as deeply felt as his friendship.

I would be remiss to focus solely on my fondness for Peter and fail to mention his importance as a scholar. He was a major figure in Italian and international film studies. He was eclectic, cosmopolitan, dedicated, and tireless. His work was scrupulously researched and informed by the latest theoretical methods and approaches. He did a great service to film studies by bringing Derridean deconstruction to an otherwise resistant discipline. His work on Pasolini and Antonioni remains particularly important to me, but he also ranged far afield of Italian studies with his important publications on François Truffaut, Michael Haneke, and Wong Kar‐wai, among others.

It was always amazing to me that Peter managed to write as many books as he did, when he spent so much time on the road serving as a festival reporter and contributor for outlets such as The Hollywood Reporter and Indiewire. However, his travels insured that his writing was the product of his experience, not just of isolated research and contemplation. The richness of his life was reflected in the richness of his work.

Peter’s immense sociability is reflected in this Companion, which brings together so many of his friends and colleagues to celebrate Italian cinema and, implicitly, Peter’s role in its academic appreciation and diffusion.

Part I

First Things

1

Introduction

Frank Burke

Italian Cinema and (Very Briefly) Visual Culture

Beginning with the silent era, Italian film has had a remarkable international history. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) was the first film shown on the lawn of the White House (Schatz 2004, 34). Far more important in cinematic terms, it had a significant influence on D. W. Griffith, particularly Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages (1916).¹ Neorealist films were hugely influential worldwide—comprising arguably the most important film movement² in terms of global impact in the history of the medium, as the chapter by Ruberto and Wilson in this volume attests. Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) and Paisà (Paisan, 1946) enjoyed a stunning reception in the United States. The former ran for 70 weeks in New York City, and the latter enjoyed even greater success with the critics and at the box office, ending up as the highest grossing foreign film of that time (Rogin 2004, 134). Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) won a special Oscar in 1947 for best foreign‐language film when there was no competitive category for foreign films, and his Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) did the same two years later (Sklar 2012, 71), while also enjoying great international success.

Serving as a bridge from neorealism to the next major international moment in Italian cinema—the auteur film—Federico Fellini’s La strada (La Strada, 1953) enjoyed a three‐year run in New York City and launched the director on a path to five Oscars. And of course Italian directors such as Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bernardo Bertolucci were in the vanguard of the 1950s and 1960s international art film, while the commedia all’italiana bestrode with great success the art film and a lighter vein of international cinema also popular during the period. As Pravadelli justly claims in this volume, From 1945 to roughly 1970 no national cinema—not even French cinema—produced as many influential films and stylistic trends as did Italian cinema. On the basis of the success of its silent, neorealist, and art cinema, Italian film stands as the second most important national cinema, after Hollywood, of the twentieth century. Though it is dangerous to overvalue the importance of Oscars and mistake them for true international dispersion and influence, as both Anglo and Italian film commentators are wont to do, it is nonetheless significant that Italian films and personnel have won more Academy Awards than those of any other non‐English‐speaking country. It is even more significant to note the influence of Italian directors, beyond neorealism, on international filmmaking—in particular, as Carolan (1914, 1) notes, the profound impact that Italian cinema has had on filmmaking in the United States. She continues, Italian masters such as Vittoria De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, and Michelangelo Antonioni have imprinted their techniques and sensibilities on American directors such as Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, Woody Allen, Neil LaBute, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, and others. Naturally, we need to add Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and many more to the list of American directors. There are many filmmakers not on Carolan’s list who have acknowledged the influence of Fellini alone (and, in particular, his Otto e mezzo—8 ½, 1963) on their work.³

Viewer popularity has, for the most part, been seen as the appeal of Italian cinema among not mainstream filmgoers but cineastes: people for whom a taste in movies signifies a kind of cultural capital that is of little or no interest to most blockbuster devotees. This type of popularity is reflected in the large number of Italian offerings in The Criterion Collection. However, there is also an impressive audience of fans of Italian B movies and cult and trash cinema: genres and subgenres such as sword‐and‐sandal, spaghetti western, horror/thriller/giallo, erotic comedy, espionage, crime/police drama, and porn. These movies have contributed greatly to the dispersion of Italian cinema in the English‐speaking world, but because so many of these have been viewable only in VHS and DVD, available from relatively obscure and unquantifiable sources, one cannot easily determine their importance relative to the B and cult offerings of other non‐English national cinemas. Nonetheless, it would be no surprise to find that Italy stands first among non‐English cinemas in the variety and diffusion of its noncanonical films.

The high cinema of the 1960s is no more, for reasons addressed in the chapters by Corsi and, to a certain extent, Pravadelli. Nonetheless, the preparation of this volume coincided with the enormous success of Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), which, according to IMDB (2016), has won 53 awards and 72 nominations in festivals and competitions worldwide, capped by a 2014 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. At the same time, CNN (2016) launched Style Italia, a new series dedicated to the past, present and future of Italian design, with features that run from the obvious (Food, Family and God: How Italy Won the Race for Beauty) to the somewhat less so (The Curious Beauty of Italian Street Signs and, not to slight Italian cinema, Ennio Morricone’s Film Philosophy). The success of Sorrentino’s film points to the recurrent though diminishing ability of Italian cinema to triumph on the international scene. The meaning of both triumph and diminishment, as well as what La grande bellezza may or may not tell us of contemporary Style Italia and today’s visual culture in general, will be explored in this Companion, particularly in chapters by Corsi, Ferrero‐Regis, and Wood on the Italian film industry and in observations by Riva in the volume’s closing forum. The Style Italia series points to the importance Italy has held in the history of Western visual culture, from the age of city‐states to the present. However, Italy’s role in the forefront of the visual has not come without its downside, as some of the clichés evident in Style Italia make clear. The association of Italy with physical beauty and fashion has helped sustain certain prejudices about Italian superficiality. I will return to this later in discussing an arguable neglect of Italian cinema on the part of cinema studies (though not on the part of Italian scholars) in the English‐speaking world. Here is not the place to delve deeply into some of the complications around superficiality, cliché, and a kind of reductive association of Italy and italianità to (mere) style evident in the CNN series. And a celebration of Italian design on such a well‐trafficked site has its advantages in terms of international validation of Italian creativity. However, the series does raise issues that have a bearing on the image of Italy and how that gets reflected in the reception of Italian cinema.

Contributors and Aims of This Volume

The Companion brings together authors from Italy, the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It combines established scholars, many of whom were present at the birth of Italian cinema studies in the English‐speaking world, with a younger generation that is bringing new interests, new methodologies, to the study of Italian film. At the same time, the established scholars represented here have undergone significant evolution, adapting to and at times spearheading innovation in film analysis, and developing strategies appropriate to a changing Italy and its changing cinema.

Although all the contributors to this compilation have an academic orientation, Peter Brunette’s originating vision (see Preface and In Memoriam), which I happily adopted, was to provide a Companion that would serve the needs of the general reader as well as those of the specialist. In terms of the former, the volume seeks to offer an overview of the development of Italian cinema, hence the periodization that informs roughly half the book. It also seeks to provide discussions that are free of the jargon one generally finds in academic analysis, as well as to offer a glossary of terms that are specific to Italian culture, history, and film.

But of course, a companion to Italian cinema must also be a companion to Italian film studies insofar as it is within the field of academic study that the history, significance, value, and implications of Italian cinema are often most fully explored and archived. As a companion to Italian cinema studies, the book addresses all the major issues that have informed academic discussion of Italian film. At times, and with editorial intent, certain discussions that have characterized recent analysis of Italian film, such as those around the transnationality, intermediality, and intertextuality of Italian cinema and around the critique of the crisis‐renewal paradigm, help problematize periodization and point to alternative ways of approaching Italian film history.

To ensure the accessibility of academic discussion to the nonspecialist, the volume opens and closes with broad‐ranging informal coverage of the academic sweep of Italian film studies and Italian film. A conversation with Peter Bondanella and a forum of noted film scholars not represented elsewhere in the Companion help contextualize the theoretical issues, methodologies, and analyses that fall between. And, as general policy, the Companion seeks to heed Christopher Wagstaff’s warnings in the forum against over‐theorizing and over‐methodologizing (quotation marks mine) Italian film—respecting, instead, the concretezza and specificity of the cinematic pleasures and intellectual challenges offered by this field of study.

Because of the conversation and forum, I am spared the responsibility of surveying the landscape of Italian cinema and thus turn quickly to an interpretive overview of what the volume tells about the nature of Italian cinema and Italian cinema studies.⁴

The Contents of the Companion

The chapters of this volume address important aspects of the Italian film industry from the silent period through Fascism and from the postwar years to the present, with modes of exhibition and reception, linked to changing venues and technologies, a particular focus of scholars addressing recent cinema and alternative cinemas. The industrial aspects of Italian cinema cannot be divorced from Italian culture, and it is the relationship between Italian cinema and Italian culture that most fully shapes this volume. From the highly gendered roles of the diva/divo and their genres in silent cinema to the class‐conscious comedies and melodramas of Fascist cinema, from the neorealist cinema of deprivation to the cinema of the Economic Miracle and its critique of delusory plenitude, from the popular genre films made in the shadow of 1970s terrorism to the intimist retreat from commitment of the 1980s, from the indigenous films of the commedia all’italiana and the Italian South to the accented cinema of postcolonial immigration—all the many moments and manifestations of Italian cinema are manifestations, as well, of a complex sociological reality. This is nowhere more evident than in the alternative cinemas—experimental, nonfiction, queer, and women‐directed—that are crucial elements in the topography of Italian film. It is a sad fact, reflected in so many of the chapters that follow, but especially in that of Luciano and Scarparo, that women’s cinema must, to some extent, be designated alternative, given the limited role women have been allowed to play in Italian film history—even in its noncanonical and nonmainstream cinemas.

While culture is always implicitly important to these discussions, it is explicitly addressed through a variety of methodological strategies. Star studies informs the chapters by Bertellini, Reich, Landy, and Buckley, with reception studies a particularly important component of the last. The role of the audience/spectator is important in these and other chapters. Star studies falls within the broader category of cultural studies, by which I mean work that addresses the relations between culture and power and, more specifically, the role of texts in the constant play of consent and contestation that marks people’s integration or marginalization within socially determining forces. Because the texts of greatest interest to cultural studies are generally those of widest impact and appeal, they often, though not always, fall within the domain of popular rather than high culture. The chapters by Bertellini, Reich, Landy, Buckley, Bayman, Gundle, Fisher, Uva, Orsitto, Wood, and D’Onofrio focus or touch significantly upon on the popular, as do several observations in the concluding forum.

The relationship between cinema and culture is also central to two of the chapters—Rhodes and Waller—that employ intensive close textual reading to illustrate, in the first case, the gaze and Italian (cinematic) modernity as evidenced in a short film by Alberto Lattuada, and, in the second, the enormous cultural and intercultural range of Italian cinema achieved through its intertextuality. Riva’s discussion of La grande bellezza links Sorrentino’s aesthetics and cultural critique in a way that questions the possibilities and limitations of each.

Issues of national character and national identity are addressed, with apposite skepticism (hence my quotation marks), by Gundle. The role of Catholicism in Italian film history is addressed by Vanelli. Gender and sexuality, as has already been suggested, is a source of dominant concern throughout the volume. Duncan explores the complex issue of sexual orientation in a strongly heteronormative society, and Áine O’Healy’s chapter portrays a changing Italy in which ethnic and racial diversity is both a reality and, from an attitudinal point of view, a serious ethical challenge. A similar and longstanding challenge is illuminated by Orsitto’s chapter, which addresses prejudicial attitudes toward a southern Italy that is doubly racialized, as southern Italians have been historically referred to by northerners as africani, and as southern Italy has been landfall in recent years for African émigrés crossing the Mediterranean in search of survival and a new life.

Culture and cinema are perhaps most pervasively intertwined through the volume’s recurrent consideration of politics and Italian film practice. Most concretely, the volume addresses government policies, legislation, influence, and both implicit and explicit censorship in the course of Italian film history. Numerous chapters link cinema and national aspiration, from the silent‐era epic, to Fascist dreams of imperial control, to neorealist hopes for reconstruction. Others address the collapse of aspiration in the violence of terrorism or the depoliticized pursuit of consumerist gratification. Many of the chapters that focus on cinema from the postwar to the present address an Italy susceptible to American late‐capitalist models of social (dis)ntegration, never more evident than in the hypermediated Berlusconi era. The chapters on alternative film practices inevitably emphasize politics, because in many cases the very choice to engage in nonmainstream filmmaking has been a political one. The frequent references to Gilles Deleuze throughout the volume reflect the recurrence of the political as critical term and category, for as Restivo’s chapter on Deleuze makes clear, the French philosopher’s engagement with film (1986, 1989) provided the means by which to elaborate a new approach to understanding political cinema in the postwar period.

Restivo notes the importance of Pasolini to this Deleuzean project. The significance of Pasolini, particularly his nonfiction work, with regard to a committed Italian cinema is highlighted on numerous occasions in this volume, reflecting what seems to be a growing consensus that Pasolini is the Italian filmmaker whose practice offers the most useful guidance in contesting power within a contemporary (ours not his) political context. Crucial to the consideration of Italian political cinema is the interrelationship between modernity and postmodernity in both cinema and culture—an issue addressed implicitly and explicitly, and in necessarily varied ways, by Parigi, Pravadelli, Rhodes, Restivo, and Riva.

In the concluding forum, Verdicchio addresses the importance of ecocinema in a world under threat from environmental degradation and global warming. Marcus highlights the continuing importance of impegno or political commitment, with an emphasis on an inclusive politics of the local to accommodate the complexities of a world that has moved beyond the polarity of class politics.

Turning from culture and politics to the pillars of traditional discussion around Italian film and film studies—the relationship between cinema and nation, the neorealist project, and auteurism/art cinema—the Companion honors all three. The first has been briefly noted above. Neorealism is given a new look, with Borgotallo’s analysis of the pervasive importance of the orphan‐child protagonist and Ruberto and Wilson’s discussion of the global influence, political and aesthetic, of this transformative cinematic moment. Neorealism is also central to Restivo’s explication of Deleuze and to Rhodes’ reading of Roman and Italian cinematic modernism. Auteurism is addressed specifically by Pravadelli, and the importance of auteur or art cinema is evident throughout the volume. In fact, one of the interesting revelations of the volume is that, while auteurism has been relentlessly critiqued as ideologically regressive since Roland Barthes (1977) announced the death of the author, some of the most committed areas of Italian cinema—for example, postcolonial, nonfiction (particularly the essay film), and experimental—must continue to rely on the category of the author because so much of the work involves the expression of a filmmaker’s personal experiences and attitudes and is the product of one person performing many of the essential roles in the filmmaking process: producing, researching, scripting, shooting, editing, and perhaps even acting. This is not to deny that there is still a tendency, both ideological and commercial, to overemphasize the role of the director in what is often a far more complex and collective process than single authorship would suggest.

Consistent with recent debates about possible overreliance on these critical staples, each is not only honored but also problematized. In terms of nation, Gundle productively questions generalizations that can be linked to nationality, such as Italian character and identity. In addition, a large number of chapters, and numerous observations in the forum, point to a cinema that is resolutely transnational and—as Bertellini and Aprà, in particular, demonstrate—has been so from its origins. Of course the transnational nature of Italian cinema does not mean that we cannot still talk of Italian cinema, but the terms of discussion need to be revised. An eternal return to older discourses on Italian nation‐building and its failures, or to film as a mirror of nation, now appears limiting and exclusionary.

The kind of dispersal of neorealism evident in Ruberto and Wilson’s chapter recurs in Rhodes’s rereading of a late neorealist text as the site of both an invisible past and an emerging (and still largely invisible) modernity and in Waller’s intertextualization of Rossellini. For both, the real is not just what appears obvious to the naked eye, and realism itself thus becomes challengingly enriched. Relevant as well, are several references to the recent work of Karl Schoonover (2012), who has argued convincingly and again dispersively that the wounded bodies of neorealism helped play a significant geopolitical role in generating the kind of pity essential to the implementation of the paternalist and, effectively imperialist, strategies of the Marshall Plan. In this respect, neorealism contributed to a kind of disarming and disempowering of Italians in outsiders’ eyes.

As with nation and neorealism, the concept of auteurism undergoes productive complication. Instead of treating it as the unquestioned site of individual genius, Pravadelli presents it, with compelling applications to Italian filmmakers, as a genre that cannot be understood without reference to historical/aesthetic categories such as the modern and postmodern. Moreover, in contrast to innumerable other treatments of Italian cinema, the Companion does not organize itself around big names or their films.

As a final note on the content of the volume, I would point out that the Lischi chapter on Italian experimental cinema and video, Sisto’s on dubbing, and Vanelli’s on Catholicism and the Italian cinema constitute rare English‐language interventions on these topics.

Metathemes

As the organization of the Companion progressed, the volume took on a life of its own, as was inevitable, and I was struck by the way in which two metathemes emerged. One was a persistent commitment to alterity or otherness—to diversity and difference. Certain interventions address the issue directly by invoking Emmanuel Levinas, a French philosopher who wrote of the ethical necessity of honoring the radical difference of the Other: Pravadelli links Levinas’s perspective to the ethics of Antonioni’s sguardo or look, and Marcus to postmodern impegno or political commitment. Levinas aside (or merely implied), Restivo concludes his chapter with reference to the ability of Vittoria in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (L’Eclisse, 1962) to produce new subjectivities, ultimately bringing us the power to think otherwise. Rascaroli describes how Pasolini’s Third World notebooks fully embrac[e] a participatory, self‐reflexive method of approaching the Other. Waller identifies the fundamental question of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan, 1946) as, "how an ‘other’ can become a paisa—someone one cares for and feels responsible for as if s/he were a fellow ‘villager’. Alterity is clearly crucial in O’Healy’s chapter on accented cinema; Duncan’s on Italian cinema queered; Borgotallo’s and Ruberto and Wilson’s chapters on neorealism; Rascaroli’s, Lischi’s, and Caminati and Sasso’s chapters on alter‐native cinemas; Luciano and Scarparo’s chapter on the limited role of women in Italian film history; and Orsitto’s analysis of the Mezzogiorno. Parigi’s analysis of the way in which certain films screen and mirror themselves, illustrates the way in which modernist cinema draws attention to its own alterity, undermining the classic Hollywood system of spectator identification or surrender that collapses self and other. Rhodes addresses the Other" from the side of erasure, implicitly joining forces with Mulvey (1989) and a host of feminist critics who have identified the male gaze as the consummate colonizer of woman‐as‐Other.

Linked to the spirit of alterity is a repeated critique of colonization: the effacement of the Other writ large. Sisto contrasts the colonizing effects of dubbing, reducing all differences of both other languages and Italian dialects to the sameness of a hypothetically homogenous Fascist culture and subjectivity, with alternative soundtrack strategies that [open] the self to perceptual indeterminacies. Waller seeks to illustrate the anti‐Fascist, decolonizing effects of postwar Italian cinematic intertextuality. Landy refuses to accept any far‐reaching success on the part of Fascist‐era cinema to create or interpellate a Fascist subject. Borgotallo’s orphan‐child marks the negation of a ventennio of attempted Fascist epistemological closure. And Ruberto and Wilson point to the centrality of neorealism to global cinemas of resistance and revolution.

These are all related to literal colonial situations and mostly to Fascism. But there is a broader decolonizing sensibility at work in the volume, a desire to resist the small f fascist mentality (Foucault’s fascist within us all) that seeks to impose boundaries that exclude, oversimplify, misrepresent, marginalize, and silence. In this broadened sense, the Companion authors who address the transnational nature of Italian cinema, seek to decolonize the screen,⁵ complicating the borders between Italian and other cinemas in terms of production and performers, influences, and genre. As Fisher and Brizio‐Skov suggest, genre itself becomes fertile ground for boundary‐crossing and deterritorialization, as Italian appropriations of Hollywood and postmodern love for generic miscegenation and contamination contest the division of popular film into distinct categories. Bertellini emphasizes border‐crossing and contamination at the outset of the volume, in his chapter on silent cinema. Laviosa’s intervention in the forum addresses the radical diffusion of Italian cinema in a contemporary context.

At the same time, the discussions of alternative cinemas help deconstruct frontiers between fiction and nonfiction, film and other media and art forms. Adorno’s (1991, 23) famous phrase cited by Rascaroli, the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy, might be appropriated to describe the dissident spirit of much if not most nonmainstream Italian filmmaking. As D’Onofrio and Sisto make clear, the history of composing for the screen in Italy has been a history of struggle against canonical, high‐art prejudices and barriers; against the marginalizing of the audible in relation to the visible; against the rigid separation of diagetic and nondiagetic sound; and against the standardization of film music as opposed to freewheeling experimentation.

The principal current debate within Italian cinema studies might also be viewed in terms of both alterity and decolonization. Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe (2011) recently launched a modest proposal in defiance of the three abovementioned touchstones of the field—(neo)realism, auteurism, and cinema‐as‐a‐mirror‐of‐nation—recommending a moratorium of five or more years on the very mention of neorealism. Neorealism was singled out not only because of its own dominance but also because of its importance to auteurist and nation‐centered approaches within Italian film discourse. (An appropriate dose of Swiftian self‐irony on the part of its proponents preserves this anticanonical manifesto from the charge of reverse fascism.)

Consistent with my metathematics, O’Leary’s and O’Rawe’s initiative demands space for other voices, other themes, and other styles of cinema. A plea is made, in particular, for greater attention to popular cinema, which until recently, had been consistently marginalized—even more so in Italy than in the English‐speaking world—as reflected in notable disregard for the archiving and restoration of noncanonical films. Fortunately, coinciding with the O’Leary–O’Rawe polemic, popular cinema became a hot topic of discussion, with commedia all’italiana, in particular, generating a host of book‐length studies. There has also been a recent surge of work on neorealism, decolonizing the O’Leary–O’Rawe imperative!

Each of the three touchstones is itself characterized by a commitment to diversity or difference, both creatively and critically. As the relevant chapters in this volume attest, neorealism was fundamentally motivated by a strong desire for a radically different kind of society from that produced by either Unification or Fascism. As her comments on postmodern impegno in the forum confirm, Marcus’s sustained work in the light of neorealism⁶ has been rooted in the same progressive sensibility that drove neorealist filmmakers. Moreover, Marcus’s remarks about her continued commitment to a realist project imply that, seen in a certain light, realism need not be perceived as an overdetermining vise, suppressing other modes of expression, or, worse still, as a set of strategies that merely produce the illusion of the real and thus efface the Other. It can be grounded in a profound respect for the real as Other, as that world beyond the self to which one owes, in Levinas’s notion, ontological courtesy (see Robbins 2001).

In a similar vein, the most valued auteurs of Italian cinema sought to provide new ways of seeing the world, as well as new worlds to be seen. Ezra Pound’s modernist battle cry make it new does not necessarily equate to ontological courtesy (as his attraction to Fascism might suggest); it can be egoist and linked to colonizing notions of progress. But the work of, say, Antonioni and Fellini certainly does invite such courtesy (despite frequent misreadings to the contrary), which is perhaps why each easily moved from modernist to postmodernist modes of expression, embracing the latter’s signifying strategies of difference and dis/semination. Many Italianist scholars have been attracted to these two filmmakers for precisely that reason. Antonioni is addressed explicitly in these terms by Pravadelli and Sisto; Bondanella’s (1992, 2002) and my work on Fellini (1996, 2002) has been similarly motivated.

The relationship between nation and otherness is clear in the cultural commitment that underlay neorealism, even when it was not part of an explicit agenda on the part of the filmmakers: to remake society on inclusive and egalitarian principles. Apart from neorealism, the innumerable films, filmmakers, and Italian films scholars who have dedicated themselves to exploring the interrelated issues of Italian nationhood and identity have frequently been engaged in a common project: extricating Italian society from the power imbalances and inequities that brought the nation into being.

Nonetheless, and with reason, O’Leary and O’Rawe argue that overreliance on the cinema‐as‐mirror‐of‐the‐nation trope, and with it the realist and auteur cinema to which the trope is largely indebted, have excluded crucial aspects of Italian society from discussion. The larger issue, of course, and one that has now been present in literary as well as film studies for several decades, is that canons and canonization risk eliminating difference—making decanonization a necessary act of decolonization.

One final point on alterity and debates within Italian cinema studies (and beyond). Scholarly resistance to profit‐driven, spin‐off, cinema, is not always canonical snobbery; it too can be a valorization of difference. It can derive from a concern that such cinema is so formulaic, so lacking in diversity, and so intent on positioning the spectator as a set of predictable responses, that it prohibits the kind othering experience that more original, creative, and subversive cinema affords. This is consistent with the classic Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) critique of mass culture and the culture industry. Such concern may involve self‐deception regarding just how other, original, and creative the art film (say) can be, particularly in light of its tendency to be its own kind of genre. And it may ignore both sociologically complex aspects of cinemagoing and the ways in which audiences create meaning regardless of how texts may seek to position them—both of which are important to the O’Leary–O’Rawe proposition. The issue, as so many explored in this volume, is complicated.

Italian Cinema as Other

Despite the extraordinary importance and popularity of Italian cinema among a broad cinemagoing public, in the field of non‐Italianist cinema studies, as Rosalind Galt points out, Italian film has been devalued for what many consider one of its greatest virtues (note how many Italian cinematographers end up in Hollywood): its aesthetics. In her chapter, The Prettiness of Italian Cinema, Galt (2013) describes a symptomatic anti‐aesthetic throughout the field of film criticism (she would include journalistic as well as academic):

I have … developed the term pretty to account for a persistent rhetoric in film culture, in which decorative images are rejected as false, shallow or apolitical, and truth and value are instead located in the austere and the anti‐aesthetic. … the term pretty points to how we commonly denigrate a decorative aesthetic…. We can trace anti‐pretty thinking to the Platonic privileging of word over image with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason and at worst a deceptive and dangerous cosmetic.

In relation to Italian film, she notes that Italian art cinema is often evaluated negatively via a vocabulary of decoration and links this to a recurring argument that a picturesque, visually rich aesthetic undermines political critique (57). In Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011), Galt addresses what she terms the iconophobia of post‐1968 Marxist film criticism, and she provides numerous instances of Italian cinema running afoul of the critics because of its aesthetic power and thus presumed superficiality and political insufficiency (194–201).

Linked to the devaluation of the aesthetic, much of the theorizing that emerged within a post‐1968 Marxist (and Freudian/Lacanian) poststructuralist environment—theorizing that came to dominate cinema studies—had a Brechtian tinge to it, promoting a counter cinema employing strategies of distanciation to neutralize the seduction of the visual. This was particularly true in British film criticism of the 1970s. In a highly influential 1972 essay, British critic and filmmaker Peter Wollen identified pleasure as one of the seven deadly sins of dominant cinema and proposed un‐pleasure as one of the cardinal virtues of counter cinema. In her famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey (1989) similarly advocated the destruction of pleasure as a necessary tactic to counter the ideological evils of conventional cinema. Hollywood was the principal target, but a will to destroy the conventional pleasures of the film text was bound to indict the aesthetic allure of Italian film.

The problem of the pretty takes us back to the CNN series Style Italia and the danger that Italy and Italianness can be damned with a certain kind of praise—overidentified with the aesthetic and dismissed, for that reason, as superficial. Aside from the larger issue of stereotypical attitudes toward il bel paese (I employ an Italian phrase here to imply that these stereotypes do, in part, originate indigenously), the dismissal of Italian cinema on grounds of the pretty fails to consider the complexity of the issue. For one thing, Italian celebration of the aesthetic, cinematic and otherwise, has often entailed a desire to convey wonder in the face of experience and the world. It has emerged from the same commitment to alterity that I suggested could be found at the heart of the (neo)realist impulse. Both the aesthetic and the anti‐aesthetic can thus be seen to unite at a more profound level than that of representation. For this reason, and there are others noted throughout this volume, it is crucial to see Italian cinema not just as pretty but as a continual dialectic between the pretty and the unpretty, the aesthetic and its renunciation, in constant negotiation with the world it seeks to articulate.

At the same time, it is important to note that Italian cinema often privileges the pretty only to call it into question. It does not succumb to the kind of cult of beauty or the chic that Style Italia tends to promote. One can argue that Italian cinema’s relation to beauty has changed as a sense of wonder, the numinous, and the auratic has disappeared or been severely compromised within the Italian and global imaginary. Generally speaking, the aestheticizing of the world has come to be recognized as colonization, not courtesy: the imposition of the self on the other in a way that evades rather than promotes engagement. This recalls the critical stance of Galt’s iconophobes. More specifically, the beauty of Visconti’s (and Fellini’s) cinema is often a studied reflection of decadence, Bertolucci’s of Fascist and/or bourgeois repression, Antonioni’s of alienating and affectless affluence, and so on. With rigorous self‐reflexivity, the Italian cinema d’autore has explored, often unseduced, both high‐modernist formalism and the simulated, digitized, beauty‐effects of postmodern sign play. At its best, it has kept its distance, maintained its otherness rather than collapsing into empty modernist/postmodernist aestheticism. Sorrentino becomes an interesting figure in this respect, as Marcus and Riva suggest in the concluding forum, as they apply terms such as the new aestheticism and grand voyeurism to the author’s work. Regardless of whether one likes La grande bellezza and its exaggerated, post‐auratic (anti)aesthetic, there is no question that the beauty to which the film’s title refers is fraught, just as Italian cinema’s encounter with the pretty has come to be.

Fortunately, as my opening remarks suggest, any relative neglect of Italian cinema that may have occurred in recent Anglo cinema studies has been more than compensated for by a large and discriminating body of filmgoers and, quite tellingly, filmmakers, who appreciate Italian cinema not only for its aesthetics but for its depth and its politics—all of which are clearly articulated in the remainder of this Companion.

References

Adorno, T. 1991. Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Translated by S. Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text. Edited and translated by S. Heath, 142–48. London: Fontana.

Benjamin, W. 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version). In Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by T. Corrigan, P. White, and M. Mazaj, 229–52. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Bertellini, G., ed. 2004. The Cinema of Italy. London: Wallflower Press.

Bondanella, P. 1992. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2002. The Films of Federico Fellini. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———, ed. 2014. The Italian Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute.

Burke, F. 1996. Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan/Twayne.

——— 2002. Federico Fellini: Reality/Representation/Signification. In Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by F. Burke and M. Waller, 26–46. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Carolan. M. A. M. 2014. The Transatlantic Gaze: Italian Cinema, American Film. Albany: SUNY Press.

CNN. 2016. Style Italia. Accessed March 22. http://www.cnn.com/specials/style/style‐italia.

Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement‐Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time‐Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ebiri, B. 2013. "8 Things That (Probably) Wouldn’t Exist Without Fellini’s 8 ½." Accessed April 22, 2016. http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/50‐years‐later‐the‐influences‐of‐fellinis‐8.html.

Galt, R. 2011. Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. New York: Columbia University Press.

——— 2013. The Prettiness of Italian Cinema. In Popular Italian Cinema, edited by Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto, 52–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Horkheimer, M. and T. A. Adorno. (1944, 1947). 2002. The Culture Industry as Mass Deception. In Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by G. S. Noerr, translated by E. Jethcott, 94–136. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

IMDB. 2016. The Great Beauty (2013). Awards. Accessed March 22. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2358891/awards?ref_=tt_awd.

Marcus, M. 1987. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975) 1989. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

O’Leary, A. and C. Rawe. 2011. Against realism: on a ‘certain tendency’ in Italian film criticism. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16 (1): 107–19. doi: 10.1080/1354571X.2011.530767.

Robbins, J. 2001. Is It Righteous: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rogin, M. 2004. Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini’s Beautiful Revolution. In Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City, edited by S. Gottlieb, 131–60. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Schatz, T. 2004. Hollywood: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 1. London: Routledge.

Sklar, R. 2012. ‘The Exalted Spirit of the Actual’: James Agee, Critic and Filmmaker, and the U.S. Response to Neorealism. In Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, edited by S. Giovacchini and R. Sklar, 71–86. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Waller, M. 1997. "Decolonizing the Screen: From Ladri di biciclette to Ladri di saponette." In Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, edited by B. Allen and M. Russo, 253–74. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wollen, P. 1972. "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est." Afterimage 4: 6–17.

Notes

1 See Carolan 2014.

2 Neorealism was more a moment than a movement: the product of shared attitudes and sensibilities rather than of clearly delineated aesthetic principles—despite the tendency of certain critics at the time to seek to impose such principles on the moment.

3 For instance in "8 Things That (Probably) Wouldn’t Exist Without Fellini’s 8 ½," Bilge Ebiri (2013) identifies several of the films that are clearly indebted to that film alone: Jim McBride’s David Holtzman’s Diary (1967), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007), Rob Marshall’s Nine (2009), Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), and Roman Coppola’s CQ (2011). Strangely, he omits Peter Greenaway’s 8½ Women (1999). He also identifies a more general influence on filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam (who introduces the Criterion edition of 8½) and David Lynch, and screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malcovich, 1999; Adaptation, 2002; Synecdoche, New York, 2008).

4 Here I would mention a kind of companion to this Companion: Peter Bondanella’s (2014) excellent edited collection, The Italian Cinema Book. Bondanella’s anthology complements this present text, though the two volumes are distinguished by the length of chapters (contributors had the luxury of more space here) and certain mutually beneficial differences in conceptual emphasis and organization.

5 I borrow this phrase from Marguerite Waller’s 1997 essay "Decolonizing the Screen: From Ladri di biciclette to Ladri di saponette."

6 Millicent Marcus, of course, wrote the seminal book Italian Cinema in the Light of Neorealism (1987).

2

Italian Cinema Studies: A Conversation with Peter Bondanella

Frank Burke

FB: Peter, how would you describe the origins of Italian cinema studies in the US?

PB: Italian cinema studies in the US began primarily as a reaction to the success of film studies in general in departments and programs outside the traditional programs and/or departments of Italian or foreign languages. Of necessity, the focus began upon what one might expect: Italian cinema after World War II, with an emphasis upon major directors (defined according to the popular auteur theory) and neorealism as the major movement. One of the first Italian film classes (if not the first) offered in the US within an Italian (not film studies) program was taught by Ben Lawton at UCLA in the summer of 1972. Because of the generosity of Dennis Stanfill, then CEO of 20th Century Fox, the course enjoyed the use of any 35 mm prints available in the Los Angeles area, while subsequent classes used films from New York’s Istituto Italiano di Cultura loaned to UCLA through the good offices of Giuseppe Cardillo, the Istituto’s director. With other colleagues and students at UCLA, Ben developed the first strictly American Italian cinema studies text, Literary and Socio‐Political Trends in Italian Cinema (1973). My own course began at around the same time at Indiana University and grew out of a development grant from the university’s Hutton Honors Division. In 1972, Ben Lawton came to Purdue University, and because of its proximity to Indiana University, the two of us were able to cooperate, sharing copies of 16 mm films available primarily from the famous Janus Collection and the Audio Brandon catalogues. During the 1970s, Ben and I publicized the syllabi from our courses and encouraged other colleagues in Italian to consider offering courses similar to our own. Probably the first official professional recognition of this new field in Italian Studies is marked by a chapter I wrote in 1976 for A Handbook for Teachers of Italian, titled Teaching Italian Film, which offered a discussion of possible topics to be covered, rental sources for 16 mm prints, and several different course outlines.

FB: As a non‐Italianist, I was introduced to Italian cinema within an English department, which was the case for many academics working outside the field of Italian studies. Partly because cinema was such an attractive new area of investigation and partly because English departments were anxious to boost enrolments, film infiltrated the academy in English lit courses (not without a great deal of resistance from traditionalists). Since literary big names (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, Eliot, and so on) were still the building blocks of the curriculum, the way for film to legitimate itself was through its own roster of big names, and the auteur moment and European art film made figures such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni timely tickets to ride. My English department at the University of Florida was intellectually generous enough to allow me to begin writing a doctoral dissertation on Fellini, rather than on a literary author, in 1971.

But back to you.

PB: After my tenure in Paris and Florence in 1973–1974 with a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that allowed me generous access to Parisian film theatres—at that moment filled with old and new Italian films—I returned home determined to write a usable American treatment of Italian cinema: one based on a competent knowledge of Italy, the Italian language, and Italian culture. My revisions of our graduate program in the late 1970s to include examinations on cinema as well as literature not only injected Italian cinema into the graduate curriculum at Indiana University, it made possible the granting of doctoral degrees with theses on Italian cinema.

Up until the mid‐1970s, most American publications on Italian film were produced by writers outside Italian programs and were primarily essays and reviews or translations from French. There was some journalistic reviewing of Italian cinema (not always positive) by figures such as Pauline Kael, John Simon, Stanley Kaufman, and Andrew Sarris, and there was some more extensive discussion of Italian film in journals such as Film Comment and Film Quarterly. Also, Italian literature journals such as Italian Quarterly, Italica, and Forum Italicum were moving toward inclusion of Italian cinema study. Fellini was at the height of his popularity in the early 1970s, and I took advantage of interest in the art film among editors at Oxford University Press to produce an anthology that included five interviews with Fellini plus selections of the classic writing on Fellini abroad (André Bazin, Christian Metz, Gilbert Salachas, Alberto Moravia, Geneviève Agel, Guido Aristarco, and many others), as well as a smattering of American writers who had written on Fellini but outside Italian departments (Claudia Gorbman, Edward Murray, Robert Richardson, Stuart Rosenthal, Stephen Snyder, and others). Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism appeared in 1978.

My major research goal, a true film history, was achieved with the appearance of Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present in 1983.¹ Given the limited availability of films at the time (16 mm or 35 mm prints, plus the first videocassettes that became slowly available but included virtually nothing from the silent or Fascist era), my first attempt at film history, reflected in the title, stressed neorealism and its heritage plus major auteur directors, with serious treatment of only two popular film genres: the commedia all’italiana and the spaghetti western. It would take me two other revised and enlarged editions of this first history, in 1990 and 2001, and then an exhaustive and radical rewrite in A History of Italian Cinema (2009), to deal adequately, if not completely, with silent and Fascist‐era film as well as with other Italian popular genres (the peplum, the giallo, Italian horror films, the poliziesco). To give the reader some idea of the enormous change in available resources, and to complete the 2009 history, I had at my disposal approximately 450 DVDs that allowed discussion of topics that would have been impossible in my first history in 1983. (Unfortunately, the archiving of films in Italy has not been ideal in terms of accumulation, preservation, or access. This is particularly true of popular or genre cinema, which has often been considered unworthy of curatorial attention. There have been numerous fine restorations of Italian films in recent years, but they represent only a very small percentage of Italian film history.)

In the meanwhile, I continued my interest in Fellini with another collection of classic essays, two monographs at university presses on him, and a continuity script of La strada (Fellini, 1954). In addition, I also wrote a brief book on Roberto Rossellini. The British Film Institute’s sponsorship of The Italian Cinema Book, under my editorship in 2014, continued the revisionist trend in Italian cinema studies, now joined by this Blackwell volume.

If we jump ahead to the 1990s, my 1995 Recent Work on Italian Cinema, based on a statistical study of major publications on Italian cinema in countries outside Italy, clearly demonstrated that American work on Italian film and Italian directors had outpaced the once dominant French work in the field and had, at least for the period in question, produced more publications on the subject than had appeared in the UK—although research on Italian film topics would soon explode in British academia as well.

One additional observation. If we take the 1976 chapter on teaching Italian film in A Handbook For Italian Teachers as a beginning date and the 2015–2016 academic year as an end date, it is clear from the explosion of publications on Italian cinema in Anglo‐Saxon universities, the numerous dissertations in this area from a wide range of academic institutions, and the numerous papers read in this discipline at professional meetings, that the larger field of Italian studies is now dominated by Italian cinema studies. Frankly, in spite of the fact that I might be, in some small measure, responsible for this state of affairs, as a retired academic who also spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Cellini, Guicciardini, Vasari, and Umberto Eco, I am as concerned today by this development as I was by the overemphasis in Italian graduate programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s on Dante and the Renaissance—to the detriment of the study of modern literature and cinema. Italian academic culture’s emphasis on philology and textual analysis has seemingly been overcome today by an interest in cultural studies and film studies, both of which often share common methodologies and preoccupations. But of course fads are as prevalent in academia as they are in food and fashion!

FB: Apart from yourself, who would you consider to be the foundational figures for/in the development of Italian cinema studies.

PB: Well, being called a foundational figure makes a person feel as if he or she were dead, and I am still kicking. So I accept the designation with some trepidation. And being asked to name others gives me the chance to forget a name or two that deserves recognition and thus to offend somebody unintentionally. But I would list a few people (restricting myself to authors of book‐length studies) who began their careers more or less around the same time as I did: Millicent Marcus for her close readings of so many classic works in the light of neorealism, as she herself put it; Marcia Landy for important books ranging from the Fascist period to star studies; Peter Brunette for auteur studies of Rossellini and Antonioni; yourself for work on Fellini; James Hay for his work on Fascist cinema; Giuliana Bruno for her pioneering study of female silent film director Elvira Notari; and Angela Dalle Vacche for her work on Italian national screen self‐image in relation to crucial moments in Italian history and silent cinema divas. Scholars abroad of around the same generation would include Gian Piero Brunetta, Jean Gili, Christopher Freyling, Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith, David Forgacs, Stephen Gundle, and Pierre Sorlin, to name only a few figures.

I think it is also important to mention two early venues for academic research and sharing organized largely by Ben Lawton: the Purdue University Annual Conferences on Film (1976–1982) and the Purdue University Annual Conferences on Language, Literature, and Film (1989–2004). The former produced a series of Purdue Film Studies Annuals and Proceedings, the latter a series of Romance Languages Annuals. The conferences and the annuals and proceedings helped build a community of scholars as well as a critical mass of work in Italian cinema studies that led to single‐authored works but also to collaborative projects such as special issues of journals and anthologies of criticism.

FB: Several of the scholars abroad you mention are British, and a brief discussion of the origins of Italian cinema studies in the UK might be of interest of the reader. (One cannot truly talk of a critical mass of Italian film study developing in places outside the UK and the US, in the English‐speaking world.) At the outset, before the existence of film degrees, movie magazines such as Sight and Sound, Movie, and Screen, were central to the development of discourse around film (not only Italian)—as were film societies. Mary Wood (2015) notes that in the 1960s and 1970s, the British Film Institute played a seminal role in the development of film studies at British universities and that by the early 1970s, the increased visibility of European cinema in festivals and on local screens had meshed with public interest, helping create a market for cinema books, resulting in academic critique and promoting university study.

Christopher Wagstaff (2015) talks of the centrality of the University of Reading to the development of Italian cinema studies in the UK. The first course in Italian cinema was offered in the mid‐1970s, and from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Reading was the one place that offered consistent study of Italian cinema. In addition to Wagstaff, important UK scholars were Roy Armes, Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith (as you have noted), and Sam Rohdie. In the UK in the 1980s, cinema studies occurred in language departments and in cinema/media studies and cultural studies programs. There was a tendency in Italian Studies to combine the study of literature with that of art history and of history and politics. In terms of Italian film criticism, the earliest studies tended, as in the US, to focus on auteurs and neorealism, but in the 1980s, there was an increased interest in popular cinema and in the industrial and cultural aspects of Italian film. In terms of the latter two, many major figures writing on Italian cinema, such as David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, have come from fields other than cinema studies and have approached Italian cinema from a historical and social, rather than a strict film‐studies, perspective.

Film sources were a crucial problem in the UK as in the US, though somewhat alleviated by the regular broadcast of non‐English‐language films by BBC2 and then Channel 4, until the 1990s. In the new millennium, Italian cinema studies in the UK has, as you suggested, really taken off, with a host of new voices addressing Italian cinema from numerous points of view derived from various studies perspectives: cinema, gender, cultural, postcolonial—while the link between film and literary studies remains strong.

PB: In fact, recent significant changes in Italian cinema studies have been led by British scholarly journals such as Italian Studies and The Italianist, advancing a pronounced revisionist perspective, challenging traditional emphases on directors or neorealism, and encouraging more theoretical rigor and more diversity of methodology: rethinking, in short, what it is that we do. This desire for change influenced the selection of authors and topics for my Italian Cinema Book, just as I broadened my own scope and focus in A History of Italian Cinema, primarily in terms of numerous new chapters on genre films—Italian filoni. American scholarly journals still include a number of essays on Italian cinema along with their traditional offerings on language or literature, but perhaps they lack the same ideological fervor that is typical of the British publications.

FB: How would you characterize the nature of Italian cinema studies within Italy itself?

PB: In general, I would say that there has been a strong archival orientation to much of the film scholarship in Italy, producing historically and philologically sound—rather than highly theoretical—work. As a result of this work, we know much about institutions important to Italian cinema, such as the Venice Biennale, Cinecittà, and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.² We have a good sense of Italian cinema’s industrial base, and we have a good deal of insight into many of the most important Italian film studios. The last has helped revise assumptions, for example, that neorealist cinema was staunchly anti‐studio, staunchly opposed to the Hollywood studio system.

Of course, the great monument of Italian film studies is the four‐volume history produced by Gian Piero Brunetta in 1979 and expanded and republished in several editions since. The Storia del cinema italiano was divided chronologically into II cinema muto 1895–1929; Il cinema del regime 1929–1945; Dal neorealismo al miracolo economico 1945–1959; and Dal miracolo economico agli anni novanta 1960–1993. Brunetta is never dogmatic, and the scope of his work is breathtaking, encompassing spectatorship, authorship, economics, nationhood and the popular, censorship, politics, genre, and the various artisanal components of film as craft, not just art.