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The article explores the production and audiences for Italian films known as "cinepattone." The author reflects on the pejorative use of the term and origin of the designation in relation to Christmas films produced by filmmakers Neri Parenti, Fausto Brizzi, and Marco Martani. Topics discussed include the status of the subgenre in critical discourse, the influence of actor and producer Massimo Boldi, and Italian national cinema. Films noted include "Natale a Miami," "Natale a Beverly Hills," and "Natale a Rio."

Forms of 'otherness' and marginalized sectors of society are prevailing social themes in contemporary Italian documentaries. Women directors are increasingly exploring how to represent transnational mobility. Their documentaries draw attention to the complexity and cultural specificity of migration experiences from different locations of origin and at different times. In this article, we focus on two documentaries that engage with such complexities and which, we argue, are both political and poetic. Sidelki/Badanti (2007) by Katia Bernardi and La stoffa di Veronica (2005) by Emma Rossi Landi and Flavia Pasquini explore transnational mobility by presenting a search for a new notion of home that requires spatial and mental mobility away from familiar spaces into new territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative of the author's experiences studying and teaching Italian cinema is presented in which she discusses U.S. media dominance, English subtitles, and the fragmentation of Italian film studies.

This article discusses the current state of Italian film studies, placing it within a critical context in which Italian cinema is thought to be perennially ‘in crisis’. It addresses the discipline's obsessive interest in neorealism and in auteur cinema, and looks at the history of debate on the contested critical status of Italian popular and genre production, using as a case study the inchiesta in 1955–56 in the Communist newspaper L'Unità on ‘cinema e popolo’. It argues that Italian film studies needs to develop a more sophisticated theoretical and historical approach to the study of both neorealism and popular cinema, in order to account for neglected films such as Vittorio De Sica's collaboration with David O. Selznick, Stazione Termini (1953). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the apparent reluctance to engage with feminist film theory and gender studies in the mainstream of Italian film studies, particularly those originating within Italy. The roots of this neglect lie in a patriarchal critical tradition and a tendency for Italian feminism to function outside academia. The article contends that this situation has led to an impoverished understanding of Italian film history and potentially negative consequences for the Italian film industry. Emphasizing a need for sensitivity to the differences between Italian and Anglophone feminist approaches, the article considers the ways in which more attention to feminism and its theoretical debates could lead to a very different picture, indeed a second take on the Italian film industry, as illustrated with the example of 1950s melodrama and spectatorship theory. Finally, the article maps some other ways in which scholars, particularly Anglophone, might approach this second take, and why they should. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented of the author's experiences teaching Italian film studies, in which she discusses Italian colonialism, race and ethnicity in films, and the teacher's role in the classroom.