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Information on several papers discussed at the 2010 American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) Conference held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on April 22-25, 2010 is presented. Topics include Italian cinema genre, Italian literature and the cinema discipline within the field of Italian studies. The conference featured several notable individuals including Anna Paparcone, Maria Teresa Maenza, and Elena Past.

Information about the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from April 7-9, 2011 is presented. The article mentions that the event was attended by scholars from various countries to share and discuss views on Italian film, culture and literature research. It also featured speakers Marcia Landy of University of Pittsburgh as well as Andrea Bini and Christopher White of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

From the farthest north to the deepest south, the cities, towns, and countryside of Italy have provided set locations which show us images of an Italy that is multiform and various. Based on a massive database of more than 5000 Italian-set films from 1988 to 2016, this paper explores the geography of Italian set locations and their related cinematic landscapes. In order to achieve this goal, the study proceeds in two phases. First, the paper identifies the concentrations of set locations (filmogenic spots) overall and by genre in particular areas through spatial analysis tools. Second, it presents a qualitative analysis of the representation of selected locations, underlining the different roles played by the landscape in film narratives. By using an integrated quali-quantitative perspective, the paper offers an analysis that combines the spatial and the representational dimensions of Italian set locations over a wide area for a long period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on some basic questions related to the field of actors' training in Italy. In order to investigate the various trajectories followed by young actors in their professional apprenticeship, the paper briefly illustrates what is specific to the Italian landscape, which features both a strong tradition in enrolling non-professional actors and a fluid professional interchange between actors who have a stage-oriented training and actors trained in film acting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at investigating the intertwining of the aesthetics of film noir and neorealism in the context of Italian cinema after the Second World War. In order to individuate the similarities between these two trends, the article will highlight how both neorealism and film noir partake in the wider discourse of melodrama, and how the melodramatic imagination is key to understanding the relationship of these texts within the issue of modernity. Through a reflection on Gilles Deleuze's category of the 'any-space-whatever', the article will focus on the deployment of postwar spatiality in a series of noir films dealing with the 1950s process of reconstruction. The fragmentation of space these films register and enhance creates a productive tension with the affective intensity of the melodramatic body. The result is a form of spatial anxiety that encompasses both neorealism and film noir, thus highlighting the importance of a transnational frame to the interpretation of Italian cinema on the verge of the economic boom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the sixties and seventies, a wide move towards personal participation and bodily involvement involved media discourse and public opinion in a shift towards experimental languages. Several filmmakers in Europe and in the USA began exploring the limits of classical film style, developing what David Bordwell labeled as intensified continuity. In this respect, a highly significant chapter is the so-called Italian giallo, or rather the whole system of cycles (also called filoni, strands) of the crime and police procedural genre that characterized Italian cinema in those years. The Italian crime cinema has left an important legacy, creating true cult phenomena, and we must assume that its importance is to be found also in its formal traits: in its ability to experiment with the forms and expressions of the new sensibility. The exemplary case study of my paper will be the cult title Don't Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972), as a typical by-product of the late sixties and seventies' anxiety to provoke and explore new languages, where many 'fear-relevant' conventions and genre markers were almost savagely exploited in a controversial but influential production formula and as an 'emotionalized' tactic of involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retranslation has received far less attention in the audiovisual translation field than in the literary domain, where it is deemed a positive phenomenon. Within the audiovisual field, retranslation tends to be either negatively received or overlooked. While some research over the past decade has focused on redubbing, resubtitling (i.e. comparing two or more sets of subtitles of the same source text, dating back to different periods) has long remained neglected from a retranslation perspective. The present paper aims to address the issue of retranslation using the case study of two Italian films distributed in the UK as an empirical basis: Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) and Federico Fellini's La Strada. Two sets of English subtitles produced for each film, 43 years apart on average, are compared according to a two-level analytical framework, technical and translational. The study shows that, although major improvements can be observed on a technical level, the more modern retranslations seem to depart further from the original dialogue than the older subtitles. Therefore, the notion of 'retranslation as improvement' and the retranslation hypothesis are questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Italian screen studies (ISS), the disciplinary boundaries and status of ISS, and concerns on the future of ISS and Italian cinema.

The article offers information on the workshop "Narration Migration" held at the Monash University Centre in Prato, Italy from September 17 to 18, 2010. It states that the aim of the program is to search on issues how migrants are represented in Italian medium, cinema and literature. It mentions that the highlight of the conference is the screening of the award winning documentary "Giallo a Milano" (2009) and question and answer session with director Sergio Basso and sociologists Daniele Cologna.

This paper explores the transnational industry of migrant cinema. It particularly addresses the production and 'guerrilla film-making' of this genre in Italy, whilst analysing the effects of cultural policies on productions and representation. After defining the genre of migrant cinema—or 'accented cinema', as Hamid Naficy terms it—by positioning it within the wider theoretical framework of Third Cinema, I concentrate on aspects of representation and diversity, identity and cultural participation. I focus on the means of production and distribution as they have expanded in a transnational strategy of international co-productions beyond post-colonial communication and cooperation flows, and within new dynamics created by digital technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two silent feature films of Hamlet —one English, one Italian. Hepworth and Plumb's film starring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson was made in 1913 for Gaumont. Rodolfi's film starring Ruggero Ruggeri was made in 1917 for Rodolfi-Film. Both actors had already been celebrated for their stage Hamlets and the films are inscribed in markedly different ways with the legacy of those earlier stage productions. As part of considering this legacy, I examine the relationship of each actor to the Shakespearean words necessarily excised from the filmic performance and of each to a set of inherited pantomimic performance codes. The English film is more widely known, exhibited, and discussed than the Italian film. In this paper I suggest that its network of extra-textual associations (theatrical, English socially prestigious) may have proved as beguiling as its particular filmic attributes. I use a comparison of the divergent critical fates of these films as the spur to discussing the marketing, profile, and trends of critical reception for material that equivocates tellingly about its intended market and medium allegiances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michele Placido's Pummarò (1990) and Carmine Amoroso's Cover Boy (2006) bring the legal, economic, and social precarity of West African and East European migrants in Italy to the screen. This article examines, firstly, how subjects who come from the Global South, or who are marked as such, are framed in their precarity from a Eurocentric perspective and, secondly, how they exercise agency and break free of the colonial, racializing, gender-critical, or classist frames imposed on them. The 'illegitimate art' of photography is suited to reflect this two-sided process of precarization and empowerment because it is accessible to diverse social classes. This heterogeneous plurality that produces, mediates, and receives photographs also determines an intersection of gazes that emerge from divergent positionings before and behind the camera. To bridge professional with amateur approaches, my performative analysis combines Philippe Dubois' artistic concept of the 'photographic act' with Ariella Azoulay's critique to reconsider the contingent and civil potentiality of photography by reimagining the 'event of photography'. A media-critical relation between photography and film ultimately reveals this interplay of gazes to be a meta-aesthetic gesture by the observing medium of film, which self-critically interrogates its own cinematographic modes of representing precarious subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on two teenagers grappling with the difficult reality of Naples, Agostino Ferrente's Selfie (2019) is a powerful depiction of an entire community at a significant time, when limited perspectives and the pervasive presence of organized crime – with a value system that is intrinsic to the Camorra – deeply influence the present and the future of a generation. Shot by two 16-year-old boys from the Traiano district (Naples), the film is a powerful example of how self-representation can be a strategic and political tool to immerse in a life and its context. Within the framework of studies on first-person filmmaking and self-representation, and mobilizing concepts from the theory of mobile films, this article argues that, through the filming carried out by the two teenagers, Selfie is able to offer us a wider glimpse of a generation, of its everyday life and imagination, and of its perception of the contemporary media imaginary. I argue that, by employing a reflexive mode of documentary and the linguistic forms of the photographic selfie, the film engages the spectator in an intimate flow of images, questioning authorial instances, the relationship of the iGeneration with filming devices, and the different approaches and aesthetic choices that form the basis of every representation of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the place of women and migrants in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema, arguing that New Migrant cinema continues and reworks key Neorealist tropes and tendencies. It intends to render explicit how an ensemble of films challenge the stereotypes concerning gender, national and cultural identities. Among the figures that are scrutinized are the borgatari, extracomunitari, popolane and terrone. Its main objective is to demonstrate how the cinematic expression of these figures in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema enhanced the reinvention of italianità and the generalised understanding of gender. It also aims to explain why the cross-fertilisation between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies is indispensable for comprehending this reinvention. Particular emphasis is placed on the shared interest of Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Vittorio De Sica's Il tetto in the plight over housing and the special character of the urban landscape of Rome. The article also sheds light on certain common concerns of Italian Neorealist and New Migrant cinema, especially as far as national and gender narratives are concerned. Pivotal for the reflections developed here are the roles of Anna Magnani in Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta, Luchino Visconti's Bellissima and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ningla A-Na is one of the most important documentaries on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Often used as a primary source by historians, little attention has been paid to how the film emerged from a transcultural collaboration between Italian filmmaker Alessandro Cavadini and Indigenous activists. Approaching Ningla A-Na through an analysis of its production and distribution history, this article argues that the film should be understood not only as the record of a crucial time in the history of Indigenous activism, but also as an integral facet of Australia's migration history and as a tool for transcultural activists' engagements in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights regarding the Italian film industry in the 1960s. The author says the industry consists of two components such as the front door for art cinema, which covers films seen at festivals, and the back door for genre films. He mentions several film directors including Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Antonioni Michelangelo. Furthermore, the Italian films have achieved success from the 1960s to the early 1970s.

In recent years a growing number of Italian film-makers have made a conscious effort to create a cinema that testifies to the great trends of the current epoch: globalization, emigration and displacement. A moral seriousness reminiscent of neorealism has re-emerged, accompanied by a return to the ethics and techniques of documentary which defined that earlier movement. The ambition to expose the country's vices, a goal shared among fiction and non-fiction film-makers alike, is implied in a struggle to express this new global environment. Beginning with the notion of 'Empire' as defined by Michael Hardt and Anotnio Negri, Luca Caminati investigates the changing social and cinematic terrain of Italy through the artistic production of current directors Francesco Munzi, Giorgio Diritti and Pietro Marcello. Their work recuperates motifs of the neorealist and cinema impegnato movements, while incorporating gestures from the new documentarians of their generation. These hybrid narratives represent a formally innovative political cinema that performs an oppositional function in the face of the new realities of Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movie industry is typically characterized by high production risk and unpredictable returns. Innovating in this kind of environment is very risky and calls for smart strategies of risk diversification. Hollywood is a recognized content innovation leader in the global movie industry, but the recent tendency for major production companies in the industry is to reduce risk by imitating previously successful productions rather than maintaining an innovation drive. We analyse here an alternative possible strategy based on risk diversification, and show how such strategy is viable for the Hollywood system whereas it is less viable for alternative, less market oriented movie production systems. We study cost/return data for 909 films from the US movie market 1988–99 by the five major US studios, and 118 films from the Italian market 1995–2003 by the three major Italian producers. Three different strategies of portfolio composition are tested, in a comparative perspective, in the US and Italy production and market environments. We find that portfolio diversification strategies are always successful in reducing operating risk in the US, but only partially so in Italy due to major differences in market size and players' characteristics, and ultimately to differences in entrepreneurial culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fascinated by the films of Fellini, the cartoonist Milo Manara offered the filmmmaker to adapt two of the scripts that he had never been able to bring to the screen. Thus, in the early 1990s, Journey to Tulum and Journey of G. Mastorna were published. Our main interest has not been in the analysis of the adaptation process. This article aims, on the contrary, to trace the origins of these projects, as well as the interests that, both artists, shared throughout the gestation and realisation of these comics books. We'll find that Fellini was too a comic fan since his childhood and, in fact, draws some comics before WWII. We'll also try to describe how, beyond the plot, Fellini's cinema influenced the cartoonist and how the peculiar and poetic universe of the filmmaker was brought to the panels drawn by Manara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Asta Nielsen, "the Duse of cinema art", and the exclusive long feature star series The issue puts a special focus on Asta Nielsen. Performers like Sarah Bernhardt, Asta Nielsen and Francesca Bertini were crucial to legitimise cinema and develop a film star system in Australia and New Zealand, well in advance of the emergence of a long feature film star culture in the US. In the first, Friederike Grimm introduces readers to the I Spezial-Nummer der Asta Nielsen-Zeitung i (Special Edition of the Asta Nielsen Magazine) from 11 November 1911, which was only recently found in the library of the German Film Institute in Frankfurt am Main and presents a small sensation, because contracts and business correspondence on the three Asta Nielsen exclusive long feature film star series from the years 1911-1914 are lost. Mark B. Sandberg, in Richard Abel's 2005 I Encyclopedia of Early Cinema i , states that the multiple-reel feature film 'became an important production and exhibition format for European cinema in the years 1910-1914' and that by the start of the First World War, 'the long feature film was clearly established and in some countries was beginning to supplant the variety format of short films' (Sandberg [35], 648). [Extracted from the article]

The 'invention' of the long feature film was the key tool used by production and distribution companies to try to solve the overproduction crisis of short films in Europe at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Neither cinema owners nor their patrons had clamoured for the shift from entertaining short film programmes to challenging long feature films that absorbed the viewer's attention and required qualifications in creating meaning while watching moving pictures. Thus, it was the local cinema manager who had to succeed in attracting paying audiences to multiple-reel feature films that ran for one hour or longer – in some cases more than two hours. This essay presents a local study of the cinema programme in Trieste before the First World War that examines the selling points put forward in newspaper ads published in Il Piccolo, the most read daily newspaper at the time, with the aim of promoting long feature films. The evaluation of a sample of over 350 cinema advertisements shows that stars and divas like Asta Nielsen and Lyda Borelli were but one among other, some stronger, selling propositions to attract local audiences for long feature films. These other selling points were Danish dramas produced by Nordisk, Italian peplum films and programmes of short film comedies by Max Linder. This diversity in selling points for the long feature film testifies to the fact that though the star system was emerging, it had not yet been fully established as a means of marketing multiple-reel feature films by the end of the 1913–14 season, at least not in Trieste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian publisher Mondadori is credited as the source of the word giallo when it started bringing out detective fiction in yellow covers in 1929. This article explores the antecedents of the word from the influence of the French feuilletons, pulp fiction featuring the lurid crimes of master criminals such as Fantômas which were published in colourful covers with titles frequently picked out in yellow. These were immensely popular as film serials and were exported to Italy and all over Europe. Analysis of Assunta Spina, the serials featuring Za-la-Mort (1913–1924) and the Pirandello adaptation Enrico IV shows Italian filmmakers adopting stylistic elements that would coalesce in later Italian film noir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the little-known history of Italian-Soviet film productions by means of a close analysis of the production history of one such coproduction, The Red Tent (1969). Produced by Franco Cristaldi's company Vides and the Russian Mosfilm, and directed by Michail Kalatozov, the film featured an international cast including Peter Finch, Sean Connery and Claudia Cardinale. Centred on the story of Umberto Nobile's calamitous scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1928, the film was as much a product of the easing of East-West tensions in the Khrushchev era as of the growing networks of collaboration in European and international cinema. Documents from the Cristaldi archive are employed to offer a detailed reconstruction of the film's production from economic, political, logistical and artistic points of view. The challenges were numerous starting with the need to ensure the cooperation of the still-living Nobile. Filming was interrupted following the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968, but nonetheless it was completed and the film found an international distribution, with the American sale making a crucial contribution to the viability of the project. Although, in contrast to the original intention, no further films were made that followed this production model, The Red Tent constitutes a key example of the creativity shown by Italian producers in forging novel patterns of international production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Schoonover and Barbara Corsi discuss a shared history of film financing and real estate redevelopment that they discovered in the archives of Italian cinema production during the 1950s and 1960s. The dialogue between Schoonover and Corsi proposes a crucial reframing of Italy's 'economic miracle,' and in doing so, exposes how the business of property inflected stardom, the depiction of landscape, tourist films, and cinema aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to engage, from an industrial perspective, with Italian cinema's concept of filone (a near equivalent of genre) by analysing the production and distribution of two of the most popular and successful Italian films at the box office: Lo chiamavano Trinità (They Call Me Trinity, Enzo Barboni, 1970) and its sequel Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity is Still My Name, Enzo Barboni, 1971). Produced by Italo Zingarelli's West Film, the two films represented, on the one hand, a departure from consolidated Spaghetti Western violent tropes in order to offer a family friendly form of entertainment. On the other hand, they represented the pinnacle of the bottom-up/low budget production strategy characteristic of the heyday of the Italian genre factory. The article argues that a contextualisation of the two films within the Spaghetti Western filone, alongside an analysis of Zingarelli's work as producer and distributor, is revealing of the ambition of Italian producers of the period and the role played by regional distribution in the development of filoni and a cinema of imitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giorgio Agliani is almost unknown as an Italian film producer. A former commander in the Resistance, he was placed, soon after the war, in charge of cinema affairs within ANPI, the Italian national association of partisans. Agliani strongly believed that cinema was the perfect medium to build the collective memory of the Resistance. As the executive producer of Caccia Tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947), directed by Giuseppe De Santis, he oversaw the making of a film which explored the tensions between men and women who had taken different sides in the recent conflict. The film won the prize for the best Italian movie at the Eighth Venice Film Festival in 1947. The article explores the tensions and difficulties that accompanied this attempt to make a film outside of conventional industry channels. The production was complicated because of the need to balance political concerns, organizational issues and artistic aspirations. Given the sensitive topic of Caccia Tragica, the Italian Communist Party put great pressure on ANPI leaders to ensure the story was told in a certain way. This impacted on Agliani, who was in charge of coordination, as well as financial and organizational matters, and also on De Santis, who demanded respect for his artistic decisions. Agliani's personal archive is drawn on to reconstruct the entire story of the making of Caccia Tragica and to disentangle the various issues involved in the production. The article highlights the way political, cultural and economic issues were intertwined as well and sheds light on a 'mode of production' that was far from being a capitalistic one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between film promotion and the wider economy has scarcely been studied in Italy. This article explores the influence of American exploitation techniques in the peninsula in the years following World War Two and the responses of the Italian film industry. It is shown that, though many advocated imitating American practices in the fields of advertising and promotion, over time the industry learned not only to appropriate successful techniques but to adapt them in ways that were better suited to products that were often presented as being more 'cultural' than 'commercial'. Attention is paid to the way film directors were drawn into campaigns to underline the cultural value of their works. By the same token, Italian stars were not cast as cheerleaders for the developing consumer economy in the way that American stars had been. Yet linkages between film making and advertising were nevertheless forged through practices of product placement that exploited the loophole of 'verisimilitude'. Hollywood runaway productions like Roman Holiday set the tone for the insertion of Vespa scooters, automobiles and other goods in feature films. The article evaluates the interplay of the cultural and the commercial in Italy's postwar economic revival and the role of cinema in its development as a mass consumer society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of Alessandro Blasetti in arguing for, and promoting, the development of the Italian film industry before and after the Second World War. Though a prominent film director for more than thirty years, Blasetti was never considered an auteur: he had no distinct authorial style and not did he specialise in any particular genre. Unlike some postwar directors, he never positioned himself in opposition to producers but, on the contrary, worked closely with many of them, winning a reputation for reliability and professionalism. A supporter of Fascism until the later 1930s, he encouraged state involvement in the industry and was the first to use the Cinecittà studios, inaugurated in 1937, to their full potential. After the war, he mediated between opposing political forces to defend the interests of the Italian cinema as an industry and a 'collective art'. He was responsible for creating several stars, including Gino Cervi and Sophia Loren. Drawing on the Blasetti archive, the article considers the range of the director's activities, political links and his way of conceiving his role, immersed in rather than against the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the collaboration between the Italian and Anglophone academies in relation to Italian films, the importance of Italian films, and the account of film papers.

This essay evaluates how negative publicity, mixed reception, and censorship regulations impacted the re-editing of Stazione Termini (1953) and its re-release in the United States in April of 1954 as the newly titled, and much shorter, Indiscretion of an American Wife. The primary archival documents used include correspondences to and from producer David O. Selznick, surveys of negative audience reactions during test screenings in Berkeley and Palo Alto in late 1953, and mixed reviews of both versions from various press outlets. Particular attention is paid to the translations and reporting of the reception of Italian audiences, who did not seem to be able to reconcile the film's neorealist expressions with the melodramatic plot of the end of a love affair. Overall, this essay argues that Selznick's editing should be contextualized with the perceived mixed reception of Stazione Termini in Italy, the poor reception from test audiences, the foundational flaws in the story, the negative publicity surrounding the American release, and American censorship standards that conflicted with – though they did not completely curb – some of the sexual content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paolo Virzì's film production is deeply rooted in Italian (often Tuscan) contemporary society, with a focus on the daily lives of ordinary people and the difference between their true selves and their public persona. The language spoken by his colourful characters, which includes regionalisms, slang, colloquialisms and a vast array of idiosyncratic traits, is the quintessence of Virzì's world and of his bittersweet irony. In this contribution, we aim to illustrate how these culture-specific scenarios are transposed in the English subtitled versions of three recent Virzì films, namely La prima cosa bella [The first beautiful thing] (2010), Paolo Virzì, Italy, Tutti i santi giorni [Every blessed day] (2012), Paolo Virzì, Italy, and Il capitale umano [Human capital] (2014), Paolo Virzì, Italy. We identify the indices of regional or Italian identity, linguistically or culturally expressed, in the three aforementioned films, with a view to elucidating the difficulties behind their translation in the English subtitles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss articles within the issue on topics including Italian film studies, neorealism in Italian screen studies, and queer theory brought by former University of Arizona visiting associate professor of Italian William Van Watson on Italian film.

Since Italy's transition to the Second Republic in the early 1990s, a period marked by attempts to come to terms with the traumatic experience of the violent 1970s, cinema and television have increasingly been (ab)used for the rewriting of national history, often within a revisionist framework, and for the promotion of new discourses of reconciliation. The miniseries Donne armate (Sergio Corbucci, 1991) is one such attempt to work through the trauma of political violence by rehumanizing - in the words of Giancarlo Lombardi (2009) - the demonized figure of the terrorist. Produced in the same period as Sergio Zavoli's television documentary La notte della repubblica, where former terrorists from both sides of the ideological spectrum are offered the chance to publicly express their personal reflections and regrets, Donne armate also promotes a discourse of reconciliation by bringing together two women belonging to different sides of the law: a terrorist and a policewoman. This reconciliation with Italy's violent past is reinforced by the casting of Lina Sastri in the role of the terrorist, calling back memories of Giuseppe Bertolucci's Segreti segreti (1984), where Sastri interpreted a ruthless terrorist killer who is eventually defeated by the law. Drawing, among other things, on theories of cultural memory and trauma, this article discusses - through an analysis of both Donne armate and a number of television programmes on terrorism broadcast in the early 1990s - the political potentialities and limits of television in processes of healing and national reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relation Italian cinema to the history of the country. It relates the selling of the customers and jewelry based on the designs in the Indian epic romantic historical drama film "Jodhaa Akbar," in which it argues that to wear history is not valuable and admirable as to read history. It discusses the need for Italian cinema to study the ecology of cinema and history.

This article analyses a group of Italian–Spanish co-productions released between 1939 and 1943, which are often described as a rather obvious by-product of the natural alliance between Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain. Among the 24 films produced, only two can be considered outstanding: the big Fascist hitSin novedad en el Alcázar/L’assedio dell’Alcazar(A. Genina, 1940) andTosca(C. Koch, 1940), a film initially assigned to Jean Renoir. Applying a cultural-industrial approach, the article reveals a world of subterranean contradictions and a much more obscure relationship than political affinity would lead us to believe. It also defies the established chronologies of political history, in those years supposedly and overwhelmingly determined by the Civil War and its aftermath, in Spain, and the Second World War, in Italy. It also sheds some light on how transnational political relations in Europe become entangled with business interests and vice versa, and the unpredictable results of such an awkward involvement. In some way, it implicitly hints at how the story of peripheral and apparently minor films might contribute to obtain a more accurate perception of mighty historical circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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."

The article discusses the studies of Italian films and genre cinema. It states that although many of the Italian genre film scholarships are dedicated to the spaghetti western, some critics have considered the slasher and zombie films. Meanwhile, it mentions that much of the films making up the pastapocalypse genre have been totally rejected in the critical tradition of Italy.

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]

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]

An essay on the themes and topics of 20th century Italian film studies is presented. The author reflects on the scholarship and subjects explored by several books including "Voci del silenzio" by Silvio Alovisio, "Pensare il neorealismo" by Giulia Fanara, "Il paesaggio nel cinema italiano" by Sandro Bernardi. Other topics include the influence of U.S. films, fascism and film, erotic films, and film audiences in Italy.

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.

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.

Discusses Italian motion pictures of the 1970s which, in different ways, use representations of the city to indicate the nature of conspiracies against democracy. Examination of how conspiracy thrillers use the city as a source of historical figures which enable meanings to be suggested; Strategies which film makers make meaning about contemporary history and social anxieties.

The author reflects on the discipline of Italian film, television and media studies. He mentions its expansion as well as the need for its development of a sense of self-awareness and self-criticism. He also notes the views of senior editor Joseph Francese towards Italian cinema at the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) conference in 2009.