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This article analyses Italian illustrated editions of Little Women published between 1908 and 1945. After an overview of the publishing history of the novel in Italy, the paper will examine Italian illustrations as hermeneutic tools in order to examine their ideological function in the representation of gender. The belated reception of Alcott's novel in Italy, caused by its representation of a nonconformist educational model for girls, is mirrored in the tension between the nationalistic drive and the influence of foreign models that can be pinpointed in the illustrated editions. By analyzing adaptations of American illustrations, original Italian creations, and omissions of iconic illustrations, this paper will unveil how much the visual element is embedded in the Italian historical and cultural context, as the choice (or omission) of particular images impacted the interpretation of the book. By examining the Italian editions of Little Women published in this time frame, we will also be able to retrace the links with the American illustrated history of the book and bear testimony to the powerful impact of the 1934 film version on printed editions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper aims to place the study of authorship in contemporary Italian cinema within the inherent practices of on-demand culture. Specifically, its objective is to question the author-platform relationship. Starting from here, we can demonstrate how the concept of Auteur— in the sense of commerce of auteurism (Corrigan), prestige economy and Made in Italy (Cucco) and strategic planning of cultural legitimization politics — is, for on-demand streaming services, a fundamental framework in pursuing a structural continuity between old and new forms of media production, promotion and consumption. Despite their «ideology of disruption», which preaches a global revolution of audiovisual practices and identifies a new technological service with a world improving view, on-demand streaming services employ, in their foundational practices, productive, cultural and spectatorship strategies that are already used by traditional studios and net-works. Among these practices, one of the most important is the authorship framework, which use is analyzed here through a theoretical frame defined as «double logic of convergence», where every on-demand authorial action is placed within a spectrum generated by two opposite poles, defined as content and event. To unify factual and theoretical perspective, this paper takes into account Italian authorship within MUBI Italia, localized branch since 2021 of the main streaming service involved in auteur cinema. Specifically, this case study concerns Alice Rohrwacher, whose film Quattro Strade (Four Roads) is not only the first Italian film available exclusively and globally on MUBI, but the perfect ex-ample how on-demand Italian authorship— in its commercial branding and artistic prestige — can serve the cultural politics and the glocal growth of platforms, even within that content/event contradiction which stays ontological to streaming consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this contribution is to assert the role of didactic audiovisual translation as a helpful tool for enhancing metalinguistic skills in a foreign language classroom in Italy; more precisely, the paper will offer an analysis of how foreign language teachers can introduce their students to the idea of sociolinguistic variation, by observing how lexical and morphosyntactic changes can occur in the translation process from an Italian source text into an English target text and/or vice versa. The following sociolinguistic variables will be examined through the lens of audiovisual translation, applied to a range of text types including films and an opera libretto turned into surtitles in English: (1) diamesic variation, making students reflect on such aspects as coarse expressions and taboo words, in relation to the Australian film Ned Kelly; (2) diachronic variation, exploring the multidisciplinary possibilities offered by opera surtitling with a focus on the opera Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi; (3) diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic variations, commenting upon some examples from the Italian films Mio cognato (My Brother-In-Law) and L'uomo che comprò la luna (The Man Who Bought the Moon). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay proposed focuses on the study of the Italian historical and cinema industry context after WWII and during the 1950s. It presents the case study of Luigi Rovere's production and distribution company P.D.C. The paper is divided into two main sections: the first one summarily describes the historical and economic context of Italy and the film industry of the time, with examples of the behaviour of some companies within the industry; the second part focuses on Rovere's firm, giving an idea of how it used to work. The essay will highlight the modes of production and distribution P.D.C. adopted, and also in which way the historical, industrial and economic context and the film market influenced and impacted on the company. [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]

On 13rd October 2016 the Chiostergi-Tuscher archive and library, originating from the heirs' house located in France (Saint-Cergues Les Voirons), was transferred to the Centro cooperativo mazziniano "Pensiero e Azione" in Senigallia. The paper reports about how this remarkable heritage of Chiostergi-Tuscher was retrieved and returned to Italy after thirty years. The collection includes correspondences, letters, diaries, documents, journals and papers, pictures, books, posters and other archival and bibliographic materials of great historical value to learn about the political, civic and cultural activities of Giuseppe Chiostergi (1899-1961), anti-fascist, member of the Italian Constituent Assembly and of Parliament, ambassador, pro-European and statesman, friend and correspondent to leading Italian and European personalities in the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This issue of the 'Archival Notes' column describes two richly intertwined archival collections, one personal and one institutional. Both are held at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin (MNC, Italy) and house documents pertaining to the activities of MNC's founder and film historian Maria Adriana Prolo (1908–91). The column provides a brief personal profile, details her personal and professional challenges – which led her to compare notes with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française – and sheds light on the plans, accomplishments and never-realized projects of Italy's first (and for decades only) woman film museum director. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines cinematic portrayals of immigrant integration in Naples, Italy particularly through documentaries. It emphasizes the complexity of the integration process, exploring emotional dimensions and challenges faced by immigrants in a dynamic societal landscape. It highlights the role of select films in capturing diverse narratives, shedding light on the struggles and cultural clashes experienced by migrants.

The article offers information of the international conference "Bach and Italy" which took place in a digital format from 22 to 28 November 2020. Topiscd discussed include the Covid-19 situation led us to consider various options for restructuring an event that had originally been planned in a traditional form; and decided to broadcast the conference on our social media channels, to make it available at no charge, and to maintain an archive of all videos.

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]

The article aims at studying the geographical variability of theatrical consumption and popularity of contemporary films imported in Italy since the beginning of the XXI century. It relies on the data about regional admissions and theatrical distribution of more than 4100 titles, namely all the films with more than 15,000 admissions that had been projected in Italy from January 2000 to the pandemic outbreak in mid-February 2020, which forced the closure of all cinemas nationwide. While the regional patterns of distribution of both domestic and foreign films are always rather homogeneous and do not undergo major regional variations, Italian and non-Italian films are consumed in very different ways, geographically. When it comes to foreign cinema, a Regional Popularity Index shows how different regions and primarily wider trans-regional areas have different preferences linked to particular themes and genres. Different films are more or less popular in different areas, even regardless of any disparities in their distribution, precisely because they meet (or fail to meet) the specific tastes of macro-regional audiences. Specifically, the data consistently show a divide in taste between the northern-central audiences and their southern counterparts, which replicates the great distance that still divides the North from the South of Italy, from an economic, social and cultural point of view. [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.

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]

This article provides an original exploration of the self-identified populist coalition leading the Italian government between 2018 and 2019. The analysis, informed by a governmentality approach, starts by scrutinising the economic, social, and cultural issues framed as political "problems" by the coalition, also highlighting the tensions underlying such constructions. The second step charts how this political subject sought to address those problems by deploying an array of political technologies. From examining these two dimensions, the article then can discern the composite rationality—techno-sovereignism—that drove precariously the coalition's art of government. Finally, the article sketches out some forms of contestation against the techno-sovereignist operations, whose significance may stretch beyond the Italian borders. Overall, although the Italian populist coalition turned out to be ephemeral, the dynamics that characterized its emergence and functioning could still be used heuristically to understand the interactions and reciprocal adjustments possibly used by right-wing and technocratic populist groups to exert political power conjointly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate crisis threatens our very existence in a myriad of urgent ways and thus merits imperative focus in pedagogic practices in general. This focus is achievable in Italian-language classrooms, where issues of global warming and climate crises are seldom mentioned, through artistic themes from Italy's rich cultural heritage of the arts. The radical art movement of Arte Povera has the potential to bring ecological concerns to the forefront through a critical cultural lens of the country. By drawing upon images of the Arte Povera movement, concepts of eco-justice and eco-pedagogy can occur through paradigms of art-based education to not only discuss the impact of the climate crisis in Italy, but also achieve Italian-language acquisition critically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike other forms of colonization, the Italian conquest of Africa has traditionally been depicted as more benevolent than other European colonial enterprises, with Italian invaders described as 'brava gente'. On the contrary, more detailed research has discovered that Italy perpetrated the same violence and oppression as other European countries, in particular during the 'Fascist African Adventure', and that there has been a deliberate censorship of its most deleterious aspects. In this respect, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been approached by Italian intellectuals, writers, and movie directors as a filter through which it was possible to reconsider in more explicit terms the relationship between Italy and its former African colonies. This is the case of Ettore Scola's movie Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l'amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (1968), a free adaptation of Heart of Darkness that reconfigured through the language of 'commedia all'italiana' Conrad's reflections on colonial exploitation and brutality. Finally, Marco Consentino, Domenico Dodaro and Luigi Panella's historical novel I fantasmi dell'impero (2017) uses Heart of Darkness as a framework within which to dramatise Italian brutality and political corruption in Ethiopia during the Fascist regime. [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 seeks to reposition the popular cinematic genre commedia all’italiana within the context of the rapid expansion of the media industries which accompanied Italy's postwar economic miracle. The article looks at three distinct aspects of the relationship between commedia all’italiana and other media. First, it outlines the important role played by the media during the boom in disseminating images of consumer lifestyles, and highlights the way in which commedia all’italiana participated in this process. Second, through a discussion of media appearances by Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi, the article emphasises the extent to which their commedia all’italiana star personas were constructed and circulated in a multimedia context. Finally, it examines how the genre represented other media, focusing in particular on the representation of gender in advertising scenes. Through close readings of commedia all’italiana advertising scenes, the article notes points of continuity with and difference from advertising imagery that was circulating at the time. The article argues that in order to further our understanding of commedia all’italiana and its relationship to Italian society, it is essential to understand the genre's relationship to other media production of the period, which both influenced the comedies’ representations and was influenced by them in turn. [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 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.

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.