Unique, truthful, brutal … Neorealism is often associated with adjectives stressing its peculiarities in representing the real, its lack of antecedents, and its legacy in terms of film style. While this is useful when confronting auteurs such as De Sica, Rossellini or Visconti, it becomes problematic when examining a widespread cultural practice that realistic modes deeply affected. This cultural production included filmmaking, literature, visual culture and photography, as well as media discourses. It was internally contradictory but fruitful inasmuch as its legacy influenced national culture for many decades to come. The volume spotlights post-war Italian film culture by locating a series of crossroads, i.e. topics barely examined when discussing neorealism: nation, memory and trauma, visual culture, stardom, and performance. The aim is to deconstruct neorealism as a monument and to open up its cultural history.
umanistici e del patrimonio Culturale, university of udine, udine, italy This special issue provides a glimpse into the way recent European quality film originally participates in renegotiations of the social and political Project Europe, with its generous democratization process and transnationally shared cultural and economic goals. The stimulation of quality film-making has been on the political agenda of the EU for a while and followed more or less explicitly, two priorities: integration and competitiveness. Taking this stimulation into account, our goal is definitely not limited to showing how recent European cinema serviced EU priorities as soft-power controlled art. Animated by our own belief in the European project, we aim to reveal the way film-makers and their public art moved forward European concerns. We also try to trace the way films articulate deviation and excess of and within signification-sometimes divergent or critical of EU priorities-which not only raises awareness of various issues independent of the EU or national states agenda, but also performs the counter-ideological work of gesturing towards the misleading questions and challenges that animate the quest for political, ethical, economic and aesthetic value in current-day Europe (Žižek 2006). Examples of EU support of the first priority-to spur European identity and integrationare initiatives such as Europa Cinemas and the Council of Europe's Eurimages, which support production, distribution and exhibition of European quality film across the continent. Another example is the European Commission's (EC) Creative Europe programme. With a 201,4-mil. budget, it describes itself as offering "grants for project (sic) which aims to foster the safeguarding and promotion of European cultural and linguistic diversity" and which supports all aspects of film creative culture, from content development and international coproductions to film education and organization of festivals. 1 EU interest in strengthening the European brand of filmmaking in terms of both box-office and geo-strategic service-the second priority-is exemplified by the EC's MEDIA program, established back in 1987 and renewed in 1995 (Jäckel 2003). Its list of goals includes the training of media professionals to generate a 'stronger European audiovisual sector' , as well as to develop, distribute, promote and exhibit projects and 'new technologies' , which includes support for the cinematic output of countries with lower production rates. 2 Emphasis on new technologies concerns the present and future adventures of European film in the apparently unpredictable waters of the forthcoming European single digital market and in the real-existing and multiple global one. It expresses the EC's worry that the industry
At the outset of one of the more celebrated American novels of the second half of the 20 th century, the main character and storyteller declares:[t]he fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carabine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.Many film scholars are certainly familiar with Binx Bolling, the alienated protagonist of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. 1 Binx has problems holding onto reality, feeling attached to it, and accordingly producing a memory of past experiences; he prefers the movies, and this preference is the symptom of an estrangement. In the novel, media experienceno matter how joyful and richequals a problematic stance in the world, though this happened a long time ago. Cinema was meeting one of its cyclical crisesoccasionally, Binx visits half-empty movie theatresand movies were still believed to address and maintain some kind of relationship with a referential reality. However, what seemed back then a contradictory attitude to the world and humankind is nowadays a widespread, constitutive, pivotal mode of individual and social existence. Cinema caters to an overall mediated memory while its boundaries and existence grow less certain. Film scholars may rejoice to discover that their students do remember some film scenes from the past. Contemporary cinema's uncertain identity is the starting point of The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) by Francesco Casetti. By telling two anecdotes, Casetti introduces the reader to basic but paramount questions, echoing André Bazin's pivotal query: what, when, and where is cinema today? Or, in a more encompassing way: how is
The article explores the work of Anna Magnani in her most productive period, between Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (Rossellini, 1945) and The Rose Tattoo (Mann, 1955). The article tackles Magnani’s work from three perspectives: in terms of performance, that is, her acting style; in terms of representation, that is, the relationship between a spatial setting and a pattern organizing both narrative and performative components; and in terms of star persona, the way in which media discourse conveyed and construed her personality as both an authentic artist and as an individual. The article posits that Rome, Open City was a turning point in Magnani’s career, and encompassed all the features that marked her following work. By closely reading her films and scrutinizing the media discourse about the actress, as expressed in neglected sources such as newsreels and popular press, the article attempts to shed light on the way in which Magnani’s alleged authenticity was designed.
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