‘I padri e i maestri’: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies

O’Rawe, Catherine

doi:10.1179/007516308x344342

Cited by 16 publications

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“…Today, Comedy Italian Style is generally praised as a unique and fascinating blend of comedy and drama, low- and high-brow tastes and entertainment and social engagement. Critics do not agree, however, to what extent the movement simply reflected ‘the mores of a changing Italy’ (O’Rawe, 2008: 182) or whether its satire influenced how modern Italians came to view gender relations.…”

Section: The End Of a Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

Larsen

2023

Journal of European Studies

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Differences in Northern and Southern European gender relations have historical roots that can be investigated in the regions’ literature and cinema. The mating morality of romantic love facilitated the West’s First Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. The Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, used Darwinian perspectives to reveal romantic delusions and double standards. The movement’s insights undergirded twentieth-century Nordic gender equality and social democratic governance. Coinciding with the Second Sexual Revolution, the film movement Comedy Italian Style (c. 1958–1979) used psychoanalytical perspectives to promote a similar cultural effect nearly a century later. Both movements contributed to the transition to our present era’s demythologised morality of confluent love, which sacralises gender equality, but the Scandinavians’ head start, evolutionary approach and genre choices partially explain why today’s Nordic women are more empowered than their Italian counterparts. Comparing these movements offers insight into how fiction helps populations transition to new mating moralities.

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Section: The End Of a Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

Larsen

2023

Journal of European Studies

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“…Recently, several studies have interrogated unacknowledged aspects of Neorealism's legacy in relation to gender, sexuality and notions of 'worthy' cinema (see Hipkins 2008;Rigoletto 2014;O'Rawe 2008;O'Leary 2017). Below, I propose a new line of inquiry into the effects of Neorealism's enduring canonicity: its instantiation of a 'brutal humanism' connected with structures of humanitarian aid and, later, neo-colonialism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A brutal humanism for the new millennium? The legacy of Neorealism in contemporary cinema of migration

Johnson

2020

Journal of Italian Cinema &Amp; Media Studies

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This article proposes that the institutional construction of Italian cinema of migration in the new millennium may be conditioned by an enduring, implicit aspect of Neorealism's legacy: a 'brutal humanism' that posits the witnessing of bodies in crisis as an ethical act. Supplementing Karl Schoonover's theory of brutal humanism with Lacanian gaze theory, I argue that the Berlin International Film Festival's synopsis of a recent cause célèbre of Italian cinema, Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) (Rosi, 2016), instantiates a 'brutal vision' directed towards the figure of the refugee, while the film text's depiction of the 'objective gaze' of these characters challenges such relations of power and looking. The article underlines the importance of competitive European film festivals and paratexts in the international circulation and ideological construction of Italian cinema, while arguing that the film text itself can offer a site of resistance to the meanings that institutions ascribe to it.

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“… 24. Pasolini (1969, 39): ‘neo-realism as the expression in the cinema of the Resistance, of the rediscovery of Italy, with all our hopes for a new kind of society.’ See also O’Rawe (2008), on the mingling of neorealism and melodrama in the period. …”

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Back for good: melodrama and the returning soldier in post-war Italian cinema

O’Rawe

2017

Mod. Italy

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General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms 1 | P a g e Back for Good: Melodrama and the Returning Soldier in Post-War Italian CinemaIn 1949, the journal Cinema published an article entitled 'Il cinema ha capito i reduci?' It reported a recent episode, in which an Italian veteran who had written to a newspaper announced that he was going to kill himself. The journalist, Lamberto Sechi, used this case as an opportunity to compare the representation of veterans in Hollywood and Italian cinema:whereas Hollywood managed to produce 'piccoli drammi intimi' that captured the alienation and out-of-placeness of the returning soldier in both its public and private aspects -in films such as The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946) and Till the End of Time (Dmytryk, 1946) -Italian films, according to Sechi, had relied on either sentiment or on schematic ideological positions (Sechi 1949, 175).1 He cites recent films such as La vita ricomincia (Mattoli, 1946), Lattuada, 1946), and Caccia tragica (De Santis, 1947) to prove his point.However, Sechi's further claim that the reduce had become a forgotten figure onItalian screens by 1949 is not accurate. Between 1945 and 1954, Italian cinema actually produced dozens of films featuring ex-combatants. Many of these films have never been analysed by scholars, because they operate in the mode of melodrama, and thus fall outside the critical parameters that deemed (and still deem) neorealism to be the only cinematic style capable of adequately representing post-war Italian society. In this sense, Sechi's assertion that the reduce is a 'personaggio ideale di una storia facilmente commovente' is accurate (1949, 174). Despite the critical neglect of these films, however, they offer to the viewing public a figure who has 'the power to embody difficult national issues' and to 'disturb and This article will first sketch out the historical context within which the reduce is situated, highlighting the silence which surrounded the figure until recent historiography began to re-evaluate him; it will then discuss how the returning soldier, coming home to a country that fails to recognise him fully, and which is in turn unfamiliar to him, is a key 2 | P a g e figure of melodrama, a mode that itself functions in terms of (mis)recognition, and divisions of guilt and innocence, silence and expression. It will analyse how the love triangle is used in various films to represent an ideological choice, and will discuss how notions of justice and victimhood, embodied by the reduce, resonate both on a personal and public level. The nature of what the reduce has suffered, often in prison or concentration camps, cannot be described, and becomes unspeakable, with silence and circumlocution the only options, and the article will relate this private struggle for articulation with Italian repression of many aspects of its ...

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‘I padri e i maestri’: Genre, Auteurs, and Absences in Italian Film Studies

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

A brutal humanism for the new millennium? The legacy of Neorealism in contemporary cinema of migration

Back for good: melodrama and the returning soldier in post-war Italian cinema

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