Danielle Hipkins - Böcker

Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic

We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema’s heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project ‘Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60’, Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema’s role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.

We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema’s heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project ‘Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60’, Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema’s role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.

This book offers a new reading of the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. It provides a formal and detailed analysis of his films to suggest that Costa’s formal procedures generate a contingency of meaning. The book proposes that Costa’s films suggest a critical thinking posited through the materiality of the cinematic medium that is capable of exposing the limits of filmic representation itself. In addition, the author argues that Costa’s political gesture derives from the articulation of the intrinsic elements of the filmic medium rather than the depiction of a social reality.

During the last three decades, Europe has undergone numerous periods of economic and political instability. The process of European integration, once hailed as a beacon of a peaceful co-operation between many, if not all, European nations appears to be stagnating, giving rise to notoriously more frequent manifestations of xenophobic violence, nationalism and right-wing fundamentalism. This book evaluates the portrayal of the migrant Other in selected examples of contemporary French and German cinema from the period 1989–2020 in the context of the ongoing debate about European identity and its socio-political significance. It focuses on the films of some of Europe’s most prolific contemporary filmmakers, such as Michael Haneke, Claire Denis and Fatih Akin. It examines cinema’s importance not only in reference to various theoretical evaluations of the concept of European identity, but also many notable events that have taken place in Europe in the last thirty years, such as the collapse of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1989, the historical expansion of the European Union in 2004, the migration ‘crisis’ of 2015, ‘Brexit’ and the war in Ukraine.

«This is an excellent and innovative study of one of the most crucial topics of today. Using gender, sexuality, and race as theoretical frameworks, The New Italian Cinema of Precarity brilliantly enlivens the study of precarity and unemployment as portrayed in contemporary Italian cinema. A must-have for both students and scholars.»(Dr. Paolo Chirumbolo, Louisiana State University)The book provides one of the first explorations of contemporary Italian cinematic depictions of precarity. In 2008, the world faced a significant financial crisis, leading to the emergence of the socio-economic phenomenon known as precarity. In Italy, precarity is a national issue, primarily referring to the widespread prevalence of temporary work, impacting the lifestyles of many minorities due to Italian legislation. Precarity has consequently become a recurring theme in contemporary Italian cinema, portraying characters with precarious lives marked by unpredictability, lack of job security, and material or psychological well-being, thereby becoming existential precarious characters.This book analyses seventeen popular Italian contemporary films, revealing their complex interplay between cinema and society. This interplay challenges traditional notions of Italianness in cinema and illustrates how characters’ precarity intersects with other issues such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, bringing further nuance to contemporary Italian identities, which are heterogeneous and plural.

Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic

Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet’s population balance tipped from a predominantly rural makeup towards an urban one, the field of cinema history has demonstrated a disproportionate skew toward the urban.

This open-access volume is the first English-language study of the vibrant contemporary landscape of Italian youth-oriented television. TV shows addressed include internationally popular series such as SKAM Italia, Baby, Summertime, We Are Who We Are, Zero, Prisma, My Brilliant Friend, Mare Fuori, and many others. The collection explores the changing representation of young people, while contextualising these developments historically and industrially. The opening section examines key issues shaping contemporary Italian youth television, such as fashion, place, music, and language, with a focus on how Italian producers and outlets are adapting local practices in response to transnational production models and international distribution networks. The second and third sections offer focused readings of Italian youth TV series in this contemporary landscape, drawing on a wide range of thematic angles, from immigration to queer identities. Finally, the book concludes with interviews with major industry figures, who reflect on recent adjustments in production and distribution practices by public service broadcasters and digital platforms.

The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. Chapters in the book address aspects of industry and spectatorship and the varied film psychology of infancy, childhood and adolescence, as well as genres as diverse as silent cinema, contemporary teen movies, melodrama and film ethnography. The contributors engage with a wide range of modes and theories including neorealism, auteurism and contemporary postfeminism. The book maps out new roles for gender, the transnational, loss and mourning, and filmmaking itself, leading to a revised understanding of the child in Italian cinema.

In the period 1940 to 1965 the female prostitute featured in at least ten per cent of all Italian-made films, but she cast her shadow over many more. With reference to the changing social and film industrial context, this book explains why the figure of the female prostitute was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence. It shows that the prostitutes that populate Italian cinema are much more than simply 'tarts with hearts' or martyr figures. Via the constant reworking of the prostitute trope across genres, the figure takes us to the heart of many ideological contradictions in postwar Italian cinema and society: these include the entanglement of rhetoric about political truth with the suppression of postwar guilt and shame, fears about racial contamination, and a preoccupation with non-normative forms of masculine behaviour and desire. The book also shows how the female prostitute is important to Italian national cinema as a 'borderline identity', used to establish, but also destabilize, the hegemony of respectable femininities. It is precisely through her borderline condition, this book argues, that the prostitute 'haunts' gender, sometimes policing it, but more often than not problematizing its very construction.

The contributors aim to consider how frequently 19th-century narratives of female prostitution—hence the label ‘fallen women’—are still recycled in contemporary visual contexts, and to understand how widespread, and in what contexts, the destigmatization of female sex work is underway on screen.

Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet’s population balance tipped from a predominantly rural makeup towards an urban one, the field of cinema history has demonstrated a disproportionate skew toward the urban.