Millicent Marcus - Böcker

The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar directors had to come to terms with it, whether in seeming imitation (the early Olmi), in commercial exploitation (the middle Comencini) or in ostensible rejection (the recent Tavianis). Despite the reactionary pressures of the marketplace and the highly personalized visions of Fellini, Antonioni. And Visconti, Italian cinema has maintained its moral commitment to use the medium in socially responsible ways--if not to change the world, as the first neorealists hoped, then at least to move filmgoers to face the pressing economic, political, and human problems in their midst. From Rossellini's Open City (1945) to the Taviani brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982). The author does close readings of seventeen films that tell the story of neorealism's evolving influence on Italian postwar cinematic expression. Other films discussed are De Sica's Bicycle Thief and Umberto D.De Santis's Bitter Rice, Comencini's Bread, Love, and Fantasy, Fellini's La strada, Visconti's Senso, Antonioni's Red Desert, Olmi's Il Posto, Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, Pasolini's Teorema, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, Bertolucci's The Conformist, Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy, Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much provides the occasion for the author's own retrospective consideration of how Italian cinema has fulfilled, or disappointed, the promise of neorealism.

What is the impulse to transform literary narrative into cinematic discourse, and what are the factors that determine that transformation? In Filmmaking by the Book, Millicent Marcus considers the adaptive process as the sum total of a series of encounters: the institutional encounter between literary and film cultures, the semiotic encounter between two very different signifying systems, and the personal encounter between author and filmmaker-sometimes involving an overt Oedipal struggle for selfhood. Marcus explores that process by looking at key works by such major postwar Italian filmmakers as Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini, Fellini, and the Taviani brothers. Drawing on the methodologies of semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and ideological criticism, she finds that cinematic imaginations typically employ literary texts self-consciously to resolve specific artistic problems. Each of the filmmakers studied here define their own authorial task in relation to that of the literary precursor, and insert "umbilical" scenes or "allegories of adaptation" to teach viewers how to read their cinematic rewriting of literary sources.

Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful. Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs-Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Fellini-extinguished the revolutionary impulse which had characterized Italian filmmaking since the Second World War. In After Fellini, Millicent Marcus contends that in the late 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of Italian filmmakers has transcended these obstacles and reasserted Italy's importance in world cinema.Through in-depth critiques of such acclaimed films as The Last Emperor, Caro Diario, and Stolen Children, as well as the immensely popular Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful, Marcus details how today's auteurs have both reflected and resisted Italy's shifting social, political, and cultural identity, and created a body of work that signals a new beginning for Italian cinema.

The last decade has witnessed an outpouring of Italian films that deal with Fascism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This would appear to mark a distinct change from the postwar reluctance to represent such an infamous history. Roberto Benigni's popular Life is Beautiful (1997) is an obvious example, but there have been a number of other works that have not been exported that also attest to a distinct tendency within Italian domestic production to address the issue. Millicent Marcus's Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz looks at this development, attributing the new acceptance not only to an international film sensation, but to a domestic cultural climate at once receptive to Holocaust representation, and ready to produce its own forms of historical testimony.Throughout the book, Marcus brings a variety of perspectives - psychoanalytical, ideological, mass cultural - to bear on the question of how Italian filmmakers are confronting the Holocaust, and why now given the sparse output of Holocaust films produced in Italy from 1945 to the early 1990s. What emerges is a fascinating look at how film is being used to confront a particularly damning aspect of cultural history.Marcus's study features in-depth analyses of five recent Italian films: Ricky Tognazzi's Canone inverso, Ettore Scola's Concorrenza sleale, Andrea and Antonio Frazzi's Il cielo cade, Alberto Negrin's Perlasca, and Ferzan Ozpetek's La finestra di fronte. As an added feature, the book includes a DVD of Scola's short film '43-'97, which has been unavailable outside of Italy until now.

This book explores the Italian film landscape with a focus on cinematic achievements of the twenty-first century.