Millicent Marcus – författare

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.

For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini’s death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tense confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary.

Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema’s new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea, along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its "post-Fellini" moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense.