Trajectories of Italian Cinema and Media – serie

Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively ‘objective’ standpoint, to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus, to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and cinematic apparatus, to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification, Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable, if extremely complex.Revisiting Burke’s 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, this new edition includes revised material from the original, plus a new preface and new chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, this book is essential reading for Fellini fans and scholars.

Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively ‘objective’ standpoint, to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus, to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and cinematic apparatus, to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification, Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable, if extremely complex.Revisiting Burke’s 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, this new edition includes revised material from the original, plus a new preface and new chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, this book is essential reading for Fellini fans and scholars.

The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has, to date, written and directed nine films, winning an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013.  In 2016, he created and directed his first TV series, The Young Pope, which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films.This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director, who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film.International contributors from the UK, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Canada and the United States, Italy, Israel, France, UK, Australia, Canada, offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work.   They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory, nostalgia, ageing, love, thirst for fulfilment, search for the self, identity crisis, human estrangement, marginality, irony and power. In so doing, they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion, challenging established assumptions and interpretations.  Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino’s highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture. While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian, noneof these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership.  This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino, arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker.The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY, and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli, who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions.Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS – The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019.  The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field.   Primary readership will be academics, researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies.  Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates.Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate coursesGiven the subject, there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership, but this is primarily a scholarly text.

The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has, to date, written and directed nine films, winning an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013.  In 2016, he created and directed his first TV series, The Young Pope, which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films.This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director, who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film.International contributors from the UK, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Canada and the United States, Italy, Israel, France, UK, Australia, Canada, offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work.   They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory, nostalgia, ageing, love, thirst for fulfilment, search for the self, identity crisis, human estrangement, marginality, irony and power. In so doing, they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion, challenging established assumptions and interpretations.  Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino’s highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture. While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian, noneof these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership.  This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino, arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker.The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY, and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli, who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions.Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS – The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019.  The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field.   Primary readership will be academics, researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies.  Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates.Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate coursesGiven the subject, there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership, but this is primarily a scholarly text.

This book aims to develop a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national television, and the central role of food in Italian culture. The focus is highly original and this is a unique interdisciplinary study at the intersection between food studies, media studies and politics.The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes.The book retraces the history of Italian food television from a political point of view: the early shows of the pioneers under strict Catholic control in the 1950s and 1960s, the left-wing political twist of the 1970s, the conservative riflusso or resurgence of the 1980s, the disputed Berlusconian era and the rise of the celebrity chefs, which, for better or for worse, makes Italy similar to the other western countries.The history of Italy since the mid-1950s is retold through the lenses of food television. This lively book demonstrates that cooking spaghetti in a TV studio is a political act, and tries to uncover how it is possible that, while watching on TV how to make pizza, we become citizens.The primary readership will be an academic audience, including those in the disciplines of food studies, media studies, politics and Italian studies, as well as potentially for those interested in Italian sociology and anthropology. There may be a potential wider readership because of the popularity of Italian food and food television.

Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini, born Lombardy, 1940) is an Italian popular music icon who throughout her sixty-year-long career has come to represent a range of diverse meanings. She is one of the best-loved popular music stars in Italy and abroad, with a large fan base across Europe, Asia, and South America. Her career began in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s.Despite having retired from public appearances at the end of the 1970s, Mina remains popular and successful today, and continues to release new albums that consistently debut in the number one spot of the Italian charts. As an Italian popular music star, she is exemplary of the way in which stardom is constructed by different media and has come to represent different local and global identities, values, ideologies, and ways of behaving. This is because whilst Mina is first and foremost a popular music star, she has also been a film star and a television personality during different phases of her career. She has advertised successful Italian brands on television, and she has been a magazine writer and agony aunt. Her star persona is the product of her work in many different areas, as well as of the promotional materials and commentaries that are produced in response to her work.This book explores these different ‘mediums’ that Mina has been involved in and which have shaped her career and significance. It traces the process by which she has come to embody a diverse range of meanings that reveal something of the values and ideals at work within contemporary Italian society.Rachel Haworth is a researcher of Italian popular music and culture of the twentieth century, and Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull, UK.The primary market for this book is students and academics in the following subject areas: Italian Studies; Popular Music Studies; Stardom and Celebrity Studies; Media Studies; Cultural History. Also scholars and researchers working on music divas.The book is suitable for use on courses and modules at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, which deal with Italian cultural studies, Italy’s post-war history, and the role of women in Italy, as well as the wider study of popular music and the construction of stardom and celebrity.The secondary audience for this book will be fans of Mina around the world, accessibly written, this will appeal to fans in Italy who are able to read in English.

Italy’s 1948 constitution states that Italy is a ‘republic founded upon work’. This book explores women’s labour following World War Two and Italy’s new republic. It focuses its enquiry on three sectors: agriculture (rice weeders), fashion (seamstresses), and religious work (nuns). It studies original oral history interviews and compares women’s own words with their representation in film.In Italy, both war and national reconstruction have typically been framed as masculine undertakings. This book shifts that frame to investigate the labour that Italian women were doing at this critical time of political, social, and ideological change. By examining (filmed) oral history interviews and postwar fiction films, the book brings a vivid, engaging, and cross-disciplinary account of women’s work.Historical studies of Italian women’s work in this period are scarce, short, and almost never in English; this work addresses that critical gap. Film histories almost invariably study women for their beauty and on-screen sexuality; this work critiques and moves beyond this bias. Oral history studies aim to give voice to the under-represented; this book shares that goal.The book is interested in how women’s work was viewed by society and by women workers themselves. Critical analysis of films produced between 1945 and 1965 reveals tensions around women workers’ financial, sexual, intellectual, and spatial independence. Oral histories reveal little-discussed professions and women’s experiences in the workplace. These interviews expose the profound difference work made to women’s lives, and the joys and dilemmas of this difference.

Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release. A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’, Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures, prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen, its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative, thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general, between the open and the hidden, and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.