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Italian cinema currently finds itself in a transitional phase after a highly successful period in which it was associated with the work of directors such as Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, and Pasolini, and with innovative styles of film-making, principally neorealism. This book explores the evolution of Italian cinema over the last twenty years, with particular reference to modern masterpieces such as Tornatore's Oscar-winning Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. The volume focuses on the work of some of the most prominent directors of recent times, combining an auteurist perspective with an incisive overview of the most important thematic and stylistic developments in modern Italian film-making.
A broad range of theoretical approaches has been selected, embracing cognitive, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, and sociological perspectives. This approach has been adopted with a view to providing the most illuminating analyses of the radically diverse work of different directors, rather than attempting to impose a single critical perspective or theme upon films that range from social realism to horror. Significantly, these different approaches are complemented by detailed discussions of the technical arrangements of given film sequences, since another of the volume's aims is to encourage a greater familiarity with the effects of mise-en-scène, montage, sound, and camera movement.
List of contents
Contents: Clodagh Brook: Screening the Autobiographical - William Hope: Giuseppe Tornatore: Nostalgia; Emotion; Cognition - Fabio Vighi: Nanni Moretti: Trauma, Hysteria, and Freedom - Andy Willis: Italian Horror Cinema: Between Art and Exploitation - Ernest Hampson: Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco: Uncompromising Visions - Aesthetics of the Apocalypse - Pauline Small: Representing the Female: Rural Idylls, Urban Nightmares - Daniela La Penna: The Cinema of Giuseppe M. Gaudino and Edoardo Winspeare: Between Tradition and Experiment - Flavia Laviosa: Francesca Archibugi: Families and Life Apprenticeship - Luana Babini: The Mafia: New Cinematic Perspectives - Laura Rascaroli: Carlo Mazzacurati, Silvio Soldini, and Gianni Amelio: Highways, Side Roads, and Borderlines - the New Italian Road Movie.
About the author
The Editor: William Hope is a lecturer in Italian language, literature and cinema at the University of Salford. He graduated from the University of Kent, did a PGCE at the University of York and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham. He has published volumes on the films of Giuseppe Tornatore, and on the writings of the novelist and journalist Curzio Malaparte.
