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A study of three high-profile Italian murder cases, how they were covered by the media, and what it all says about Italian culture. Looking at media coverage of three very prominent murder cases, Murder Made in Italy explores the cultural issues raised by the murders and how they reflect developments in Italian civil society over the past twenty years. Providing detailed descriptions of each murder, investigation, and court case, Ellen Nerenberg addresses the perception of lawlessness in Italy, the country’s geography of crime, and the generalized fear for public safety among the Italian population. Nerenberg examines the fictional and nonfictional representations of these crimes through t...
This book explores docudrama as a creative response to troubled times. With generic characteristics formed via traditions in theatre as well as film, and with claims to fact underscored by investigative journalism, television docudrama examines key events and personalities in unfolding national histories. Post-Fall of the Berlin Wall, docudrama has become a means for nations to work through traumatic experiences both within national borders and Europe-wide. In this regard, it is an important genre for television networks as they attempt to make sense of complex current events. These authors offer a template for further study and point towards ways in which European television cultures, beyond those discussed here, might be considered in the future.
A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.
In Recent Italian Cinema, two fundamental questions are asked: the first concerns whether Italian cinema, as national cinema, is in reality reduced to a niche market in its own territory. The second relates to what Italian audiences do with domestic films.For nearly two decades, most Italian films have been produced outside box office returns, through a practice of subsidy and co-financing between many institutional and private entities. Thus Italian cinema has had to define its mode of production and use-value of films in a different way. It is clear that it is no longer possible to separate national cinemas from the grip that the American film industry has on world markets, in terms of imagination and modes of production, distribution and exhibition. It is thus only by examining the multiple layers of description and analysis, which take into account the presence of Hollywood, that we can come to an understanding of what recent Italian cinema actually is.
In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.
The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway is a new study of the films of this most prominent of German directors, and penetrates the seductive sounds and images for which he is best known. The book analyses the individual films in the context of a preoccupation central to all of Wenders' work and writings: why modern cinema - a recording art, solely composed of sounds and images - naturally developed into a primarily narrative medium, a domain traditionally associated with words and sentences? With its emphasis on analysing the films themselves, this book identifies and critically elucidates Wenders' chief artistic motivation: that the act of seeing can constitute a creative act in its own right.
In this work, Marcus interprets a body of work that managed to transcend the decline of Italian cinema's prominence within the industry during the last two decades of the 20th-century.
Richard Dyer's 'In the Space of a Song' takes an in-depth look at the use of songs in film. Songs take up space and time in film and the way they do so indicates a great deal about the songs themselves, the nature of the feelings they present, and who is allowed to present feelings how, when and where. This book explores this perception.
Federico Fellini’s script for perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema, The Journey of G. Mastorna (1965/6), is published here for the first time in full English translation. It offers the reader a remarkable insight into Fellini’s creative process and his fascination with human mortality and the great mystery of death. Written in collaboration with Dino Buzzati, Brunello Rondi, and Bernardino Zapponi, the project was ultimately abandoned for a number of reasons, including Fellini’s near death, although it continued to inhabit his creative imagination and the landscape of his films for the rest of his career. Marcus Perryman has written two supporting essays which discuss the reasons why the film was never made, compare it to the two other films in the trilogy La Dolce Vita and 81⁄2, and analyze the script in the light of It’s a Wonderful Life and Fredric Brown’s sci-fi novel What Mad Universe. In doing so he opens up an entire world of connections to Fellini’s other films, writers and collaborators. It should be essential reading for students and academics studying Fellini’s work.
Italy is more strongly influenced by the experiences of migrants than many other European countries. This includes an historically ongoing internal migration from the south to the north, which is strongly echoed in neo-realism; a mass emigration mainly to western Europe and North and South America that is connected with mafia films, among others, in Italy's collective imaginary; as well as a more recent immigration influx from the southwestern Mediterranean, which is dealt with at a film leve...