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The Autonomous Image
Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a "living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains" in terms of man's "new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essense is cinematic narration." Prats' work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors—Fellini's Director's Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller's Seven Beauties, Antonioni's Blowup—Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods of the past and the new narrative in which images are free to display their energies fully, to lead the eye beyond rational concepts of reality and illusion, truth and falsity, good an evil, beauty and ugliness. The autonomous visual event, Prats finds, offers one of the most direct ways of entering into adventures of ideas, particularly in the realm of human values. Movies have revolutionized art as well as thought about art, and inasmuch as art and life converge, they have revolutionized life itself.
The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, and political others. This book exposes the "madness" inherent in such a course, which attests to the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical constructions from political, ideological, and moral codes. Kriss Ravetto argues that contemporary discourses using such devices actually continue unacknowledged rhetorical, moral, and visual analogies of the past. Against postwar fictional and historical accounts of World War II in which generic images of evil characterize the nazi and the fascist, Ravetto sets the more complex approach of such filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and Lina Wertmuller. Her book asks us to think deeply about what it means to say that we have conquered fascism, when the aesthetics of fascism still describe and determine how we look at political figures and global events. Book jacket.
Religion in Film
This carefully edited collection of essays explores, in greater diversity and depth than has been attempted before, the relationship between film and religion. Combining perspectives from traditional film criticism and from religious studies, Religion in Film asserts that it is no longer possible to view films simply in terms of their moral impact, nor is it reasonable to limit religious meaning only to those films that make an explicit appeal to religious elements. The essays offer a variety of theoretical reflections on the religious interpretation of film, explore particular cinematic variations on the archetypal images of savior and demon, analyze significant cultural trends of a religio...
Beyond the Traveller's Gaze
This book offers a stimulating analysis of three non-canonical texts in different genres written by British women who lived in Sicily in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. These texts cover a series of crucial political events as well as social and cultural changes which affected the history of Sicily during the period in question, all seen through the direct and indirect experiences of the authors. The book offers a historical perspective on the late-Victorian and Edwardian representations of post-Unification Italy. At the same time the author challenges current critical literature on travel writing which tends to analyse travel texts without mak...
Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism
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 th...
Surviving the Holocaust
A collection of essays and articles, reprinted from various journals, dealing with psychological mechanisms leading to genocide and the adaptation and reactions of the victims. Views the Holocaust as a phenomenon of totalitarianism rather than of antisemitism. See especially "Eichmann: The System, the Victims" (131-149) and "The Holocaust - One Generation Later" [Appeared in his book "Surviving, and Other Essays" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).] (192-213).
The New Yorker
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