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Elio Petri (1929-1982) was one of the most commercially successful and critically revered Italian directors ever. A cultured intellectual and a politically committed filmmaker, Petri made award-winning movies that touched controversial social, religious, and political themes, such as the Mafia in We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), police brutality in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), and workers' struggles in Lulu the Tool (1971). His work also explored genre in a thought-provoking and refreshing manner with a taste for irony and the grotesque: among his best works are the science fiction satire The 10th Victim (1965), the ghost story A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), and the grotesque giallo Todo modo (1976). This book examines Elio Petri's life and career, and places his work within the social and political context of postwar Italian culture, politics, and cinema. It includes a detailed production history and critical analysis of each of his films, plenty of never-before-seen bits of information recovered from the Italian ministerial archives, and an in-depth discussion of the director's unfilmed projects.
Since World War II, aesthetic impulses generated in Italy have swept through every film industry in the world, and in her book Mira Liehm analyses the roots in literature, philosophy, and contemporary Italian life which have contributed to this extraordinary vigor. An introductory chapter offers a unique overview of the Italian cinema before 1942. It is followed by a full and profound discussion of neorealism in its heyday, its difficult aftermath in the fifties, the glorious sixties, and finally by an analysis of the contemporary cinematic crisis. Mira Liehm has known personally many of the leading figures in Italian cinema, and her work is rich in insights into their lives and working methods. This impressive scholarly work immediately outclasses all other available Italian film histories. It will be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the cinema.
Francesco Rosi is one of the great realist artists of post-war Italian, indeed post-war world cinema. In this book, author Gaetana Marrone explores the rich visual language in which the Neapolitan filmmaker expresses the cultural icons that constitute his style and images. Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading in...
Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini’s government that took as their subjects or settings Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship.
Traces the career of the influential French director and uses psychoanalytical concepts to analyze his major films.
Discusses renowned masters including Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, as well as directors lesser known outside Italy like Dino Risi and Ettore Scola. The author examines overlooked Italian genre films such as horror movies, comedies, and Westerns, and he also devotes attention to neglected periods like the Fascist era. He illuminates the epic scope of Italian filmmaking, showing it to be a powerful cultural force in Italy and leaving no doubt about its enduring influence abroad. Encompassing the social, political, and technical aspects of the craft, the author recreates the world of Italian cinema.
This cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship discusses the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. The work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past.
Industriële films worden gezien als een apart filmgenre van de twintigste eeuw. Ze werden geproduceerd en gesponsord door de overheid en grote bedrijven en moesten vooral aan de wensen van de sponsors voldoen, en niet zo zeer aan die van de filmmakers. In de hoogtijdagen werkten er duizenden mensen aan deze industriële films. Zo zijn er vakbladen en filmfestivals ontstaan door samenwerking met grote bedrijven als Shell en AT & T. Daarnaast hebben belangrijke regisseurs, zoals Buster Keaton, John Grierson en Alain Resnais, aan deze films meegewerkt. Toch lijkt de industriële film geen spoor te hebben achtergelaten in het filmische culturele discours. Films that Work is het eerste boek waarin de industriële film en zijn opmerkelijke geschiedenis worden onderzocht.
Par son caractère exhaustif, cette bibliographie offre au praticien, au simple amateur, aussi bien qu'au chercheur spécialisé, la possibilité d'embrasser d'un coup d'oeil la quasi-totalité des ouvrages en français, concernant les spectacles, parus entre 1985 et 1995. This comprehensive bibliography of the performing arts lists almost 8000 French-language books, published between 1985 and 1995, and is a welcome work of reference for anyone interested in the subject.