IT314 ITALIAN CINEMA: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES
Jennifer Burns
Programme, spring 2017
Film offers a powerful medium for expressing the interior life of individuals and sometimes communities. The world of the individual or group is often seen to be in conflict or at odds with a wider view of what society is, and cinema has the capacity to allow the viewer to participate in the individual perspectives of its human subjects. Italian cinema of the postwar period has a strong and varied tradition of exploring interior experience and idiosyncratic or marginalized perspectives, and of exploiting the opportunities offered by film form and technique to construct alternative realities. This module explores a range of examples of such films, from the sentimental depictions of dispossession associated with neorealism, to auteurist explorations of selfhood and creativity, to psychoanalytic studies of individuals in crisis, to the expression of counter-cultures and anti-normative subjectivities in recent cinema. Tracing themes such as social exclusion, creativity, anxiety and neurosis, gender and sexuality through a selection of films from the 1940s to the 2000s, students encounter significant figures and movements in Italian cinema history and form a sense of the interactions between them, whilst developing a complex understanding of factors which have influenced and shaped Italian cinema, from both film-makers’ and spectators’ points of view.
Teaching: Tuesday 1-2pm (lecture) and Thursday 1-2pm (seminar).
Students are expected to watch each film twice in the week that it is studied, before the lecture and then before the seminar.
There will be a revision and consolidation seminar in the summer term for those taking the exam for this module.
Assessment:
EITHER one essay of 4,000-4,500 words, to be submitted Monday 24th April 2017
OR one essay of 2,000-2,500 words, to be submitted Monday 24th April 2017 plus one one-hour exam in the summer.
Viewing: All films included in the syllabus are available to view on the Moodle site for the module: look up IT314 or see http://moodle.warwick.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=19622.
The films can also be borrowed on DVD from the TRC. Please be aware that the number of copies may be limited.
Introduction (week 1):
Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951)
1. the establishment of national film vocabularies
2. the presence of landscape (and cityscape) as a key element of these vocabularies
3. femininities and masculinities in Italian cinema
4. influences
5. neorealism and its legacies.
Section 1. Cinema and self (weeks 2-5)
8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
Un’ora sola ti vorrei (Alina Marazzi, 2002)
La grande bellezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
Section 2. Alternative perspectives (weeks 7-10)
Sciuscià (De Sica, 1946)
Respiro (Emanuele Crialese, 2002)
Hamam.Il bagno turco (Ferzan Ozpetek, 1997)
Io, l’altro (Mohsen Melliti, 2007)
General bibliography:
Bertellini, Giorgio (ed.), The Cinema of Italy ((London & New York: Wallflower, 2004)
Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1990)
Bordwell, David & Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th edn (New York, London: McGraw Hill, 2007)
Bullaro, Grace Russo (ed.), From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema. Shifting Demographics and Changing Images in a Multi-Cultural Globalized Society (Leicester: Troubador; 2010)
Landy, Marcia, Italian Film (Cambridge: CUP, 2000)
Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986)
Marcus, Millicent, After Fellini. National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore, MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002)
Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989)
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, et al., Companion to Italian Cinema (London: BFI, 1996)
O’Leary, Alan and Catherine O’Rawe (eds), Thinking Italian Film, special issue of Italian Studies, vol. 63, n. 2 (Autumn 2008)
Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988)
Wagstaff, Christopher, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
Wood, Mary, Italian Cinema (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005)
Web resources:
www.imdb.com Internet Movie Database
www.imsdb.com Internet Movie Script Database
www.sensesofcinema.com information and critical articles on major directors’ work
www.davidbordwell.net Bordwell’s cinema website
www.italica.rai.it/cinema history, information, overviews
www.cinecittastudios.it [useful material in ‘cinecittà la leggenda’ section]
www.cinemonitor.it news, articles, reviews, ideas on cinema; site based at ‘La Sapienza’ University, Rome
www.italiancinema.com links to pages dedicated to various directors
Jennifer Burns H4.11