Alan O'Leary

The Phenomenology of the cinepanettone

The Italian film industry has often been pronounced moribund but has always survived by providing critically despised films for a popular audience. Since the early 1980s, irregularly at first and then annually, it has produced a series of comedies with titles like Vacanze di Natale ‘90 (Enrico Oldoini, 1990) and Natale a Rio (Neri Parenti, 2008), released in time for Christmas and colloquially referred to as ‘cinepanettoni’. In Italian film studies, as in journalistic discourse, the cinepanettone has become a byword for low quality and a metonym for the degradation of Italian film culture. The traditional suspicion of the popular (in the sense of mass culture) in culturally authoritative circles in Italy itself has meant that the cinepanettone remains almost unstudied. Italian cinema studies remains wedded to the notion of a ‘national’ cinema, where the ‘national’ is conceived of as a kind of diplomatic project to be presented abroad, and genre and popular filmmaking (and film-going) is still seen as inauthentic and pernicious. Catherine O’Rawe has analysed this phenomenon, and writes that:

Italian cinema and the ‘anni di piombo’

This essay provides an introduction to the representation and working through in Italian cinema of the experience of terrorism during the ‘leaden years’ (anni di piombo, 1969—c. 1983). It begins by discussing the key terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘anni di piombo’ themselves before providing a short history of the different terrorisms in Italy during the long 1970s. The remainder of the essay is given over to a discussion of the key films, genres and modes that have dealt with the events or memories of that terrorism. Genres include the cop film, Italian-style comedy and auteurist films. Key titles include Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, dir. Francesco Rosi, 1976), Colpire al cuore (A Blow to the Heart, dir. Gianni Amelio, 1982), La seconda volta (The Second Time, dir. Mimmo Calopresti, 1995), and Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, dir. Marco Bellocchio, 2003).

Sotto il segno della metafora: Una conversazione con Giancarlo De Cataldo

Giancarlo De Cataldo, nato a Taranto nel 1956, e Giudice di Corte d’Assise a Roma e uno tra gli scrittori contemporanei piu noti in Italia. E stato reso celebre soprattutto dal libro Romanzo criminale (Einaudi, 2002), a cui e seguito l’adattamento cinematografico per la regia di Michel Placido (2005). Ha pubblicato diversi romanzi, tra cui Il padre e lo straniero (Manifestolibri, 1997), Teneri assassini (Einaudi, 2000), Nelle mani giuste (Einaudi, 2007), L’India, l’elefante e me (Rizzoli, 2008). Per Einaudi ha curato due raccolte di racconti noir, Crimini (2005) – tradotta in inglese per Bitter Lemon (2007) – e Crimini italiani (2008). Ha collaborato alla stesura di diverse sceneggiature per il cinema e la televisione. Con Giuseppe Palumbo ha recentemente pubblicato anche un graphic novel, Un sogno turco (BUR, 2008).

After Brunetta: Italian Cinema Studies in Italy, 2000 to 2007

After Brunetta? Only in the sense that Italian cinema studies is written after Gian Piero Brunetta’s pioneering work, and is always indebted to it. In fact, Brunetta remains our contemporary:2 the most recent aggiornamenti of volumes i and iv of Brunetta’s Storia del cinema italiano (originally published in 1979 and 1982) were published just this year and last year respectively.3 They confi rm the status of the author’s massive personal undertaking to map the terrain of Italian cinema across its century of development as an indispensable guide for all students of the subject. At the same time, Brunetta’s four-volume Storia is but a part of his oeuvre. He has coordinated the Einaudi history of world cinema, which itself contains substantial sections devoted to the Italian cinema.4 His many other books (whether authored or edited) investigate different aspects of Italian cinema history or apply a different emphasis to that found in the Storia del cinema italiano.5 The range of his work means that scholars with very different interests fi nd valuable material therein: Stephen Gundle in this volume remarks on Brunetta’s contribution to star studies;6 Mariagrazia Fanchi, in the book Spettatore, discussed below, indicates Brunetta’s

Of Shite and Time

Why does a young man have sex with a freshly baked apple pie in American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999)?Why do the bridesmaids in the eponymous film (Paul Feig, 2011) suffer diarrhoea and nausea in a pretentious bridal store and why is the bride-to-be made todefecate in the street outsidewhilewearing a floridweddinggown?Notorious scenes like this are intended to make us laugh: why might they be funny? Mikhail Bakhtin never saw these films, but he already knew the answers tomy questions. They were set out inRabelais andHisWorld, first published in English translation in 1968. ReadingRabelais andHisWorld is a heady experience, though ‘heady’ is hardly the apt word; better to say that to first encounter Bakhtin’s explication of the ‘carnivalesque’ and ‘grotesque realism’ is a visceral experience, given thatRabelais and HisWorld is concerned with a poetics of the lower body. Bakhtin’s long book has had the influence it has had not because of its place in Rabelais scholarship but because it provides, even in sometimes clumsy translation, the tools and vocabulary to describe a whole area of ritual human behaviour and ‘low’ laughter that often eludes both the approval and the understanding of ‘official culture’–and, as academics, I am including you and me in that abject category (I return to the abject below). If you laughed and spluttered as I did at the sight of Bridesmaids’ woman in a wedding dress with explosive diarrhoea and were obliged to explain why to the appalled person beside you, then reading Rabelais and His World is an empowering experience. Bakhtin dubs ‘carnivalesque’ an anarchic aesthetic that employs and celebrates the body-based and chaotic elements of popular culture (by which Bakhtin means the ‘culture of the people’) and that refuses all authority. Carnivalesque laughter in the face of the givenorder gives it aUtopian aspect: ‘[The] carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely neworder of things’ (p. 34).The carnivalesque is expressed especially in the grotesque. For Bakhtin the carnival body is an abundant and corpulent thing of ‘apertures and convexities’ (p. 26); it is a body ‘in-becoming’, permeable to and continuous with the living and dying world. The carnival body is also a ‘social’ body, representing the cyclical character of life in society, where individual mortality is not tragic but the necessary condition of birth and regeneration. What Bakhtin calls ‘grotesque realism’ expresses a material and ‘degrading’ vision of the world. All that is spiritual, respectable, and ‘high’ is brought low. And so, in the carnivalesque American Pie, we have the emblem of the wholesome American family made thewarm receptacle of teen penis, while, inBridesmaids, a commoditized symbol of virginity and nuptial union is defiled by shit.