Alex Marlow-Mann

The New Neapolitan Cinema

Vito and the Others (1991), Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician (1992) and Libera (1993), the debuts of three young Neapolitan filmmakers, stood out dramatically from the landscape of Italian cinema in the early 1990s. On the back of their critical success, over the next decade and a half, Naples became a thriving centre for film production.In this first study in English of one of the most vital and stimulating currents in contemporary European Cinema, Alex Marlow-Mann provides a detailed, multi-faceted and provocative study of this distinct regional tradition. In tracing the movements relationship with the popular musical melodramas previously produced in Naples, he reveals how contemporary Neapolitan filmmakers have interrogated, subverted and reconfigured cinematic convention as part of a through-going re-examination of Neapolitan identity.

Il Divo: A Discussion

Il Divo: A discussion Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008) is, indisputably, one of the key films of recent years, and it has already generated a large amount of analysis and debate. We present this batch of four papers (an interpretation, two responses and a reply to these responses) as a contribution to this debate. We hope to reprise this model of discussion in relation to key films (new or old) and key themes in future issues.

Whose Heritage?: Noi credevamo ( We Believed ) and the National, Regional and Transnational Dynamics of the Risorgimento Film

This essay will focus on Noi credevamo (We Believed, Mario Martone 2010), an ambitious and high-profile historical film about the events leading up to the Unification of Italy in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Highly acclaimed and enormously successful domestically, the film is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished and significant Italian films of recent years, although it failed to achieve a similar impact internationally. At first glance the film would appear to be a celebration of Italian culture and a commemoration of the founding of the nation, but in actual fact it constitutes a complex historiographic intervention that illuminates previously neglected or under-emphasised elements of Italian history and problematises conventional unification narratives by emphasising both the use of questionable acts of violence and the ultimate failure to achieve a true popular revolution. The tensions between the film’s foregrounding of national heritage and the complexities raised by its historiographic discourse, together with the differing receptions it achieved on the national and international stage, prompt questions about how regional and transnational dynamics impinge on national heritage narratives, which are relevant to a broader consideration of European heritage films in the new millennium.

The tears of Naples' daughters: Re-interpreting the sceneggiata in Mario Martone's L'amore molesto

This article sets out to explore the relationship between L’amore molesto (Mario Martone, 1995) and the kind of traditional Neapolitan narratives exemplified by the sceneggiata and the filone napoletano through an analysis of its intertextual relationship with Lacrime napulitane (Ciro Ippolito, 1981).It will be argued that L’amore molesto constitutes less a complete break with tradition than a complex reconfiguration of the ideological basis and functional aims of traditional Neapolitan cinema, making them more congenial to contemporary audiences. In this respect it is exemplary of the approach employed by the New Neapolitan Cinema that emerged in the 1990s and of which it is part.