Bernadette Luciano

New Zealand and Europe

This book is one of first comparative studies of the cultural, political and economic interactions between New Zealand and Europe. The chapters that comprise this book are a deliberate exercise in variety inside the theme of New Zealand and Europe: Connections and Comparisons. They derive from the first conference of the New Zealand European Studies Association and give a flavour of the active and far-reaching nature of studies relating to Europe currently taking place in New Zealand. The cultural and historical chapters, while often quite specific in focus, touch on themes of universal cross-cultural relevance: the fate of imported languages and cultures; the tendencies to familiarise or exoticise unknown lands; the problematic representation of women in politics; the ambivalences and tensions between dominant and subordinate cultures; and the responsibility of the intellectual in the face of authority.

The dis/locat/ing migrant as an agent of transposition: Borensztein’s Un cuento chino and Segre’s Io sono Li

Extending the conventional understanding of polyglotism, this article explores multiple polyglossic interactions, both intra- and extradiegetic, in two films that foreground the language and culture of the Chinese migrant, Un cuento chino/Chinese Takeaway (2011) directed by Sebastián Borensztein (Argentina) and Io sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (2011) directed by Andrea Segre (Italy.) Both films feature dislocated Chinese immigrants who, throughout the films, speak in their native languages. In both cultural contexts Chineseness represents diametrical otherness that is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend. Both films require their primary audiences to engage with significant quantities of spoken Chinese in order to develop a meaningful comprehension of sympathetic Chinese characters. We argue that, in contrasting ways, the films’ mechanisms of polyglotism break the dominance of a singular cultural/linguistic discourse. Using Rosi Braidotti’s (2006) notion of transposition, we argue that polyglotism is able to explore a nomadic vision of subjectivity whereby multiple, mobile subject positions offer modes of resistance to traditional habits of thought and representation. Understood in the context of diaspora space, a point of confluence and intersectionality, transposition enables a zigzagging and crossing, which enacts a creative leap that takes the form of a change of culture both in terms of how we think about the world and of how we inhabit it.

Directing Terramatta;. An interview with Costanza Quatriglio

This interview with Costanza Quatriglio offers insights into the making of the documentary film Terramatta;. She answers questions about the filmic language she used to evoke the situations Vincenzo Rabito described in his autobiography and discusses links between her filmmaking and the oral tradition and the importance of understanding what Vincenzo Rabitos language meant to him. She explains how she selected the episodes from the autobiography to be included in the film and how she crafted the relationship between Rabitos story and official historiography. Finally, she discusses the significance of the archival images, the words, the music, and the landscape in this journey documentary that reinvents and reframes images, constructing new visual itineraries that propose a re-reading of Italian history through the autobiographical account of a man living on the margins who struggled to become literate in order to tell his story.

Costanza Quatriglio: In search of the invisible

ABSTRACT In this article we provide an overview of the work of the ‘invisible’ Italian film-maker Costanza Quatriglio. In Italy, the term ‘cinema invisibile [invisible cinema]’ has come to denote high-quality films that are not widely distributed. Quatriglio embraces the idea of invisibility both in reference to herself and to the subjects of her films. All her films—including her shorts, her feature film and her feature-length documentaries—are either journeys in search of marginalized and invisible subjects or psychological explorations of the invisible aspects of highly visible individuals. Her protagonists are predominantly individuals who live at the margins of society—street children from Sicily, unaccompanied minors, international adoptees or domestic workers from Cape Verde and their daughters. Her 2009 documentary about the Italian pop star Nada focuses on the invisible and private side of a public figure. In all cases, the point of view of Quatriglios investigative camera does not speak for but rather accompanies its subjects, creating a filmic space for what otherwise often remains invisible or incomprehensible.

Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary Italian Cinema

In this chapter, Luciano and Scarparo discuss Alina Marazzi’s Tutto parla di te (All About You, 2012) and Cristina Comencini’s Quando la notte (When the Night, 2011), two films that focus on women who struggle to reconcile the expectations of motherhood with the conflicting emotions they experience as mothers. While many scholars have defined this conflict as ‘maternal ambivalence’, the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, proposes an alternative notion, that of ‘maternal inclination’. While inclining or leaning over her helpless child, the mother must make the choice of whether or not to provide care. Applying Adriana Caverero’s notion to their analysis, the authors highlight how the two films’ protagonists are able to reimagine mothering through female support networks and a genealogical understanding of maternal strength.

Performing the invisible past: Costanza Quatriglio's Terramatta;

All of Costanza Quatriglios films – her shorts, feature films and feature-length documentaries – are either journeys in search of marginalized and invisible subjects or psychological explorations of the invisible aspects of visible individuals. In Terramatta; Il Novecento italiano di Vincenzo Rabito analfabeta siciliano (2012), Quatriglio continues her inquiry into invisible subjects and uses the story of an ‘invisibile’ (as she defines Rabito) to rewrite the history of Italy, not as a historian but as a filmmaker, self-reflexively drawing attention to the history and style of Italian cinema itself. In our discussion of Terramatta;, we analyse Quatriglios juxtaposition and intersection of the archival footage of official history with Rabitos personal accounts conjured on the screen through the voice of the actor Roberto Nobile, and her filmed images of contemporary landscapes inhabited by Rabitos words. We consider the ways in which the documentary creates a dialogue between public and private history, between the present and the past and between memory and language.

Book reviews including 'Mission Italy: on the front lines of the Cold War', by Richard Gardner

Fosi’s study is concerned with the administration of justice in the Papal State, primarily between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the terminal date being ambiguous. Starting with a description of the complex system of jurisdictions, she examines judicial ideology and the micro-politics of enforcement. Her work, therefore, does not belong to the genre of history of criminality, pre-eminently represented for the papal domain by Peter Blastenbrei’s study of crime patterns in Rome in the period 1560 – 85 (Blastenbrei 1995). It is again to be contrasted with the work of the anthropologists Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen on mid-to-late sixteenth-century Rome (Cohen and Cohen 1993), which uses judicial records as windows upon social mores. Fosi’s concerns are not particularly with judicial testimonies. A major orientating theme of her work is the myth of ‘good government’ which was a significant facet of the Counter-Reformation papacy’s self-projection, one linked to the theme of a ‘purified’ Rome as new Jerusalem. Clearly there are exceptionally rich archival sources for judicial administration in the Papal States, pertaining to a multiplicity of jurisdictions. Hitherto, however, historical studies in this area have been under-developed, most notably by comparison with a well-established Venetian historiography. In addition to the aforementioned books (Blastenbrei 1995; Cohen and Cohen 1993), there is a discrete body of articles on Rome and on the Papal State as a whole. The concentration of these has been upon the sixteenth and, to a lesser extent, the seventeenth centuries. There are also local studies, which are difficult to access. With regard to the problems of order in the Papal State outside Rome, the emphasis of general studies has been upon banditry in the late sixteenth century. Fosi’s present work is unprecedentedly broad in scope, in terms both of chronology and of geographical area. The Papal State, in real terms, was essentially a creation of the sixteenth century, as the papacy sought to assert its suzerainty over feudatories and city governments. Here it pursued a grandiose project of control, moralization and maintenance of religious orthodoxy, in which there was no very firm distinction between civil and criminal jurisdiction and which was enforced by a bureaucracy and judiciary whose upper echelons became exclusively clerical. The utopian nature of this project was balanced by Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13(1) 2008: 103 – 131

Back to the future: The Comencini sisters and their search for a cinematic language

Abstract As part of a larger project on contemporary Italian women directors, this article will focus on Cristina Comencinis Il più bel giorno della mia vita/The best day of my life (2002) and Francesca Comencinis Mi piace lavorare, mobbing/I like to work, mobbing (2003). We argue that these films and their modes of production challenge and reassess a traditional style of filmmaking as well as the representation of women and children in cinema. They explore the changing private and public dimensions of womens lives in contemporary Italy and the impact that this has on family relationships, in particular on the mother-daughter relationship. By approaching these films through the lens of Italian feminist philosophers and feminist film critics we will consider the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in the films as well as the cinematic implications, for both protagonists and spectators, of what it means to search for a new (cinematic) language constructed through the eyes of children and daughters.