Catherine G O'Rawe

Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma: opera, melodrama and the Resistance

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italys experience of the Second World War and the Resistance, through canonical films such as Rossellinis Roma citta aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945). It is important, however, to restore a full picture of the array of genres which narrated and refracted the Resistance experience in the post-war period. To this end, this article looks at a key genre that has been overlooked by scholarship, the opera film or melodramma. In examining Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (Before Him All Rome Trembled, Gallone, 1946), the article considers Mary Woods contention (in Italian cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2005, 109) that in this period ‘realist cinematic conventions were insufficient for the maximum perception of the historical context’, and that the ‘affective charge’ of melodrama was essential for restoring this complexity. It assesses the appeal to the emotions produced by the film, and the ways in which this is constructed through the ...

Italian Star Studies

In a recent piece on Italian star studies, Stephen Gundle pointed to the need to broade n our enquiry into Italian stardom; he noted that there is still much work to be done on stars in early cinema, on the transnational nature of Italian stardom, on male stars, and on TV, radio, and recording stars. Gundle has been one of the pioneers of star studies in the Italian context, through his work on Sophia Loren and on stardom in the post-war period.1 Gundle’s influence can be felt, to varying degrees, on the works by Marcia Landy and Pauline Small reviewed here. Work by Gundle, Réka Buckley, and Jacqueline Reich has explored the function of the star as ‘cultural symbol and conduit for ideas about gender, values and national identity’.2 It is undeniable, however, that the emphasis within Italian film scholarship on cinema as a privileged vehicle to reflect Italian history and society in key moments has hampered the development of a star studies capable of going beyond the ways in which the star image or star body resolves ideological contradictions or instantiates the Italian body politic. It is important that we begin to bring together textual analysis with detailed analysis of performance styles or performance elements as a part of the mise-en-scène.3 Similarly, it is important to unite reflections on how genre may shape performance style with a fully theorized gender perspective. Angela Dalle Vacche’s book on the Italian diva, although far from the methodology of star studies per se, is the result of years of research into early Italian film culture; she is keen to move the discussion beyond the tired argument of the diva as femme fatale, and to illuminate the diva as ‘composite and contradictory being’ (p. 81). Although her interest is less in the social context of the diva than in the ways in which she ‘dominates the visual register’ (p. 18), she does identify that the diva’s cultural function was to ‘embody a conflicted answer to major changes within italian studies, Vol. 65 No. 2, July, 2010, 286–92

Mapping Cinema Memories: Emotional Geographies of Cinema-going in Rome in the1950s

This article, based on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project ‘In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, Genre and National Identity’, explores the power of geovisualization for capturing the affective geographies of cinema audiences. This mapping technique, used in our project to interrogate the Italian exhibition sector as well as to map film distribution, is used to illustrate the affective and emotional dimensions of cartographic practices related to memory. The article first examines the imbrication of memory and space, before moving on to a discussion of our mapping of the memories of one single respondent and the questions this mapping raises about geographical and remembered space, mobility and the relation between mapping and life-cycles.

La polvere dei sogni

This editorial marks the sixth issue of the Italianist dedicated entirely to film, but cinema has been one of the journal’s areas of focus from the beginning. In no small part, this is due to the contributions of Christopher Wagstaff, one of the pioneering scholars of Italian cinema in the UK. Wagstaff, who retired this year after four decades at the University of Reading, should be celebrated for his ‘commitment to raising Italian film studies to a high academic standard’, says Zygmunt Barański, Wagstaff’s former Reading colleague. ‘He worked tirelessly and, at times, eccentrically, to develop new undergraduate and graduate courses, to build a major film library, to establish national and international contacts and networks, to enlighten and encourage students, and, most importantly, to demand the highest standards of scholarly seriousness from himself and his students’. Wagstaff’s students echo this sentiment. ‘Chris has taught me not to be satisfied with easy solutions, but to think hard, the best I can’, says Sergio Rigoletto. In the words of Alex Marlow-Mann, ‘it is no coincidence that so many of today’s Italian cinema scholars studied under Chris, and his legacy rests not solely on his own hugely influential scholarship, but also on the way he shaped and informed the work of so many others, myself included’. Wagstaff’s contributions to Italian Film Studies range widely, from meticulous investigations of the film industry and its international markets, to subtle explorations of popular cinema and the media, to rigorous readings of the work of Italy’s most renowned directors. Especially remarkable is his scholarship on neorealism, which culminated in his monograph Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (University of Toronto Press, 2007), a commanding study that is ‘destined to become a classic in film studies’, in the words of Pierre Sorlin. Working against the received wisdom of ‘the institution of neorealism’, Wagstaff insists on examining the canonical neorealist films with exacting care, and in so doing he debunks some of the mythology that continues to surround them. Wagstaff’s is one of the most significant efforts at de-mystifying Italy’s post-war cinema to have emerged since the 1976 Pesaro Film Festival, which engendered a momentous reconsideration of neorealism’s debts to the ‘Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo’. Among the giovani leoni leading the post-Pesaro charge for an