Dana Renga

1.9: Coming of Age in the Camorra (‘Gelsomina Verde’, Claudio Cupellini)

entering voters. And, in a crucial scene, two henchmen force the returning officer to steal and give them a signed blank ballot paper. Thus, votes can be controlled and bought: one person votes with an already marked ballot and emerges from the voting booth with another blank ballot, and so it goes. Meetings, propaganda, intimidation, vote rigging: elections in Gomorra: la serie demonstrate how various redundant methods are employed to guarantee an outcome. When a local TV news anchor broadcasts the results – Casillo has won – the family gathers at the election committee to celebrate Genny’s strategic success. Now he must rule, and not only Giugliano, but the entire clan that he dominates. The shadows of the recent past are erased and his metamorphosis is complete.

Gomorra: la Serie: Beyond Realism

In 2014 Giancarlo Lombardi pointed to a recent, albeit limited, body of scholarship in Italian screen studies focusing on Italian television. During the last few years, however, substantially more work has become available in Italian television studies. For example, the 2014 Italianist Film issue includes a lengthy section on ‘televisionism’, in 2015 the Journal of Italian Cinema &Media Studies produced a RAI anniversary double issue devoted to Italian television, the inaugural issue of the innovative new online journal SERIES: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives focuses on Italy in the ‘Geographica’ section, and about half of the content of this issue of The Italianist is dedicated to Italian seriality. And although the focus of several of the essays in those collections is showrunner Stefano Sollima’s Romanzo criminale: la serie and Gomorra: la serie we should also note that they contain scholarship devoted to, for example, miniseries about the Holocaust, terrorism, and organized crime, political talk shows, public service broadcasting, reality television, ‘Carosello’ and advertising, and Italian production models. This collaborative section contributes to this exciting new trend in Italian screen studies, and focuses on the immensely popular Gomorra: la serie which Variety dubbed ‘Italy’s answer to TheWire’. The TVadaptation of Roberto Saviano’s bestselling fictional reportage is a clear example of so-called ‘quality television’, and is the most watched series in the history of Italian pay-TV. Within Italy, the series has spawned many transmedial offshoots such as blog sites, fanfiction, and spoofs, and has engendered, recalling Marta Boni’s work on Romanzo criminale: la serie, several ‘paratexts’ such as iPhone aps, Facebook pages, marketing campaigns, merchandizing, trailers and recaps, and official websites and fan pages, all of which ‘reframe the experience of the fictional universe, adapted to the times and contexts in which they appear’. Gomorra: la serie, like Sollima’s earlier series, has met with a fair amount of controversy, and has prompted several negative publicity campaigns. Romanzo criminale: la serie mainly came under attack for its glamorization of criminality. While it narrated events from decades earlier and thus might have had a mild distancing effect in terms of spectatorial engagement, this is not the case for Gomorra: la serie whose narrative is contemporary. Prior to the filming of the series the entrepreneur Alfredo Giacometti hung posters around Naples accusing Roberto Saviano of getting rich on the back of the camorra: ‘Chi specula su Napoli è il colpevole di tutto. Saviano Scampia ha bisogna di fiction, ha bisogna di posti lavoro. Gomorra 2 non lo vogliamo!’ Giacometti then later canvassed The Italianist, 36. 2, 287–292, June 2016

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

ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES IN THE ANGLOPHONE CONTEXT: 2008–2013

In 2011, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe called for a moratorium on the use of the term ‘neorealism’ for at least half a decade and asked, ‘Let us see what such a moratorium might allow us to reveal in its stead, what our silence on realism might allow us to reveal about other modes and genres.’ In their polemical piece, O’Leary and O’Rawe made the provocative claim that ‘all cinema is popular cultural production’ and suggested, ‘we should not neglect the ability of popular film to speak to the national or to contribute to a discourse of national memory.’ As they cogently point out, popular genres such as the commedia all’italiana and the poliziesco engaged with Italian terrorism some years before the so-called cinema impegnato of Francesco Rosi or Elio Petri. At Ohio State, I teach a large enrolment (150–200 student) General Education class on Italian cinema annually, and over the last few years have toyed with the course content, removing films by Scola, Pasolini, and Fellini, to make space for units on genre cinema and contemporary popular films, content that more closely mirrors my own research interests. As my teaching and research move more towards the popular, broadly considered, I have found, in line with O’Leary and O’Rawe’s position, that popular cinema is the centrepiece of the Italian cinematic tradition and quite aptly ‘elaborates a national experience’ and fascinates my students. Taking into consideration O’Leary and O’Rawe’s call, together with my own developing teaching and research interests, I endeavoured to see what Italian screen studies has looked like in the Anglophone context over the last five years and I was particularly interested in gauging the extent to which ‘popular’ genres and topics are taught in the classroom and are the subject of recent scholarship. I began by pooling information from seventy-six scholars at universities and liberal arts colleges working in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States who primarily teach and/or publish on Italian cinema and television. I asked them to share with me any details of the content of courses on Italian film and television that they have offered since 2008 (including the level and delivery language) and also to provide me with information regarding any forthcoming books or edited volumes primarily on Italian cinema and television not yet available in searchable databases. I was particularly interested to discover whether Italian screen studies is witnessing a move in the direction towards the popular both in teaching and research. I was also curious to discover whether we could identify a shift away from courses and monographs and volumes The Italianist, 34. 2, 242–249, June 2014

Made Men: Mafia Culture and the Power of Symbols, Rituals, and Myth

that the mechanisms through which inequality is produced in Italy are a source of particular concern. He refers to the prevalence of tax evasion and clientelism, and the myriad gaps between the Italia reale and Italia legale. The fact that a considerable part of Italy’s inequality is produced by flaunting the law makes the legitimacy problem worse. If the west in general has a problem, Parsi suggests, then, that Italy has it with particular acuteness. If even American democracy is being subverted by rising inequality, what chance does Italy have, a country long challenged by the absence of norms of fundamental fairness and solidarity? Industrialization in the USA led to unprecedented inequality in the Gilded Age, but also to the rise of countervailing forces and political reform. Parsi pays particular attention to the New Deal. The immediate circumstances surrounding the creation of the New Deal were of course the Great Depression, which caused a crisis of legitimacy for the capitalist economy, and also for the principles of liberal democracy. Franklin D. Roosevelt saved capitalism from the capitalists, by bolstering social security and curbing speculation. The only valid exit from the current crisis would have to involve similar principles, but Parsi fears they have not been, and may not be adopted. This is not the first book any reader, even an Italian reader, should pick up to learn about the problem of inequality, but it is quite interesting in its own right. It shows us the extent to which Italian intellectuals have assimilated Anglophone culture. It illustrates how quickly domestic political and philosophical debates in the USA now reach Italy. Finally, it indicates how closely tied some Italians now feel political outcomes in their own country are to domestic political struggles in the USA.