Pierpaolo Antonello

Di crisi in meglio. Realismo, impegno postmoderno e cinema politico nell’Italia degli anni zero: da Nanni Moretti a Paolo Sorrentino

Abstract Questo saggio sostiene che c’è stato un abuso della nozione di ‘crisi’ nel contesto critico italiano, il quale ha spesso trascurato aspetti cruciali inerenti la produzione cinematografica e proponendo analisi alquanto schematiche, spesso fortemente ideologizzate, rispetto al rapporto tra estetica e politica. Il saggio critica inoltre il legame causale, proposto da alcuni critici italiani, tra la comparsa di un’estetica postmoderna nel cinema italiano e un generale declino delle strategie politiche emancipatorie nell’arte. Una breve panoramica sulla produzione cinematografica recente dimostra la necessità di non dissociare il giudizio di ‘valore’ di un determinato periodo della storia cinematografica nazionale dal suo particolare contesto di produzione; in termini estetici concetti quali ‘realismo’ o ‘postmodernismo’ dovrebbero essere intesi come ‘modi’ narrativi che possono essere più o meno efficaci in termini politici secondo i diversi contesti storici di ricezione. Come verrà dimostrato attraverso una breve analisi di Palombella rossa di Nanni Moretti, Gomorra di Matteo Garrone e Il divo di Paolo Sorrentino, da una parte queste due modalità possono coesistere nella stessa opera; dall’altra una particolare idea di impegno politico emerge evidente in film in cui la modalità narrativa dominante è proprio quella auto-referenziale, metanarrativa e postmoderna.

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).

Gadda: miseria e grandezza della letteratura

Ott’s work is well-researched and highly coherent, and Montale’s poetry is clearly analysed and interpreted in its metalinguistic complexities, in a writing style that is always accessible and clear (perhaps even to a fault sometimes, preserving a slight fl avour of a doctoral thesis). The volume is completed by an extensive bibliography of cited works. However, despite the fact that the analysis is coherent and well-researched, some parts of her monograph present slightly stretched interpretations of the chosen texts. In particular the section on the Mottetti in Chapter Three does not convince fully, instead leaving a suspicion in the reader that some of the richness of the motets has been somehow lost. Nonetheless, as Stefano Agosti demonstrates in the introduction to the volume, Ott’s research is steeped in inventiveness and originality, and her analysis is able to unify and show an original reading of all Montale’s collections, but especially the later poetry, from Satura through to Diario postumo.

The Emergence of Human Consciousness in a Religious Context

This chapter discusses the role of sacrifice and sacrificial rituals in the development of human consciousness, both in terms of self-awareness and of moral outlook. The articulation of a theory of the evolution of consciousness from an archeological reading of the sacrificial matrix would help to chart a cluster of behavioral structures and cognitive elements which may have contributed to the development of proto-consciousness and conscience. This would include the attention-grabbing and strong emotional response elicited by ritual sacrifice; the cognitive and mnemonic reinforcements provided by repetition and ritualization; the employment of ecstatic practices and transcendental experiences; the emergence of symbolism and the “mythical” mind; the capacity to subvert kin affiliation and the emergence of codes of practice (morality) which overrun solidarity and personal attachments; and the later crystallization of mechanisms for “sacrificial creations of subjectivity” in the form of highly codified “rites of passage.”

1.7: A’ Storia e’ Maria: Gender Power Dynamics and Genre Normalization, (‘Imma contro tutti’, Francesca Comencini)

e mo Marij addo staMarij che faMarij nun se chiamm cchiu Marij(Franco Ricciardi, A’ Storia e Maria)1The seventh episode of the first season of Gomorra: la serie could be defined ‘Mariological,’ for...

‘HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.’ MINACCIA NUCLEARE, APOCALISSE E TECNOCRITICA NELLA CULTURA ITALIANA DEL SECONDO NOVECENTO

Abstract This article discusses the theme of nuclear threat in Italian narratives and culture during the ‘Cold War’ (1945–89). Texts are discussed by a range of authors, including Leonardo Sinisgalli, Edoardo De Filippo, Elsa Morante, Leonardo Sciascia, Paolo Volponi, Alberto Moravia, and Marco Belpoliti. For much of the century the atomic bomb has been viewed, more than as just a historical and technical development, as a projective fetish-object in which to bring together ideologically conceived rationales as well as fears and anxieties linked to the general process of modernization that Italy was undergoing during the years of the economic boom.

Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s

Simone Castaldi’s Drawn and Dangerous is a very welcome contribution to the field of Italian cultural studies as it fills a critical gap on a subject, Italian adult comics, that has long called for an academic assessment and thorough historiographic and aesthetic analysis. For the first time in the English-speaking context, this book explores the origins, the historical context and the innovative and experimental charge, as well as the legacy of a series of influential cartoonists, self-dubbed as ‘manipolo di ragazzi geniali’, which in the span of half a decade produced extremely original and influential fringe magazines that radically innovated the language and the aesthetics of adult comics in Italy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, like Cannibale (1977–79) and Il Male (1978–82). They also contributed crucially to the success of one of the most important counter-culture magazines of that period, Frigidaire (1980–2006). Artists like Andrea Pazienza, Stefano Tamburini, Filippo Scòzzari and Massimo Mattioli have entered into a sort of semi-legendary status, not only among comic aficionados of a particular generation (to which Castaldi enlists himself with passionate autobiographical anecdotage), but currently to a very large audience. This is particularly true in the case of Pazienza – named by Vittorio Tondelli, ‘il James Joyce del fumetto’ – whose works have been republished by major houses, like Einaudi and Fandango, prompting several exhibitions and inspiring a film, Paz! (2002), directed by Renato De Maria. However, because of the autobiographical content of his strips, enmeshed in a highly idiosyncratic historical and social context, Pazienza’s national success (prompted also by his premature death in 1988) has not been matched by an equal fortune abroad, where other authors have received a wider reception, like Hugo Pratt, Milo Manara, Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore, Lorenzo Mattotti or Igort. Although the book claims to cover two decades, it actually zooms in mainly on a consideration of the production of this ‘manipolo di ragazzi geniali’, thoroughly contextualized in Chapter 2 (and more analytically considered in Chapter 3). The second chapter is in fact the core of the book. It explores the nexus between politics and culture in the late 1970s, forming the historical background, and the contextual cultural matrix, from which the experience of Cannibale emerged, as one of the products of the larger 1977 counter-culture movement, about which much historiographic interest and fictional nostalgia has recently been concerned (see, for instance, Claudia Salaris and Pablo Echaurren’s Controcultura in Italia 1967–1977 (1999); Guido Chiesa’s film Lavorare con lentezza (2004); or 1977. L’ultima foto di famiglia (2007) by Lucia Annunziata). The first chapter basically serves as the historical prologue, which prepared the almost teleological emergence of what Castaldi defines as ‘the second generation of adult comics’. From the theoretical and cultural ‘sdoganamento’ offered by Umberto Eco’s Apocalittici e integrati (1964) and by Oreste Del Buono’s magazine Linus (1965), to the success of a series of ground-breaking adult comics, including Angela and Luciana Giussani’s Diabolik (1962), the middle-class erotica of Guido Crepax’s Valentina (1965), the exotic, adventurous escapism of Pratt’s Corto Maltese (1967), and Max & Bunker’s Alan Ford (1968), Italian comics of the 1960s indeed present quite a wealth of provocative and interesting material that requires a more ample analysis than that given Book reviews

Beyond Futurism: Bruno Munari’s Useless Machines

This essay discusses Bruno Munari’s understanding of the relationship between art and technology in the light of his early collaboration with the Futurist movement. It explores the legacy and influence of Futurist experimentation in Munari’s opus, starting from his early works in the late 20s, up to mid-century. It also discusses Munari’s progressive distancing from the Futurist aesthetics and the more encompassing integration of his art with other aesthetic trends in Europe at the time. In particular, the essay focuses on the epistemological implications at the base of his famous ‘useless machines’, which Munari developed from the early 30s, and which marked a departure from the main thrust of Futurist ‘technolatry’, towards a broader understanding of technology, which is more pragmatic and structuralist in nature, and which seems to question any dualistic separation between nature and technology, between the artificial and the natural.

Humanities Now. What Matters and the Speed we are Moving at. An Interview with Jeffrey T. Schnapp

Jeffrey Schnapp is the Rosina Pierotti Chair and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford Universty. A graduate of Vassar College (B.A., 1975) and Stanford (Ph.D., 1983), he taught at Dartmouth College before returning to Stanford in 1985. His research interests extend from antiquity to the present, encompassing Dante and his age, Fascist culture, the material history of literature, 20-century architecture and design, and the cultural history of science and engineering. His books include: The Transfi guration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), and Building Fascism, Communism, Democracy. Gaetano Ciocca: Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). He has edited (with Robert Hollander) Bernardino Daniello’s Commento sopra la Commedia di Dante (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), as well as (with Rachel Jacoff) The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). He edited the Oscar Mondadori edition of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Teatro (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). He is co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity. His main current projects are Quickening — An Anthropology of Speed (a transcultural account of attitudes towards velocity) and Songs of Matter (on the culture of modern materials such as steel, aluminium, tempered glass, and plastic). An internationally acclaimed curator who has collaborated with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Arts Center, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Schnapp’s recent curatorial work has emphasized experimentation with ‘mixed reality’ approaches to physical exhibitions.