Sergio Rigoletto

‘Country Cousins: Europeanness, Sexuality and Locality in Contemporary Italian Television’

This article examines the consequences of the concurrence of a recent surge of interest in LGBT lives in the Italian media with the perceived transformation of Spain. Long considered Italys close – though inferior – cultural cousin, Spain has been seen to be forging its own path with the reforms of the Zapatero administration, gay marriage especially. The article focuses on Il padre delle spose (RAI1, 2006), which generated intense discussion across the political spectrum precisely during the period in which the issue of recognising domestic partnerships between same-sex couples was being contested in Italy. The drama and surrounding media debates are analysed in order to articulate both the anxieties and the sense of opportunity brought about by Spains ‘sorpasso’ of Italy. The drama is also informative for the way it reverses the standard ‘metropolitan’ trajectory of LGBT narrative. By relocating its lesbian protagonists to rural Puglia, the drama indicates how local traditions might be better able to ...

Contesting National Memory: Masculine Dilemmas and Oedipal Scenarios in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno and Il conformista

Abstract This article reads the theme of the oedipal conflict between father and son in Bernardo Bertolucci´s Il conformista (1970) and Strategia del ragno (1970) as an exploration of the problematic relation between Italy’s post-1968 reality and its fascist past. It shows that this particular oedipal construction of the past not only disrupts the coherent national narrative of antifascism inherited from the Resistance but also allows us to observe a number of conflicts in the cultural construction of masculinity during the 1970s. The article also takes issue with the view of a conservative, patriarchal, and self-defeatist vision offered by Bertolucci, which is predominant in existing scholarship, and suggests readings of the two films that highlight the possibility of resistance and disruption.

Against the Teleological Presumption: Notes on Queer Visibility in Contemporary Italian Film

In Mine vaganti (Ozpetek, 2011), a young man living in Rome (Tommaso) goes to visit his family in southern Italy to tell them that he is gay. Tommaso plans to come out during a big family dinner; however, during the dinner, something unexpected happens. Rather than Tommaso, it is his brother (Antonio) who comes out as gay. In order to come out, Antonio tells a story: an account of his falling in love with another man who used to work at the family-owned factory. Misunderstanding their son’s story for a joke, the parents burst into laughter. The tale told by Antonio foregrounds what coming out is, after all: a narrative that both constructs and makes visible for us a recognizable gay subject. As one of the defining tropes of contemporary gay identity, coming out is the quintessential gesture of acknowledging publicly who one is. As Nicholas de Villiers has pointed out, coming out locates gay identity ‘not just in a speech act but in a speech act by which one presumably discloses a previously closeted “secret”’. Its remarkable significance in contemporary culture stems from the way it challenges the injunction to silence and invisibility to which queers have been historically confined. To ‘come out’ was one of the imperatives of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. Aptly, the title of the most important magazine of the Italian gay liberation movement was Fuori!, while the first US-based gay magazine, published after the Stonewall riots, was called ComeOut!. In line with the content of the many affirmative documentaries being made during and after gay liberation, these magazines encouraged their readers to disclose publicly their gay identity as both an act of political responsibility and one of individual self-affirmation. The prominence of coming out within contemporary gay identity may be thought of as one of the effects of the institutional incitement to speak about sex, which, from the eighteenth century onwards – as Michel Foucault pointed out in his History of Sexuality Vol. 1 – has made sex into a defining marker of one’s identity. Following the gay liberationist thrust to render public through the verbalization of one’s sexual identity, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ has now become something that needs to be spoken, a truth that is waiting to be uncovered. As a narrative trope in fiction film, coming out has become especially prominent in the last 40 years, reaching its zenith in the 1990s with films such as Get Real (Shore, 1998), Beautiful Thing (MacDonald, 1996) and Edge of Seventeen (Moreton, 1998). In these films, the coming out narrative tends to take the viewers on a journey through the formation

WHAT IS ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES FOR

There is something wishful, aspirational if you will, in the title of this roundtable. I find its temporality especially intriguing. The past has been significantly elided: is it because we are supposed to know it already? Or is it because we are being encouraged to break with it? We are left with the present and the future. But we all know that, when faced with the choice between the two, it is always more exciting to talk about the latter, about how we want this future to be, about how it should be. I will resist this temptation, as I believe it is more important to ask what Italian Screen Studies (ISS) — the object we have been invited to discuss — is in the first place. It seems to me that in the very act of talking about ISS there is the assumption that this is a consistent and unifying discipline that brings specialists together. One could suggest that, as a discipline, ISS is concerned exclusively with the study of Italian films and that its practitioners are scholars primarily or exclusively involved in the study of Italian Cinema. Yet, I do not think that all those who write on Italian cinema can be considered to be scholars working in ISS, especially if they publish also on other national contexts or consider cinema from transnational perspectives. Interestingly, all those invited to speak at the roundtable in Eugene publish almost exclusively on Italian cinema. With the exception of the speakers from Italy, all of us included in this collaborative piece hold, partly or entirely, job appointments in departments/sections of Italian studies. Perhaps this comes as no surprise, given that we originally spoke at the 2013 AAIS. But I think that there is an underlying truth here that transcends the particular context in which we are speaking today: the home of ISS is at the moment Italian Studies, which of course raises the issue of its being a sub-discipline within a discipline. This assumed position of ISS within Italian Studies opens up possibilities but also carries some limitations: it allows the occasional productive contributions to ISS of Italianists who do not work mainly on Italian Cinema (normally with a literary background); but it also helps to perpetuate a sense of inferiority in relation to Cinema and Media Studies, for example. My modest hypothesis is that ISS is an ‘imagined’ discipline, or sub-discipline, whose existence depends on the work of Italianists and their feeling together as a collective intellectual community that engages in particular debates, and shares a set of cultural, theoretical, and methodological frameworks and references. In thinking and talking about ISS today we are actually dealing with a performative: it is precisely our being here to talk about the future of ISS that ‘makes’ ISS. It is The Italianist, 34. 2, 238–241, June 2014

Laughter and the Popular in Lina Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimì

When her first feature film, The Lizards/I basilischi (1963), was released in Italy, critics almost unanimously welcomed Lina Wertmuller as one of the enfants terribles of 1960s Italian cinema. That same year, Wertmuller had worked as assistant director for Federico Fellini on 8½ (1963). In acknowledging the debt that her first film paid to neorealism and to Fellini himself, critics were celebrating the rise of a young director whose work seemed to be entirely within the great Italian tradition of auteur cinema (Brunetta, 1993: 291; Micciche, 1975: 156). After The Lizards, Wertmuller did some work for the Italian state television company RAI. She directed the first edition of the show Canzonissima and then went on to make the first musicarello (music-comedy) ever broadcast on Italian TV, Il giornalino di Gianburrasca (1964–65). In the 1970s, Wertmuller returned to the attention of film critics and achieved her first major international success on the big screen, The Seduction of Mimi/Mimi metallurgico ferito nell’onore (1972). This was a very different film from The Lizards. It was full of gags, crass humour and had a virtuoso visual style that was far from the restrained realist aesthetic of her first film. Wertmuller went on to make some of the most commercially successful Italian films of the 1970s. On the year of its release, The Seduction of Mimi took 820,725,000 lire in Italy and had the seventh highest box-office receipts, while Swept away/Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto had the fifth highest in 1975 (Colombo, 2001: 81). In the same period, Wertmuller’s films became a sensation in the United States where she was nominated for an Oscar for best director.

‘The Fair and the Museum: Framing the Popular’

Popular Italian cinema encompasses many delights: the foundational spectacle of the early historical epics and the passionate theatricality of the first screen divas take their place within a gallery of emotional and sensual pleasures. Even the canonical works of Italy’s post-war art cinema grew from the soil of popular genres and were nourished by traditions of theatricality and entertainment. And yet while Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni are icons of the European auteur canon and neorealism is a core unit of academic study, the vast and diverse output that made cinema a key popular form in Italy remains in many ways more unfamiliar. This volume aims to help correct this imbalance of attention by exploring films that may count in one way or another as popular entertainment. It interrogates the very meaning of the popular and hopes to give a sense of its complexity and specificity in Italian cinema.

Review Article: Cadute, riprese e la critica militante

Da tempo, il dibattito sullo stato del cinema italiano ci ha abituato a valutazioni dai toni a dir poco apocalittici che tendono a riconoscere negli anni Settanta l’inizio di un periodo di torpore morale ed intellettuale. Lino Micciche nota in quegli anni l’avviarsi di un processo di deterioramento qualitativo della produzione cinematografica nazionale che sfocera nel baratro degli anni Ottanta e Novanta. Per Micciche, il quadro degli anni Settanta e paragonabile ad ‘una palude stagnante dove pigri nocchieri seduti su barche ammuffite di muschio palustre attendono, senza neppure troppa convinzione, che irrompa una corrente a smuovere le acque ormai limacciose e metifiche’.1 In quest’ottica polemica, e di solito la morte dei grandi padri del cinema italiano (Visconti, Rossellini, Pasolini e De Sica negli anni Settanta) a segnare, simbolicamente, l’inizio della fine. Visti i toni nostalgici (e un po’ vaghi) coi quali la crisi del cinema italiano viene frequentemente dibattuta, il libro di Barbara Corsi, Con qualche dollaro in meno, rappresenta una innegabile boccata d’aria fresca ed un eccellente contributo alla riflessione critica sullo stato del cinema italiano negli ultimi quarant’anni. Questa storia economica del cinema italiano copre in verita un lasso di tempo piu ampio, che va dal ventennio fascista ai giorni nostri. Il suo merito e quello di fornire un quadro estremamente lucido su alcune delle trasformazioni che porteranno alla grande fuga del pubblico dalle sale dagli anni Settanta in poi. Esaminando le condizioni ‘materiali’ che accompagnano il passaggio dagli splendori del periodo d’oro (anni Cinquanta e Sessanta) alla crisi degli anni Settanta, Corsi rivela una rigorosa attenzione per i dati e per le statistiche, oltre che un’innegabile competenza nell’analisi dei vari meccanismi legislativi e delle dinamiche produttive e di distribuzione. L’autrice sostiene che le varie crisi e rinascite del cinema italiano siano storicamente legate all’abilita o meno dell’industria di difendersi dalla concorrenza americana.