After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern AgePremio Flaiano given by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful. Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs—Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Fellini—extinguished the revolutionary impulse which had characterized Italian filmmaking since the Second World War. In After Fellini, Millicent Marcus contends that in the late 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of Italian filmmakers has transcended these obstacles and reasserted Italy's importance in world cinema. Through in-depth critiques of such acclaimed films as The Last Emperor,Caro Diario, and Stolen Children, as well as the immensely popular Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful, Marcus details how today's auteurs have both reflected and resisted Italy's shifting social, political, and cultural identity, and created a body of work that signals a new beginning for Italian cinema. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Looking Back | 13 |
National Identity by Means of Montage in Roberto Rossellinis Paisan | 15 |
Luchino Viscontis Bellissima The Diva the Mirror and the Screen | 39 |
Italy by Displacement | 59 |
Bernardo Bertoluccis The Last Emperor Powerless in Peking | 61 |
Mediterraneo and the Minimal Utopias of Gabriele Salvatores | 76 |
From Salazars Lisbon to Mussolinis Rome by Way of France in Roberto Faenzas Pereira Declares | 94 |
Giuseppe Tomatores Cinema Paradiso and the Art of Nostalgia | 199 |
From Conscience to Hyperconsciousness in Maurizio Nichettis The Icicle Thief | 214 |
Postmodern Pastiche the Sceneggiata and the View of the Mafia from Below in Roberta Torres To Die for Tano | 234 |
The Return of the Referent | 251 |
Filming the Text of Witness Francesco Rosis The Truce | 253 |
The Seriousness of Humor in Roberto Benignis Life Is Beautiful | 268 |
Caro diario and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti | 285 |
Plot Summaries and Credits | 301 |
Family as Political Allegory | 113 |
Francesco Rosis Three Brothers After the Diaspora | 115 |
The Alternative Family of Ricky Tognazzis La scorta | 138 |
The Gaze of Innocence Lost and Found in Gianni Amelios Stolen Children | 154 |
Postmodernism or the Death of Cinema? | 179 |
Ginger and Fred Fellini after Fellini | 181 |
Notes | 321 |
| 355 | |
Videography | 365 |
| 367 | |