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Italian Film in the Present Tense
Millicent Marcus (Author)
9781487546182
Hardback, published 15 February 2023
290 pages, 28 b&w illustrations
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.8 cm, 0.52 kg
For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini’s death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tense confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary. Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema’s new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea, along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its "post-Fellini" moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense.
Acknowledgments Introduction: An Overview Mafias 1. Toward a New Language of Engagement for the New Millennium: 2. The Anti-Mafia Martyr Film Takes an Unexpected Turn: 3. "This Is Not a Crime Film": 4. "The Normality of Devastation": Neo-regionalism 5. "Non per vacanza, ma per viverci!" (Not to Vacation, but to Live Here!): 6. The Child as the "Custodian of Future Memory": Migrants 7. Channeling the Geographic Unconscious: 8. "Your Position Please": Leadership 9. The Ironist and the Auteur: 10. Liberating the Left: Toward a Humanist Language of Engagement for a Post-Political Age: 11. The Pontiff and the Shrink: Women 12. "It Ended the Way It Should Have": 13. Comic Relief: In a Category unto Itself 14. Hidden Beneath the "Blah Blah Blah": Bibliography
Preface
Marco Tullio Giordana’s The One Hundred Steps, 2000
Pierfrancesco Diliberto’s The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, 2013
Michele Placido’s Crime Novel, 2005
Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, 2008
Giorgio Diritti’s The Wind Blows Round, 2005
Giorgio Diritti’s The Man Who Is to Come, 2009
Federico Bondi’s Black Sea, 2009
Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, 2016
Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, 2008
Roberto Andò’s Long Live Liberty, 2013
Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope, 2011
Francesca Comencini’s The Blank Space, 2008
Riccardo Milani’s Don’t Stop Me Now, 2019
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, 2013
Index