Italian Motherhood On Screen

This book is the first scholarly analysis that considers the specificity of situated experiences of the maternal from a variety of theoretical perspectives. From “Fertility Day” to “Family Day,” the concept of motherhood has been at the center of the public debate in contemporary Italy, partly in response to the perceived crisis of the family, the economic crisis, and the crisis of national identity, provoked by the forces of globalization and migration, secularization, and the instability of labor markets. Through essays by an international cohort of established and emerging scholars, this volume aims to read these shifts in cinematic terms. How does Italian cinema represent, negotiate, and elaborate changing definitions of motherhood in narrative, formal, and stylistic terms? The essays in this volume focus on the figures of working mothers, women who opt for a child-free adulthood, single mothers, ambivalent mothers, lost mothers, or imperfect mothers, who populate contemporary screen narratives.

With its physical beauty and kaleidoscopic cultural background, Sicily has long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers. Twelve new essays by international scholars--and additional writings from directors Roberta Torre, Giovanna Taviani, and Costanza Quatriglio--seek to offset the near-absence of scholarship focusing on the relationship between the Mediterranean island and cinema. Touching on class relations, immigration, gender and poverty, the essays examine how Sicily is depicted in fiction, satire and documentaries. Situated between North and South, East and West, innovation and tradition, authenticity and displacement, Sicily acts as a microcosm of the world, a place to explore numerous narratives and develop intercultural dialogue. It is also the center of cinematographic discussions and events such as the Taormina Film Festival and the SalinaDocFest. The volume presents Sicily almost as a character and creator in its own right.

Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality puts gender at the centre of cinematic representations of contemporary transnational Italian identities. It offers an intersectional feminist analysis of the ways in which transnational migration has been represented, understood, and constructed in the contemporary cinema of Italy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality and in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies, and feminist critiques, the six chapters of the book focus on a series of exemplary fiction films from the last twenty years, which both reflect and shape the nation’s responses to the growing presence of transnational migrants in Italian society. The book shows how questions of gender, sexual difference, and reproductivity have been central to Italian filmmakers’ approaches to stories of mobility and displacement. Gender is also enmeshed in the rhetoric and poetic of hospitality that filmmakers propose as a critical framework to condemn Italian border policies and politics. Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality traces an arc that moves from the embrace of a humanitarian rhetoric of infinite hospitality toward migrants, apparent in films produced in the early 2000s, to a more fluid understanding of Italian identities from a transnational perspective.

Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives. Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. The unusual emptiness of the cities that the nomadic female protagonists traverse highlights the absence of, and their wish for, life-sustaining communities. Laura Di Bianco contends that women's urban filmmaking—while articulating a claim for belonging and asserting cinematic and social agency—brings into view landscapes of the Anthropocene, where urban decay and the erasure of nature intersect with human alienation. Though a minor cinema, it is also a powerful movement of resistance against the dominant male narratives about the world we inhabit. Based on interviews with directors, Wandering Women deepens the understanding of contemporary Italian cinema while enriching the field of feminist ecocritical literature.

As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.

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.

"Radical Equalities and Global Feminist Filmmaking - An Anthology"’s main objective is to exhibit and unveil the fruit of the growing movement of feminist filmmakers around the world through interviews with current filmmakers themselves and through critical analysis of the works of these filmmakers. Every filmmaker we examine tells their own story about radical equality from a place that they have lived, are drawing from, or have imagined. The common theme in all of the films of our selected filmmakers is the obligation they feel towards the oppressed and the resulting ethics of interdependence their films exhibit. Some films give voice to those who are suffering in the shadows, or have been silenced and murdered because of their political orientation and work; some films showcase vulnerable identities (especially gender identities) because the characters are inter-sex, transgender, of a marginalised class and skin color, are being forced into a split identity because of a colonial history, or because they are living in a part of the world from which they cannot escape. Other films highlight the feminist experience of lesbian love and its constraints or revolutions, the experience of motherhood, and the question of origin in all of its complexities. The authors have, to date, conducted 16 interviews with filmmakers from around the world who, in very different ways - at times with comic relief , at times by pointing the cameras back at themselves, at times by inviting the viewer to grieve with them - question radical equality and vulnerability. We have selected these films on the basis of their unique stories and story-telling style, and their diverse points of view referencing different socio-political historical realities around the world. Each of them has one, if not several, female, intersex or non binary characters as their leads; each of them engage us with the question of feminism in a political way that highlights our obligation toward the character and her lived experience. Each of them focuses on “interdependence” as an aesthetic and cinematic principle. But what is most important is the fact that each filmmaker will be able to describe how they found their access and inspiration for their story, and how the film reflects on their own lived experience that is socio-economically and historically determined.

Examines the role that parenting, as a theme and practice, plays in film and media cultures.