From the radical 1960s through the neo-conservative 1980s and into the early 1990s, the provocative cinematic careers of French director Jean-Luc Godard and Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci have captured the imagination of filmgoers and critics alike. Although their films differ greatly - Godard produces highly cerebral and theoretical works while Bertolucci creates films with more spectacle and emotionalism - their careers have sparked lively discussion and debate, mostly centred around the notion of an Oedipal struggle between them.
Robert Burgoyne uses historical analysis to elucidate a range of historical arguments and interprestations in Bertolucci's 1900. His central proposition that the narrative patterning in all historical films vests them with the power of historical explanation provides a basis for understanding the genre of historical film.
A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.
In this anthology, filmmakers, psychoanalysts, film scholars, and cultural historians use a psychoanalytic approach to examine Bernardo Bertolucci's epic film The Last Emperor (I988). Evolving out of a conference on Bertolucci's work, the essays interweave psychological, political, and cinematic themes in The Last Emperor as well as in much of Bertolucci's other works. This volume includes a foreword by Bernardo Bertolucci and is organized into four parts or "takes," including "Filmcraft," "Psychoanalysis," "Film Scholarship," and "Cultural History." Although we can never fully know the real Aisingioro Pu Yi, Bertolucci used his vision of the intricate relationship between art, ideology, and the psychic experience to tell the story of one ordinary man's extraordinary life. Bertolucci's The Last Emperor hopes to illuminate this complex and often enigmatic creation as well as renew an excitement about the possibilities of interdisciplinary criticism in film studies.
Bringing together scholars from the Italian and English-speaking worlds, Bosworth and Dogliani's edited book reviews the history of the memory and representation of Fascism after 1945. Ranging in their study from patriotic monuments to sado-masochistic films, the essays here collected ask how and why and when Mussolini's dictatorship mattered after the event, and so provide a fascinating study of the relationship between a traumatic past and the changing present and future.
The Couch and the Silver Screen is a collection of original contributions which explore European cinema from psychoanalytic perspectives. Both classic and contemporary films are presented and analysed by a variety of authors, including leading cinema historians and theorists, psychoanalysts with a specific expertise in the interpretation of films, as well as the filmmakers themselves. This composite approach offers a fascinating insight into the world of cinema. The Couch and the Silver Screen is illustrated with stills throughout and Andrea Sabbadini's introduction provides a theoretical and historical context for the current state of psychoanalytic studies of films. The book is organised into four clear sections - Set and Stage, Working Through Trauma, Horror Perspectives and Documenting Internal Worlds - which form the basis for engaging chapters including: easily readable and jargon-free film reviews. essays on specific subjects such as perspectives on the horror film genre and adolescent development. transcripts of live debates among film directors including Bernardo Bertolucci, actors, critics and psychoanalysts discussing films. The cultural richness of the material presented, combined with the originality of multidisciplinary dialogues on European cinema, makes this book appealing not only to film buffs, but also to professionals, academics and students interested in the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the arts.
This rich, wide-ranging book explores Italy's national film style by relating it closely to politics and to the historicist thought of Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Here is a new kind of film history--a nonlinear, intertextual approach that confronts the total story of the growth of a national cinema while challenging the traditional formats of general histories and period studies. Examining Italian silent films of the fascist era through neorealism to modernist filmmaking after May 1968, Angela Dalle Vacche reveals opera and the commedia dell'arte to be the strongest influences. As she presents the whole history of Italian cinema from the standpoint of a dialectic between these two styles, she offers brilliant interpretations of individual films. The "body in the mirror" is the national self-image on the screen, which changes shape in response to historical and political context. To discover how the nation represents, understands, and recognizes this fictional "body," Dalle Vacche discusses changes in the strongest parameters of Italian cinema: allegory, spectacle, body, history, unity, and continuity. In her hands these concepts yield a wealth of insights for film scholars, art historians, political scientists, and those concerned with cultural studies in general, as well as for other educated readers interested in Italian cinema. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The Persistence of History examines how the moving image has completely altered traditional modes of historical thought and representation. Exploring a range of film and video texts, from The Ten Commandments to the Rodney King video, from the projected work of documentarian Errol Morris to Oliver Stone's JFK and Spielberg's Schindler's List, the volume questions the appropriate forms of media for making the incoherence and fragmentation of contemporary history intelligible.
This anthology examines a number of issues related to violence within the media landscape. Violence has been a topic of continued concern within American culture and society. Although there have been numerous sociological and historical studies of violence and its origins, there is relatively little systematic analysis of violence within media representation, even as this issue becomes preeminent within public discourse. This anthology examines a number of issues related to violence within the media landscape, using various methodologies to suggest the implications of the increasing obsession with violence for postmodern civilization.
