Picturing Color in Italian Cinema by Luis Avy Valladares a Dissertation
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Picturing Color in Italian Cinema By Luis Avy Valladares A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair Professor Mia Fuller Professor Deniz Göktürk Spring 2015 Abstract Picturing Color in Italian Cinema by Luis Avy Valladares Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair This dissertation examines the engagement of post-1989 Italian cinema with (im)migration from the global south and multiculturalism in Italy within Europe. Focusing on a selection of films from 1990 to 2010, I argue that Italian cinema of immigration is constructed and maintained through constant erasures of Italian histories and desires. As films of social engagement, cinema of immigration is about the “here” and the “now,” namely Italian problems after the end of the Cold War. However, it also operates within older and broader frameworks, engaging different aspects of Italian/European society, history and culture. This dissertation unfolds those aspects and articulates connections between Italian cinema of immigration, Italy’s misremembered colonial past, neorealism, Europe’s project of supra-national integrations, and economic networks of exchange. Despite the fact that the cinema of immigration has become one of the most recognizable ‘sub- genres’ of Italian cinema since Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990), scholarship on this subject is relatively recent and still taking shape. For that reason, the first half of my dissertation examines the history of Italian cinema, and engages the points of contact between the mobility of people and the moving image. In my introductory chapter, I historicize the representation of racialized others by focusing on certain key moments of interplay between the spectacular and the real, scenes that demonstrate the endurance of Italian orientalist ideologies. I then focus on the rhetorical move of equating immigrants from the global south with Italian migrants from the postwar era, and argue that even though the analogy was mobilized to create a sense of empathy, those representations are actually based on pre-existing models of alienation and discrimination. The second half of my research looks to Europe and beyond, and situates Italian cinema of immigration within synchronic networks. For example, my third chapter looks at the global circulation of the cinema of migration, and shows that seeming peripheral networks of distribution are, in fact, central to its existence. My final chapter compares English, French and German accented cinemas, which is the production of first and second-generation immigrant filmmakers, in order to postulate the existence of an Italian accented cinema and delineate its possible, though constantly changing, and contours. 1 A MIS MADRES: ALTAGRACIA GARCIA RIVERA JOSEFINA VALLADARES GARCIA IRMA FLORES PINEDA i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii CHAPTER 1: SPECTACULAR REALITIES, REALISTIC SPECTACLES 1 Historical Epics 3 Spectacular Realities 8 Spectacle, Spectacle, Spectacle 15 Reframing the Historical Epic 16 Exceptional Faccette and Facce 24 Conclusion 27 CHAPTER 2: “THEY ARE AS WE ONCE WERE”? 31 Il colore dell’odio and Tomato 33 Invoking Neorealism and Its Cultural Legacy 35 They Are As We Once Were 39 A Template to Follow 48 Misremembered History 55 They Are As They Once Were 67 Filmography 71 CHAPTER 3: FROM CINEMA OF IMMIGRATION TO MIGRANT CINEMA 73 Evolving Topographies and Cultural Capital 74 Italian Markets: Perennial Struggle 87 Landscape of Films on Immigration 91 Voyage through the Festival Circuit 96 Epilogue: Beyond the Festival, Digital Media 111 CHAPTER 4: ACCENTED ITALIAN CINEMA 117 Accented Cinema 118 Cinema of Duty 120 Black British, Beur and Turkish German Cinema 123 Italian Cinema of Immigration 128 Accented Italian Cinema 133 Marcello Bivona: Layering Here and There 134 Rachid Benhadj: Performing Cosmopolitanism 138 Mohsen Melliti: Relocating the Sites of Struggle 143 Ferzan Özpetek: Autobiographical Inscription 146 Epilogue: The Return of Cinema of Duty? 155 BIBLIOGRAPHY 159 ii iii INTRODUCTION I never wanted to be an Italian professor, or get a PhD in Italian. What I always wanted was to become an English professor, and teach at some fancy liberal arts college in the North East, with an office full of mahogany or oak furniture and bookcases, even though I really did not know why those particular types of wood were the “appropriate” kind to have. I dreamed of teaching Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Frost while wearing a blazer with elbow patches. It was a good dream. Somewhere along the line, though, I made some turns that made me face certain truths about my social reality that I had been avoiding, which in turn led me to where I am today. I am sure that this process happened gradually, but a particular event comes to mind that surely steered me into this path. While I was pursuing and English degree as an undergraduate at UCLA, I decided to do an Italian minor. After studying in England for one summer, I took advantage of my Italian minor and signed up to do a full year abroad in Italy, my last year as an undergraduate. As part of the program, students were required to complete a summer of intensive language courses in Siena. I was an advanced student, and placed accordingly in the tiered system of courses. I remember that one day, another student said something to me that upset deeply: “Avy, your Italian has a very strong Spanish accent.” I felt insulted, and I was furious. Later that day I met with Cinzia, an Italian friend I had made soon after my arrival to Siena, and asked her if a Spanish accent was an ugly accent in Italian. She laughed, and assured me that to her Mediterranean ears, my Italian sounded accented, but “normal,” and preferable to any Anglo- Saxon accent. For years I had worked on my “normal American” accent, attempting to erase any traces of Spanish. Part of my English professor fantasy, I believe, was a function of my anxieties as a second-generation immigrant to the United States. To be an English professor, to speak fluidly the language of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, was to master that sense of not belonging. At that point in my life, I felt that I had succeeded in fitting in, in not standing out as a foreigner in my American home. My brown skin was not an issue in Southern California, where the heterogeneity of the population made it so that the accent with which one spoke English, more so than skin color, determined who was an American D.O.C and who was a FOBO. In hindsight, I realize that my peer’s comment was not offensive, or meant to be for that matter, but it did help me understand that the configuration of the race/ethnic politics of the United States did not transferred to Italy, or other countries for that matter. It also reminded me that no matter where I was, my Mexican heritage was always going to be with me. That year in Italy was highly instructive for me. I shared university housing with Italians from different regions of the peninsula, with international students from Ghana and Albania, and Albanian students who had grown up in Italy. My roommate while in Italy was one of the later, and as I got to know him better over the course of that year I started to see aspects of my life in his. What he had to put up with growing up in Italy resonated with my own experiences as a second generation Mexican American, and though it was upsetting at times, the distance between myself, and his experiences in Italy, made it possible for me to hear and see with a certain amount of objectivity. I never intended back then to study the representation of immigrants in Italian cinema, but within the Italian context, I found a forum in which to investigate many of the questions about identity, nation formation, immigration, language, etcetera, that I had not iv allowed myself to pursue within my own cultural context. I am well aware that our experiences are not exchangeable, that the specific power relations my friend negotiated in Italy are not the same as the ones I negotiated in Southern California, but there are enough commonalities to make me feel that as I learned about him, I was learning about myself. This dissertation is, in a way, an oblique response to my own feelings of alienation. More specifically, this dissertation explores the post-Cold War cinematic production that engages with the social phenomenon of immigration and multiculturalism in Italy. I take as a point of departure films whose main focus at the thematic level is immigration into Italy from the global south, and follow up on certain questions that emerge as I study them: how are the immigrants represented? Are there any antecedents? How are such films marketed? Who is making them? I then bring into the discussion films that by all customary criteria are considered “Italian” productions, but are directed by an immigrant from the global south – that is someone who resides permanently in Italy but whose birth or cultural formation generated from outside the Italian national borders. The purpose of this exploration is to discern what constellation of relationships this body of films engenders around the bi-focal points of the nation and the other, a constellation that includes Italy’s misremembered colonial past, Neorealism, Europe’s project of a supra-national belonging, and the role of film as an economic product. Within the larger European context, this project is by no means new.