FILM STUDIES by Clodagh Brook, University of Birmingham, and Cosetta Veronese, University of Birmingham

FILM STUDIES By Clodagh Brook, University of Birmingham, and Cosetta Veronese, University of Birmingham General readers of Italian film history. Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, Comedy Italian Style: The Golden Age of Italian Film Comedies, New York–London, Continuum, 276 pp., provides a panorama of commedia all’italiana within the broader context of comedy in Italy. Bert Cardullo, After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 198 pp., provides interviews with directors and analyses of their work, including Visconti, Fellini, Monicelli, Pasolini, Antonioni, Olmi, Amelio, and Moretti. Fabio Vighi, Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, 258 pp., offers a radical Lacanian- Žižekian re-reading of European auteur cinema, including analysis of Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini, and Antonioni. Adaptations and cross-media studies. V. Galbiati, ‘Tra lettera tura e cinema: Landolfi, Cavazzoni e Fellini’, Italianistica, 38.3:159–66, studies the echoes of Landolfi’s work and Cavazzoni’s novel Il poema dei lunatici in Fellini’s film La voce della luna. ParL, 60.81–83 contains an extensive section on cinema, including a reflection upon Bertolucci’s activity as a cinema critic (F. Zabagli, ‘Attilio Bertolucci “cronista di cinema”’, 80–85), and an analysis of the significance that the advent of cinema had on literary activity of the early 20th century (I. Gambacorti, ‘Lo schermo di carta. Letteratura sul cinema negli anni Dieci’, 86–98). E. Ciccotti, ‘Mario Verdone, Eugène Ionesco, Siena e il rinoceronte. Tra teatro, circo e cinema’, NA, 144.2252:187–202, analyses Verdone’s 1963 theatrical piece La gloria del Rinoceronte. Dialogo tra Eugène Ionesco e il Rinoceronte, and discusses its origins. M. Martone, ‘Una guerra che non è finita: Noi credevamo di Anna Banti dal libro al film’, Paragone, 81:44–51, outlines the passage of Banti’s novel to the film of the same name. G. Faleschini Lerner, ‘Francesco Rosi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli: Toward a Cinema of Painting’, Italica, 86:272–92, explores how Levi’s experience as a painter, and the role played by painting in his autobiographical work Cristo si è fermato a Eboli are reflected in Rosi’s adaptation. A. Fochi, ‘Oltre Eboli: il viaggio di Rosi nell’universo remoto del Cristo di Levi’, Italianistica, 38.3:167–76, argues that Rosi’s interest in Levi’s work derives from its potentially 524 Italian Studies disruptive representation of the agrarian south as a model solution to the problems of contemporary Italy. F. Vitella, ‘Michelangelo Antonioni drammaturgo: “Scandali segreti”’, Bianco & nero, 79.563:79–93, looks at Antonioni’s work as a playwright at the Eliseo in Rome (1957) and its influence on his later films. Violence, terrorism, political cinema. These themes drew great critical attention. Gian Piero Brunetta, Il cinema italiano di regime: Da “La canzone dell’amore” a “Ossessione”, 1929–1945, Rome–Naples, Laterza, xi + 436 pp., is a revised edition of Brunetta’s earlier historical surveys in the light of more up-to-date international theories of Italian cinema. Vito Zagarrio, L’immagine del fascismo: la re-visione del cinema e dei media nel regime, Ro, Bulzoni, 292 pp., explores the apparatus of fascism and some of its key films. A. O’Leary and N. Srivastava, ‘Violence and The Wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo’, The Italianist, 29.2:249–64, gives an overview of P’s cinema in relation to the representation of violence. W. Hope, ‘Gabriele Salvatores’ Marrakech Express and Mediterraneo: Capitalist Dystopias, The Marxist Sublime, Nascent Radicalism’, The Italianist, 29:115–31, analyses how the two films embody the director’s disillusionment with modern capitalist society. R. Lumley, ‘Amnesia and Remembering: Dal polo all’equatore, a Film by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’, ISt, 64:134–43, examines issues of memory and history in this 1986 remake of Luca Comerio’s homonymous pioneering documentary from 1925. C. Clò, ‘Mediterraneo Interrupted: Perils and Potentials in Representing Italy’s Occupation in Greece and Libya through Film’, ItC, 27:99–115, discusses Italy’s difficulty in coming to terms with its colonial past through the analysis of Renzo Renzi’s 1963 proposal for the film L’armata sagapò (on Italy’s occupation of Greece) and Moustapha Akkad’s 1981 The Lion of the Desert (on Italy’s occupation of Libya). G. Manzoli, ‘Il carnevale di Venezia: 1968’, Bianco & nero, 70.563:40–49, examines the contestation by filmmakers at the Venice film festival, especially with regards to Pasolini’s part in it. C. O’Rawe, ‘More More Moro: Music and Montage in Romanzo criminale’, The Italianist, 29.2:214–26, explores the relationship between pop soundtracks and the historical, arguing that the use of Patti Labelle’s ‘Lady Marmalade’ for the Moro kidnapping sequence is more than nostalgia-creation, but indicates the film’s awareness that accounts of the event are ‘already clichéd’ (p. 222). A. O’Leary, ‘Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema’, in Imagining Terrorism (48–62) (see ‘General. On Literature, Politics and Media’ above), explores conspiracy theories, arguing that such theories are symptomatic of social anxieties, as .

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