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Home , Ava Gardner, City of Film, Italian fashion

Italian Style. & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age by Eugenia Paulicelli ([email protected]) Department of European Languages and Literature

Italian cinema launched Italian fashion to the world. My forthcoming book Italian Style. Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age is the story of this launch. The creation of an Italian style and fashion as they are perceived today, especially by foreigners, was a product of the post World War II years. Before then, Parisian fashion had dominated and the world. Just as fashion was part of Parisian and French national identity, I argue that the process of shaping and inventing an Italian style and fashion ran parallel to, and at times took the lead in, the creation of an Italian national identity. In bringing to the fore these intersections, as well as emphasizing the importance of craft in cinema, fashion and costume design, the book aims to spotlight the films, directors (Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti), film stars (Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, , Marcello Mastroianni and others), costume archives and designers who have been central to the development of Made in and Italian style. Therefore, the single parts of the book, including the images and photographs in both the main body of the book and the appendix, as well as the interviews with the people who have worked and are working in film for the excellence of , complement each other and make up an interconnected whole. However, I have encountered a number of limitations regarding the use of images in the book, not only related to the high cost of the illustrations themselves, but also to the length of the book, which cannot exceed 300 pages according to the publisher’s norms, and the maximum number of 45 images the book can contain. In addition, the fees requested to republish the images are also high. I have agreed with the publisher the creation of an online virtual exhibition to accompany the book where I could post the illustrations and other material that I have not been able to include in the book due to the space constraints. The virtual exhibition would be a companion to the book and a great resource for teaching and learning about film, fashion and costume. Courses on this topic and that also include and rely on online resources are being designed and offered in several universities both in the US and abroad. A project of this kind would put Queens College in the forefront of this expanding field of research and pedagogy. In order to create this resource I need additional funds for travel to Italy to visit again the archives in order to complete my project. Over the years, I have established very good relationships with costume and fashion archives based in , as well as with the son of a photographer, Giuseppe Palmas, a paparazzo during the years of the Dolce Vita in Rome who photographed not only Italian actors but also the American and European stars visiting Rome and Italy (Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, and even the American Ambassador in Rome Clare Booth Luce and many more). Space constraints have again meant that I have been unable to include in my book as much material on this important archive as I would have liked. In the virtual exhibition I would like to dedicate much more space to this photographic archive and recount for the first time the story behind the photographs. In my book but also in the virtual exhibition, the city of Rome will take center stage on account both of its multilayered meanings in the and the west and as a city of film (Cinecittà studios, the School of Cinematography) and a city of fashion (especially couture, jewelry etc.). It would be interesting to explore how the intersections between Rome and New York bear on Queens where The Kaufman Studios and the Museum of the Moving Image are located. New York and Rome are both city of film and cities of fashion. With this request, I am applying for funds to develop a project that would also allow our institution to organize film screenings and exhibitions on fashion and film in an international perspective that highlights location and geography. The Tirelli and Annamode Archives (historical costume archives for theatre, opera and cinema with more than 170,000 costumes) are featured in the appendix of my book and are still today the point of reference for filmmakers such Martin Scorsese, Sophia Coppola, Woody Allen and many more. For the appendix, I have also interviewed Massimiliano Attolini whose sartoria from is known in the world for the bespoke and for making the costumes for the 2013 Italian Oscar winner film The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza, dir. Paolo Sorrentino). The relationship between fashion, cinema and the arts has occupied many years of my career and research. This book is the result of a passion that has also informed my research and teaching at Queens College and Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). I have now delivered the final version of the MS to Bloomsbury Academics with whom I have a contract. The book is scheduled to be published sometime at the end of the summer in the series “Topics on National Cinema” curated by Dr. Armida de La Garza. Let me add a few words about the project itself, which is the first in-depth scholarly study of the intersection of Italian fashion and film, both very powerful industries and media machines that shape and construct equally powerful symbolic narratives and identities. It is hardly surprising, then, that filmmakers have been fascinated by the transformative power of the language of clothing and fashion and the impact it has on style, consumption and behavior. All the films examined in my book are concerned with the negotiation with modernity. Fashion is as much a negotiation with modernity as is film; they both expose the seams of technology. Clothing in film has a highly symbolic charge that affects the wearer and his/her perception in any social space. More specifically, clothing, fabrics, shapes, color and textures frame the apperception of self. Clothing materializes a sentient way of perceiving the body in space. Materializing the dynamics of image and copy, the natural and the technological, costume and clothing in film take on the form of a dense and precise essay on language and signification.

Project Budget:

Air Travel from NYC to Rome: $1,100

Lodgings for two weeks: $2,000

Cost of Illustrations/Rights: $2,000

Total funds requested: $5,100

EUGENIA PAULICELLI Email: [email protected]

EDUCATION  1991 PhD, Department of French & Italian, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Major: /Minor: French Literature

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

 2012-present. Appointed to the Faculty of MALS at the City University of New York (CUNY, Graduate School and University Center)  2005-present. Professor, Department of European Languages & Literatures, Queens College, CUNY & the PhD Program in Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY  March 2002. Appointed to the Faculty of PhD Certificate Program in Women’s Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School, New York  2000-present. Member Film Studies Faculty, Queens College  June 1999. Appointed to the Faculty of the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate School, New York  June 1997-2005 Associate Professor, Department of European Languages & Literatures, Queens College, CUNY  February 1996-June 1997. Assistant Professor, Department of European Languages & Literatures, Queens College, CUNY  September 1992-February 1996. Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages, Queens College, CUNY  July 1991-August 1992. Assistant Professor, Department of Italian, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

BOOKS  Italian Style. Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury Academics, & New York) (forthcoming in 2016).  Rosa Genoni: La moda è una cosa seria. Milano Expo 1906 e la Grande Guerra (Fashion is a Serious Business: The World Fair of 1906 and the Great War), in English and Italian, Preface by John Davis; Afterword by Eleonora Fiorani (Milan: Deleyva Edizioni, 2015).  * 2015 Enhancement Grant  Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy. From Sprezzatura to Satire (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2014). * 2014 Enhancement Grant  1960: Un anno in Italia. Costume, Cinema, e Cultura, coeditor with Antonio Maraldi (Cesena: Società Editrice Il Ponte Vecchio, 2010) (bilingual edition).  The Fabric of Cultures. Fashion, Identity, Globalization (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), co-editor with Hazel Clark, author of introduction & one of the chapters.  Moda e Moderno. Dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Rome: Meltemi, 2006), editor, author of introduction & one of the chapters.  Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the Black (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2004).  Parola e immagine. Sentieri della scrittura in Leonardo, Marino, Foscolo, Calvino (: Edizioni Cadmo, 1996).  Dimore (Dwellings) (Ragusa: Libro Italiano, 1996), volume of poetry.  Lo spreco dei significanti: L’Eros, la morte, la scrittura (Bari: Adriatica, 1983). co-author with Augusto Ponzio & Maria-Grazia Tundo

JOURNALS

 WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly), special issue on Fashion (Spring 2013), CUNY Feminist Press, co-editor with Elizabeth Wissinger.  Guest Editor for Journal of Modern Italian Studies, special issue on Italian Fashion: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Routledge: Fall 2014.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

 Fashion, Film and Urban Space: Revisiting the 1960s (under consideration, Indiana University Press, co-editor with Louise Wallenberg); co-author of Introduction and one of the chapters.

SELECTED ARTICLES & CHAPTERS  “Rome: Eternal City of Fashion and Film,” in Joseph Hancock, Toni Johnson-Woods & Vicki Karaminas (ed), Fashion in Popular Culture (: Intellect, 2012), pp. 243-258.  “Fashion: The Cultural Economy of the made in Italy,” in Fashion Practice, special issue dedicated to Italian Fashion, 6:2 (Fall 2014):155-174.  “Waiting, Suspense and the Neutral in Rossellini and Antonioni,” in Susan Petrilli, ed., Writing, Voice, Undertaking (Toronto: Legas, 2013), pp. 193-197.  “Engendering Faust: The Veiled Lady in Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica, 1915-1917,” in M. Ulhirova, ed., Birds of Paradise (London, 2013), pp.169- 178.

GRANTS & AWARDS  March 2013, Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor, University of Bristol, .  2010-2011 Mellon Fellowship, Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center, “Fashion in 1960s Italian Cinema. Space, Displacement, Affect.