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After Fellini

National Cinema in the Postmodern Age

Millicent Marcus

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Premio Flaiano given by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura

Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful. Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs—Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini...

Premio Flaiano given by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura

Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful. Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs—Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Fellini—extinguished the revolutionary impulse which had characterized Italian filmmaking since the Second World War.

In After Fellini, Millicent Marcus contends that in the late 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of Italian filmmakers has transcended these obstacles and reasserted Italy's importance in world cinema. Through in-depth critiques of such acclaimed films as The Last Emperor,Caro Diario, and Stolen Children, as well as the immensely popular Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful, Marcus details how today's auteurs have both reflected and resisted Italy's shifting social, political, and cultural identity, and created a body of work that signals a new beginning for Italian cinema.

Reviews

Reviews

Detailed and persuasive, this book makes an important contribution to the study of contemporary Italian film.

Scholars of film as well as those who enjoy Italian cinema will welcome this fine survey by Marcus.

Millicent Marcus's book offers new conclusions about continuities and changes in the mapping of cinematic landscapes. Nothing in English rivals her interpretations of Visconti's Bellissima, Rosi's Three Brothers and The Truce, Amelio's Stolen Children, Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Moretti's Caro diario. After Fellini will become the benchmark for any further study of contemporary Italian cinema.

Millicent Marcus's After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age makes a highly original contribution to the study of Italian cinema. Through close analysis of a series of individual recent films, she sets the record straight about Italian cinema's contributions to the medium during the last two decades of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the new Italian cinema following in Fellini's footsteps promises a bright future in the new millennium.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
392
ISBN
9780801868474
Illustration Description
34 halftones
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Looking Back
Chapter 1. National Identity by Means of Montage in Roberto Rossellini's Paisan
Chapter 2. Luchino Visconti's Bellissima: The Diva, the Mirror, and the

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Looking Back
Chapter 1. National Identity by Means of Montage in Roberto Rossellini's Paisan
Chapter 2. Luchino Visconti's Bellissima: The Diva, the Mirror, and the Screen
Part II. Italy by Displacement
Chapter 3. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor : Powerless in Peking
Chapter 4. Mediterraneo and the "Minimal Utopias" of Gabriele Salvatores
Chapter 5. From Salazar's Lisbon to Mussolini's Rome by Way of France in Roberto Faenza's Pereira Declares
Part III. Family as Political Allegory
Chapter 6. Francesco Rosi's Three Brothers: After the Diaspora
Chapter 7. The Alternative Family of Ricky Tognazzi's La scorta
Chapter 8. The Gaze of Innocence: Lost and Found in Gianni Amelio's Stolen Children
Part IV. Postmodernism; or, the Death of Cinema?
Chapter 9. Ginger and Fred: Fellini after Fellini
Chapter 10. Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso and the Art of Nostalgia
Chapter 11. From Conscience to Hyperconsciousness in Maurizio Nichetti's The Icicle Thief
Chapter 12. Postmodern Pastiche, the Sceneggiata, and the View of the Mafia from Below in Roberta Torre's To Die for Tano
Part V. The Return of the Referent
Chapter 13. Filming the Text of Witness: Francesco Rosi's The Truce
Chapter 14. The Seriousness of Humor in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful
Chapter 15. Caro diaro and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti
Appendix: Plot Summaries and Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Videography
Index

Author Bio
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Millicent Marcus

Millicent Marcus is Mariano DiVito Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Director of the Center of Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.