Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943

Forsideomslag
Jacqueline Reich, Piero Garofalo
Indiana University Press, 7. maj 2002 - 384 sider

When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.

Fra bogen

Udvalgte sider

Indhold

Mussolini at the Movies Fascism Film and Culture
3
Dubbing LArte Muta Poetic Layerings around Italian Cinemas Transition to Sound
30
Intimations of Neorealism in the Fascist Ventennio
83
Placing Cinema Fascism and the Nation in a Diagram of Italian Modernity
105
Fascism Cinema and Sexuality
139
Sex in the Cinema Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films 19301943
141
Luchino Viscontis Homosexual Ossessione
172
Ways of Looking in Black and White Female Spectatorship and the Miscegenational Body in Sotto la croce del sud
194
Seeing Red The Soviet Influence on Italian Cinema in the Thirties
223
Theatricality and Impersonation The Politics of Style in the Cinema of the Italian Fascist Era
250
Shopping for Autarchy Fascism and Reproductive Fantasy in Mario Camerinis Grandi magazzini
276
The Last Film Festival The Venice Biennale Goes to War
293
Film Stars and Society in Fascist Italy
315
Selected Bibliography
341
Contributors
353
Index
356

Fascism and Cinema in Contexts
221

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Populære passager

Side 70 - Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Side 83 - Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature...
Side 70 - LAST NIGHT i WAS in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there — the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air — is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
Side 70 - They were engaged in working out an explicit and pure style of silent film, using its restrictions to transform the peep show into an art. The introduction of sound film smashed many of the forms that the film artists were using in favor of the inartistic demand for the greatest possible "naturalness" (in the most superficial sense of the word).
Side 219 - O'Barr (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 149. 13. Jane Rowland Martin, "Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Dangerous Traps," Signs 19 (spring 1994): 647. 14. Barrett, 32. 15. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21.
Side 77 - Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance - in the case of the sound film, for two of them. "The film actor," wrote Pirandello, "feels as if in exile - exiled not only from the stage but also from himself.
Side 46 - ... are identified with those of the actors, and consequently are always different. The new manifestation of Art should really be more precisely a Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time, as in music and poetry, which realise themselves by transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution.
Side 291 - subject" is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a "subject" is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.
Side 70 - The Complete Film The technical development of the motion picture will soon carry the mechanical imitation of nature to an extreme. The addition of sound was the first obvious step in this direction. The introduction of sound film must be considered as the imposition of a technical novelty that did not lie on the path the best film artists were pursuing. They were engaged in working out an explicit and pure style of silent film, using its restrictions to transform the peep show into an art. The introduction...
Side 167 - Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Richard Maltby, "The Production Code and the Hays Office...

Om forfatteren (2002)

Jacqueline Reich is Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Piero Garofalo is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of New Hampshire.

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