About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press

ISBN-10148754619X

ISBN-139781487546199

eBay Product ID (ePID)6067521439

Product Key Features

Number of Pages277 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameItalian Film in the Present Tense

SubjectEurope / Italy, Film / History & Criticism

Publication Year2023

TypeTextbook

Subject AreaPerforming Arts, History

AuthorMillicent Marcus

SeriesToronto Italian Studies

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Weight15 Oz

Item Length9.1 in

Item Width7.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2024-442096

Dewey Edition23

Reviews"Millicent Marcus's new book confirms her status as the preeminent authority in Italian film studies in North America. Offering a constellation of close readings of key films, the book draws a map of Italian cinematic production since 2000. Marcus's brilliant analyses of these films interweave film semiotics, social and political considerations, deep knowledge of Italian film history, as well as an erudite awareness of the artistic legacies continuing to inform cultural production in Italy today." --Áine O'Healy, Professor of Italian, Loyola Marymount University, and author of Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame "Millicent Marcus's groundbreaking work has once again provided a definitive conceptual language for the vision driving new generations of filmmakers. In lyrical, lucid prose and via insightful close readings, Italian Film in the Present Tense amply proves Marcus's case: that contemporary Italian cinema is as innovative, rooted, and politically engaged as ever. The rigorous, medium-specific analysis tracks a multitude of ways in which twenty-first-century Italian cinema takes the pulse of Italy's body politic - and shows how its creative vitality enables deep memory, political soul-searching, and profound hope for the future." --Elena Past, Professor of Italian, Wayne State University "In her new book, Marcus offers an insightful, lively, and very personal reading of some of the great figures of contemporary Italian cinema as well as of the lesser-known directors of the new millennium - a vast continent of cultural models now mapped with lucidity within crime stories, gendered landscapes, regional peripheries, migration, and political contexts. Italian Film in the Present Tense is a remarkable and entirely engaging book, a major work of scholarship." --Gaetana Marrone, Professor of Italian, Princeton University

Grade FromCollege Graduate Student

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal791.43/750945

Table Of ContentAcknowledgments Preface Introduction: An Overview Mafias 1. Toward a New Language of Engagement for the New Millennium: Marco Tullio Giordana's The One Hundred Steps, 2000 2. The Anti-Mafia Martyr Film Takes an Unexpected Turn: Pierfrancesco Diliberto's The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, 2013 3. "This Is Not a Crime Film": Michele Placido's Crime Novel, 2005 4. "The Normality of Devastation": Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, 2008 Neo-regionalism 5. "Non per vacanza, ma per viverci!" (Not to Vacation, but to Live Here!): Giorgio Diritti's The Wind Blows Round, 2005 6. The Child as the "Custodian of Future Memory": Giorgio Diritti's The Man Who Is to Come, 2009 Migrants 7. Channeling the Geographic Unconscious: Federico Bondi's Black Sea, 2009 8. "Your Position Please": Gianfranco Rosi's Fire at Sea, 2016 Leadership 9. The Ironist and the Auteur: Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, 2008 10. Liberating the Left: Toward a Humanist Language of Engagement for a Post-Political Age: Roberto Andò's Long Live Liberty, 2013 11. The Pontiff and the Shrink: Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope, 2011 Women 12. "It Ended the Way It Should Have": Francesca Comencini's The Blank Space, 2008 13. Comic Relief: Riccardo Milani's Don't Stop Me Now, 2019 In a Category unto Itself 14. Hidden Beneath the "Blah Blah Blah": Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, 2013 Bibliography Index

SynopsisThis book explores the Italian film landscape with a focus on cinematic achievements of the twenty-first century., For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini's death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tens e confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary. Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema's new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea , along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its "post-Fellini" moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense., This book explores the Italian film landscape with a focus on cinematic achievements of the twenty-first century. For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini's death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tens e confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary. Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema's new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea , along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its "post-Fellini" moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense.

LC Classification NumberPN1993.5