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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2020
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Fellini's 8½: Dreams, guilt, casting and 'the code of codes' of the cinematographic image
Authors: Sandra Meiri and Odeya Kohen RazAbstractThis article argues that Guido's two dreams in Federico Fellini's 8½ reflect guilt stemming from his inability to meet his mother's expectations to remain chaste and pure. This is a faulty belief based on an early childhood memory representing Guido's mixed feelings of sexual exaltation and shame, resulting in fantasies that attempt to solve the riddle of his mother's desire. The film thus raises the question of fantasy 'what does the Other want from me?' and shows that assuming to know the answer involves guilt, stagnation and indecisiveness. This becomes evident in the screentests scene near the end of the film, when Guido cannot decide which actresses will play the roles of the characters duplicating the women in his life. The screen tests are 'textual mise en abymes', reflecting not only Guido's life but also the basic code of the medium, i.e., the cinematographic image: reproduction, which precedes the cinematic language, is composed of a denotative code (a referent – the actor in front of the camera) and a connotative code (cultural, including film iconography). Film can thus materialize fantasy through casting, which involves a level of concretization, by predicting what the audience wants. Therefore, guilt is an inherent part of the cinematographic image. Where Guido fails in choosing the 'right' actresses, because of his guilt, Fellini, having worked through his own guilt, thrives. This suggests that setting free the filmmaker's imagination and creative forces depends on ridding oneself of the guilt inherent in the translation of an image from fantasy to film.
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The 'angelification' of girls: Winx Club as a neo-liberal Catholic project
Authors: Nicoletta Marini-Maio and Ellen NerenbergAbstractThis article examines and contextualizes the socio-economic model and values system from which the transmedial, transnational text that we call the Winx Project derives and in which it is produced. The Winx Project centres on an animated television series for girls and tweens, Winx Club, produced in Italy and distributed in 150 countries worldwide, but includes spin-off television formats, films, live and interactive entertainments, an amusement park and merchandising and fashion to compose a multifaceted, multiple 'text'. This plural text is employed to measure the functionality of the Winx Club within a global and transnationalized discourse of neo-liberal economics on the one hand and, on the other, a local context that reaches deep into the regional character of Social Catholicism to purvey on a global scale its ethics and values system.
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Italian transnational masculinity: Jeeg Robot, Il ragazzo invisibile and MilzaMan
More LessAbstractThis article looks at three recent examples of superheroic masculinity in Italian film and media, arguing that it is always conceptualized transnationally, triangulated between Italy, the United States and a vague 'East'. This transnational masculinity is repeatedly coupled with fantasies and anxieties about the environment – the toxic, as Mel Chen suggests, is animate, weaving in and out of containers, bodies and borders, allowing it to threaten Italian bodies (toxic waste, garbage, the 'ecomafia' of the South), and allowing us to imagine that it might bestow on those same bodies the strength, vitality and power to resist the toxic. Ultimately, these toxic and transnational male bodies may be always from elsewhere, but strangely Italian, too – after all, Esposito argues that the hallmark of Italian thought is precisely a refusal of the idea of a stable and strong national identity.
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A brutal humanism for the new millennium? The legacy of Neorealism in contemporary cinema of migration
More LessAbstractThis article proposes that the institutional construction of Italian cinema of migration in the new millennium may be conditioned by an enduring, implicit aspect of Neorealism's legacy: a 'brutal humanism' that posits the witnessing of bodies in crisis as an ethical act. Supplementing Karl Schoonover's theory of brutal humanism with Lacanian gaze theory, I argue that the Berlin International Film Festival's synopsis of a recent cause célèbre of Italian cinema, Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) (Rosi, 2016), instantiates a 'brutal vision' directed towards the figure of the refugee, while the film text's depiction of the 'objective gaze' of these characters challenges such relations of power and looking. The article underlines the importance of competitive European film festivals and paratexts in the international circulation and ideological construction of Italian cinema, while arguing that the film text itself can offer a site of resistance to the meanings that institutions ascribe to it.
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A threefold adaptation: Mario Martone's Leopardi
More LessAbstractThis article explores how Martone's seemingly traditional period biopic of nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi challenges the conventions of the genre, and could be read, instead, as an interesting case of cinematic adaptation on at least three different levels. I propose that Il giovane favoloso (Leopardi) is a film that, as a biopic, can be understood as an adaptation of a life experience – an adaptation that, in its cinematic construction, expresses an awareness of the biopic as a film genre that can only perform a representational version of a life. Secondarily, Leopardi is a film that engages with an array of cinematic strategies to 'give body' to Leopardi's lyrical texts, turning his lines into a sensorial experience. Finally, it is a film that not only 'translates' specific literary texts in images but also expresses the overall development of Leopardi's poetics into a distinctly cinematic syntax.
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