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Vital Crises in Italian Cinema : Iconography, Stylistics, Politics

ISBN: 9780199862177 | 0199862176

Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 3/1/2013

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Summary Author Biography

Examining over twenty key works of the period, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema identifies and explores the major thematic crises at the heart of seminal films produced by the likes of Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michael Antonioni, and Federico Fellini.

First published in 1995 b, P. Adams Sitney'sVital Crises in Italian Cinemahas become a work of enduring importance in the study of Italian films produced from 1945-1963. Examining over twenty key works of the period, Sitney identifies and explores the major th... MOREematic crises at the heart of seminal films produced by the likes of Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michael Antonioni, and Federico Fellini. The debate over regional dialects and a unified national language find reflection in Visconti's La terra trema and its source, the novel I Malavoglia. The father-son relationship serves as an opportunity to consider the tension between filial loyalty and individuality in works such as Uccellacci e uccellini and Ladri di biciclette. Romantic love juxtaposed with lust against the background of Roman Catholic iconography exemplifies another recurring predicament in the nation's cinema. Rocco i suoi fratelli, La dolce Vita, and Accatone all feature female and male characters grappling with the idea of woman as either the epitome of Marian virtue or Magdalene-like sexuality. With each film under discussion, Sitney provides the relevant political and cultural context to demonstrate how the changes in Italian life found their way into cinematic art. A new afterword extends the range of the study to the early 1970s, as it considers the pastoral ideal deflated by urban reality in Padre Padrone and L'albero degli zoccoli.

Examining the landmark works that ushered in Italy's golden age of cinema, P. Adams Sitney provides a stylish, historically rich survey of the epochal films made by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others in the years after World War II. Remarking on the period in 1957, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote that its films reflected a "vital crisis" in Italian culture after the fall of Fascism. Sitney expands this conceit to demonstrate the multivalent social and political forces behind a range of movies made from the mid-1940s through the1960s that includes Paisa, La terra trema, Ladri di biciclette, L'Avventura, and La dolce vita. Throughout its pages, the book considers how the nation's cinema depicts the convergence of Christian and Resistance iconography; contemplates the debate over dialect and a national language; deploys cinematic effects for the purposes of political allegory; and incorporates insights from the psychoanalytic discourse that became popular in Italy during the fifties and sixties. This new edition includes an epilogue that extends the range of the study into the 1970s with discussions of Nanni Moretti's Io sono autaurchico, the Tavianis' Padre Padrone, and Ermanno Olmi's L'albero degli zoccoli.

P. Adams Sitney is a Professor of Visual Art at Princeton University. He has taught at Bard College, New York University, The Cooper Union, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the School of Visual Arts. He is the author of Visionary Film: The American Avan-Garde 1943-2000; Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Film and Literature; and he edited the Film Culture Reader; The Essential Cinema; The Avant-Garde Film; and Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision. In 1969 he co-founded Anthology Film Archives in New York.

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