Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics

ISBN-13: 9780199862177 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 288 str.

P. Adams Sitney

Opis

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.

Recenzje

Vital Crises in Italian Cinema is characterized by an extremely sensitive attention to aesthetic issues. It is one of the very few books on Italian cinema that manages to put politics and art, film and society, together intelligently. Its new epilogue brings it ahead to another important milestone in the development of Italian film history.

O autorze

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 1943-1200; 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.