A NEW ITALIAN POLITICAL CINEMA?
ADELAIDE WORKSHOP ABSTRACTS
Stefano Bona – Flinders University
La stella che non c'è by Gianni Amelio - Italy, globalisation and the rediscovery of different cultures
La stella che non c'è (The Non-existent Star) is a film about Italian de-industrialisation and the contemporary growth of China as the new World power, seen through the eyes of the maintenance worker Vincenzo Buonavolontà. He does not join the demonstrations against the closure of the steel production plant where he worked for decades. Rather, he starts a difficult journey to China: not the postcard China of gardens and the Great Wall, not even the booming China of skyscrapers and of new billionaires, but the daily China of common people. His journey, accompanied by a young interpreter, is a rediscovery of a country very different from his expectations, and a reason to think about the changes occurring in his own life. In my presentation, I will analyse Vincenzo's trip by considering the multiple messages (cultural, political, psychological) that Amelio convenes more through images than through words: the traditional capitalism "defeated" by a communist-led market socialism; the social cost of fast-paced industrial progress; the political, economic and ideological implications of steel production; globalisation as a drama for old economies but at the same time as a way to discover a totally different culture; failures as an opportunity to rise again for those who accept the challenge.
Piera Carroli – Australian National University
Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta: Reclaiming Subjectivity and Mothering
Tornatore’s film, La sconosciuta, divided critics and the public – defined either as brilliant or too violent and dramatic. Predictably, the film was also defined as Cinema Inferno, in contrast with his earlier Cinema Paradiso, and did not win an Oscar. Unlike Tornatore’s internationally praised Oscar-winning nostalgic glance at the end of an era for cinema in village life, an image Americans cherish, La sconosciuta is too confrontational and disturbing, informed as it is by today’s social cultural context of the global sexual and reproduction trade. A familiar tale of oppression and resistance, domination and agency, the narrative slowly and violently unravels through the brutalised eyes of Irena, a Ukrainian woman – one of the many women illegally brought to Italy to be subjected to violence and torture, used as merchandise for prostitution and child production. In this paper, I will focus in particular on the film’s social subtext about generations of exploited Eastern women, exploitative men, and the possible embodiment by Irena of a collective vengeance and reclaiming of subjectivity and mothering. Through the lenses of feminist film criticism and feminist subjectivity studies, I will analyse scenes of Irena’s faceless body gazed upon by prospective buyers through the peephole and later scenes in which the screen is dominated by her gaze. The past unravels for the spectator as it does for Irena yet her determination to regain possession of what has been stolen from her grows stronger. From fetish and object of pleasure, Irena gains agency and becomes watcher: intent on taking back her stolen motherhood. The spectator, who watches the film through Irena’s perspective, is denied pleasure or voyeurism and identifies with Irena’s relentless pursuit.
Luciana d’Arcangeli – Flinders University
Nuove donne di mafia
Criminologi e ricercatori (Graziosi, Fiume, Puglisi, Rizza) credono che il ruolo delle donne nelle varie espressioni di mafia italiana stia cambiando sia in meglio che in peggio. Al tradizionale ruolo di riproduzione e sopravvivenza dei modelli culturali mafiosi, si e' aggiunto quello di staffette di "pizzini", ovvero gli appunti con i quali i mafiosi si scambiano informazioni e istruzioni. Eppure il nuovo e piu' importante ruolo che le donne di mafia hanno e' quello di comunicare attraverso la loro appartenenza alla mafia il potere della stessa al mondo esterno. Sposare pubblicamente un uomo incarcerato e dare dei figli ad un latitante o rinnegare i propri mariti o figli pentiti e' una dichiarazione pubblica della forza della mafia ed insieme una sfida allo Stato. In questo braccio di ferro comunicativo e' particolarmente importante il crescente numero di donne che, al contrario, si oppongono alla mafia diventando pentite a loro volta; le loro informazioni saranno sicuramente importanti ma lo sara' vieppiu' la dimostrazione dell'effettiva rottura degli antichi codici di omerta' e vendetta. Fatto indiscutibile e' la crescita del numero di donne di mafia "visibili" da ambedue i lati della barricata. Questo breve intervento vuole esaminare se e come sono avvenuti cambiamenti nelle rappresentazioni cinematografiche delle mafiose nel nuovo millennio, se questi riflettono la loro sopradescritta "emancipazione" e quanto queste siano importanti nella lotta
contro la mafia.
Sally Hill - Victoria University of Wellington
Images of Disability in Contemporary Italian Cinema
How does contemporary Italian cinema represent disability? Do cinematic images of disability tend to reflect or perpetuate societal devaluing, exclusion, oppression and "othering," or are there signs that negative or well-intentioned but patronizing stereotypes are being overcome and a newly politicised image of disability is appearing? This presentation analyses the representation of mental or physical disability/illness in a number of Italian films of the past decade, focusing in particular on the theme of social inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on theoretical work in disability and film studies (e.g. Smit, Shakespeare, Darke, Mitchell and Snyder), and the politics of representation of marginalised groups in contemporary Italy (e.g. Parati, Forgacs), it looks at the ways in which these films do or do not reflect contemporary disability politics in Italy.
William Hope - The University of Salford, UK
Sabina Guzzanti – Political Opposition Through Cinematic Expression
The career of the actor/director Sabina Guzzanti exemplifies the way in which Italians have found themselves oppressed by converging political and economic forces, with diminishing opportunities for self-realization. Both in Guzzanti’s life and work, the personal has become political; this presentation will examine how she channels notions of the political through her personal experiences and through her presence in films such as Viva Zapatero! (2005), a documentary examining the suppression of satire on Italian television, and Draquila – L’Italia che trema (2010), an investigation into the lucrative reconstruction projects and press censorship which characterized the aftermath of the Abruzzo earthquake in April 2009. Channelling the political through the personal has a range of implications. My presentation will consider: the consequences of the viewer’s close emotional and cognitive alignment with Guzzanti and the impact of this upon her documentary film-making; the creation of binary oppositions between Silvio Berlusconi and Sabina Guzzanti in terms of gender, politics, status and interpersonal relations; and the strategic effectiveness of channelling the political through the personal as a means of sensitizing viewers to political realities.
Lara Palombo - Macquarie University
Framing Diasporic and Transnational Women’s Lives: Entering in a dialogue with A Fistful of Flies, Looking for Alibrandi and La Spagnola
The ongoing but limited cinematic representation of Italo-Australian diasporic women since the late 1980s has been repeatedly positioned within the frame of daughter/mother relationships. Monica Pellizzari in A Fistful of Flies (1996) through the framing of this relationship begins an important critical dialogue with audiences on the heteropatriarchal ethnicised relations that constitute Italo-Australian diasporic-transnational women’s lives. This frame is also visible in the more commercial film Looking for Alibrandi (2000) but in this case this becomes a celebratory narrative of Multiculturalism that positions diasporic-transnational women’s relations within a ‘rhetoric of nostalgia’ that embodies their lives within the realm of familiar relations. The film La Spagnola (2001) is a film that although centers on Spanish-Australian diasporic women, it also positions Italo-Australian women as ‘a diasporic chorus’ that comments and reflects on the possible meanings of women’s relations. This paper begins a critical dialogue with the framing of diasporic transnational
women’s lives in these texts. I want to question the way this frame in its variations has become a dominant form of embodying diasporic women’s lives. I argue that these films raise important critical questions on intimate and everyday familiar relations but they also assume the centrality of daughter/mother relations at the cost of de-historicising the embodiments of diasporic women’s lives in Australia. Borrowing from Rubertos’ critique of
cinematic images of Italian women in US film, I want to focus on the way women’s labour operates in these films and to question the assimilationist, ethnicised diasporic values assumed within the daughter/ mother framing adopted here.
Susanna Scarparo (Monash University) & Bernadette Luciano (University of Auckland)
Reframing Italy: The New Wave of Italian Women Filmmakers
In an influential volume of essays about the cinema of the new millennium, Vito Zagarrio identifies the role played by women directors in the Italian film industry as a distinguishing feature of “New-New Italian Film”. But the proliferation of films by women in Italian cinema in the past ten years has been a quiet revolution. Notwithstanding their national and international critical recognition, the new generation of Italian women filmmakers is often overlooked – with the exception, perhaps, of Cristina Comencini, Francesca Archibugi and Roberta Torre. This is in part due to the difficulties many Italian filmmakers experience in finding distributors willing to promote their films beyond the festival circuit. More importantly, the marginalisation of works by Italian women filmmakers both nationally and internationally is due to their distinctive features in terms of their style and their content.
This presentation will discuss selected works from a rich body of films and documentaries. Through a thematically based discussion that references a number feature films and documentaries, we argue that women filmmakers who came of age in the last ten years, while not overtly feminist, are making films which increasingly foreground a desire to engage, create and conceive of female subjectivity on the screen. The filmmakers discussed are ‘re-framing’ Italy on a number of levels. They are appropriating and rethinking ways of imaging Italy within less conventional cinematic modes and through experimental technology and by
rethinking ways of approaching Italian landscapes in transition. In addition, by challenging traditional representations of women and of pressing social issues that have historically captured the gaze of the Italian camera the films discussed ‘re-frame’ Italy providing a different representation of both women and the national context. Finally, in a pejorative and idiomatic sense, framing refers to the act of setting someone up, of contriving events in such a way to incriminate someone falsely. In a reconsideration of this definition, we propose that through a range of filmic styles, strategies, and practices contemporary women filmmakers are engaging in a political critique that aims not to falsely accuse but certainly to implicate patriarchal attitudes and institutions that resist change and that are complicit in making it difficult even in the new millennium for women’s films to be made and distributed.
Filippo Ticozzi - writer and director
Il cinema invisibile italiano