Italian Film in the Present Tense

"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