Film & Performance Studies / Film Studies / Italian Cinema

This book analyses the media, cultural, and testimonial narratives of ransom kidnapping in Italy, a phenomenon linked to banditry and organized crime that terrorized the country for decades.

This book explores the Italian film landscape with a focus on cinematic achievements of the twenty-first century.

This is the first book-length study to address the question of religion in contemporary Italian cinema and television. It questions why religion persists on Italian screens and how this reflects and constructs Italy’s emerging post-secularity.

Mafia Movies: A Reader provides incisive interpretations of over fifty films and television programs about the Italian and Italian-American Mafias.

Benini illuminates the radical politics embedded within Pasolini’s adoption of Christian themes.

Enlightening Encounters traces the impact of photography on Italian literature from the medium’s invention in 1839 to the present day.

In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci presents an insightful analysis of the groundbreaking HBO series and its complex psychological themes

Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which films sponsored by Italian and American government agencies promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people.

Pacchioni explores the dynamics of Fellini’s cinematic collaborations through analyses of the writers’ independently produced works, their contributions to the conceptualization of the films, and their conversations with Fellini himself, found in public and private archival sources.

Aldouby employs an innovative pictorial approach that allows her to uncover a wealth of visual evocations overlooked by Fellini scholars over the years.

Unfinished Business is the first book to examine Italian mafia cinema of the past decade.

The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod traces the encounter of Italy’s writers with cinema, and in doing so offers vibrant new perspectives on the country’s early twentieth-century culture.

Including work on psychoanalysis, politics, film production, autobiography, and the relationship between film tradition and contemporary culture, Marco Bellocchio touches on fundamental issues in film analysis.

Throughout the book, Marcus brings a variety of perspectives to bear on the question of how Italian filmmakers are confronting the Holocaust, and why now given the sparse output of Holocaust films produced in Italy from 1945 to the early 1990s.

Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it.