Italian Studies / Italian Film

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

This book seeks to redefine, recontextualize, and reassess Italian neorealism – an artistic movement characterized by stories set among the poor and working class – through innovative close readings and comparative analysis.

This book examines the many ways in which anger and indignation shape authorial intentions and determine the products of contemporary Italian artists.

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.

Through close readings of key texts, including spiritual writings, fairy tales, and a botanical treatise, Golden Fruit examines the role of oranges in Italian culture from their introduction during the medieval period through to the present day.

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

Fictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s prose, poetry, and cinema.

Landscapes in Between analyses Italian authors and filmmakers who turn to interstitial landscapes as productive models for coming to terms with the modified natural environment.

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

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.