IT314 ITALIAN CINEMA: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES
Jennifer Burns
Programme, autumn 2014
Film offers a powerful medium for expressing the interior life of individuals and
sometimes communities. The world of the individual or group is often seen to be in
conflict or at odds with a wider view of what society is, and cinema has the capacity
to allow the viewer to participate in the individual perspectives of its human
subjects. Italian cinema of the postwar period has a strong and varied tradition of
exploring interior experience and idiosyncratic or marginalized perspectives, and of
exploiting the opportunities offered by film form and technique to construct
alternative realities. This module explores a range of examples of such films, from
the sentimental depictions of dispossession associated with neorealism, to auteurist
explorations of selfhood and creativity, to psychoanalytic studies of individuals in
crisis, to the expression of counter-cultures and anti-normative subjectivities in
recent cinema. Tracing themes such as social exclusion, creativity, anxiety and
neurosis, gender and sexuality through a selection of films from the 1940s to the
2000s, students encounter significant figures and movements in Italian cinema
history and form a sense of the interactions between them, whilst developing a
complex understanding of factors which have influenced and shaped Italian cinema,
from both film-makers’ and spectators’ points of view.
Teaching: The course is taught in two one-hour sessions (Monday 12-1pm and
Thursday 10-11am), the Monday session consisting predominantly of tutor
presentation and the Thursday combining student presentation and seminar
discussion. There will also be two scheduled film screenings per week in the
Transnational Resources Centre (TRC): Tuesday 3-5pm and Friday 10am-12pm.
Students are expected to watch each film twice at the time that it is studied.
There will be a revision and consolidation seminar in the summer term for those
taking the exam for this module.
Assessment:
EITHER one essay of 5,000 words, to be submitted Monday 5th January 2015
OR one essay of 2,500 words, to be submitted Monday 5th January 2015 plus one
one-hour exam in the summer.
Viewing: Students are recommended to take advantage of the scheduled screenings
in the TRC each week in order to watch films in preparation for lectures/seminars
and to prepare seminar presentations. Students may also make their own
arrangements to watch the films individually or in groups, either in the TRC or
privately. All films included in the syllabus are available to view or borrow on DVD
in the TRC, and some are also available in the Library. Please be aware that the
number of copies may be limited.
Introduction (week 1):
Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951)
1. the establishment of national film vocabularies
2. the presence of landscape (and cityscape) as a key element of these
vocabularies
3. femininities and masculinities in Italian cinema
Jennifer Burns
H4.11
j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
IT314 ITALIAN CINEMA: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES
Jennifer Burns
4. influences
5. neorealism and its legacies.
Section 1. Cinema and self (weeks 2-5)
8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
Gli occhi la bocca (Marco Bellocchio, 1982)
Un’ora sola ti vorrei (Alina Marazzi, 2002)
Section 2. Alternative perspectives (weeks 7-10)
Sciuscià (De Sica, 1946)
Respiro (Emanuele Crialese, 2002)
Hamam.Il bagno turco (Ferzan Ozpetek, 1997)
Io, l’altro (Mohsen Melliti, 2007)
General bibliography:
Bertellini, Giorgio (ed.), The Cinema of Italy ((London & New York: Wallflower,
2004)
Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York:
Continuum, 1990)
Bordwell, David & Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th edn (New York,
London: McGraw Hill, 2007)
Landy, Marcia, Italian Film (Cambridge: CUP, 2000)
Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1986)
Marcus, Millicent, After Fellini. National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore &
London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002)
Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989)
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, et al., Companion to Italian Cinema (London: BFI, 1996)
O’Leary, Alan and Catherine O’Rawe (eds), Thinking Italian Film, special issue of
Italian Studies, vol. 63, n. 2 (Autumn 2008)
Sorlin, Pierre, Italian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996)
Wagstaff, Christopher, Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach (Toronto,
London: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
Wood, Mary, Italian Cinema (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005)
Web resources:
www.imdb.com Internet Movie Database
www.imsdb.com Internet Movie Script Database
www.sensesofcinema.com information and critical articles on major directors’ work
www.davidbordwell.net Bordwell’s cinema website
www.italica.rai.it/cinema history, information, overviews
www.cinecittastudios.it [useful material in ‘cinecittà la leggenda’ section]
www.cinemonitor.it news, articles, reviews, ideas on cinema; site based at ‘La
Sapienza’ University, Rome
www.italiancinema.com links to pages dedicated to various directors
Jennifer Burns
H4.11
j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk