Italian Locations

by Steimatsky, Noa

• ISBN13: 9780816650880
• ISBN10: 0816650888
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-02-18
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

Fascism and the Second World War left Italy indelibly changed, and cinema was arguably the art that most rigorously confronted the devastated nation. In this examination of four Italian filmmakers, Noa Steimatsky brilliantly maps their forceful negotiation of Italyrs"s identity and posits that the cinematic forms they employ constitute an imaginary reinhabiting of Italy-one that is inextricably linked with the political, physical, and symbolic predicament of reconstruction. A dynamic intersection of pictorial and photographic, architectural and literary discourses inform Steimatskyrs"s revisionist interrogation of exemplary works from the 1940s to the mid1960s. From the earliest documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni on the River Po to Pier Paolo Pasolinirs"s re-siting of the Gospel in the arid, peripheral landscape of the Italian south, and from Roberto Rossellinirs"s tracing of a neorealist project in ruinous Berlin to Luchino Viscontirs"s wrought grandeur visited upon a humble Sicilian fishing village, Italian Locationsprobes the historical experience of displacement, anachronism, and a thoroughly contemporary anxiety in the cinematic arena. For Steimatsky, Antonionirs"s modernist achievement, informed by his native landscape, Rossellinirs"s neorealist image of Italy as a nation of ruins, Viscontirs"s reaching back to the nineteenth century and even more archaic pasts, and Pasolinirs"s ambivalence about modernity-all partake in a search for a politically and culturally redeemed Italy. Noa Steimatsky is associate professor of the history of art and film studies at Yale University.

Author Biography

Noa Steimatsky is associate professor of film studies and the history of art at Yale University

Table of Contents

Introduction: Italy as Seen from the Moon	p. vii
Aerial: Antonioni's Modernism	p. 1
Ruinous: Rossellini's Corpse-Cities	p. 41
Choral: Visconti's Dramaturgy of Nature	p. 79
Archaic: Pasolini on the Face of the Earth	p. 117
Afterword: The Ends of the Land	p. 167
Acknowledgments	p. 173
Notes	p. 175
Publication History	p. 217
Index	p. 219
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