Italian Cinema

by Gunsberg, Maggie

• ISBN13: 9780333751152
• ISBN10: 0333751159
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on melodrama, commedia all'italiana , peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored from a gender standpoint which takes into account the historical and socio-economic context of cinematic production and consumption. An interdisciplinary feminist approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of film.

Author Biography

Maggie Gunsberg is Professor of Italian in the Department of Italian Studies at Manchester University, UK. Her research interests include women's writing, Italian cinema and Italian drama. She has published several books in these areas including Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni; The Epic Rhetoric of Tasso: Theory and Practice; Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present and Patriarchal Representations: Gender and Discourse in Pirandello's Theatre.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	1	(18)
Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in Melodrama	19	(41)
Mater dolorosa	28	(18)
Family romance	46	(14)
Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in Commedia all'italiana	60	(37)
Comic consumption	68	(16)
The price of marriage	84	(13)
Heroic Bodies: The Cult of Masculinity in the Peplum	97	(36)
Negotiating gender, sexuality and race	104	(15)
Homosociality vs gynosociality	119	(14)
Looking at Medusa: Investigating Femininity in the Horror Film	133	(40)
The threat to masculinity	142	(17)
Femininity divided	159	(14)
The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the Spaghetti Western	173	(42)
Masculinity as masquerade	182	(17)
Sadomasochism, race and sexuality	199	(16)
Notes	215	(7)
Filmography	222	(4)
Bibliography	226	(8)
Index	234