Film Sound in Italy Listening to the Screen

Considering films as audio-visual creations opens new inroads into the cultural practice, politics, and aesthetics of the soundtrack. This book is critical and trans-disciplinary engagement with cinema in Italy that examines the national archive of film based on sound and listening using a holistic audio-visual approach to film politics and practices from the coming of sound to the screen in the Fascist era, through the work of post WWII neorealist directors, to art cinema directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Sisto shifts the sensory paradigm of film history and analysis from the optical to the sonic, demonstrating how this translates into a shift of canonical narratives and interpretations. Listening functions as a fundamental critical tool that permits viewers to detect the interplay of technological productions, historical contingencies, and mediations which coalesce within the political and aesthetical track of sound at the movies.

Antonella Sisto is Five College Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Her area of research is Italian cinema and literature, sound and media studies, history, and fascism.