Description
Book SynopsisThe Italian art cinema of the 1960s is known worldwide for its brilliance and vitality. This title argues for an understanding of that cinema as a negotiation between a national aesthetic tradition of realism and a nascent post-modern image culture. It is suitable for scholars and students in different areas of film studies.
Trade Review“Theoretically sophisticated, politically astute, and historically informed, this is a brilliant work, one that will be a productive model for the future study of Italian cinema as well as the investigation of national cinema in general. There is no doubt that this is one of the best books ever written in English on Italian cinema, and by far the most theoretically advanced. Restivo’s fascinating exploration of questions of subjectivity, space, and nation will be of great interest to scholars in fields beyond Italian cinema as well.”—Peter Brunette, author of
Roberto Rossellini“This book is far above the usual histories of national cinema. It combines political analysis, psychoanalytic reading, and close cinematic explication with Restivo’s breathtaking first-hand knowledge of Italian socio-political history, enabling him to locate each author in a specific context and to discern connotations that are out of reach for most Anglo-Saxon cinema historians.”—Slavoj Zizek, author of
Gaze and Voice as Love ObjectsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Part I: Neorealism and Nation
1. Writing the National Cinema
2. Neorealism and the Stain
Part II: The Nation, The Body, and Pasolini
3. Tropes of Modernization: The Bandit and the Road
4. Spatial Transformations: Mapping the New Italy
5. Pasolini and the Limits of Resistance
Part III: Antonioni and the Postmodern Sublime
6. The Object Antonioni
7. The Sublime and the Disaster
Part IV: Boundaries
8. The Erotics of the Periphery
Notes
Bibliography
Index
