Description
Book SynopsisOffers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Rémi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career.
Trade ReviewLanzoni and Bowen have assembled and skillfully guided a stellar cast of scholars to produce a coherent, wide-ranging, and illuminating study. This intelligent volume finally mines the complexity of Ettore Scola's work as writer and director, and will become essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Italian cinema. This brilliantly researched volume by rising and seasoned scholars on Scola's legacy captures his meta-cinematic style from film to digital image; his inventiveness in the use of different narrative forms; interactions with other filmmakers, including Pietrangeli, Pasolini, and Fellini; and powerful uses of space, place, and time in philosophic explorations of history, memory, and politics. Unfairly, Scola's work is less well-known outside of Italy than is the work of many of his contemporaries. This important edited collection, with its broad array of approaches and methods, makes Scola intelligible for readers and viewers only coming to know his films, but it also refreshes and reframes our understanding of this powerful, curious, and curiously political body of filmmaking. In this volume, leading experts offer brilliant assessments of the themes of comedy, exile, and nostalgia in Scola's work, as well as of his oeuvre as a whole and his activities as a screenwriter and as a public figure. The only volume in English to be entirely dedicated to this important filmmaker, this superb collection is destined to become an indispensable resource for anyone interested in postwar Italian cinema.
