Research Seminar on Italian Cinema

Dr Ivelise Perniola

(Università degli Studi Roma III)

The Return of the Real in Contemporary Italian cinema

Monday, 7 March 2011, 4 p.m., ORB 1.24

Since the 1930s fiction and nonfiction films in Italy have followed two different lines of development. While realism turned into fiction (let us think of Neorealism), phantasmagoria, superstition and propaganda became the main subjects of nonfiction films (as in the first documentaries of Antonioni or of Di Gianni and Mangini). Nothing has changed in the new millennium. Quoting John Grierson, fiction is still dominated by the ‘creative treatment of reality’ (Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris talks about ‘realitysm’), as is the case of films such as Gomorra, Il divo, Vallanzasca and Romanzo criminale. Nonfiction is characterized by a new form of ‘verism’, with poor aesthetic qualities, the result of which are documentaries directed to state a strong point of view, and not too dissimilar from the propaganda films of the 1930s and 1940s (see for instance Draquila by Sabina Guzzanti or Videocracy by Erik Gandini). This talk will investigate these issues, and in doing so it will also interrogate aspects of contemporary Italian literature and society.

Ivelise Perniola is Assistant Professor in History of the Documentary at University of Roma Tre. She is the author of Chris Marker o del film-saggio (Lindau, 2003), Oltre il neorealismo (Bulzoni, 2004), Il cinema di Claude Lanzmann (Kaplan, 2007).

A seminar jointly organised with Italian at UCC