After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age - Softcover

Marcus, Millicent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801868475 ISBN 13: 9780801868474

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Premio Flaiano given by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura

Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful. Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs―Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Fellini―extinguished the revolutionary impulse which had characterized Italian filmmaking since the Second World War.

In After Fellini, Millicent Marcus contends that in the late 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of Italian filmmakers has transcended these obstacles and reasserted Italy's importance in world cinema. Through in-depth critiques of such acclaimed films as The Last Emperor,Caro Diario, and Stolen Children, as well as the immensely popular Cinema Paradiso and Life Is Beautiful, Marcus details how today's auteurs have both reflected and resisted Italy's shifting social, political, and cultural identity, and created a body of work that signals a new beginning for Italian cinema.

About this title

Review:

"Detailed and persuasive, this book makes an important contribution to the study of contemporary Italian film."

(Choice)

"Marcus is always at her best in the description and analysis of the characters in the films she explores... The Italian cinema, in her master project, is a human comedy of characters. Typically she will tease out the intricate relationship, say, of the three brothers of Rosi's film to each other, to their parents, and to their wives and lovers. In doing so, she will invariably keep one eye on the cinematic deployment of shots and another on the nuances of difference the same characters present in a source text."

(P. Adams Sitney Cineaste)

"Millicent Marcus's book offers new conclusions about continuities and changes in the mapping of cinematic landscapes. Nothing in English rivals her interpretations of Visconti's Bellissima, Rosi's Three Brothers and The Truce, Amelio's Stolen Children, Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Moretti's Caro diario. After Fellini will become the benchmark for any further study of contemporary Italian cinema."

(Gaetana Marrone, Princeton University)

"Millicent Marcus's After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age makes a highly original contribution to the study of Italian cinema. Through close analysis of a series of individual recent films, she sets the record straight about Italian cinema's contributions to the medium during the last two decades of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the new Italian cinema following in Fellini's footsteps promises a bright future in the new millennium."

(Peter Bondanella, Indiana University)

"Scholars of film as well as those who enjoy Italian cinema will welcome this fine survey by Marcus."

(Book News)

"To open this book is to walk into Marcus' own Cinema Paradiso where the present and the past of Italian cinema deliciously mingle. Anyone disappointed with what the movies have become will be restored by her acuity, her erudition, and by the warmth of her prose as she fondly evokes what remains the most marvelously human of national cinemas."

(Dudley Andrew, Yale University)

Synopsis:

During the last two decades of the 20th century, the perception of Italian cinema's prominence within the film industry waned. This decline, in part due to the loss of its great directors, was also influenced by the legalization of private television networks. These networks glutted the airwaves with films and contributed to a shift from attendance at public theatres to private home-viewing that eventually altered the way media culture was produced and consumed in Italy. In this work, Millicent Marcus interprets, in detail, a body of work that manages to transcend these obstacles and establish an independent profile for the Italian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Marcus applies the concept of postmodernism to characterize video culture, then examines the cinematic path that developed in opposition to it. Throughout, she frames her study of the films with an examination of Italy's shifting social and political identity over the second half of the 20th century - an identity which Italian filmmakers have sought both to represent and resist.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0801868475
• ISBN 13: 9780801868474
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392