Italian Studies 397F - ST-Screening Italian Modernity

This course focuses on the film aesthetic production of a century of national cinema in it's social and cultural contexts. It investigates cityscapes and sound-scapes, follows city walkers on their journeys through the ruins of bombed out postwar cities, the monumental sites of millennial history, the urban and industrial expansion and peripheries of the economic miracle of the 1960's, finally crossing into the global metropolis of late capitalism with its glittering splendors and pathologies. This mapping of Italy is inextricably linked to the social and political negotiation of national, collective, and subjective identities, from xenophobic Fascism, postwar southern emigrations, to a porous and congested Mediterranean, where flows of migrations from North Africa and Eastern Europe face the politics and rhetoric of European privilege rendered human only in its encounters with people. We will analyze the cinematic forms and articulations employed by renowned filmmakers who while coping with national history - its constraints and permissions for consciousness and imaginary - diverted from conventional film making to explore new audio-visual modalities that radically shaped world cinema.