Browsing by Subject "Italian cinema"
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Item Beyond the casting couch : a feminist recovery of female stars' experience in Italy(2022-07-28) Fanelli, Vanessa; Bonifazio, Paola, 1976-; Bini, Daniela; Hipkins, Danielle; Sturm, CirceIn this dissertation, I study Italian female film stardom through an interdisciplinary approach which aims to focus on gender representation and production practices of the 1960s. This decade is relevant to the investigation of postwar rhetoric in the national effort to promote modernization and progress. In fact, it is precisely in the 1960s that the social fabric began to unravel, laying the foundations to the legislative changes of the 70s which would grant essential women’s rights, such as laws on divorce, abortion, and reproductive rights. Among my primary concern is the investigation of female stars as a vehicle for social change as they offered unconventional lifestyles that promoted, in newspapers and magazines, discourses on gender-power dynamics which focused on women’s inequality in terms of work harassment, rape, marriage, and motherhood. In addition to establishing the historical significance of the phenomenon of female stardom in Italy this dissertation also tackles the crucial question of why traditional historical narratives focusing primarily on the corporeality of female stars have paid little to no attention to their everyday, gendered lives. With the analyses of the three case studies of Jennifer Jones, Marisa Solinas, and Stefania Sandrelli, I seek to construct a coherent narrative of female stardom which focuses on the opportunity for self-representation and self-determination these actresses had in the film industry. Finally, this dissertation argues that, contrary to the prevailing belief that there was no star system in Italy and that female stars thus exercised no control over their careers, there were indeed complex and widely varying degrees and modes of control through which women could resist the process of their commodification.Item The Italian musicarello : youth, gender, and modernization in postwar popular cinema(2017-05-03) Hotz, Stephanie Aneel; Bonifazio, Paola, 1976-; Raffa, Guy; Bini-Carter, Daniela; Beltran, Mary; Reich, JacquelineThe musicarello was a popular Italian film cycle consisting of more than eighty musical films from 1959 through the 1960s, a period that coincided with Italy’s postwar industrialization. During the postwar economic boom, these musical films emerged as a new form of popular cinema that was unique from other Italian postwar genres because of their intended youth audience, and because of their reference to British and North American popular entertainment. The films were primarily star vehicles, promoting and augmenting the careers of emerging young popular musicians such as Mina, Rita Pavone, Caterina Caselli, Gianni Morandi, Adriano Celentano, and Little Tony. This dissertation details how these young stars and their musical film performances represented youth and their consumer and entertainment choices during Italy’s era of modernization and consumerism, and how the films offered empowering representations of marginal, queered, and liminal subjectivities for young Italians. Analyzed within this framework, I argue that the musicarello can be perceived as camp because it represented the way in which youth and gender are performative and fluctuating subjectivities. While there has been an increased attention on popular cinema in Italian film scholarship, there have been few studies on the musicarello in both Italian and English scholarship at large. In this extensive study of the musical films, my methodology consists of close text formal analysis and an engagement with American and Italian film scholarship, cultural studies, and gender/queer theories. My formal analyses focus on film narratives, character development, musical numbers, and star status, alongside my examination of recurring themes, narratives devices, and tropes within the cycle. With a heavy emphasis on socio-historical contextualization and youth culture, my project adds to current scholarship on 1960s Italian youth culture and mass media, thereby filling a void not only in Italian film studies, but also in studies on Italian youth representation