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Other library resource(s)
Cinecittà Studios by Call Number: Electronic resourceHistorically, the Cinecittà Studios, commonly referred to as Cinecittà (“Cinema City”), have been considered the most important Italian film studio complex. Cinecittà, which is located in the southeastern area of Rome, opened in 1937 under the direction of Luigi Freddi, the Fascist general director of cinematography.
Italian cinema from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Italian national cinema developed quickly between the last decade of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I (particularly in Turin and also in Rome), and it won a sizeable share of film audiences around the world for, in particular, its epic films set in classical settings.
Italy from Media History Digital Library by Call Number: Electronic resourceThough much critical attention to Italian cinema centers on select neo-realist films made towards the end of and following WWII, those films make up only a small portion of what constituted Italian cinema in the early and mid 20th century. In the 1930s, for example, Benito Mussolini’s fascist government both funded and censored domestic film production, leading to overt propaganda films as well as conservative escapist productions—called “white telephones” (telefoni bianchi) for their lavish sets featuring wealthy characters making calls to each other. Cinema (1939–1948) was published by the National Fascist Federation of Italian Industrialists, with Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito, serving as its director. It largely focuses on Italian films, though even this nationalistic publication includes coverage of other European and American productions and stars. ...
Internet resource(s)
- Evolution of Italian Cinema: Neorealism to Post-Modernism from Film InquiryAuguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean Lumière were pioneers of the film industry in the 1890s. They were among the first to create moving pictures, and the first people to conceive of the idea that one can use film as a mass medium. In fact, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895) is considered to be the first film ever made. ...
- Italian Film CommissionThe Italian Film Commission (IFC) is a division of the Italian Trade Commission (ITC) and operates as the promotional office for the audiovisual industry.
Keeping up with the journal literature
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Introduction to Italian cinema
In 1895 an Italian, Filoteo Alberini, patented the Kinetograph, a device for making, printing, and projecting films; and the country’s earliest public exhibition of moving images, via the Lumière Cinématographe, took place on 13 March 1896 in Rome. Italy’s earliest fiction film is thought to be a 1905 historical drama called La presa di Roma, 20 settembre 1870/The Capture of Rome, 20 September 1870. Film production flourished in the silent era, with numerous, mostly small, companies scattered around the country: one of these—Cines, founded in 1906—remained in operation in various guises until 1957. Between 1911 and 1914, with stars such as Hesperia, Maria Jacobini, and Emilio Ghioni, Italian films proved extremely successful in gaining entry to international markets. From the earliest years, historical spectacle, especially films set in ancient Rome and Greece, was a staple genre: examples include La caduta di Troia/The Fall of Troy (Giovanni Pastrone, 1911) and the big-budget international hit Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) (see epic film; history film). After 1922, the film industry was brought under the control of the Fascist government and centralized in Rome, and the Istituto Nazionale LUCE was established with the remit of harnessing cinema for propagandist purposes. Censorship was widely applied, there were restrictions on film imports, and dialogue in foreign-language films was dubbed (see dubbing); but the government appears to have supported the development of the national industry, and filmmakers such as Rossellini began their careers during the Fascist period. In the mid 1930s the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia was founded as part of the Ministry of Culture and a film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, opened. Rome’s renowned studio, Cinecittà, boasting Europe’s most advanced production facilities, opened in 1937 and remained the main locus of Italian film production through to the 1970s. Cinecittà played a part in the creation of a distinctively Italian genre of the 1930s—telefoni bianchi, or white telephone films: glossy comedies and dramas with glamorous metropolitan settings. Outside the capital, government-sponsored mobile cinemas took films to rural areas.
Following the fall of Fascism in 1943 there emerged a socially and politically aware cinema epitomized most famously by the Neorealist films made between the end of World War II and the early 1950s. Characterized by real-life plots and characters and authentic settings, as in Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948) and Roma città aperta/Rome Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), Italian Neorealism became hugely influential, inspiring numerous ‘new’ cinemas around the world and launching or consolidating the careers of significant auteurs such as Federico Fellini, Rossellini, and de Sica. Neorealism also paved the way for the careers of prominent art cinema directors like Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Liliana Cavani. The decline of Neorealism overlapped with gli anni facili, Italian commercial cinema’s ‘easy years’ of the 1950s and early 1960s, when locally-made films were enjoying peak popularity with domestic audiences, and producing international stars like sex goddesses Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. This was the period of ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, when Cinecittà hosted a number of US co-productions, most prominently spectacular biblical/historical epics like Ben-hur (William Wyler, 1959) and peplum films such as Le fatiche di Ercole/Hercules (Pietro Francisci, 1958). In the 1960s and 1970s, with the spaghetti western, Italy made a distinctive contribution to an established Hollywood genre; but after the 1970s, film production in Italy became increasingly decentralized, and the industry suffered a decline in both production output and cinema admissions. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, with the domestic and international successes of confessional films like Nanni Moretti’s Caro diario/Dear Diary (1994), and nostalgia films like Nuovo Cinema Paradiso/Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) and La vita è bella/Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997), Italy began to find market niches, and its auteur films continue to attract international attention: La grande belleza/The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film; Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/US/Brazil/France, 2017) secured four Oscar nominations and one win; and Dogman (Matteo Garrone, 2018) was a Palme d’Or nominee and winner of Best Actor at Cannes. See also Europe, film in; exploitation film; Futurism; horror film; pornography; science fiction.
Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Italy, film in. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 16 May. 2021
Searching the online catalog
You can use the subject heading below to find resources in the online catalog. The call number range is also included.
- motion pictures italyCall number range PN 1993.5 .I88 on Baker Level 4. Please note: this is not the only call number range, but it has the most items.
- horror films italyAlso known as giallo films.
Introductory reading(s)
Historical dictionary of Italian cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 M56 2008ISBN: 9780810860735Italian cinema is now regarded as one of the great cinemas of the world. Historically, however, its fortunes have varied. Following a brief moment of glory in the early silent era, Italian cinema appeared to descend almost into irrelevance in the early 1920s. A strong revival of the industry which gathered pace during the 1930s was abruptly truncated by the advent of World War II. The end of the war, however, initiated a renewal as films such as Roma citt aperta (Rome Open City), Sciusci (Shoeshine, 1946), and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), flagbearers of what soon came to be known as Neorealism, attracted unprecedented international acclaim and a reputation that only continued to grow in the following years as Italian films were feted worldwide. Ironically, they were celebrated nowhere more than in the United States, where Italian films consistently garnered the lion's share of the Oscars, with Lina Wertmüller becoming the first woman to ever be nominated for the Best Director award. ...
A history of Italian cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 B57 2017ISBN: 9781501307638Publication Date: 2nd ed.A History of Italian Cinema is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. ...
The history of Italian cinema: a guide to Italian film from its origins to the twenty-first century by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 B69313 2009ISBN: 9780691119885The History of Italian Cinema is the most comprehensive guide to Italian film ever published. Written by the foremost scholar of Italian cinema and presented here for the first time in English, this landmark book traces the complete history of filmmaking in Italy, from its origins in the silent era through its golden age in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and its subsequent decline to its resurgence today. ...
Italian national cinema, 1896-1996 by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780415116985From such films as La Dolce Vita and Bicycle Thieves to Cinema Paradiso and Dear Diary, Italian cinema has provided striking images of Italy as a nation and a people. In the first comprehensive study of Italian cinema from 1886-1996, Pierre Sorlin explores the changing relationship of Italian cinema and Italian society and asks whether the national cinema really does represent Italian interests and culture.
Italian political cinema: public life, imaginary, and identity in contemporary Italian film by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .P6 I83 2016ISBN: 9783034322171Despite the powerful anti-political impulses that have pervaded Italian society in recent years, Italian cinema has sustained and renewed its longstanding engagement with questions of politics, both in the narrow definition of the term, and in a wider understanding that takes in reflections on public life, imaginary, and national identity. This book explores these political dimensions of contemporary Italian cinema by looking at three complementary strands: the thematics of contemporary political film from a variety of perspectives; the most prominent directors currently engaged in this filone; and case studies of the films that best represent this engagement. ...
Selected book titles
After Fellini: national cinema in the postmodern age by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 M283 2002ISBN: 9780801868474Over 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. ...
Cinema Italian style: Italians at the Academy Awards by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.92 .B5913 2002ISBN: 9788873015000Lists Italian movies that were big hits, nominated, and won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film.
Dreamscapes in Italian cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .D67 D84 2015ISBN: 9781611477818Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others).
Equivocal subjects: between Italy and Africa-constructions of racial and national identity in the Italian cinema by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781472535214Analysing the depiction of African Italian mixed-race subjects from the historical epics of the Italian silent "golden" era to the contemporary period, Equivocal Subjects engages the history of Italian nationalism and colonialism through theories of subject formation, ideologies of race, and postcolonial theory. Greene's approach also provides a novel interpretation of recent developments surrounding Italy's status as a major passage for immigrants seeking to enter the European Union. This book provides an original theoretical approach to the Italian cinema that speaks to the nation's current political and social climate.
Filming the nation: Jung, film, neo-realism and Italian national identity by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 S65 2011ISBN: 9780415555142Italian neo-realism has inspired film audiences and fascinated critics and film scholars for decades. This book offers an original analysis of the movement and its defining films from the perspective of the cultural unconscious. Combining a Jungian reading with traditional theorizations of film and national identity, Filming the Nation reinterprets familiar images of well-known masterpieces by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti and introduces some of their less renowned yet equally significant films. ...
Italian neorealist cinema: an aesthetic approach by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 W34 2007ISBN: 9780802095206The end of the Second World War saw the emergence of neorealist film in Italy. In Italian Neorealist Cinema, Christopher Wagstaff analyses three neorealist films that have had significant influence on filmmakers around the world. Wagstaff treats these films as assemblies of sounds and images rather than as representations of historical reality. If Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà, and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette are still, half a century after they were made, among the most highly valued artefacts in the history of cinema, Wagstaff suggests that this could be due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled narratives, performances, locations, lighting, sound, mise en scène, and montage. ...
Performing place in French and Italian Queer documentary film: space and Proust's lieu factice by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .H55 B74 2018ISBN: 9783319967004This book explores the space of queer documentary through the modernist optic of Marcel Proust's 'lieu factice' (artificial place), a perspective that problematizes the location of place in a post-postmodern world with a dispersed sense of the real. The practice of queer documentary in France and Italy, from the beginning of the new millennium onwards, is seen to re-write the coherence of 'place' through a range of emerging queer realities. ...
The Pocket Essential Spaghetti westerns by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781903047422A new guide covering the spaghetti western genre which not only made a star out of Clint Eastwood, Klaus Kinski, Lee Van Cleef and many others but was a major influence on such directors as Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino. Everything you need to know in one handy volume.
Risorgimento in modern Italian culture: revisiting the nineteenth-century past in history, narrative, and cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PQ 4086 .R54 2005ISBN: 9780838640548The renewed attention to the origin and shape of nationalist discourses has promoted many excellent studies devoted to examining the rich storehouse of cultural responses produced during and after Risorgimento, the political events that, from 1859 to 1870, led Italy from being a fragmented peninsual to an independent and unified nation-state. However, the assessment of Risorgimento and its myths from the post-World War II era to the present remains, for the most part, unexplored. While it is undeniable that the dramatic economic, social, and political transformations that have characterized Italy from the second half of the twentieth century to the present have altered the role and function of nationalist narratives, it remains equally true that interest in the Risorgimento in modern Italian culture has not diminished.
Stardom, Italian style: screen performance and personality in Italian cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .I88 L39 2008ISBN: 9780253220080Marcia Landy examines the history of Italian celebrity culture and ponders the changing qualities of stardom in the 20th and 21st centuries. She considers the historical conditions for the rise of stardom in the context of various media, from the silent era to contemporary media, tracking how stardom shapes national and international identities. The phenomenon of the diva in the early European cinema, the invention of new stars in the sound cinema, the postwar impact on stardom through the introduction of changing forms of narration in popular genres, and the contributions to the changing faces of stardom through the films and the personas of such auteurs as Rosselini, Visconti, Fellini, and Pasolini are examined in Stardom, Italian Style. ...
Finding journal articles
Articles and other writings about Italian film can be found in many publications. Our collection does not titles that looks exclusively at Italian film. You can use Film & Television Literature Index to find articles or use the search box at the top of the page.
Film & television literature index by Call Number: Electronic resourceUse this index to find articles about this national cinema.
Screen studies collection by Call Number: Electronic resourceA comprehensive survey of current publications related to film scholarship alongside detailed filmographies. This collection includes the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database and the detailed and complementary filmographies created by the American Film Institute (AFI) and the British Film Institute.
The web of science citation databases by Call Number: Electronic resourceThe online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.
Selected film titles
Find more Italian film titles in the library's online catalog.
Allegro non troppo by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #4013ISBN: 9780780027916Master animator Bruno Bozzetto offers his irreverent tribute to Disney's Fantasia. Transcending parody, this erotic, satiric, and delirious animated film featuring six classical music pieces represents Bozzetto's vision of the world. Humorous live action scenes of the animator and an elderly all-women orchestra led by a lively conductor are interspersed with the animated shorts.
Don't move = Non ti muovere by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #7163ISBN: 9780794206123Life takes a dramatic turn for successful surgeon Timoteo when he discovers that his young daughter is seriously injured in an accident. Faced with the loss of his daughter, Timoteo's life begins to flash back to his illicit love affair with a destitute young woman named Italia. As their encounters increase in passion, Timoteo finds himself entangled in a torrid love affair that he cannot end. With no where to go, Timoteo is forced into making a decision that will break both his and Italia's hearts and change their lives forever.
Il Generale della rovere by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #8457ISBN: 9781604651249A film of intrigue and heroism within the Italian underground during the German occupation of Italy. Emanuele Bardone, a petty con man, fleeces his victims by posing as a colonel. Persuaded by the Germans to impersonate a partisan leader they have killed, he assumes the admirable qualities of the heroic officer and the German plan backfires.
Identificazione di una donna = Identification of a woman by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #13669ISBN: 9781604654967After his wife leaves him, a film director finds himself drawn into affairs with two enigmatic women, while at the same time searching for the right subject (and actress) for his next film.
Italy, love it or leave it by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #22302Luca and Gustav are two young Italians who over the past few years have witnessed the exodus of many of their friends to Berlin, London or Barcelona. Creative, talented people who don't see a future in their country. They're fed up with the high cost of living, the lack of job security, the feudal university system, the generally reactionary attitudes and indifference to human rights, the clear sense that you don't get anywhere just on merit. Tired of a country that appears to be mired in quicksand, can they find a reason to stay?
I pugni in tasca = Fists in the pocket by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #4212ISBN: 9781559409742A story about a blind widow and her four children. Three are afflicted with epilepsy, and the fourth, Augusto, has to support the family. Alessandro (Sandro) wants to free his brother from this burden and sees killing the rest of the family as the only way.
Mio fratello è figlio unico = My brother is an only child by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #7948The violent political unrest of 1960's Italy brings simmering tensions between two feuding brothers to the boiling point in this critically acclaimed film.
Saturn in opposition = Saturno contro by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #7543The hosts of regular gatherings are the dynamic Lorenzo and his life partner, the successful writer Davide. The somewhat uptight Angelica is helping to prepare the food, while her Antonio has yet to appear. The guest list is the abrasive Neval and her husband Roberto, Davide's ex, Sergio, the spirited Roberta, and a new arrival, the budding writer Paolo. These 40-somethings will remember the carefree existence of the past two decades.
