All posts tagged: Italian Cinema

Film & Media in a Time of Repression: Practices & Aesthetics of Resistance

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On December 13, 2016, a month after the presidential election, Film Quarterly organized an emergency panel with the sponsorship of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Staged amid the political aftershocks, the event at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center’s Amphitheater brought together eight panelists from wildly divergent arenas to engage a rapt audience with its central theme: “Film & Media in A Time of Repression: Practices and Aesthetics of Resistance.”

The Battle of Algiers at Fifty

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The fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) offers an occasion to challenge commonplaces about the film and to show that there remains much to be clarified about its character. Typically discussed in terms of its debt to Italian neorealism, The Battle of Algiers can also be related to Italian colonial cinema made during the fascist period. The film recounts the genesis of the Algerian nation, but it is at the same time a film about the end of the French empire. Meanwhile, an analysis of location in the film’s little-discussed coda shows The Battle of Algiers to be the first in a long line of banlieue cinema—that is, it is a film that presciently anticipates postcolonial conditions on the territory of France itself.

Turin Notebook: “We Have a Pope”

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Every spring for the past ten years I have been visiting Turin in the spring to teach some seminars. With a bit of luck and good management I can make my visits coincide with May Day, which in Italy in general and Turin in particular is celebrated with proper ceremony and a sense of history.

La Malavita: Gomorrah and Naples

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Our first night in Naples, a little past midnight, my wife and I were woken by several gunshots, followed by a woman screaming in English, “He’s still alive! He’s still alive!” We looked out the eighth-floor window of our hotel, as did many of the residents of the apartment high-rise opposite us, and waited for the anticipated sirens and flashing police lights

On Looking Back

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FQ Editor Rob White charts a course through the Autumn 2008 issue, on the occasion of FQ’s golden anniversary. In the fall of 1958, fifty years ago, the inaugural issue of Film Quarterly was published, and it is fascinating to revisit those first years, when the European New Wave cinemas generated a scintillating critical energy in a pioneer magazine. In this anniversary issue, founding editor Callenbach recalls FQ’s origins and traces the development of its agenda; James S. Williams argues that Antonioni’s cinema opened up whole “new spaces of thought and being”; while D. A. Miller reconsiders Visconti’s epic melodrama and its strange “larval beauty.”