italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear colleagues,
For the first event in the Italian at Leeds research seminar series 2014-15, we are very happy to welcome Prof. Stella Bruzzi (University of Warwick) and Dr Giacomo Lichtner (Victoria University of Wellington), who will be speaking on ‘Memory, re-enactment and equivalent events’ and ‘Meaning, mourning and memory: notes towards a thematic reconsideration of Holocaust cinema’.
The event, organised in association with the 'Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories' project (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italian-cinemas-italian-histories/),
will be chaired by Matthew Boswell (Leeds, Arts Engaged) and will take place at the University of Leeds on
THURSDAY 27TH NOVEMBER 2014 at 4 PM, in HILLARY PLACE SR (G.18).
**ALL WELCOME!**
Please find below the abstracts of both papers and further information about the speakers.
Stella Bruzzi
MEMORY, RE-ENACTMENT AND EQUIVALENT EVENTS
Ideas of “collage junk‟ methods of documentary film compilation form the basis for a discussion of how generically and historically diverse texts interact to create an amplified approximation of political events. This paper will use examples from German and Italian history and cinema: the portrayals of the Red Army Faction - "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" (Uli Edel, 2008), "Stammheim" (Reinhard Hauff, 1986) and Gerhard Richter's photographs of the terrorists after their arrests - and the spate of Italian films which revisit Italy’s recent political past, such as "Buongiorno, Notte" (Marco Bellocchio, 2003), "Vincere" (Bellocchio, 2009), "Il Divo" (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008). Central to the paper is the manner in which fiction approximates original fact and incorporates factual documents and footage to construct dramas out of shared political memory.
Stella Bruzzi is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick and Fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely in the fields of documentary, costume and fashion, and masculinity and cinema. Her most recent publications are “Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-Scene in Hollywood” (EUP, 2013) and (co-edited with Pamela Church Gibson) “Fashion Cultures Revisited” (Routledge, 2013). She is currently writing a monograph relating to her recent Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, Approximation: ‘Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality’. This talk forms part of this research.
Giacomo Lichtner
MEANING, MOURNING AND MEMORY: NOTES TOWARDS A THEMATIC RECONSIDERATION OF HOLOCAUST CINEMA
In spite of an ever-growing canon, Holocaust cinema remains strangled between the ethical call to avoid voyeurism and a necessity to communicate made ever more urgent by the passing of survivors and the proliferation of negationist discourses. Focusing on the overwhelming inability to represent aspects of the Holocaust experience such as dehumanisation and collective loss, this paper argues that - in spite of its long history - Holocaust Cinema continues to struggle with representational challenges as old as the first accounts of the camps. The paper will refer a number of films including the Italian films “La tregua” (“The Truce”, Francesco Rosi, 1997), and, unavoidably, “La vita è bella” (“Life is Beautiful”, Roberto Benigni, 1997).
Giacomo Lichtner is Senior Lecturer at the School of History, Philosophy, Political Sciences and International Relations at the University of Wellington. His monograph “Film and the Shoah in France and Italy” (Vallentine Mitchell, 2008) assesses the role of cinema in the development of a national memory of the Holocaust in these countries, while his latest book, “Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), is a longue-durée study of filmic representations of Italian fascism since 1945, with case studies on neo-realism, the Commedia all'Italiana, Bertolucci, the political filmmakers on the 1970s and the tv-movies of the Berlusconi era.
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