italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear colleagues,
I am very pleased to invite you to the next event in the Italian at Leeds research seminar series 2014-15.
Dr Alan O' Leary (University of Leeds), 'Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories: Project-in-Progress Report'
Wednesday 4th March 2015, 4 pm
University of Leeds, Emmanuel Centre SR 07
This session will report on the development of the large scale and long-term project 'Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories’.
http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italian-cinemas-italian-histories/
All welcome!
Please find below further information about the paper, the project, and the speaker.
ITALIAN CINEMAS/ITALIAN HISTORIES: PROJECT-IN-PROGRESS REPORT
The project asks: How have Italians used films to negotiate their histories and interrogate their identities over more than a century of Italian cinema?
Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories aims to completely reconfigure the understanding of the relationship between Italian cinema and history. Dramatic (as distinct from documentary) historical films are a hugely influential form of historical representation, and history has been a particular preoccupation of Italian cinema: most conspicuously in ‘admirable’ forms that represent Italy abroad, but also in many less exportable films, from opera films to low-brow comedy. Italian Cinema Studies have, however, failed to capture this range, and scholarship has often been prescriptive.
The project will provide a radically extended account of the modes, genres and registers in which dramatic Italian films have dealt with the history of Italy. It will describe the variety of the technical and formal means employed to facilitate a relationship with the past in Italian films. It will analyse the role played by Hollywood, as the most watched form of cinema, in the construction of this relationship. And it will answer to a methodological imperative: to study the very many ‘typical’ and not just those ‘exceptional’ Italian films that have previously constituted a canon of historical cinema. The project will trace the development of this vastly extended corpus from the early cinema period to the Twenty-first Century.
It will do this by employing a holistic and mixed methodology. Quantitative and digital methods will allow the project to bypass narrow canon and prescriptive definitions of ‘Italy’, ‘history’, and ‘historical cinema’, while qualitative and interpretative approaches will allow sophisticated analysis of results, and so of a key aspect of the Italian historical imaginary.
Because of its scale and ambition, the Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories project has been in development for some years, with two graduate courses taught at the University of Mumbai (2011/2013), workshops at Bristol and Cambridge, and a series of seminars and other events at Leeds. The development of the project has been funded by a pump-priming grant and other funding from Leeds, Bristol, Cambridge and the Italian Institute of Culture (Delhi). It has also benefited from financial support to develop the public engagement aspect of the project, and secondary schools, arts organizations and film festivals, in Italy and Ireland as well as Leeds and the UK, are already participating as non-academic partners, and their contribution is feeding in to the research questions.
The development of the project is recorded on the project website: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italian-cinemas-italian-histories/.
Alan O'Leary is Associate Professor in Italian. He is the author of a monograph on the terrorism of the 1970s in Italian cinema (2007, 2011) and has also co-edited two volumes on the theme. His monograph on the Italian Christmas film, the 'cinepanettone', was published in 2013. He has written on the historiography of Italian cinema, including the controversial 'Against Realism', co-written with Catherine O'Rawe (Bristol). He edited the annual ITALIANIST film issue from 2009 to 2013.
Kind regards,
Federica Pich
Dr Federica Pich
Lecturer in Italian
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (LCS)
University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT
UK
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