italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies

Gentili colleghi,

We would like to remind you that the deadline for the call for papers for the conference Da Sodoma a Gomorra is very soon (30^th September 2009).

Call For Papers

Titles and abstracts (maximum of 300 words) for proposed papers should be sent in either English or Italian to one of the conference organizers, Dominic Holdaway ([log in to unmask]), or Mariarita Martino ([log in to unmask]), by 30^th September 2009.

Any further enquiries should be addressed to one of the conference organizers, and for information about the Department of Italian and the University of Warwick, please visit: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/italian.

Further information is below.

Best regards,

Dom Holdaway & Mariarita Martino

Da 'Sodoma' a 'Gomorra': Framing Crisis and Rebirth in Italian Cinema

22-24 January, 2010

From the 1970s, when Pier Paolo Pasolini shocked the world with his scandalous Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Italian cinema has been tagged by labels of crisis and a deadlocked stasis, yet contrastingly apotheosized through public recognition and allusions to rebirth. Never has this been more evident than in the last decade when simultaneously with polemical debates in the Italian press which have described the national cinema as suffering from a ‘crisi d’identità’ (E. G. della Loggia, 2007), films like Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrahave triggered hope in the form of ‘il riscatto italiano’ (N. Aspesi, 2008).

In an attempt to bring synthesis to this polarizing tendency, a wavering image of the national cinema has emerged, marked by what Nanni Moretti refers to as ‘il vizio di stabilire, due o tre volte all’anno, lo stato di salute del cinema.’ Scholars have responded to the need to re-evaluate the role of Italian cinema from an international perspective through collaboratively re-envisioning methodological approaches and proposing a ‘more robust theoretical debate’ (C. O’Rawe and A. O’Leary, 2008). To mark the emergence of this focus of academic enquiry, the Department of Italian at the University of Warwick will host a conference which aims to contextualize and interrogate the notion of crisis and rebirth of contemporary Italian cinema.  

The conference seeks to address the following key questions:

§  In what ways has the Italian socio-historical context informed the trends of national cinema over the last forty years?

§  To what extent can the crisis of Italian cinema be investigated in terms of mutating ideologies?

§  How has the engagement with and the identification of the spectator changed over the last four decades?

§  After auteurssuch as Fellini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Pasolini, has Italian cinema exhausted the stylistic possibilities of a ‘linguaggio del cinema’?

§  With digital filmmaking constantly gaining popularity, how has recent cinema engaged with new technologies, and what is the scope for new generation of filmmakers to emerge?

Suggested areas of interest may include but are not limited to:

§  Film aesthetics and film style

§  Film theory and methodologies

§  Spectatorship and audience

§  Authors/auteurs; cinema as intellectual practice

§  National cinematic ‘canons’

§  Popular cinema

§  Academic and non-academic perspectives

§  Gender and/or genre

§  Adaptation and novelization

§  Political commitment and impegno

§  Realism(s) in cinema

§  Migration and cinema at/of the borders

§  Pan-European and transnational contexts

For further information, please see http://dasodomaagomorra.wordpress.com