Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama PDF Download

Author: Louis Bayman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474402879
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Author: Louis Bayman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474400947
Category : Melodrama in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This monograph argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society.

Author: Louis Bayman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Melodrama in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
This thesis argues for the centrality of melodrama to post-war Italian cinema and culture. It seeks to add to knowledge of the form within the Italian context and to develop conceptualisations of melodrama more generally. I proceed through relating direct film analysis to the social and intellectual contexts informing the field. -- The thesis positions melodrama within popular culture, defining the pleasures it offers as part of this culture. However, the pleasures of melodrama are not simplistically direct but emerge from the complexity of the relationship between artistic construction and everyday life, creating an ambiguous emotionality. -- The thesis also views melodrama as a productive union of the prestige forms of realism and opera. Melodrama in this period is characterised by realism, as is the phenomenon of neorealism by melodrama. I argue that the Italian example shows that, rather than being antagonistic, melodrama and realism can meaningfully interact. Potential for the two forms to intermingle is found in their common reference to the problems of everyday life, their interest in the ordinary, and their search for an elemental vividness. -- Melodrama in Italy is also fundamentally linked to opera. In discussing films which feature opera performance as well as non-musical melodrama, I locate the operatic in Italian cinema in a theatrical relationship of style to drama and expressivity to emotion. I argue that this operatic form of melodramatic musicality is discernible across Italian cinema, contrasting manifestations of which can be found in the films of Raffaello Matarazzo and Luchino Visconti. -- Thus the work seeks to characterise Italian melodrama as a form whose dynamics exist in the relationship between popular and high culture, style and society, realism and opera, and ultimately between restriction and excess which I argue is the central tension animating melodrama more generally.

Author: L. Bayman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137305657
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Exciting new critical perspectives on popular Italian cinema including melodrama, poliziesco, the mondo film, the sex comedy, missionary cinema and the musical. The book interrogates the very meaning of popular cinema in Italy to give a sense of its complexity and specificity in Italian cinema, from early to contemporary cinema.

Author: Flora Derounian
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1789388139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Italy’s 1948 constitution states that Italy is a ‘republic founded upon work’. This book explores women’s labour following World War Two and Italy’s new republic. It focuses its enquiry on three sectors: agriculture (rice weeders), fashion (seamstresses), and religious work (nuns). It studies original oral history interviews and compares women’s own words with their representation in film. In Italy, both war and national reconstruction have typically been framed as masculine undertakings. This book shifts that frame to investigate the labour that Italian women were doing at this critical time of political, social, and ideological change. By examining (filmed) oral history interviews and postwar fiction films, the book brings a vivid, engaging, and cross-disciplinary account of women’s work. Historical studies of Italian women’s work in this period are scarce, short, and almost never in English; this work addresses that critical gap. Film histories almost invariably study women for their beauty and on-screen sexuality; this work critiques and moves beyond this bias. Oral history studies aim to give voice to the under-represented; this book shares that goal. The book is interested in how women’s work was viewed by society and by women workers themselves. Critical analysis of films produced between 1945 and 1965 reveals tensions around women workers’ financial, sexual, intellectual, and spatial independence. Oral histories reveal little-discussed professions and women’s experiences in the workplace. These interviews expose the profound difference work made to women’s lives, and the joys and dilemmas of this difference.

Author: Emma Barron
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319909630
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
When Mona Lisa smiled enigmatically from the cover of the Italian magazine Epoca in 1957, she gazed out at more than three million readers. As Emma Barron argues, her appearance on the cover is emblematic of the distinctive ways that high culture was integrated into Italy’s mass culture boom in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when popular appropriations of literature, fine art and music became a part of the rapidly changing modern Italian identity. Popular magazines ran weekly illustrated adaptations of literary classics. Television brought opera from the opera house into the homes of millions. Readers wrote to intellectuals and artists such as Alberto Moravia, Thomas Mann and Salvatore Quasimodo by the thousands with questions about literature and self-education. Drawing upon new archival material on the demographics of television audiences and magazine readers, this book is an engaging account of how the Italian people took possession of high culture and transformed the modern Italian identity.

Author: Heike Paul
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839459737
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This new go-to reference book for global melodrama assembles contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, gender and queer studies, political science, and postcolonial studies. The melodramas covered in this volume range from early 20th century silent movies to contemporary films, from independent ›arthouse‹ productions to Hollywood blockbusters. The comprehensive overview of global melodramatic film in the Lexicon constitutes a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of film, teachers, film critics, and anyone who is interested in the past and present of melodramatic film on a global scale. The Lexicon of Global Melodrama includes essays on All That Heaven Allows, Bombay, Casablanca, Die Büchse der Pandora, In the Mood for Love, Nosotros los Pobres, Terra Sonâmbula, and Tokyo Story.

Author: Peter Bondanella
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501307630
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
The only comprehensive and up-to-date book on the subject of Italian cinema available anywhere, in any language.

Author: Katharine Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000457486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This original study makes a valuable contribution to Italian feminist/women’s history, spectatorship studies, and cultural history by examining women as protagonists, producers and consumers of literature, theatre, opera and film. Drawing on archival material – female correspondence, life-writings and journalism – as well as an impressive range of canonical texts, it brings together detailed engagement with female performance and with female spectators’ material responses to "women’s opera, theatre and film," placing these in the context of melodrama from the 1880s to the 1920s in Italy, France, the US, and elsewhere. It is unique in its interdisciplinary approach and in its consideration of female relationships based on admiration among performers and writers – the embodiment of a vibrant, mobile and successful Italian female culture industry during the first wave of feminism.

Author: Niamh Cullen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192576763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Love, Honour, and Jealousy investigates the impact of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s on intimate life. Just as Italy was rapidly forged into an urban, industrial nation in these years, the ways in which Italians thought about family, love, and marriage were transformed by migration and modern consumer culture. At the core of this book lies the investigation of almost one hundred and fifty unpublished diaries and memoirs written by ordinary men and women who were coming of age during these years. These personal testimonies reveal unique insights into the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of those who came of age against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Italy. The personal stories are explored alongside the films, magazines, and music of the time, which were saturated with both new and old ideas of romance. Films and magazines encouraged young Italians to put romantic love and individual desire over family, contributing to changing expectations about marriage, and often resulting in family tensions. At the same time popular love stories were frequently laced with jealousy, hinting at the darker emotions that were linked in many minds, to love. This darker side was a significant part of the story of changing ideas about intimacy in post-war Italy, as was the growing desire to marry for love. Control and violence against women was closely linked to southern ideas about family honour but also to anxieties about Italy's changing society, which manifested itself in romantic jealousy. Through its exploration of courtship, marriage, honour crime, forced marriage, jealousy, and marriage breakdown, Love, Honour, and Jealousy traces the ways in which the lives both of individuals and of the nation itself, were shaped by changing understandings of romantic love and its darker companions, honour and jealousy.