Session
Coordinator: Lodovica Guidarelli
Department of
French and Italian, UW – Madison
"Un corpo di donna che
pensa": Feminist Realism in Historical
Perspective
Drawing upon Dacia Maraini's metapoetic reflections
and critical writings, this paper examines how her early works--commonly
considered the most prominent example of so-called "feminist
realism"--address women's passage from lack of social memory (the
pre-history of hypercorporeality) to historical
awareness.
Cinzia Sartini Blum
The
“The Reality of
Realism in Post-WWII Italian Painting: The Case of Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti”
This paper will reconsider the nature of realism in Italian painting
immediately after the Second World War.
Post-WWII realism has been considered most often in relation to the
neorealist filmmaking of de Sica, Visconti, and their
contemporaries. However, the discourse
surrounding (neo)realism in Italian painting was
equally fraught with formal innovation and political tensions and is, this
paper will argue, a site of profound epistemological contention during
Considering the case of Il Fronte Nuovo delle
This paper will return to the works and texts produced during this
period in search of an unencumbered language with which to understand Italian
painting during this period, thus subverting the binarist
methodologies of the Cold War and undoing the Manichean opposition of realism
and abstraction that has contoured art historiography for over a half a
century.
Adrian R. Duran
Memphis College
of Art
“The
Art of Low Culture: Garrone's ‘fatti
di cronaca’”
Garrone remains an odd director who
simultaneously draws inspiration from low culture while rising to the level of
auteur with a cinema that narrates psycho-physical atmospheres. In the two
films investigated in this paper, L’imbalsamatore and Primo
amore, Garrone based the storylines on ‘fatti di cronaca’.
The former tells of the mysterious, if not squallid,
death of a midget taxidermist who had been employed by the Mafia; in the
latter, a contemporary Nosferatu manipulates the
bodily trasformation of a woman. The conception of Primo amore, in fact, came to Garrone after he had viewed an episode of Maledette storie, the
true-crime drama series on RAI 3.
Though,
at first glance, both films share the commonality of being sordid pulp
thrillers, that exploit real-life horror, they become a genre of the new
Italian ‘noir’ (an Antonionian noir ‘in color’ that
picks up where Deserto rosso left
off). Garrone’s films resist being reduced to the
narrative mechanisms of genre, as we have seen in contemporary detective
fiction and pulp stories, whose authors are content to be making a
self-reflexive, intertextual statement on form and
less content with exploring narrative solutions. Even as Garrone
fashions his own style, he avoids sentimentality, preferring to focus on the
bonds between characters, as well as those between
characters and place. In this sense, Garrone’s colors
and shadows narrate a visual poetry not found in today’s contemporary Italian
cinema. Like Antonioni and Pasolini, he pares down
his dialogue to the essential, the bare, so that the combination of mise-en-scène and montage creates a series of images that
represent the relationship between the mind and the body. Garrone
has also partaken of the Italian heritage of neorealism,
as he cast his ‘bodies’ for their immediate, organic connection with their
environment. Yet his investigations remain psychological and social
explorations, not political ones. Through his characters, we trace the alchemy
of the human psyche as it concerns itself with desire and transformation and
struggles to find balance in the body. These noirs represent Garrone’s filmic vision
which offers promising narrative solutions for the expression of that struggle.
Gregory
M. Pell