Italian Film Resources
The Cinema of Italy by ISBN: 9781903364987Date: 2005-01-19The Cinema of Italy, a new addition to the 24 Frames series, looks at the recurring historical, thematic and stylistic features of twenty-four of the most important Italian sound films. Viewing Italian cinema at the intersection of history, politics, art and popular culture, the 24 concise essays of this anthology contextualize each film within both Italian and Western film culture.
A Companion to Italian Cinema by 
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ISBN: 1119006147Date: 2017-03-24A Companion to Italian Cinema re-maps Italian cinema studies, employing new perspectives on traditional issues, and fresh theoretical approaches to the exciting history and field of Italian cinema. Presents a theory based approach to historical and archival material. Includes work by both established and more recent scholars, with new takes on traditional critical issues, and new theoretical approaches to the exciting history and field of Italian cinema. Covers recent issues such as feminism, stardom, queer cinema, immigration and postcolonialism, self-reflexivity and postmodernism, popular genre cinema, and digitalization.
Directory of World Cinema: Italy by ISBN: 9781841504001Date: 2011-10-15While Italian cinema has long been popular with international audiences, a surprising unfamiliarity remains regarding the rich traditions from which its most fascinating moments arose. Directory of World Cinema: Italy aims to offer a wide film and cultural context for Italian cinema's key aspects, from political radicalism to opera, from the art house to popular cinema. Essays by leading academics about prominent genres, directors, and themes provide insight into the cinema of Italy and are bolstered by reviews of significant titles. From the silent spectacle to the giallo, the spaghetti western to the neorealist masterworks of Rossellini, this book offers a comprehensive historical sweep of Italian cinema that will appeal to film scholars and cinephiles alike.
Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781538119471Date: 2020-12-08This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on major movements, directors, actors, actresses, film genres, producers, industry organizations and key films.
The History of Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9780691119885Date: 2009-04-12Written by the foremost scholar of Italian cinema and presented here for the first time in English, this landmark book traces the complete history of filmmaking in Italy, from its origins in the silent era through its golden age in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and its subsequent decline to its resurgence today. He examines overlooked Italian genre films such as horror movies, comedies, and Westerns, and he also devotes attention to neglected periods like the Fascist era. Brunetta illuminates the epic scope of Italian filmmaking, showing it to be a powerful cultural force in Italy and leaving no doubt about its enduring influence abroad.
A History of Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9781501307638Date: 2017-10-19Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics.
Italian Cinema by ISBN: 1845201612Date: 2005-06-01Outlining the artistic, cultural, technical and commercial context of film, Italian Cinema presents a history from silent to contemporary film. As well as illuminating the work of classic directors such as Visconti, Fellini, Rossellini, Antonioni and Rosi, the book explores the interaction between art and popular cinema, visual style and spectacle, space and architecture, gender representations and politics.
The Italian Cinema Book by ISBN: 1844574040Date: 2013-12-27The Italian Cinema Book is an essential guide to the most important historical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of Italian cinema, from 1895 to the present day. Acutely aware of the contemporary 'rethinking' of Italian cinema history, Peter Bondanella has brought together a diverse range of essays which represent the cutting edge of Italian film theory and criticism.
Italian Film in the Present Tense by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 1487546181Date: 2023Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema's new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life.
Italian National Cinema by ISBN: 041511697XDate: 1996-09-09From such films as La Dolce Vita and Bicycle Thieves to Cinema Paradiso and Dear Diary, Italian cinema has provided striking images of Italy as a nation and a people. In the first comprehensive study of Italian cinema from 1886-1996, Pierre Sorlin explores the changing relationship of Italian cinema and Italian society and asks whether the national cinema really does represent Italian interests and culture.
A New Guide to Italian Cinema by ISBN: 1403975604Date: 2007-06-06This book is a complete reworking and update of Marga Cottino-Jones' popular A Student's Guide to Italian Film (1983, 1993) . This guide retains earlier editions' interest in renowned films and directors but is also attentive to the popular films which achieved box office success among the public.
Acting Across Borders: Mobility and Identity in Italian Cinema by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781474439862Date: 2021-03-16Studying the careers of popular actors Amedeo Nazzari and Alberto Sordi, Acting Across Borders explores the question of how Italian cinema from the 1930s to 1980s has considered human mobility. Through close readings of a selection of films, Alberto Zambenedetti examines the concept of italianità (Italian-ness) as manifested in contexts related to migration, diaspora, exile, tourism, travel and their supporting infrastructures.
Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9780816675555Date: 2012-02-16Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. Brutal Vision challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films--including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves--should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics.
A Cinema of Poetry by ISBN: 9781421411668Date: 2014-06-30Explores the poetics and aesthetics of the Italian art film in Rossellini, Antonioni, Fellini, and other groundbreaking directors. A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history.
Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9781611477818Date: 2015-01-21Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example).
Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 1441107444Date: 2012-03-01Shelleen Greene argues that from the silent era to the present, the cinematic representation of the "mixed-race" or interracial subject has served as a means by which Italian racial and national identity have been negotiated and re-defined. She examines Italy's colonial legacy, histories of immigration and emigration, and contemporary politics of multiculturalism through its cultural production, providing new insights into its traditional film canon. Analysing the depiction of African Italian mixed-race subjects from the historical epics of the Italian silent "golden" era to the contemporary period, this enlightening book engages the history of Italian nationalism and colonialism through theories of subject formation, ideologies of race, and postcolonial theory.
Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781474474030Date: 2020-07-22Discussing a variety of independent and experimental Italian films, this book gives voice to a critcically neglected form of Italian cinema. It thereby explores the character of independent films and their related practices within the Italian historical, cultural and cinematic landscape.
French B Movies: Suburban Spaces, Universalism, and the Challenge of Hollywood by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9780253064899Date: 2023-03-07French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin.
Giallo: Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema by ISBN: 9781438480336Date: 2020-11-01Italian giallo films are cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.
Italian Giallo in Film and Television: A Critical History by ISBN: 9781476682488Date: 2022-05-31Since the release in 1929 of a popular book series with bright yellow covers, the Italian word giallo (yellow) has come to define a whole spectrum of mystery and detective fiction and films. Although most English speakers associate the term giallo with the violent and erotic thrillers popular in the 1960s and 1970s from directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and others, the term encompasses a wide range of Italian media such as mysteries, thrillers and detective stories--even comedies and political pamphlets.
Italian Horror Film Directors by ISBN: 9780786418343Date: 2004-11-15There is no cinema with such effect as that of the hallucinatory horror of Italian horror films. This work recounts the origins of the genre, celebrates ten auteurs who have contributed to Italian horror, mentions the many who have made noteworthy films, and discusses the influential genres associated with Italian horror. The directors discussed in detail are Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Mario Bava, Ruggero Deodata, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti, Aristede Massaccesi, Bruno Mattei, and Michele Soavi.
Italian Neorealist Cinema by ISBN: 9780802097613Date: 2008-01-10In Italian Neorealist Cinema, Christopher Wagstaff analyses three neorealist films that have had significant influence on filmmakers around the world. If Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà, and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette are still, half a century after they were made, among the most highly valued artefacts in the history of cinema, Wagstaff suggests that this could be due to the aesthetic and rhetorical qualities of their assembled narratives, performances, locations, lighting, sound, mise en scène, and montage. Italian Neorealist Cinema not only offers readers in Film Studies and Italian Studies a radically new perspective on neorealist cinema and the Italian art cinema that followed it, but theorises and applies a method of close analysis of film texts for those interested in aesthetics and rhetoric, as well as cinema in general.
Italy's Other Women: Gender and Prostitution in Italian Cinema, 1940-1965 by ISBN: 9783034319348Date: 2016-07-29In the period 1940 to 1965 the female prostitute featured in at least ten per cent of all Italian-made films, but she cast her shadow over many more. With reference to the changing social and film industrial context, this book explains why the figure of the female prostitute was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence.
Masculinity and Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9780748654543Date: 2014-07-04Italian cinema has traditionally used the trope of an inadequate man in crisis to reflect on the country's many social and political upheavals. Masculinity and Italian Cinema examines how this preoccupation with male identity becomes especially acute in the 1970s when a set of more diverse and inclusive images of men emerge in response to the rise of feminism and gay liberation. Through an analysis of the way Italian films explore anxieties about male sexuality and femininity, the book shows how such anxieties also intersect with particular preoccupations about national identity and political engagement. This is an essential study-tool to understand the multiple constructions of masculinity in Italian cinema, helping students and researchers to understand the work of some of Italy's most provocative filmmakers.
Migrant Anxieties by ISBN: 9780253037176Date: 2019-01-24During a period of heightened global concerns about the movement of immigrants and refugees across borders, Migrant Anxieties explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompanying the country's shift from an emigrant nation to a destination point for over five million immigrants over the course of three decades. Áine O'Healy traces a phenomenology of anxiety that is not only present at the sociopolitical level but also interwoven into the narrative strategies of over 30 films produced since 1990, throwing into sharp relief the interface between the local and the global in this transnational era. Starting with the representation of post-communist migrations to Italy from Eastern Europe and subsequent arrivals from Africa through the controversial frontier of Lampedusa, O'Healy explores topics as diverse as the configuration of migrant labor, affective surrogacy, Italian whiteness, and the legacy of Italy's colonial history.
New Trends in Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9781443845915Date: 2013-04-01The aim of this book is to show that, far from being exhausted, the vivifying lymph of post-Second World War Italian Neorealism continues to sustain the aesthetic praxis of many artists. Predominantly, the staying power of Neorealism becomes apparent in the stringent moral urgency behind the realization of films such as Gomorra, Lamerica, or Terra Madre. All of them, although cinematically very sophisticated, retain the anxiety of engagement and the impassionate look upon reality that characterized the masterpieces of Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. All the essays in this collection highlight how, in responding to the unprecedented challenges of the New Millennium, Italian movie makers such as Garrone, Amelio, or Olmi, are able to recapture the ethical and methodological spirit of classic Neorealism in very interesting ways.
New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9783034302692Date: 2014-08-18The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema.
Once upon a Time in the Italian West by ISBN: 9781850434306Date: 2004-09-24Covering every Italian Spaghetti Western--mainly the good but also the bad and the ugly--this is an authoritative, entertaining and comprehensive companion to the implausible international fusion of producers, directors, actors and composers who created the mythical Spaghetti West under the most improbable circumstances.
Re-Viewing Fascism by ISBN: 9780253340450Date: 2002-05-07Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism--ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies.
Requiem for a Nation: Religion and Politics in Post War Italian Cinema by ISBN: 9788869770562Date: 2017-01-20The main objective of this edited collection is to examine the ways in which religion, culture and politics converge in configuring the contradictions of a post-war Italy's cultural history. Starting from the assumption that to conduct a critical reflection on Italian post-war visual culture one must investigate the inevitable impact of Catholic religion on everyday life and its social, political and cultural dimensions, the volume employs the vantage point of cinema to propose a critique and exploration of religion's influence on the Italian cultural landscape.
Screening Religions in Italy: Contemporary Italian Cinema and Television Fiction in the Post-Secular Public Sphere by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 1487503474Date: 2019This is the first book-length study to address the question of religion in contemporary Italian cinema and television. It questions why religion persists on Italian screens and how this reflects and constructs Italy's emerging post-secularity.
Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9780253064646Date: 2022-12-06Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city.
Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 147446324XDate: 2021-12-29Italian cinema experienced its peak of domestic and international popularity in the years between the 'economic miracle' of the late 1950s and the social and political turmoil of the 1970s. But how did the growing development of the feminist movement in this period impact on Italian film culture? And what role did that film culture play in women's lives? This book explores the multiple intersections between feminism and Italian cinema from the perspective of women's everyday relationship with the medium. Drawing from a feminist approach to Gramscian cultural theory, the book builds an archival counter-history of Italian cinema in which women took part as movie-goers, activists and practitioners, by means of a collective-historical agency that challenged cinema's patriarchal structures and strategies of invisibilisation.
World Film Locations: Florence by ISBN: 9781783203604Date: 2014-10-15Florence, with its rich history, privileged place in the canon of Western art, and long-standing relationship with the moving image, is a cinematic city equal to Venice or Rome. Contributors to the collection consider a wide range of topics, including the tourist's perception of Florence, representations of art and artists on screen, the camera-friendly Tuscan countryside and mouthwatering local cuisine, and filmic adaptations of canonical Italian literature. Through scene reviews of films including Bobby Deerfield, A Room with a View, Tea with Mussolini, and Under the Tuscan Sun, contributors delve deeper into the makeup of the city, looking at both familiar and unfamiliar locations through the lens of such filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini, Mario Monicelli, Brian DePalma, and Ridley Scott.
Federico Fellini by ISBN: 0847818780Date: 1995-07-15Examines the life and work of the Italian film director, and includes texts and comic strips of his unmade films.
The Films of Sergio Leone by ISBN: 9780810860414Date: 2008-02-15In this enhanced revision of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone, Robert C. Cumbow examines the work of this Italian filmmaker who made his mark re-envisioning the American Western. Cumbow also studies Leone's compositional style and the influence of Catholicism and the Italian grand opera tradition on his work. He provides a critical evaluation of Leone's style in reshaping the Western genre (and later, the crime film), as well an assessment of the influences on Leone's work, and his continuing impact on subsequent generations of film makers.
Man in Disorder by ISBN: 9781905886395Date: 2007-01-01Despite the phenomenal international success that Italian director Lina Wertmüller attained in the 1970s with films such as Swept Away and Seven Beauties, there has been no full length in-depth study of her four major films. This book fills that inexplicable void in the scholarship of Italian cinema.
Michelangelo Antonioni by ISBN: 9781934110652Date: 2008-04-01Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews collects a broad range of conversations with this iconoclastic filmmaker, including one, never before in print, with the editor of this volume. In interviews ranging from 1960 to 1983, Antonioni discusses his neuroses, his cinematic concerns, his roots in Italian neorealism, and the reasons he ultimately broke free of the style's constraints. He insists that the struggle to understand the inner lives of characters is the crucial issue that cinema must tackle.
Roberto Rossellini by ISBN: 9780851707945Date: 2001-04-01A master of modern European cinema and a key figure in the Italian neorealist movement, Roberto Rossellini had one of the longest and most varied careers of all major directors. This specially commissioned overview of Rossellini's works examines key issues and themes covering all phases of his career. Leading critics from across the world examine, among other issues, the Fascist context of Rossellini's early work, the view of Europe that emerges in his films, the stylistic trajectory of the work through neorealism and beyond and its influence on the French New Wave, the issues of representation that emerge in later films and his extensive work for television.
Vittorio de Sica by ISBN: 9781443812337Date: 2009-09-01Recognized as a master of Italian and world cinema, Vittorio De Sica is considered one of the major proponents of neorealism, an Italian movement that forever altered the content and style of the cinema worldwide. This work covers De Sica's entire career as a stage and screen actor, director, and screenwriter.
Antonio Pietrangeli, the Director of Women by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781785273193Date: 2020-04-30One of the founding fathers of neorealism in the postwar period in Italy, Antonio Pietrangeli went on to focus his lens upon the female subject. Eight of his ten full-length films feature female protagonists. This study seeks to better understand both his achievements and his failings as a feminist auteur as well as analyse his films by applying new critical and theoretical approaches.
- Rome Open City (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
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- Paisan (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
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- Umberto D. (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
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- Black Sunday (dir. Mario Bava, 1960)
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- L'avventura (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
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- Il Posto (dir. Ermanno Olmi, 1961)
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- Mamma Roma (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)
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- 8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini, 1963)
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- Red Desert (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
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- The Seduction of Mimi (dir. Lina Wertmüller, 1972)
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- Love And Anarchy (dir. Lina Wertmüller, 1973)
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- The Great Beauty (dir. Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
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- Martin Eden (dir. Pietro Marcello, 2020).
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Additional Resources on Selected Major Italian Films
André Bazin and Italian Neorealism by ISBN: 9781441170750Date: 2011-09-15André Bazin and Italian Neorealism presents a new selection of André Bazin's writings on Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Federico Fellini; lesser known but important neorealist works such as The Roof, Forbidden Christ, and Love in the City; and vital topics like realism versus reality, neorealism's eclipse amid postwar Italy's economic prosperity, and the relationship between neorealism and propaganda. This volume thus represents a major contribution to the discipline of cinema studies, as well as a testament to the continuing influence of one of film's pre-eminent critical thinkers.
Eight and a Half (Otto e Mezzo) by ISBN: 9781839024733Date: 2022-05-19Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo) shocked audiences around the world when it was released in 1963 by its sheer auteurist gall. The hero, a film director named Guido Anselmi, seemed to be Fellini's mirror image, and the story to reflect the making of 8 1/2 itself.
- Cineforum Quarterly magazine of cinematographic culture Published by FIC - Italian Cineforum Federation
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- Cinema Nuovo A left-leaning Italian film magazine that published between 1952 and 1996
- Domitor Journals Project - Italy Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, is an association for people interested in cinema from its emergence to its institutionalization around 1915.
- Filmcritica Filmcritica is an Italian periodical of film criticism founded in Rome in 1950
- Italian Culture Italian Culture is the official publication of the American Association for Italian Studies and is currently housed at the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Berkeley. Its interdisciplinary scope reflects the broad and diverse interests, offering subscribers scholarly articles on Italian linguistics, history, literature, cinema, politics, philosophy, folklore, popular culture and migration as well as on Italy's influence on other cultures.
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- Italian Studies Italian Studies has a national and international reputation for academic and scholarly excellence, publishing original articles (in Italian or English) on a wide range of Italian cultural concerns from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. The journal covers a range of disciplines and inter-disciplinary subjects from scholarly and critical work on Italy's literary culture and linguistics to Italian history and politics, film and art history, and gender and cultural studies.
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- Journal of Italian cinema & media studies A fully peer reviewed English language journal, which explores Italian cinema and media as sites of crossing, allowing critical discussion of the work of filmmakers, artists in the film industry and media professionals.
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- Media History Digital Library This link opens in a new window Freely available online portal, featuring millions of pages of books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.
- ANICA (Archivio del Cinema Italiano) The Italian Cinema Database of Anica has its main purpose the cultural and scientific preservation of the historical memory of our cinema. The online version of the Archive (a sample of the much more extensive electronic Archive of Anica) contains the synopses of all the feature films, documentaries produced and distributed since 1930.
- Filmographies Database (Instituto Luce - Cinecittà) Instituto Luce – Cinecittà distributes and supports domestically the theatrical releases of Italian first and second time feature films; moreover distributes films and documentaries made by Italian and European directors and guarantees they are given an adequate release in the national market.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books.
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- Portale Cinema Muto Italiano Italian Silent Film Portal, includes indices, images, filmographies, bibliographies, etc.
- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals This link opens in a new window Searches film and television articles in the International Index to Film Periodicals (1972-current) and Treasures from the Film Archives, which contains silent film-era listings from archives.
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- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window Indexes worldwide publications on literature, language, linguistics, folklore, film, television, and theater from 1923 to the present. See also the MLA Directory of Periodicals.
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- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Articles and reviews from a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, circus, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Former database title: International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) Full Text.
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- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles.
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- Filmitalia Information on contemporary Italian films.
Selected Italian Films
Rome Open City (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
"Though told with more melodramatic flair than the other films that would form this trilogy and starring some well-known actors—Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member."
Received the Grad Prix at Cannes and a nomination for Best Writing at the 1947 Academy Awards.
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The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966).
"THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s."
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Bicycle Thieves (dir. Vittorio de Sica, 1948).
"With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief."
Bicycle Thieves received an Academy Honorary Award (most outstanding foreign language film) in 1950.
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La Notte (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961).
"Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a novelist and his frustrated wife, who, over the course of one night, confront their alienation from each other and the achingly empty bourgeois Milan circles in which they travel."
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Paisan (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946).
"With its documentary-like visuals and its intermingled cast of actors and nonprofessionals, Italians and their American liberators, this look at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people to live their everyday lives in extreme circumstances is equal parts charming sentiment and vivid reality. PAISAN is a treasure of Italian cinema."
Nominated for Best Writing at the Academy Awards. Nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Film from any Source.
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Il Posto (dir. Ermanno Olmi, 1961).
"When young Domenico ventures from the small village of Meda to Milan in search of employment, he finds himself on the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder in a huge, faceless company. The prospects are daunting, but Domenico finds reason for hope in the fetching Antonietta."
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Rocco and His Brothers (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1960).
"Looking for opportunity, five brothers move north with their mother to Milan, finding fame in the boxing ring and love in the same woman."
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Seven Beauties (dir. Lina Wertmüller, 1975).
"A petty thief who lives off of the profits of his seven sisters while claiming to protect their honor at any cost, Pasqualino is arrested for murder and later sent to fight in the army after committing sexual assault. The Germans capture him and he gets sent to a concentration camp where he plots to make his escape by seducing a German officer."
Nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes.
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La Strada (dir. Federico Fellini, 1954).
"Gelsomina is sold by her mother into the employ of Zampanò, a brutal strongman in a traveling circus. When Zampanò encounters an old rival in highwire artist the Fool, his fury is provoked to its breaking point."
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1956.
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Suspiria (dir. Dario Argento, 1977).
"A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders."
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The Great Beauty (dir. Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
"For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city’s literary and elite social circles. But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep unexpectedly finds himself taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the lavish nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome itself, in all its monumental glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty."