Italian Film in the Present Tense

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by Millicent Marcus

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > Italy
Keywords: Italy, 2000s, 2010s
Publishing date: 2023
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Collection: Toronto Italian Studies
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 290 pages
6 x 8 ¾ inches (15 x 22.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4875-4619-9

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Book Presentation:
For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini's death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tense confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary.

Millicent 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. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea, along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its "post-Fellini" moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense.

About the Author:
Millicent Marcus is a professor of Italian Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University.

Press Reviews:
"Millicent Marcus’s new book confirms her status as the preeminent authority in Italian film studies in North America. Offering a constellation of close readings of key films, the book draws a map of Italian cinematic production since 2000. Marcus’s brilliant analyses of these films interweave film semiotics, social and political considerations, deep knowledge of Italian film history, as well as an erudite awareness of the artistic legacies continuing to inform cultural production in Italy today."
―Áine O'Healy, Professor of Italian, Loyola Marymount University, and author of Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame

"Millicent Marcus’s groundbreaking work has once again provided a definitive conceptual language for the vision driving new generations of filmmakers. In lyrical, lucid prose and via insightful close readings, Italian Film in the Present Tense amply proves Marcus’s case: that contemporary Italian cinema is as innovative, rooted, and politically engaged as ever. The rigorous, medium-specific analysis tracks a multitude of ways in which twenty-first-century Italian cinema takes the pulse of Italy’s body politic – and shows how its creative vitality enables deep memory, political soul-searching, and profound hope for the future."
―Elena Past, Professor of Italian, Wayne State University

"In her new book, Marcus offers an insightful, lively, and very personal reading of some of the great figures of contemporary Italian cinema as well as of the lesser-known directors of the new millennium – a vast continent of cultural models now mapped with lucidity within crime stories, gendered landscapes, regional peripheries, migration, and political contexts. Italian Film in the Present Tense is a remarkable and entirely engaging book, a major work of scholarship."
―Gaetana Marrone, Professor of Italian, Princeton University

See the publisher website: University of Toronto Press

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