International conference
Pietro Ammaturo
Biography
Abstract
P. Ammaturo is journalist, film critic and lecturer in the laboratory of Cinematography and Film Criticism at the University of Basilicata. He is in the communication team of the Giffoni Film Festival and collaborates with the University of Salerno for the courses of History of European and American Cinema, Analysis of the filmic text and Filmology.
Uno sguardo umano sul postcolonialismo: Le rose del deserto di Mario Monicelli
L’intervento verterà sull’analisi dettagliata del film Le rose del deserto, ultima regia di Mario Monicelli e ispirato a Il deserto della Libia di Mario Tobino e a Guerra d’Albania di Giancarlo Fusco. Ambientato nel 1940 nel deserto della Libia, in un periodo di cosiddetta ‘stasi’, il film si propone come fonte d’analisi non solo storica, ma allo stesso tempo sociale, politica, territoriale e con non poca importanza di tipo emotiva. Il contributo proposto verrà sviluppato seguendo una metodologia di tipo comparatistico, concentrandosi sull’aspetto storicoantropologico: il film diventa specchio della contemporaneità, attraverso un certo effetto da ‘istantanea’, permettendoci di proporre una analisi dissacrante e precisa della ‘valanga’ colonialista.
Erica Bellia
Biography
Abstract
Erica Bellia is completing a PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Cambridge with a dissertation entitled: 'Industrial Writing and Anticolonial Discourse in Italy, 1955-1965'. Her research interests include industrial literature and cinema, the reception and production of anti-colonialist thought in Italy, the categories of Modernism and Neomodernism, and the study of the post-war periodical press. Erica collaborates with Todomodo: rivista internazionale di studi sciasciani as assistant to the editorial director.
Algeria: anno settimo.
Le attività del Comitato Anticoloniale Italiano (CAI) attraverso un documentario
L'intervento intende partire da un documentario girato nel 1961, Algeria: anno settimo (21 minuti, diretto da Pompeo De Angelis, commento di Lucio Luzzatto), e prodotto dal CAI per riflettere sul ruolo di quest’ultimo nella ricezione, diffusione e produzione del pensiero anticolonialista in Italia nella prima metà degli anni Sessanta. Algeria: anno settimo, infatti, mostra già ed enuclea alcuni aspetti che saranno poi distintivi dell’anticolonialismo italiano: il legame di continuità istituito con l’esperienza della Resistenza (su cui cfr. Neelam Srivastava, Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930 – 1970, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); la riflessione sugli aspetti economici della dominazione coloniale; la costruzione di un’estetica del conflitto; il silenzio sul passato coloniale italiano. Un esame della diffusione del documentario – su cui frammentarie ma importanti informazioni si ricavano dall’analisi delle carte d’archivio del CAI – può dirci qualcosa sui processi di circolazione e disseminazione di questi materiali, sulle persone e istituzioni coinvolte, sui canali e, in definitiva, sulla posta in gioco dell’anticolonialismo italiano dei primi anni Sessanta.
Elena Benelli
Biography
Abstract
Elena Benelli (Concordia University, Montreal) has published, with Professor Grace Russo-Bullaro, the volume Shifting and Shaping a National Identity: Transnational Writers and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today, as well as several book chapters and articles on migrant writers and contemporary Italian fiction and cinema.
The Order of Things: Borderscapes and Biopower in Italian Postcolonial Cinema
When we look at our planet from a satellite, we remark that the Earth has no borders. Borders are lines that seal the territory as well as a crucial site of intervention. I will focus on Andrea Segre’s film, The Order of Things, and his documentary Mare chiuso. I will explore the postcolonial ramifications of the exteriorization of borders in Libya and the transformation of the Mediterranean in a barrier between North and South, through the imposition of passport controls and new bio-controlling technologies. Furthermore, I will analyze how the visual representation of migration disrupts b/orders, b/ordering and create new borderscapes.
Luca Caminati
Biography
Abstract
Luca Caminati is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His current project, Traveling Auteurs: The Geopolitical Entanglements of Postwar Italian Art Cinema, investigates the travel films of Italian directors in Non-Aligned Countries.
Notes for an Italian Anticolonial Film Archive
This paper wants to bring attention to the Italian anticolonial film tradition of the long ‘68 by focusing on the film culture from that period that was in dialogue with liberation movements world-wide. I contend that a potential "anticolonial film archive" could point to a useful rethinking of the history of Italian cinema under an internationalist lens, and to provide an antidote to the colonial imagery that pervades the current media culture in Italy and elsewhere.
Rossella Catanese
Biography
Abstract
Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Udine, she is also Adjunct Professor of ‘History of Italian Cinema’ at NYU Florence. Previously, she collaborated with Sapienza University of Rome, University of Milan – Bicocca, and IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. Her publications focus on film restoration, cinematheques, film history, experimental film and avant-garde: among various articles and essays, her books include the monograph Lacune binarie. Il restauro dei film e le tecnologie digitali (Bulzoni, Rome 2013), and the edited collections Futurist Cinema. Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2017) and From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media, co-edited with Francesca Scotto Lavina and Valentina Valente (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle Upon Tyne 2019).
Black and White Mogadishu:
Cinematographic Portrait of a (Former) Italian Colony
This contribution intends to propose an analysis of a short film, emblematic of the non-fiction film heritage of the second post-war era in Italy. Mogadiscio bianca e nera (Gianfranco Pagani, 1954), produced by Documento Film, and recently digitized by the lab “La camera ottica” for Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa, is fully inscribed in the tradition of the ethnographic documentary. The description of the Somali capital refers to the same cinematographic medium, between the white of the ancient architectures of different ages and styles and the black of the skin of its people, described as “indigenous”, in a vision still heir to the colonial dimension. The clear division of the public space, in which the white neighborhoods are the institutional ones while the natives are relegated to the slums, denotes the still separatist impact of the colonial imposition.
The 1950s were also the years of AFIS, the Italian Trusteeship Administration of Somalia, the only case of trusteeship assigned to a nation defeated in the Second World War; the film is therefore placed halfway between the massacre of Mogadishu (1948) and Somali independence in 1960.
Yet, the story of the markets, of the so-called “big city” and of the working activities of the local population, seems to want to liberate itself from the colonialist dichotomy through a more careful look at the real life of the inhabitants of Mogadishu.
The representational ambiguity triggered by the ethnographic dimension is undeniable: it regards the configuration of diversity and the so-called imagological processes - i.e. images, prejudices, clichés and stereotypes of a given culture, according to the literary studies on national and ethnic stereotypes by Hugo Dyserinck (1966) and Daniel-Henri Pageaux (1994), pivotal in the self-assertion of European identity through alterity that over the centuries justified the control and influence exercised in colonized territories.
Nevertheless, a dimension of simultaneity timidly emerges in the film, which Edward W. Said, using a musical term, calls “contrapuntal” (2007: p. 141); the music composed for the film by Ussen Scek and Mohamed Fara, despite soliciting a typical trait of exoticism, strengthen the truthful presence of Somali identity and culture.
Valerio Coladonato
Biography
Abstract
Valerio Coladonato is Assistant Professor (RTDb) at Sapienza University of Rome and Associate Researcher at the Paris EHESS. He has published essays on stardom, gender, Italian cinema and its reception in France.
Totò postcoloniale. Maschera e mimicry negli anni del boom
L’intervento parte da concetti legati alle teorie postcoloniali – come quelli di “maschera” e “mimicry” – per rileggere l’ultimo decennio della produzione cinematografica di Totò. I suoi ruoli si fanno carico di uno slittamento nell’articolazione tra razza e classe sociale, attraverso i meccanismi del mascheramento, della truffa, dello scambio d’identità. Totò si rende protagonista di fantasie esotiche e di un ripetuto confronto con l’alterità razziale: i suoi film intercettano, da un lato, la rimozione delle recenti esperienze coloniali fasciste e, dall’altro, l’evoluzione della “questione meridionale” negli anni del boom.
Massimiliano Coviello
Biography
Abstract
Massimiliano Coviello is Associated Professor of Film and Media Studies at Link Campus University. His research focuses on links between images, witness and memory, Italian cinema and migration phenomena, analysis of film and seriality. Among his publications are the books Sensibilità e potere. Il cinema di Pablo Larraín (Cosenza 2017, coauthored with F. Zucconi), Testimoni di guerra. Cinema, memoria, archivio (Venezia 2015) and the essay Emigrazione in Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di vita e forme di rappresentazione (Milano-Udine 2014, edited by R. De Gaetano).
Estetica e politica di uno sguardo postcoloniale: il cinema di Andrea Segre
Il cinema di Andrea Segre può essere pensato come uno spazio aperto all’incontro con l’altro, una dimora narrativa per le soggettività costrette ai margini e in particolare per le forme di vita migranti. Seguace della poetica del pedinamento teorizzata da Cesare Zavattini, cofondatore di Zalab, laboratorio audiovisivo e associazione culturale che da anni realizza e distribuisce documentari partecipativi per raccontare storie di subalternità, Segre è fautore di una politica dello sguardo tesa a superare gli steccati tra documentario e fiction, interessata a cercare e creare immagini in cui tra osservatore e osservato sussista sempre un dialogo e un avvicendamento.
L’intervento si concentrerà su Come un uomo sulla terra (Segre, Yimer e Biadene, 2008), Mare chiuso (Segre, Liberti, 2012) e L’ordine delle cose (2017). Si tratta di tre film dedicati ai fenomeni migratori contemporanei e all’eredità coloniale italiana in Libia. All’attualità dei temi affrontati si affiancano le strategie estetiche e le riflessioni politiche di cui questi film si fanno portatori e in particolare: le divergenze tra le rappresentazioni mediatiche dei migranti, le loro memorie e auto-rappresentazioni; la conflittualità tra il controllo dei flussi e delle frontiere e l’esercizio di un diritto alla mobilità e al viaggio; infine l’importanza delle testimonianze e dei racconti di vita per la costruzione di nuove forme di comunità.
Leonardo De Franceschi
Biography
Abstract
Leonardo De Franceschi is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Roma Tre, with a focus on Postcolonial Film and Media Studies. He works for an inclusive revision of the narratives on Italianness and for the creation of spaces of agency in creative industries for talents expressing subaltern subjectivities. His most recent publications are Il nero di Giovanni Vento: Un film e un regista verso l’Italia plurale (2021), La cittadinanza come luogo di lotta (2018), Lo schermo e lo spettro (2017).
Giovanni Vento’s Il nero (Black, 1967): a message in a bottle for a plural, color conscious Italy
When thinking through film production about Italy of the mid 1960s, in connection with the process of decolonization in Africa, it would be relatively easy to sketch the image of a country split in two, between a leftist, third-worldist side, aligned with Algeria and the new postcolonial African countries – epitomized by Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers – and a reactionary party, attached to the nostalgia for a world order dominated by Western colonial empires – to be associated with millions viewers of Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Africa: Blood and Guts. The truth is possibly more complicated than that, in a nation far more inclined to sympathize with Black Americans fighting for civil rights or even for countries still actively at war against their former colonial powers, than to scrutinize the Italian nation-building process, in connection with internal and external dynamics of racialization. In that country, widely dominated by a socially constructed forgetfulness of colonial and racial experience, former communist film critic Giovanni Vento in 1967 dared to evoke in his debut film Il nero, based in Naples, the image of an emerging new generation made of “white and black Italians and strangers”, more prepared to deal with internal recent and older histories of encounter and intermingling, facing a systemic order ready to choke their energies of resistance. A bet doomed to be lost, Il nero is a message in a bottle to be opened in a nation still uncomfortable with its history and its myths of moral superiority and immunity to racism.
Simone Dotto
Biography
Abstract
Simone Dotto is a researcher and a lecturer in “History and Technique of Television and New Media” at the Udine University. His main interests deal with history of sound technologies, non-fiction cinema and media cultures in Italy between the Interwar period and the early aftermath of WWII. He is currently collaborating with national and international projects (PRIN “Modi, memorie e culture della produzione cinematografica” and HERA “ViCTOR E. Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration and Recostruction in PostWII Europe). He is the author of Voci d’Archivio. Fonografia e culture del suono nell’Italia tra le due guerre (Meltemi – Milano 2019).
A Journey of Interest.
Roadmaps and Agendas of Italian Sponsored Cinema after Colonial Loss.
When addressing post-WWII colonial loss, “street building activities” became one of the key rhetorical arguments waged by the early Italian republican government to persuade national and international public opinion of the civilizing efforts made by the settlers and of their right to keep exerting control over former colonies (Morone 2011; Labanca 2002). Such insistance on the routes of transport and communication is also telling of the stubborn need to conceive northern and eastern African territories as spaces “traversed” (Innis 1950) by geopolitical and business interests, even after the fall of the empire.
It has already been acknowledged how italian newsreels and non-fiction cinema in the 1950s contributed in shaping said national narratives of early decolonization by harnessing a sense of nostalgia and national belonging toward the lost territories (Morescu 2015; Baratieri 2011; Ottaviano 2008). My contribution will elaborate on this point focusing on the sponsored character of some of these films, and on the governmental tasks to which they proved useful (Grieveson 2017; Acland-Wasson 2011). The production story of Istituto Luce’s Una lettera dall’Africa (Bonzi, 1951) will serve as the main case study: after the Italian administration was assigned with the Trust Territory of Somaliland, the car trip from Tripoli to Mogadishu taken by former air-pilots Leonardo Bonzi and Maner Lualdi didn’t just followed a deliberately political agenda, but was also supported by the sponsorship of media (“Il Corriere della sera”) and automotive companies (Alfa Romeo, Pirelli). By drawing mainly on corporate archival sources and the transnational corpus of non-fiction film materials gathered within the ViCTOR-E research project, I will critically assess Bonzi and Lualdi’s “sentimental journey” as both a representation as a direct byproduct of the state and industrial infrastructures underlying the Italian presence in Eastern Africa.
Linde Luijnenburg
Biography
Abstract
Linde Luijnenburg teaches European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. After her doctorate from the University of Warwick on the project she will discuss at this conference, she was awarded fellowships in London (Institute of Modern Languages Research) and Amsterdam (University of Amsterdam) for a project on Somali-ness in England and the Netherlands.
She has published 'peer-reviewed' articles on literature and cinema in Italian, Dutch and English. Her main interests are postcolonial studies, film studies, new media, Italian studies, and comparative literature. She has produced several short films and documentaries.
Hidden Postcolonial Conscience in Italian Cinema: Attempts to Autodefine ‘The Italian’ Through Representations of the ‘Black Other’ in the commedia all’italiana
In my paper, I would like to discuss my PhD dissertation for which I am currently working on a monography. Combining Italian Studies with Postcolonial Theory and Film Studies, it explores representations of what I have coined the Black Other: In order to construct the cinematographic figure of the ‘italiano medio’ (the standard Italian) this Black Other (everything the standard Italian is not) results to be a much required and central figure in the nationally celebrated Italian comedic films of the 1950s-1970s called commedia all’italiana. This cinematographic Black Other gains in agency over this period of two decades, coming to dominate iconic ‘Italian’ public spaces inside film plots, and from a meta-perspective, taking over a dominant position in some of the most critically acclaimed cinematographic productions now belonging to what we could describe as the ‘Italian cultural archive’. As such, imaginaries of an ‘Italian identity’, strongly interrelated with colonial enterprises and particular pieces of land, are deconstructed, predicting current socio-political crises many European nation states find themselves in.
Gianmarco Mancosu
Biography
Abstract
Gianmarco Mancosu is postdoctoral researcher in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cagliari. His research interests deal with Italian colonial and postcolonial histories and visual cultures.
At the Empire’s end: Newsreels and Documentaries on the former Italian Colonies between memories and the new projection in Africa (1946-1960)
My presentation will tackle a broad range of non-fiction films about Italy’s former colonies produced between the end of WWII and the 1960s. The production of this footage reflected a shifting balance between state propaganda and private forms of production. Furthermore, the study of the film’s mediated gaze on the former colonial world will offer a valuable means to understand the ambiguous and contradictory articulation of Italian colonial memories.
Lorenzo Marmo
Biography
Abstract
Lorenzo Marmo is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Universitas Mercatorum (Rome) and he also teaches film history at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. In 2017 he was Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo melodramma noir (Bulzoni 2018) and the co-editor, with Carlo Baghetti and Jim Carter, of Italian Industrial Literature and Film. Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor (Peter Lang 2021).
Scatti (post)coloniali. Ricorrenze e metamorfosi del discorso fotografico italiano sull’Africa tra gli anni Trenta e gli anni Sessanta.
Sulla base degli sparuti ma preziosi contributi precedenti (Labanca, Rossetto), si traccerà un quadro degli stilemi fotografici con cui è stata raccontata (sia a livello istituzionale che nella pratica amatoriale) l’Africa Orientale Italiana. Si vedrà poi in che modo le retoriche del corpo, del paesaggio e del pittoresco presenti nella fotografia degli anni Trenta perdurino o si modifichino nella più tarda produzione dedicata all’Africa indipendente nel periodo postbellico.
Mariano Mestman
Biography
Abstract
M. Mestman is Head Researcher at the National Council of Scientific Research and the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). His academic works focus on the bonds between Third World, Latin American, and Italian cinemas from the 1950s to 1970s.
The Italian Third Worldism in the film I dannati della terra (V.Orsini and A.Filippi, 1968)
The film The Wretched of the Earth (V.Orsini and A.Filippi, 1968) is a prominent example of the connection between the Italian “cinema of intervention”, the legacy of the Resistenza Partigiana and the Third World struggles of the 1960s. Set as a “film within a film”, this testimonial fiction tells the story of an Italian leftist filmmaker who faces the challenge of finishing a film about the liberation struggles of sub-Saharan Africa by building on documentary footage. I will recover overlooked and little-known documents (part of a forthcoming book) to show the film was the expression of an active cinematic Third Worldist internationalism of the time.
Nico Psaltidis
Biography
Abstract
Nico Psaltidis is an Italian film and media researcher and filmmaker. After earning an MPhil in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, he joined the PhD program at the same institution. His current research interests range from ethnocinema to issues of creative labour in the media industries.
Against Ethical Distance in Ethnocinema: the Postcolonial Films of Pier Paolo Pasolini
Throughout the period of decolonisation, innovative ethno-cinéastes showed non-Western peoples entering modernity, with all the violence entailed in such transition. However, as the years passed, ethnographic cinema became integral to an institutionalised model of visual anthropology built on an implicit need for showing an ethical interaction with the filmed subjects. Against ethnographic cinema’s distanced take on history, Pasolini and his films seem to advocate a more spectacular intervention in the here and now. Taking cue from the self-reflexivity of underlining the White presence in the postcolonial worlds in Rouch's cinema, Pasolini envisioned a unified history for the West and its Others. In present times the trajectories of ethnographic cinema and those of filmmakers like Pasolini diverge so much as to give rise to criticism of their cinema marked by the assumptions of methodological correctness of ethnographic filmmaking. While acknowledging to a certain extent such criticisms, the aim of the paper is to dispel the moralism that underlies them.
Lorenzo Carlo Tore
Biography
Abstract
Lorenzo Carlo Tore is a researcher and collaborates with Centro Studi Movimenti (study center on social movements) in Parma. His research focused on Latinamerican Documentary in 60’s and 70’s. At the moment he’s working on the translation of unpublished essays about “Third cinema”, political and militant cinema in Latin America. He’s co-founder of Culture Diffuse, a social enterprise based in Parma that works in the promotion of local history and culture. He published La Sardegna in pellicola tra isola e continente (Admira, 2017).
Vittorio Bottego tra cinema e televisione
Analisi e decostruzione della figura dell'esploratore italiano
L’intervento ha come obiettivo quello di discutere e decostruire la figura del celebre esploratore italiano di fine ‘800, Vittorio Bottego (Parma, 1860 – Daga Roba, 1897). Attraverso il confronto dei lavori cinematografici e televisivi a lui dedicati è mia intenzione quella di capire quali parole usare per quali immagini, al fine di evitare che ancora oggi, a oltre un secolo di distanza dalla morte del militare parmigiano, si prosegua a parlare e a ritrarre quell’uomo e quell’epoca con l’utilizzo di termini e archetipi di provenienza coloniale. Terrò in considerazione soprattutto gli elaborati Sulle orme di Vittorio Bottego (Leandro Lucchetti e Piero Amighetti, 1987), e la sceneggiatura di Tommaso Dazzi e Graziano Diana, Nel cuore dell’Africa, storia di Vittorio Bottego esploratore (1987), scritta per un film di finzione che non vide mai la luce.
Carlo Ugolotti
Biography
Abstract
Carlo Ugolotti is Post-doctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for the History of Art and researcher at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza e dell’Età Contemporanea di Parma (ISREC).
La voce del colonizzato: uso del sonoro come mezzo per definire l'Alterità in Abunas Messias e L'assedio
Questo intervento sarà incentrato sull’analisi della resa cinematografica della voce come strumento di costruzione dell’Alterità africana. Attraverso due casi studio - Abuna Messias (1938) e L’assedio (1998) – si proverà a vedere come il sonoro possa essere uno strumento di privazione/restituzione dell’umanità del Subalterno. Si cercheranno di vedere i rapporti tra i film presi in esame e il pensiero politico razzista e post-colonialista, cercando di problematizzare il rapporto tra autore e rappresentato.