Napoli/New York/Hollywood is an absorbing investigation of the
significant impact that Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and
directors-and the southern Italian stage traditions they
embodied-have had on the history of Hollywood cinema and American
media, from 1895 to the present day. In a unique exploration of the
transnational communication between American and Italian film
industries, media or performing arts as practiced in Naples, New
York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this groundbreaking book
looks at the historical context and institutional film history from
the illuminating perspective of the performers themselves-the
workers who lend their bodies and their performance culture to
screen representations. In doing so, the author brings to light the
cultural work of families and generations of artists that have
contributed not only to American film culture, but also to the
cultural construction and evolution of "Italian-ness" over the past
century. Napoli/New York/Hollywood offers a major contribution to
our understanding of the role of southern Italian culture in
American cinema, from the silent era to contemporary film. Using a
provocative interdisciplinary approach, the author associates
southern Italian culture with modernity and the immigrants'
preservation of cultural traditions with innovations in the mode of
production and in the use of media technologies (theatrical venues,
music records, radio, ethnic films). Each chapter synthesizes a
wealth of previously under-studied material and displays the
author's exceptional ability to cover transnational cinematic
issues within an historical context. For example, her analysis of
the period from the end of World War I until the beginning of sound
in film production in the end of the 1920s, delivers a meaningful
revision of the relationship between Fascism and American cinema,
and Italian emigration. Napoli/New York/Hollywood examines the
careers of those Italian performers who were Italian not only
because of their origins but because their theatrical culture was
Italian, a culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy,
music, dance and even acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation.
Their previously unexplored story-that of the Italian diaspora's
influence on American cinema-is here meticulously reconstructed
through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive
film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs
to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia
Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase,
Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.
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