Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them "Cinema Paradiso" and "Life Is Beautiful." Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs--Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Fellini--extinguished the revolutionary impulse which had characterized Italian filmmaking since the Second World War.

In "After Fellini," Millicent Marcus contends that in the late 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of Italian filmmakers has transcended these obstacles and reasserted Italy's importance in world cinema. Through in-depth critiques of such acclaimed films as "The Last Emperor," "Caro Diario," and "Stolen Children," as well as the immensely popular "Cinema Paradiso" and "Life Is Beautiful," Marcus details how today's auteurs have both reflected and resisted Italy's shifting social, political, and cultural identity, and created a body of work that signals a new beginning for Italian cinema.

The Cinema of Ettore Scola offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. Scola was a crucial figure in postwar Italy as a screenwriter of comedies in the 1950s and 1960s who later became one of the country's most beloved directors in the 1970s and 1980s with his bittersweet comedies and dramas on history, politics, and social customs. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career. The volume (containing fourteen chapters) is organized in four parts, the first two of which focus both on Scola's contributions to Comedy Italian Style-as a screenwriter and director-and his commentaries on the history of Italy, Rome, and the film industry. The second half of the book is divided into sections on Scola's relationship to and use of place, politics, and legacy. Mariapia Comand's chapter begins the volume with an exploration of the development of Scola's narrative methods by examining his early work as an illustrator, ghostwriter, and screenwriter. Later, Brian Tholl approaches one of Scola's best-known and most frequently studied films, Una giornata particolare, from a less-explored perspective, namely its commentary on surveillance and internal exile, or confino, during the fascist period. At the close of the volume is a broad-sweeping tribute to and reflection on Scola's filmmaking by Gian Piero Brunetta, a leading historian of Italian cinema who developed a close relationship with Scola over the years, who reveals the varied narrative strategies linked to food that the director utilized for character development and social commentary. The Cinema of Ettore Scola makes Scola accessible to English-reading audiences and helps readers better understand his film style, the major themes of his work, and the representations of twentieth-century Italian history in his films.

What is the impulse to transform literary narrative into cinematic discourse, and what are the factors that determine that transformation? In "Filmmaking by the Book," Millicent Marcus considers the adaptive process as the sum total of a series of encounters: the institutional encounter between literary and film cultures, the semiotic encounter between two very different signifying systems, and the personal encounter between author and filmmaker--sometimes involving an overt Oedipal struggle for selfhood.

Marcus explores that process by looking at key works by such major postwar Italian filmmakers as Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini, Fellini, and the Taviani brothers. Drawing on the methodologies of semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and ideological criticism, she finds that cinematic imaginations typically employ literary texts self-consciously to resolve specific artistic problems. Each of the filmmakers studied here define their own authorial task in relation to that of the literary precursor, and insert "umbilical" scenes or "allegories of adaptation" to teach viewers how to read their cinematic rewriting of literary sources.

The Cinema of Ettore Scola offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. Scola was a crucial figure in postwar Italy as a screenwriter of comedies in the 1950s and 1960s who later became one of the country's most beloved directors in the 1970s and 1980s with his bittersweet comedies and dramas on history, politics, and social customs. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career. The volume (containing fourteen chapters) is organized in four parts, the first two of which focus both on Scola's contributions to Comedy Italian Style-as a screenwriter and director-and his commentaries on the history of Italy, Rome, and the film industry. The second half of the book is divided into sections on Scola's relationship to and use of place, politics, and legacy. Mariapia Comand's chapter begins the volume with an exploration of the development of Scola's narrative methods by examining his early work as an illustrator, ghostwriter, and screenwriter. Later, Brian Tholl approaches one of Scola's best-known and most frequently studied films, Una giornata particolare, from a less-explored perspective, namely its commentary on surveillance and internal exile, or confino, during the fascist period. At the close of the volume is a broad-sweeping tribute to and reflection on Scola's filmmaking by Gian Piero Brunetta, a leading historian of Italian cinema who developed a close relationship with Scola over the years, who reveals the varied narrative strategies linked to food that the director utilized for character development and social commentary. The Cinema of Ettore Scola makes Scola accessible to English-reading audiences and helps readers better understand his film style, the major themes of his work, and the representations of twentieth-century Italian history in his films.

The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar directors had to come to terms with it, whether in seeming imitation (the early Olmi), in commercial exploitation (the middle Comencini) or in ostensible rejection (the recent Tavianis). Despite the reactionary pressures of the marketplace and the highly personalized visions of Fellini, Antonioni. And Visconti, Italian cinema has maintained its moral commitment to use the medium in socially responsible ways--if not to change the world, as the first neorealists hoped, then at least to move filmgoers to face the pressing economic, political, and human problems in their midst. From Rossellini's Open City (1945) to the Taviani brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982). The author does close readings of seventeen films that tell the story of neorealism's evolving influence on Italian postwar cinematic expression. Other films discussed are De Sica's Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. De Santis's Bitter Rice, Comencini's Bread, Love, and Fantasy, Fellini's La strada, Visconti's Senso, Antonioni's Red Desert, Olmi's Il Posto, Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, Pasolini's Teorema, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, Bertolucci's The Conformist, Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy, Scola's We All Loved Each Other So Much provides the occasion for the author's own retrospective consideration of how Italian cinema has fulfilled, or disappointed, the promise of neorealism.

Noted as a 'civil poet' by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a creative and philosophical genius whose works challenged generations of Western Europeans and Americans to reconsider not only issues regarding the self, but also various social concerns. Pasolini's works touched and continues to inspire students, scholars, and intellectuals alike to question the status quo. This collection of thirteen articles and two interviews evidences the on-going discourse around Pasolini's lasting impressions on the new generation. Pasolini's Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini thus explores the civic poet's oeuvre in four parts: poetry, theatre, film, and culture. Although the collection does not include every genre in which Pasolini wrote, it addresses many, some which often receive little or no attention, particularly in Italian Studies of North America. The underlining theme of the book, 'death, eros and literary enterprise' intertwines these genres in a rather unique way, allowing for inter-disciplinary interpretations to Pasolini's rich opus. The edited volume concludes with two artists, Dacia Maraini and Ominio71's reflections on Pasolini in the 21st century. In fact, the cover represents a recent work on Ominio71 underscoring Pasolini's visual presence still within the Roman walls. In conclusion, this collection demonstrates how his works still influence contemporary Italian society and motivate intellectual dialogue through new theoretical outlooks on Pasolini's oeuvre.

Noted as a 'civil poet' by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a creative and philosophical genius whose works challenged generations of Western Europeans and Americans to reconsider not only issues regarding the self, but also various social concerns. Pasolini's works touched and continues to inspire students, scholars, and intellectuals alike to question the status quo. This collection of thirteen articles and two interviews evidences the on-going discourse around Pasolini's lasting impressions on the new generation. Pasolini's Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini thus explores the civic poet's oeuvre in four parts: poetry, theatre, film, and culture. Although the collection does not include every genre in which Pasolini wrote, it addresses many, some which often receive little or no attention, particularly in Italian Studies of North America. The underlining theme of the book, 'death, eros and literary enterprise' intertwines these genres in a rather unique way, allowing for inter-disciplinary interpretations to Pasolini's rich opus. The edited volume concludes with two artists, Dacia Maraini and Ominio71's reflections on Pasolini in the 21st century. In fact, the cover represents a recent work on Ominio71 underscoring Pasolini's visual presence still within the Roman walls. In conclusion, this collection demonstrates how his works still influence contemporary Italian society and motivate intellectual dialogue through new theoretical outlooks on Pasolini's oeuvre.

The last decade has witnessed an outpouring of Italian films that deal with Fascism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This would appear to mark a distinct change from the postwar reluctance to represent such an infamous history. Roberto Benigni's popular "Life is Beautiful" (1997) is an obvious example, but there have been a number of other works that have not been exported that also attest to a distinct tendency within Italian domestic production to address the issue. Millicent Marcus's "Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz" looks at this development, attributing the new acceptance not only to an international film sensation, but to a domestic cultural climate at once receptive to Holocaust representation, and ready to produce its own forms of historical testimony.

Throughout the book, Marcus brings a variety of perspectives - psychoanalytical, ideological, mass cultural - to bear on the question of how Italian filmmakers are confronting the Holocaust, and why now given the sparse output of Holocaust films produced in Italy from 1945 to the early 1990s. What emerges is a fascinating look at how film is being used to confront a particularly damning aspect of cultural history.

Marcus's study features in-depth analyses of five recent Italian films: Ricky Tognazzi's "Canone inverso," Ettore Scola's "Concorrenza sleale," Andrea and Antonio Frazzi's" Il cielo cade," Alberto Negrin's "Perlasca," and Ferzan Ozpetek's "La finestra di fronte," As an added feature, the book includes a DVD of Scola's short film "'43-'97," which has been unavailable outside of Italy until now.