Francesco Rosi is one of the great realist artists of post-war Italian, indeed post-war world cinema. In this book, author Gaetana Marrone explores the rich visual language in which the Neapolitan filmmaker expresses the cultural icons that constitute his style and images. Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading ineluctably to a designated end and solution. Rosi's logical investigations are conducted by an omniscient eye and translated into a cinematic approach that embraces the details of material reality with the panoramic perspective of a dispassionate observer. This book offers intertextual analyses within such fields as history, politics, literature, and photography, along with production information gleaned from Rosi's personal archives and interviews. It examines Rosi's creative use of film as document, and as spectacle). It is also a study of the specific cinematic techniques that characterize Rosi's work and that visually, compositionally, express his vision of history and the elusive "truth" of past and present social and political realities.

Francesco Rosi is one of the great realist artists of post-war Italian, indeed post-war world cinema. In this book, author Gaetana Marrone explores the rich visual language in which the Neapolitan filmmaker expresses the cultural icons that constitute his style and images. Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading ineluctably to a designated end and solution. Rosi's logical investigations are conducted by an omniscient eye and translated into a cinematic approach that embraces the details of material reality with the panoramic perspective of a dispassionate observer. This book offers intertextual analyses within such fields as history, politics, literature, and photography, along with production information gleaned from Rosi's personal archives and interviews. It examines Rosi's creative use of film as document, and as spectacle). It is also a study of the specific cinematic techniques that characterize Rosi's work and that visually, compositionally, express his vision of history and the elusive "truth" of past and present social and political realities.

In this, the first comprehensive book on Liliana Cavani, Gaetana Marrone redraws the map of postwar Italian cinema to make room for this extraordinary filmmaker, whose representations of transgressive eroticism, spiritual questing, and psychological extremes test the limits of the medium, pushing it into uncharted areas of discovery. Cavani's film "The Night Porter" (1974) created a sensation in the United States and Europe. But in many ways her critically renowned endeavors--which also include "Francesco di Assisi, Galileo, I cannibali, Beyond Good and Evil, The Berlin Affair, " and several operas and documentaries--remain enigmatic to audiences. Here Marrone presents Cavani's work as a cinema of ideas, showing how it takes pleasure in the telling of a story and ultimately revolts against all binding ideological and commercial codes.

The author explores the rich visual language in which Cavani expresses thought, and the cultural icons that constitute her style and images. This approach affords powerful insights into the intricate interlacing of narrated events. We also come to understand the importance assigned to the gaze in the genesis of desire and the acquisition of knowledge. The films come to life in this book as the classical tragedies Cavani intended, where rebels and madmen experience conflict between historical and spiritual reality, the present and the past. Offering intertextual analyses within such fields as psychology, history, and cultural studies, along with production information gleaned from Cavani's personal archives, Marrone boldly advances our understanding of an intriguing, important body of cinematic work.

The "Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies" is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects off Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The "Encyclopedia "is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The encyclopedia also includes of writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food, and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as toscholars.