Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers

Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers
Author: Jonathan J. Cavallero
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2011-05-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 025203614X

"[This book] explores the different ways in which Italian American directors from the 1920s to the present have responded to their ethnicity. While some directors have used film to declare their ethnic roots and create an Italian American 'imagined community,' others have ignored or even denied their background . . . Cavallero's exploration of the films of Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola,and Tarantino demonstrates how immigrant Italians fought prejudice, how later generations positioned themselves in relation to their predecessors, and how the American cinema, usually seen as a cultural instituion that works to assimlate, has also served as a forum where assimilation was resisted." -- Book cover.

The Transatlantic Gaze

The Transatlantic Gaze
Author: Mary Ann McDonald Carolan
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-12-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438450265

In The Transatlantic Gaze, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan documents the sustained and profound artistic impact of Italian directors, actors, and screenwriters on American film. Working across a variety of genres, including neorealism, comedy, the Western, and the art film, Carolan explores how and why American directors from Woody Allen to Quentin Tarantino have adapted certain Italian trademark techniques and motifs. Allen's To Rome with Love (2012), for example, is an homage to the genius of Italian filmmakers, and to Federico Fellini in particular, whose Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (1952) also resonates with Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as well as with Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty (2000). Tarantino's Kill Bill saga (2003, 2004) plays off elements of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a transatlantic conversation about the Western that continues in Tarantino's Oscar-winning Django Unchained (2012). Lee Daniels's Precious (2009) and Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna (2008), meanwhile, demonstrate that the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, which arose from the political and economic exigencies of postwar Italy, is an effective vehicle for critiquing social issues such as poverty and racism in a contemporary American context. The book concludes with an examination of American remakes of popular Italian films, a comparison that offers insight into the similarities and differences between the two cultures and the transformations in genre, both subtle and obvious, that underlie this form of cross-cultural exchange.

Gangster Priest

Gangster Priest
Author: Robert Casillo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 080209113X

Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive. Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various facets of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists. Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian American films offer what Casillo views as a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Italian America and Southern Italy, the conflicts between the ethnic generations, and the formation and development of Italian American ethnicity (and thus identity) on American soil through the generations. Raised as a Catholic and deeply imbued with Catholic values, Scorsese also deals with certain forms of Southern Italian vernacular religion, which have left their imprint not only on Scorsese himself but also on the spiritually tormented characters of his Italian American films. Casillo also shows how Scorsese interrogates the Southern Italian code of masculine honour in his exploration of the Italian American underworld or Mafia, and through his implicitly Catholic optic, discloses its thoroughgoing and longstanding opposition to Christianity. Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.

Napoli/New York/Hollywood

Napoli/New York/Hollywood
Author: Giuliana Muscio
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0823279391

This cinema history illuminates the role of southern Italian performance traditions on American movies from the silent era to contemporary film. In Napoli/New York/Hollywood, Italian cinema historian Giuliana Muscio investigates the significant influence of Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors on Hollywood cinema. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, Muscio demonstrates how these artists and workers preserved their cultural and performance traditions, which led to innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies. In doing so, she sheds light on the work of generations of artists, as well as the cultural evolution of “Italian-ness” in America over the past century. Muscio examines the careers of Italian performers steeped in an Italian theatrical culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance, 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.

Italian Americans on Screen

Italian Americans on Screen
Author: Ryan Calabretta-Sajder
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793611556

Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future reconsiders Robert Casillo’s definition of Italian-American cinema as “appl[ying] to works by Italian-American directors who treat Italian-American subjects” to expand this classification. Contributors situate Italian-American cinema and media within the contemporary and intersectional debates about ethnic identity, including race, class, gender, and sexuality studies. This book links past scholarship to theoretical underpinnings with new hermeneutical approaches in television and film to establish new interpretations concerning Italian Americans on screen. Scholars of film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

Mussolini's Dream Factory

Mussolini's Dream Factory
Author: Stephen Gundle
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1782382453

The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference. Focused on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945, this book examines the development of an Italian star system and evaluates its place in film production and distribution. The performances and careers of several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari, and Alida Valli, are closely analyzed in terms of their relationships to the political sphere and broader commercial culture, with consideration of their fates in the aftermath of Fascism. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema.

Italian Americans

Italian Americans
Author: Eric Martone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 792
Release: 2016-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN:

The entire Italian American experience—from America's earliest days through the present—is now available in a single volume. This wide-ranging work relates the entire saga of the Italian-American experience from immigration through assimilation to achievement. The book highlights the enormous contributions that Italian Americans—the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States—have made to the professions, politics, academy, arts, and popular culture of America. Going beyond familiar names and stories, it also captures the essence of everyday life for Italian Americans as they established communities and interacted with other ethnic groups. In this single volume, readers will be able to explore why Italians came to America, where they settled, and how their distinctive identity was formed. A diverse array of entries that highlight the breadth of this experience, as well as the multitude of ways in which Italian Americans have influenced U.S. history and culture, are presented in five thematic sections. Featured primary documents range from a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus announcing his discovery to excerpts from President Barack Obama's 2011 speech to the National Italian American Foundation. Readers will come away from this book with a broader understanding of and greater appreciation for Italian Americans' contributions to the United States.

Fifty Hollywood Directors

Fifty Hollywood Directors
Author: Suzanne Leonard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317593944

Fifty Hollywood Directors introduces the most important, iconic and influential filmmakers who worked in Hollywood between the end of the silent period and the birth of the blockbuster. By exploring the historical, cultural and technological contexts in which each director was working, this book traces the formative period in commercial cinema when directors went from pioneers to industry heavyweights. Each entry discusses a director’s practices and body of work and features a brief biography and suggestions for further reading. Entries include: Frank Capra Cecil B DeMille John Ford Alfred Hitchcock Fritz Lang Orson Welles DW Griffith King Vidor This is an indispensible guide for anyone interested in film history, Hollywood and the development of the role of the director.