Books by Catherine O'Rawe
he Total Art: Italian Cinema from Silent Screen to Digital Image, ed. J. Luzzi, 2020
Examines the popular in Italian cinema through the lens of post-war melodrama and post-2010 polit... more Examines the popular in Italian cinema through the lens of post-war melodrama and post-2010 political comedies
Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context, 2018
This volume will be the first work to consider rural cinema-going from a global perspective. Aimi... more This volume will be the first work to consider rural cinema-going from a global perspective. Aiming to provide a rich and wide-ranging introduction to this growing field and to further develop some of its key questions, this volume is an innovative interjection that brings North American and European ruralities into dialogue with contributions on Latin America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. This volume offers a structure for understanding the framework of rural cinema-going, moving beyond a Western focus that is essential for thinking through questions of the rural, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world.
These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the w... more These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.
Book chapter by Catherine O'Rawe
Il cinema e Pirandello, ed. E. Lauretta, 2003
in L'attore nel cinema italiano contemporaneo: storia, performance, immagine, ed. by Pedro Armoci... more in L'attore nel cinema italiano contemporaneo: storia, performance, immagine, ed. by Pedro Armocida and Andrea Minuz (Venice: Marsilio, 2017), pp. 235-45.
in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, ed. by Tom Whittaker and... more in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, ed. by Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 157-72.
Alain Delon: Style, Stardom, and Masculinity, ed. by Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (Bloomsbury, 2015)
The major French/Italian co-productions starring Alain Delon (Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and h... more The major French/Italian co-productions starring Alain Delon (Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and his Brothers, (Visconti, 1960), L’eclisse/The Eclipse (Antonioni, 1962) and Il gattopardo/The Leopard (Visconti, 1963)) have been little studied from the viewpoint of Delon’s star image and performance style. One of the reasons for this is the neglect of star studies within the discipline of Italian film studies: additionally, work on star studies in the Italian context has emphasised the need to view stars as ‘cultural symbol and conduit for ideas about gender, values and national identity’ (Gundle 2008) and so has been unable to account for the influence of non-Italian stars working in Italian cinema. This paper will examine Delon’s performance style in Rocco and His Brothers, probing the established definitions of his ‘impassive acting style’ (Hayes 2004), and ‘expressionless face’ (Austin 2003). It will raise the question of whether Delon’s critical status as ‘homme fatal’ who is ‘too beautiful’ (Vincendeau 2000) has obscured the range and variety of his performance idiom in these French/Italian films, and how the fact of dubbing his voice into Italian works to support or undermine his position as erotic object of the camera’s gaze.
in Directory of World Cinema: Italy (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), pp. 105-07.
in Mafia Movies: a Reader, ed D. Renga (University of Toronto Press, 2011).
This chapter discusses the femme fatale and the homme fatal as figures of transnational transmiss... more This chapter discusses the femme fatale and the homme fatal as figures of transnational transmission in Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, De Santis, 1949) and Ossessione (Obsession, Visconti, 1943)
Essays and Articles by Catherine O'Rawe
The Italianist, 2021
This short piece reflects upon a particular kind of social media use during Italy's lockdown from... more This short piece reflects upon a particular kind of social media use during Italy's lockdown from March to June 2020: it addresses the use of Instagram Live as a medium for stars like Alessandro Borghi to intervene in debates, and to construct a dialogue with fans and experts during an unprecedented period of national crisis. The piece considers how Instagram Live can be studied as a media platform that is now important for the construction of the online celebrity identity, and which offers a particular effect of intimacy and access to celebrity, but which presents specific methodological and interpretative challenges.
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2019
Report on the conference held at the University of Turin, 17–18 May 2018, funded by the British A... more Report on the conference held at the University of Turin, 17–18 May 2018, funded by the British Academy
Carmela Sazio, discovered by Roberto Rossellini for this neorealist classic Paisa', has been forg... more Carmela Sazio, discovered by Roberto Rossellini for this neorealist classic Paisa', has been forgotten by film history. The paper analyses the discourses around her 'disturbing' bodily presence in Paisa', as a non-professional and as a girl with unconventional looks for the screen. It places Carmela within the wider context of the use of non-professionals in the post-war period in Italy, and looks specifically at the dangers that cinema was felt to pose to unprotected girls and women.
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Books by Catherine O'Rawe
Book chapter by Catherine O'Rawe
Essays and Articles by Catherine O'Rawe
In association with the Centro Ricerche Attore e Divismo, Università di Torino, and the British Academy.
Download the CFP in Italian or English here.
By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier or reduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by the reduce to familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.
On Checco Zalone, I soliti idioti, Italiano medio
of the 1970s in Italy. Giordana’s film investigates the 1975 murder of intellectual and director Pier Paolo Pasolini using a variety of media sources, while La prima linea is a fictional reconstruction of particular moments of the terrorist campaign of the group Prima Linea. The article places the films in the context of contemporary
Italian cinema’s obsession with the return to the 1970s, and examines the use of archive footage as part of a strategy by the filmmakers to negotiate the problematic memories of the period. Finally, it considers the consequences of this return to the archive for thinking about historical memory, postmemory, and the difficult
and sometimes tortured dynamic between the present and the past in relation to the 1970s in Italy, and elsewhere.
It is important, however, to restore a full picture of the array of genres which narrated and refracted the Resistance experience in the post-war period.
To this end, this article looks at a key genre that has been overlooked by scholarship, the opera film or melodramma. In examining Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (Before Him All Rome Trembled, Gallone, 1946), the article considers Mary Wood’s contention (in Italian cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2005, 109) that in this period ‘realist cinematic conventions were insufficient for the maximum perception of the historical context’, and that the ‘affective charge’ of melodrama was essential for restoring this complexity. It assesses the appeal to the emotions produced by the film, and the ways in which this is constructed through the bodily and vocal performance of the opera divo, and questions the critical division between emotion (always viewed as excessive) and authenticity (seen in neorealism, the mode of seriousness) which has seen the opera film relegated to
the margins of post-war Italian film history.
within a tradition of writing about Sicily, a tradition which is, it has been argued, ‘citationary’ and intertextual. It then outlines the three principal techniques the authors use to construct a
particular rhetorical discourse of the Sicilian place, which entwines texts and landscape in a particular manner: they create literary cartographies and topographies of Sicily, they describe and recuperate past landscapes through citations of canonical Sicilian texts, and they use figures and metaphors which unite the material and the symbolic, with the effect of positioning their own texts as monuments to a disappearing place. Finally, the article discusses the relation between this
prefatorial production and the status of its authors as intellectuals within the Sicilian context
also led to adjustments in the production and distribution practices by public service media and commercial networks, with different writing and production, greater inclusion in linear and nonlinear libraries, new targets, and more attention to international circulation and recognition for “classic” fiction. What do such encounters mean in the Italian context? How are changing industrial practices and professional roles, from script development to the emergence of “showrunners” and casting, tied up with youth television fictional programming? How do tensions between transnationalism and ‘domestication’ work in the context of Italian-made productions? We are already seeing shifts in areas typically underrepresented, such as LGBTQ+ (e.g. Baby, We Are Who We Are) and race (e.g. Summertime, Zero), but what does this visibility mean? To what extent does the hype around these new products obscure the longer history of
youth television in Italian broadcasting? What bearing does this longer history have on
contemporary production? How is the public service mandate adjusted to a different, digital media system? How are Italian audiences and their viewing practices responding to these rapid shifts in apparent choice and availability of content? To what extent are their choices still defined by questions of access? Who is watching Italian youth television, in Italy and abroad, and what do audiences make of it?
We welcome contributions on the following topics, primarily on Italian youth series which
premiered between 2015 to the present, and comparative approaches are welcome:
- globalization and Italianness, transnationalism and domestication in contemporary youth TV productions;
- genre and “Teen TV”, quality and popular TV;
- teen TV series and teen TV entertainment/edutainment;
- the history and tradition of youth television in Italy;
- industrial structures of Italian teen television: production companies and models,
distribution on linear TV and platforms, marketing and promotion;
- censorship, auto-censorship, dubbing and subtitling;
- professional roles: scriptwriters, showrunners, directors, editors, costume designers;
- original programming vs. format adaptations;
- youth actors, casting and stardom;
- language and/or location, authenticity, location branding;
- representation and ideology;
- questions of diversity and inclusion (gender, queer, race, disability, …);
- consumption patterns, access and algorithms;
- international circulation and foreign reception of Italian teen television;
- audiences and success: ratings, social discourses, press.
Sections
1. We invite proposals for a series of chapters on the topics listed above (approx. 5,000-6,000 words).
2. The volume will also include a series of more focussed ‘close-ups’, i.e. readings of specific episodes or themes and approaches from these key youth-oriented television shows (1,000-1,500 words): Baby, Generation 56k, Luna Park, My Brilliant Friend, SKAM Italia, Suburra, Summertime, We Are Who We Are, Zero, Curon, Nudes, Mental, Mare fuori, Anna, …
3. We plan to include a section on practitioners and industry professionals, with interviews with or reflections from those involved in the industry, from producers to writers to performers.
For 1., please provide a title and an abstract of up to 500 words, along with a short bio of up to 250 words. For 2., please provide series name and episode number or series name and theme or approach with an abstract of 250 words, along with a short bio of up to 250 words. For 3., please provide the practitioner’s name and brief description of interview focus. Submission deadline:
January 15, 2022, with final submissions of accepted pieces due November 15, 2022. Please send all submissions to
Luca Barra: [email protected]
Danielle Hipkins: [email protected]
Catherine O’Rawe: [email protected]
Dana Renga: [email protected]
We are currently working on securing a publishing contract and will provide further details once an agreement has been made.
In association with the Centro Ricerche Attore e Divismo, Università di Torino, and the British Academy.
Wednesday 6 December
1-2pm, G102 (21 Woodland Road)
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