Giorgio Bertellini

I am a historian interested in film aesthetics in the context of the dense artistic and cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. In my first book in English, "Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque" (2010), I followed the historical and geographic journeys of an aesthetic form, the picturesque, from 17th century paintings and 18th century prints to turn-of-the-20th-century films, and from the Italian to the North American racial culture. In the process, I also followed the picturesque’s original subjects, Southern Italians, as both protagonists and consumers of picturesque works. In the end, my research sought to recast established time-centered notions of cinematic modernity by mobilizing equally pressingly modern notions of geographic variance, racial difference, and migration. In 2010, the volume received two book awards, from the American Association of Italian Studies and the Canadian Association of American Studies, as well as recognitions from the American Studies Association and the Modernist Studies Association.

My second monograph was a study of Bosnian film director Emir Kusturica, published in Italian for the series Il Castoro Cinema (Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 2011) and in English in the Contemporary Film Directors Series of the University of Illinois Press (2014). Both versions revised and substantially expanded an earlier study, published in 1996, which included a limited number of Kusturica films.

In my last project, "The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America," I am focusing on the 1920s American popularity of Hollywood star Rudolph Valentino and dictator Benito Mussolini. Based again on a wide variety of sources and documents, "Divo/Duce" seeks to unearth the historical convergences of celebrity culture, charismatic leadership and national sovereignty and in the process identify the affinities between star studies and political theory. While the bulk of the research relates to the North American scene, for comparative purposes some portion will also be devoted to the repercussions of the Divo/Duce’s transnational fame in Italy and Argentina—two Latin, predominantly Catholic, cultural settings.

Over the years, I have published essays in a dozen scholarly journals and three dozens anthologies. I have also edited volumes for both pedagogical and scholarly use, from "Emir Kusturica" (Rome, 1995), "The Cinema of Italy" (London: 2004; 2007), and "Early Cinema and the National" (London, 2008; with Richard Abel and Rob King) to the newly released "Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader" (London-Bloomington, 2013), published with the support of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone).  The Reader was a Finalist for the 2013 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association (New York) and the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation’s Best Moving Image Book Award (London, 2014). An "Outstanding Academic Title of 2014" (Choice), it was the winner of the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association’s 2015 Peter C. Rollins Book Award/Film and Television.

"The Divo and the Duce" won book awards from the American Association of Italian Studies and the Italian American Studies Association, and was a finalist for the LIMINA Award for Best International Film Studies Book. The research for the book began while at Cambridge as a Radcliffe Fellow.

For my next project, "The Poverty of Others: New Deal to Neorealism (and back)," I was honored to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.

I am an Associate Editor for the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies and a co-editor of a book series, "Cinema Cultures in Contact," for the University of California Press. My essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Il Foglio (Rome) and La Lettura/Corriere della Sera (Milan).
Phone: ph. (734) 763 1144 (o.)
Address: Department of Film, Television, and Media
University of Michigan
6435 North Quad
105 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285

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