Con il termine ecocriticism Rueckert indica "the application of ecology and ecological concepts t... more Con il termine ecocriticism Rueckert indica "the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature, because ecology (as a science, as a discipline, as the basis for human vision) has the greatest relevance to the present and future of the world" (Ibid., p. 107). Di L. Buell, citiamo solo alcuni tra i suoi lavori più noti:
This article follows the search for a cinematic language adequate to address the vast temporal an... more This article follows the search for a cinematic language adequate to address the vast temporal and spatial scales of the Anthropocene, by examining Il buco, a film directed by Michelangelo Frammartino (2021). The film reconstructs a 1961 expedition by the Italian Geological Expedition to explore the Bifurto cave in the Parco Nazionale del Pollino, Calabria, and I suggest that in the process, it launches a quest for an underground cinematic language for the Anthropocene: a language that must reckon with visual, spatial, and acoustic limits. Il buco, which opens with historic footage of the Pirelli Tower in Milan, architects a vertical landscape in which commercialized words above ground are counterbalanced by the audiovisual language of the underground. In the Bifurto abyss, human language abstracts and dissolves, the language of material prosperity falls flat, and cinema expresses its yearning to watch and to listen, even as cavernous darkness and resonance challenge its ability to do so.
This article explores the seemingly discordant ecologies that animate the ecopoetics of Tonino Gu... more This article explores the seemingly discordant ecologies that animate the ecopoetics of Tonino Guerra’s thinking, arguing that in Guerra’s work we find both a critique of human uses and abuses of the environment – in the era of environmental loss we are currently calling the Anthropocene – and an invitation to creatively reimagine our planetary place. More specifically, it addresses the contrasts between the bereft landscapes in the tetralogy of films Guerra wrote with Michelangelo Antonioni and the intricate, rich gardens of his poetry and of his hometown, Pennabilli. In contrast with (or perhaps in response to) the out-of-control gardens and unpalatable fruits of the films, Guerra’s personal philosophy led him to cultivate poetic and earthly gardens that nourish biodiversity and community and express optimism for a habitable Anthropocene future.
Gianrico Carofiglio's novels featuring attorney-protagonist Guido Guerrieri have gained popularit... more Gianrico Carofiglio's novels featuring attorney-protagonist Guido Guerrieri have gained popularity in Italy and abroad since the first in the series emerged in 2002. Although often discussed alongside other popular crime fiction, Carofiglio's work also has a wider resonance, participating in debates about justice, violence, and the law. This article proposes connections between the Guerrieri novels and several contemporary discussions of state violence-including essays by Jacques Derrida, Dominick La Capra, and Giorgio Agamben-that gravitate around Walter Benjamin's essay, "Critique of Violence." Carofiglio's novels, like these essays, lead us to contemplate the question of what action is possible once law's violence has been acknowledged.
Stati Generali del Patrimonio Industriale 2022, 2022
The pressbook for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) claims to pres... more The pressbook for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) claims to present «the film that the entire world will see until the end of the world». The bold tagline borrows the final words of the Gospel to pitch the 'eternal' nature of Pasolinian cinema, offering a starting point to consider the lifespan of cinematic heritage-which elements of film culture endure, where, for how long, and at what cost? My research, based in the Environmental Humanities, revives the industrial backstory of Italian cinema (starting from the production of Ferrania film stock) and uncovers the environmental impacts of the film industry and film archives on the Italian landscape. Pasolini's Gospel is a case study to consider the environmental footprint of film. In fact, to honor Pasolini in the Anthropocene (and in the year of the centenary of his birth), I argue that it is vital to contemplate the material impacts of his work-and cinema more broadly-on landscapes past, present, and future.
Table of contents for the issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yita20/39/2?nav=tocList
This short essay explores an impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in ... more This short essay explores an impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in Italian cinema: that of thinking on foot. Drawing on the work of sociologist and philosopher Franco Cassano, I consider why contemporary philosophers seek to understand Italy at a pace that works strategically (sometimes defiantly) against petroleum-fueled speed. Three recent Italian films that proceed on foot (Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], La lunga strada gialla [2016], and Il cammino dell'Appia antica [2016]) attempt to reanimate southern Italian landscapes as "vehicles of identity, solidarity, and development" (Cassano xxxvi). Each film represents a socio-political project enabled by its walking pace; each, in turn, has the potential to unveil how these projects depend on the naturalcultural health of the landscapes being traversed. Against the "slow violence" being perpetrated on Italian landscapes-a slow violence of toxic contamination at the hand of ecomafias, of the cementification of agricultural lands and delicate coasts-and against the speed of turbocapitalism, thinking on foot enables modes of ethics and aesthetics simultaneously attuned to historical depth and ecological crisis. In this view, Italy is no longer a "bel paese," but rather an ecocultural landscape in which the seeds for meaningful change are deeply embedded. Resumen Este breve artículo explora uno de los conceptos que está impulsando la ecocrítica italiana, así como una de las tendencias más recurrentes en el cine italiano: el acto de pensar a pie. Basándose en el trabajo del sociólogo y filósofo Franco Cassano, se consideran las razones por las cuales los filósofos contemporáneos buscan entender Italia con un ritmo que funciona estratégicamente (a veces desafiantemente) frente la una noción de velocidad alimentada por el petróleo. Usando breves ejemplos de tres películas italianas recientes en las que se "piensa a pie" (Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], La lunga strada gialla [2016] e Il cammino dell'Appia antica [2016]) se observan los intentos de reanimar los paisajes del sur de Italia h "vehículos de identidad, solidaridad y desarrollo" (Cassano xxxvi). Cada película representa un proyecto sociopolítico habilitado por el ritmo de su marcha; cada uno, a su vez, tiene el potencial de revelar cómo estos proyectos dependen de la salud cultural-natural de los paisajes que se atraviesan. Contra la "violencia lenta" que se perpetra contra los paisajes italianos (una violencia lenta de contaminación tóxica a manos de las ecomafias, de la cementación de tierras agrícolas y costas delicadas) y contra la velocidad del turbocapitalismo, pensar a pie permite modalidades de ética y estética simultáneamente compenetradas con la profundidad histórica y la crisis ecológica. Desde este punto de vista, Italia ya no es un "bel paese," sino más bien un paisaje ecocultural en el que están profundamente arraigadas las semillas para un cambio significativo.
In Italy, tomatoes exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics. They occupy such an important place in the Italian imaginary, and in the world’s imaginary of Italy, that their cultural and culinary stature obscures the deplorable conditions of their production, and silences the voices of those whose labour delivers them to the global table. In this article, we examine the tomato harvest in three contemporary works that confront the conditions of agricultural migrant labour in Puglia and Lazio: Leogrande’s (2016) book Uomini e caporali, the noir novel Bloody Mary by Vichi and Gori (2008), and Mariani’s (2017) docu-musical film The Harvest. Through an environmental humanistic approach we unravel persistent tropes in these different forms of representation: toxicity and toxic masculinity; socio-cultural isolation; narrative and biological hybridity. These themes foreground the human costs of the harvest, but they also expose the challenges and limitations of representing it. We argue that, although the work they do is of vital importance, by dedicating little attention to tomatoes themselves and sidelining the tomato’s cultural destination on the Italian table, these accounts risk reinforcing the divide between comfortable meals and the punishing labor of the harvest.
This issue features a special section on Italian Ecomedia Studies as well as a section of scholar... more This issue features a special section on Italian Ecomedia Studies as well as a section of scholarly articles and reports.
Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes, 2019
“Fire and Ice: Thinking Film, Climate Change, and (Stealth) Environmental Humanities with Paolo S... more “Fire and Ice: Thinking Film, Climate Change, and (Stealth) Environmental Humanities with Paolo Sorrentino's Youth (2015).” Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes. Ed. Ingemar Haag, Karin Molander Danielsson, Marie Ohman, and Thorsten Paplow. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. 11-30.
Return to the Aeolian Islands (Fughe e approdi, 2010) chronicles director Giovanna Tav... more Return to the Aeolian Islands (Fughe e approdi, 2010) chronicles director Giovanna Taviani’s journey to the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago off the coast of Sicily and setting for a host of films. Return documents the islands’ geological past in a study of ecological, and not just cinematic history. This essay begins to unravel the threads of a magmatic Aeolian landscape where volcanoes, cinema, and memory collaborate in the creation of more-than-human stories.
Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, 2014
I argue that "The Wind Blows Round" (dir. Giorgio Diritti, b. 1959) and "Le quattro volte" (dir. ... more I argue that "The Wind Blows Round" (dir. Giorgio Diritti, b. 1959) and "Le quattro volte" (dir. Michelangelo Frammartino, b. 1968) screen the coevolution of mountain landscapes, human communities, and goats. Traversing rugged terrain at the extreme ends of Italy, these two films show the complexities of cohabitation as they follow the historical, social, and philosophical pathways of goatherds and goats over the steep slopes. The unnostalgic "The Wind Blows Round" warns of the ethical and environmental risks of losing the memory of our interlocking, interspecies past, while the meditative "Le quattro volte" shows the way to a collaborative, posthuman cinema.
The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Mer... more The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana ", find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel's title. The location for the book's concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an " oikos ", to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. " Oikos ", which became the prefix "eco" in both "economics" (literally, law of the house) and "ecology" (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as "the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces" (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative's exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The "Pasticciaccio", as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions.
Con il termine ecocriticism Rueckert indica "the application of ecology and ecological concepts t... more Con il termine ecocriticism Rueckert indica "the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature, because ecology (as a science, as a discipline, as the basis for human vision) has the greatest relevance to the present and future of the world" (Ibid., p. 107). Di L. Buell, citiamo solo alcuni tra i suoi lavori più noti:
This article follows the search for a cinematic language adequate to address the vast temporal an... more This article follows the search for a cinematic language adequate to address the vast temporal and spatial scales of the Anthropocene, by examining Il buco, a film directed by Michelangelo Frammartino (2021). The film reconstructs a 1961 expedition by the Italian Geological Expedition to explore the Bifurto cave in the Parco Nazionale del Pollino, Calabria, and I suggest that in the process, it launches a quest for an underground cinematic language for the Anthropocene: a language that must reckon with visual, spatial, and acoustic limits. Il buco, which opens with historic footage of the Pirelli Tower in Milan, architects a vertical landscape in which commercialized words above ground are counterbalanced by the audiovisual language of the underground. In the Bifurto abyss, human language abstracts and dissolves, the language of material prosperity falls flat, and cinema expresses its yearning to watch and to listen, even as cavernous darkness and resonance challenge its ability to do so.
This article explores the seemingly discordant ecologies that animate the ecopoetics of Tonino Gu... more This article explores the seemingly discordant ecologies that animate the ecopoetics of Tonino Guerra’s thinking, arguing that in Guerra’s work we find both a critique of human uses and abuses of the environment – in the era of environmental loss we are currently calling the Anthropocene – and an invitation to creatively reimagine our planetary place. More specifically, it addresses the contrasts between the bereft landscapes in the tetralogy of films Guerra wrote with Michelangelo Antonioni and the intricate, rich gardens of his poetry and of his hometown, Pennabilli. In contrast with (or perhaps in response to) the out-of-control gardens and unpalatable fruits of the films, Guerra’s personal philosophy led him to cultivate poetic and earthly gardens that nourish biodiversity and community and express optimism for a habitable Anthropocene future.
Gianrico Carofiglio's novels featuring attorney-protagonist Guido Guerrieri have gained popularit... more Gianrico Carofiglio's novels featuring attorney-protagonist Guido Guerrieri have gained popularity in Italy and abroad since the first in the series emerged in 2002. Although often discussed alongside other popular crime fiction, Carofiglio's work also has a wider resonance, participating in debates about justice, violence, and the law. This article proposes connections between the Guerrieri novels and several contemporary discussions of state violence-including essays by Jacques Derrida, Dominick La Capra, and Giorgio Agamben-that gravitate around Walter Benjamin's essay, "Critique of Violence." Carofiglio's novels, like these essays, lead us to contemplate the question of what action is possible once law's violence has been acknowledged.
Stati Generali del Patrimonio Industriale 2022, 2022
The pressbook for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) claims to pres... more The pressbook for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) claims to present «the film that the entire world will see until the end of the world». The bold tagline borrows the final words of the Gospel to pitch the 'eternal' nature of Pasolinian cinema, offering a starting point to consider the lifespan of cinematic heritage-which elements of film culture endure, where, for how long, and at what cost? My research, based in the Environmental Humanities, revives the industrial backstory of Italian cinema (starting from the production of Ferrania film stock) and uncovers the environmental impacts of the film industry and film archives on the Italian landscape. Pasolini's Gospel is a case study to consider the environmental footprint of film. In fact, to honor Pasolini in the Anthropocene (and in the year of the centenary of his birth), I argue that it is vital to contemplate the material impacts of his work-and cinema more broadly-on landscapes past, present, and future.
Table of contents for the issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yita20/39/2?nav=tocList
This short essay explores an impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in ... more This short essay explores an impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in Italian cinema: that of thinking on foot. Drawing on the work of sociologist and philosopher Franco Cassano, I consider why contemporary philosophers seek to understand Italy at a pace that works strategically (sometimes defiantly) against petroleum-fueled speed. Three recent Italian films that proceed on foot (Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], La lunga strada gialla [2016], and Il cammino dell'Appia antica [2016]) attempt to reanimate southern Italian landscapes as "vehicles of identity, solidarity, and development" (Cassano xxxvi). Each film represents a socio-political project enabled by its walking pace; each, in turn, has the potential to unveil how these projects depend on the naturalcultural health of the landscapes being traversed. Against the "slow violence" being perpetrated on Italian landscapes-a slow violence of toxic contamination at the hand of ecomafias, of the cementification of agricultural lands and delicate coasts-and against the speed of turbocapitalism, thinking on foot enables modes of ethics and aesthetics simultaneously attuned to historical depth and ecological crisis. In this view, Italy is no longer a "bel paese," but rather an ecocultural landscape in which the seeds for meaningful change are deeply embedded. Resumen Este breve artículo explora uno de los conceptos que está impulsando la ecocrítica italiana, así como una de las tendencias más recurrentes en el cine italiano: el acto de pensar a pie. Basándose en el trabajo del sociólogo y filósofo Franco Cassano, se consideran las razones por las cuales los filósofos contemporáneos buscan entender Italia con un ritmo que funciona estratégicamente (a veces desafiantemente) frente la una noción de velocidad alimentada por el petróleo. Usando breves ejemplos de tres películas italianas recientes en las que se "piensa a pie" (Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], La lunga strada gialla [2016] e Il cammino dell'Appia antica [2016]) se observan los intentos de reanimar los paisajes del sur de Italia h "vehículos de identidad, solidaridad y desarrollo" (Cassano xxxvi). Cada película representa un proyecto sociopolítico habilitado por el ritmo de su marcha; cada uno, a su vez, tiene el potencial de revelar cómo estos proyectos dependen de la salud cultural-natural de los paisajes que se atraviesan. Contra la "violencia lenta" que se perpetra contra los paisajes italianos (una violencia lenta de contaminación tóxica a manos de las ecomafias, de la cementación de tierras agrícolas y costas delicadas) y contra la velocidad del turbocapitalismo, pensar a pie permite modalidades de ética y estética simultáneamente compenetradas con la profundidad histórica y la crisis ecológica. Desde este punto de vista, Italia ya no es un "bel paese," sino más bien un paisaje ecocultural en el que están profundamente arraigadas las semillas para un cambio significativo.
In Italy, tomatoes exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics. They occupy such an important place in the Italian imaginary, and in the world’s imaginary of Italy, that their cultural and culinary stature obscures the deplorable conditions of their production, and silences the voices of those whose labour delivers them to the global table. In this article, we examine the tomato harvest in three contemporary works that confront the conditions of agricultural migrant labour in Puglia and Lazio: Leogrande’s (2016) book Uomini e caporali, the noir novel Bloody Mary by Vichi and Gori (2008), and Mariani’s (2017) docu-musical film The Harvest. Through an environmental humanistic approach we unravel persistent tropes in these different forms of representation: toxicity and toxic masculinity; socio-cultural isolation; narrative and biological hybridity. These themes foreground the human costs of the harvest, but they also expose the challenges and limitations of representing it. We argue that, although the work they do is of vital importance, by dedicating little attention to tomatoes themselves and sidelining the tomato’s cultural destination on the Italian table, these accounts risk reinforcing the divide between comfortable meals and the punishing labor of the harvest.
This issue features a special section on Italian Ecomedia Studies as well as a section of scholar... more This issue features a special section on Italian Ecomedia Studies as well as a section of scholarly articles and reports.
Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes, 2019
“Fire and Ice: Thinking Film, Climate Change, and (Stealth) Environmental Humanities with Paolo S... more “Fire and Ice: Thinking Film, Climate Change, and (Stealth) Environmental Humanities with Paolo Sorrentino's Youth (2015).” Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes. Ed. Ingemar Haag, Karin Molander Danielsson, Marie Ohman, and Thorsten Paplow. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. 11-30.
Return to the Aeolian Islands (Fughe e approdi, 2010) chronicles director Giovanna Tav... more Return to the Aeolian Islands (Fughe e approdi, 2010) chronicles director Giovanna Taviani’s journey to the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago off the coast of Sicily and setting for a host of films. Return documents the islands’ geological past in a study of ecological, and not just cinematic history. This essay begins to unravel the threads of a magmatic Aeolian landscape where volcanoes, cinema, and memory collaborate in the creation of more-than-human stories.
Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, 2014
I argue that "The Wind Blows Round" (dir. Giorgio Diritti, b. 1959) and "Le quattro volte" (dir. ... more I argue that "The Wind Blows Round" (dir. Giorgio Diritti, b. 1959) and "Le quattro volte" (dir. Michelangelo Frammartino, b. 1968) screen the coevolution of mountain landscapes, human communities, and goats. Traversing rugged terrain at the extreme ends of Italy, these two films show the complexities of cohabitation as they follow the historical, social, and philosophical pathways of goatherds and goats over the steep slopes. The unnostalgic "The Wind Blows Round" warns of the ethical and environmental risks of losing the memory of our interlocking, interspecies past, while the meditative "Le quattro volte" shows the way to a collaborative, posthuman cinema.
The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Mer... more The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel, " Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana ", find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel's title. The location for the book's concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an " oikos ", to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. " Oikos ", which became the prefix "eco" in both "economics" (literally, law of the house) and "ecology" (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as "the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces" (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative's exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The "Pasticciaccio", as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions.
Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, "Italian Ecocinema ... more Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, "Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human" examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. Elena Past uses these films—"Red Desert" (1964), "The Winds Blows Round" (2005), "Gomorrah" (2008), "Le quattro volte" (2010), and "Return to the Aeolian Islands" (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing enviornmental questions such as cinema's dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, "Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human" theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema's ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world. (http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=809477)
Exceprt from the introduction to a volume edited by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past that draws to... more Exceprt from the introduction to a volume edited by Deborah Amberson and Elena Past that draws together essays on Italian writers and filmmakers whose work engages with nonhuman animal subjectivity. Analyzing works from unification to the present, they address three major strands of current philosophical thought: the perceived borders between man and nonhuman animals, historical and fictional crises facing humanity, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world. These essays are driven by philosophical, theoretical, and ethical questions that interrogate Italian cultural production in provocative new ways, and their analysis has implications not simply for Italianists, but for a range of scholars doing work within cross-disciplinary fields such as animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthuman philosophy.
The first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in ... more The first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in English, Methods of Murder examines works by major authors both popular, such as Gianrico Carofiglio, and canonical, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda.
Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria’s Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist Criminal Man.
Through her examinations of these texts, Past demonstrates the links between literary, philosophical, and scientific constructions of the criminal, and provides the basis for an important reconceptualization of Italian crime fiction.
Elena Past’s recently published Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human (Indiana University Press, 20... more Elena Past’s recently published Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human (Indiana University Press, 2019) studies a complex of issues surrounding on-location films made in Italy and the way their production leaves lasting, material traces on the environment. The films span a number of regions and ecospheres within Italy: the Adriatic, site of the petrochemical wastelands in Antonioni’s Red Desert; the Neapolitan hinterland’s toxic waste dump in Garrone’s Gommora; the plight of an outlander goatherd in the Italian alps in Diritti’s The Wind Blows Round; the Calabrian mountains in Frammartino’s Le quattro volte; and the volcanoes of the Aeolian Islands in Taviani’s Fughe e approdi/Return to the Aeolian Islands. Past explores pressing environmental questions as well as the partnerships and collaborations of film crews, local protagonists (including human and non-human animals), and the environment as she works to bring the “matter” of cinema, its material side, into the production of its meaning.
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fruits of the films, Guerra’s personal philosophy led him to cultivate poetic and earthly gardens that nourish biodiversity and community and express optimism for a habitable Anthropocene future.
In Italy, tomatoes exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics. They occupy such an important place in the Italian imaginary, and in the world’s imaginary of Italy, that their cultural and culinary stature obscures the deplorable conditions of their production, and silences the voices of those whose labour delivers them to the global table. In this article, we examine the tomato harvest in three contemporary works that confront the conditions of agricultural migrant labour in Puglia and Lazio: Leogrande’s (2016) book Uomini e caporali, the noir novel Bloody Mary by Vichi and Gori (2008), and Mariani’s (2017) docu-musical film The Harvest. Through an environmental humanistic approach we unravel persistent tropes in these different forms of representation: toxicity and toxic masculinity; socio-cultural isolation; narrative and biological hybridity. These themes foreground the human costs of the harvest, but they also expose the challenges and limitations of representing it. We argue that, although the work they do is of vital importance, by dedicating little attention to tomatoes themselves and sidelining the tomato’s cultural destination on the Italian table, these accounts risk reinforcing the divide between comfortable meals and the punishing labor of the harvest.
https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/aesthetica-preprint/article/view/2549
fruits of the films, Guerra’s personal philosophy led him to cultivate poetic and earthly gardens that nourish biodiversity and community and express optimism for a habitable Anthropocene future.
In Italy, tomatoes exist at the intersection of national-cultural culinary pride, Mediterranean petro-politics, agro-environmental policy, and even gender politics. They occupy such an important place in the Italian imaginary, and in the world’s imaginary of Italy, that their cultural and culinary stature obscures the deplorable conditions of their production, and silences the voices of those whose labour delivers them to the global table. In this article, we examine the tomato harvest in three contemporary works that confront the conditions of agricultural migrant labour in Puglia and Lazio: Leogrande’s (2016) book Uomini e caporali, the noir novel Bloody Mary by Vichi and Gori (2008), and Mariani’s (2017) docu-musical film The Harvest. Through an environmental humanistic approach we unravel persistent tropes in these different forms of representation: toxicity and toxic masculinity; socio-cultural isolation; narrative and biological hybridity. These themes foreground the human costs of the harvest, but they also expose the challenges and limitations of representing it. We argue that, although the work they do is of vital importance, by dedicating little attention to tomatoes themselves and sidelining the tomato’s cultural destination on the Italian table, these accounts risk reinforcing the divide between comfortable meals and the punishing labor of the harvest.
Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria’s Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist Criminal Man.
Through her examinations of these texts, Past demonstrates the links between literary, philosophical, and scientific constructions of the criminal, and provides the basis for an important reconceptualization of Italian crime fiction.