Popular Italian Cinema (co-edited with Louis Bayman)

in Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. K. Aveyard and A. Moran (Intellect, 2013), pp. 351-67.

2009

Italian Industrial Literature and Film, Edited by C. Baghetti, J. Carter and L. Marmo, Peter Lang, Oxford-New York, 2021

This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first article of the postwar Italian Constitution states that the Republic is founded on labor. Forces across the political spectrum, from Catholic to communist, invested labor with the power to build a new national community after Fascism and war. The 1950s-1970s saw dramatic transformations, in economic, social and cultural terms, as labor moved from agriculture to industry and a whole generation of Italian writers and filmmakers used literature and cinema to interpretand influence-these changes and to capture the new experiences of industrial labor. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation's work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors. Carlo Baghetti is a postdoctoral fellow at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid (École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques). He holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Aix-Marseille Université and l'Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma. He is the editor of Il lavoro raccontato. Studi su letteratura e cinema italiani dal postmodernismo all'ipermodernismo (2020) and a special issue of Costellazioni (2020) dedicated to representations of work in Europe. Jim Carter is Lecturer of Italian at Boston University. His articles on Italian industrial culture, especially at the Olivetti company, have appeared in journals like Modern Italy and Italian Culture. In 2018-2019, he won a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenzo Marmo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Universitas Mercatorum and also teaches at the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale." In 2017, he was Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo melodramma noir (2018).

The questions in this Q+A were asked by Frank Burke (Queen's University, Ontario) for a roundtable piece in a forthcoming companion to Italian cinema studies that Frank is editing for Blackwell. Frank will be able to use only a small proportion of my responses so I am making the complete text available here.

History, 2017

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema – which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

2019

In this paper I mean to examine the case of the Italian director Mario Bava and his crucial influence not only in the Italian context, but also and most of all in the international one. In the case of Bava, all of his films influenced so much great cinema classics and even whole genres that he is still one of the most quoted directors in a wide range of cinema genres in what we define as postmodern pastiche. For a series of motivations, it is not wrong to say that he is the forerunner of the pop culture in cinema and he could also be described as 'terrorista dei generi'.

Italianist (Film Issue), 2013

The question of politics in Italian cinema continues to exercise critics and scholars to a remarkable degree. This is demonstrated by several contemporary research initiatives, and by the continued deployment of the concept of political or social commitment (impegno) as a live and value term in the writing of Italian cinema history. Contributors to this roundtable were invited to interrogate critical assumptions about political value in Italian cinema, and to consider the various ways in which a film or genre can deal with politics or be deemed ‘political’. The roundtable is grouped roughly into three sections: the first deals with cinema and politics from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives; the second deals with different genres and modes; the third deals with individual filmmakers and their films. In this introduction I do not try to summarize the articles, which should be read on their own terms, but limit myself to gesturing at certain themes that seemed to me to emerge as important across the sections.

Modern Italy, 2017