During the conference will be held the following workshops:

 

Thursday 26th November 9:30-12:00

 

Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories

Organizer and chair: Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds)

How have Italians used films to negotiate their histories and interrogate their identities over more than a century of Italian cinema? This workshop will discuss the aims and research methods of a major project intended to reconfigure the understanding of the relationship between Italian cinema and history.

 

Partecipants:

 

1. Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds, UK)

Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories: Introduction to the Project

 

2. Austin Fisher (Bournemouth University, UK)

Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Films of the 1970s

 

3. Paolo Noto (Università di Bologna, IT)

State as Film Producer, State as Historian

 

4. Catherine O’Rawe (University of Bristol, UK)

Back for Good: Melodrama and the Return Home in Post-War Italy

 

Respondent: Robert Burgoyne (University of St Andrews, UK)

 

 

Friday 27th November 14:00-17:30

 

Cinema and the Construction of the Nation: Italian Identities Between History and Memory

Organizers and chairs: Sally Hill (Victoria University of Wellington), Giacomo Lichtner (Victoria University of Wellington)

Focusing on Italy as a case study that is both emblematic and anomalous, the workshop’s starting point is the hypothesis that the Italian case is emblematic, because Italian cinema has traditionally made effective and widespread use of stereotype to construct a sanitised and homogeneous narrative of national identity, but also an anomalous one, because it has dealt ambiguously with the nation’s historical contradictions. While every nation’s history is contested, Italy’s inability to construct a shared narrative of its recent past suggests that the peculiarity of Italian ‘memory’ lies in the coexistence of ‘divided memories’ (Foot, 2009).

 

Partecipants:

 

Session 1

Sally Hill (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)

Chi li ha visti?: Italian Cinema’s Missing Bodies

 

Maurizio Zinni (Università Roma Tre, IT)

Una storia da ricordare, un futuro da costruire. Spettacolo, politica e identità coloniale nel cinema italiano e inglese del dopoguerra (1945-1960)

 

Damiano Garofalo (Università di Padova, IT)

Deicidi, crocefissioni, sacrifici. Una rilettura critica del cinema italiano sulla Shoah

 

Stefano Pisu (Università di Cagliari, IT)

Memorie co-prodotte: il film Italiani brava gente fra narrazione nazionale e negoziazione con l’URSS

 

Session 2

Roundtable discussion (based on questions sent to roundtable participants)

Noa Steimatsky (USA)

Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds, UK)

Federica Capoferri (John Cabot University, IT)

 

Closing Remarks

Giacomo Lichtner (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)

An Absence of Resolution