Manuela Gieri
University of Basilicata (Italy)
Towards South: For a New Ecology of the Gaze
Since its unification, the history of our nation has been scarred by a painful search for an identity, and Italian cinema has been and still is at the service of such grueling journey, since it has been immediately conceived «come forma di espressione vicina alla vita e ad essa strettamente intrecciata» (as a form of expression closed to life and intimately interwoven with it) (De Gaetano, 2018, 9). In the aftermath of World War II, as a mark of its modernity, Italian cinema has relinquished action in favor of wandering and visionary characters whose gaze has produced, however, an often picturesque and mostly contrived portrayal of the country, at times choosing the comedic-parodic mode and at others the melodramatic-realistic one. Since the late ’80 and the early ’90, though, after the collapsing of the Berlin Wall and of our First Republic, things have changed, and Italian cinema has participated in the search for a new and more ‘ecologic’ gaze, no longer informed by the binary logic which had for decades produced artificial dichotomous juxtapositions – man vs woman, center vs periphery, North vs South, and so on. The new Italian filmmaking seems to have come to an awareness of the fact that in the age of the simulacra, in the time of the relentless substitution of the thing with the image, and of the absolute triumph of fiction over life itself (Baudrillard, 1981; Semeraro, 2006), it is imperative to renegotiate the very notions of nation, of home, of belonging, and this is only possible by uncovering and reusing the ‘waste’, that which was hidden and/or expelled from the picture. Moving from Il ladro di bambini (1992) by Gianni Amelio to Favolacce (2020) by the D’Innocenzo brothers, the present paper will investigate the ways in which in the past thirty years Italian cinema renegotiates and re-writes the very notions of South and periphery, and it does so by searching for a new ‘ecology of the gaze’, one which finds in impurity and imperfection its closeness to reality, and thus a novel clarity.
Manuela Gieri is Associate Professor of Film, Television and Photography Studies at the University of Basilicata. She also taught Italian and Cinema Studies at the University of California, Davis, in 1988-89 and from 1989 to 2007 at the University of Toronto. In 2002-2003, she has also served as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, with a Research Project on Italian popular radio and film culture in 1920-1940. In the summer 1990 and 2016, she was Visiting Professor in the Middlebury College Graduate Summer Program. Gieri has published extensively in learned journals, she has edited volumes on Italian cinema and theatre. Her main research interests are Italian and world film history, Federico Fellini, Luigi Pirandello, contemporary Italian women’s writing, and new historiography. Among her works, deserving special mention are La Strada: Federico Fellini, Director (Rutgers, 1990), Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion (University of Toronto Press, 1995), Cinema. Dalle origini allo studio system (1895-1945) (Carocci, 2009). At present, she is completing the second volume of her history of film, and she has started a research work on the representation of male characters in Italian cinema.