Customer Reviews:
scholarly classic in its field is stimulating and very readable.......2001-01-14
ITALIAN FILM IN THE LIGHT OF NEOREALISM contains essays on seventeen Italian films, released between 1945 and 1982, which are either Neorealist classics or demonstrate the influence of Neorealism on Italian films made after the movement (7 yrs. duration, according to Marcus) ended. Marcus strikes a fine balance of theory, literary criticism, history, and readability. The book is an informative and stimulating companion to several of the finest Italian films, and several classics of international cinema.
The essays are on the following films: Part I: Neorealism Proper: Open City (d. Rossellini) ; Bicycle Thief (d. De Sica); Bitter Rice (d. De Santis); Umberto D. (d. De Sica) / Part II: Transitions Bread, Love, and Fantasy (d. Comencini); La Strada (d. Fellini); Senso (d. Visconti); Red Desert (d. Antonioni) / Part III: Return to Social Commentary: Il Posto (d. Olmi); Seduced and Abandoned (d. Germi); Teorema (d. Pasolini); Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (d. Petri) / Part IV: Fascism and War Reconsidered The Conformist (d. Bertolucci); Love and Anarchy (d. Wertmuller); Christ Stopped at Eboli (d. Rosi); Night of the Shooting Stars (d. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani); We All Loved Each Other So Much (d. Scola).
[back cover: Millicent Marcus is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas, Austin] Marcus was until recently at the University of Pennsylvania, and is now at Yale. The latest DVD editions of CINEMA PARADISO (released 2006) sport her excellent feature length commentary, accompanied here and there by director Giuseppe Tornatore. She makes a brief appearance on a supplement on the MALENA DVD (d. Giuseppe Tornatore), and more recently gives a brief historical background to Visconti's THE LEOPARD (Criterion Collection DVD, supplement). "NEOREALISM" is my favorite book by Marcus, and if you find you enjoy this title, check out her other work as well; the most recent is AFTER FELLINI.
P.S. Most of the films listed above are available on Region 1 DVD (U.S. & Canada coding). Some of them are out of circulation, and some are on Region 2 release. Region 2 DVDs are great for students of Italian who may not get catch the too-fast dialogue through listening comprehension, but can read the Italian-language subtitles usually available on Region 2 (Europe) DVDs of Italian films. [...]
Book Description
Italian Cinema is the only complete and up-to-date book on the subject available anywhere, in any language. New coverage from 1989 to the present includes the Italian horror-film genre, Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful et al.), Bernardo Bertolucci (Stealing Beauty), Franco Zeffirelli (Tea with Mussolini), Michael Radford (The Postman [Il postino]), Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo), Maurizio Nichetti (The Bicycle Thief et al.), Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, The Starmaker), and much more. The book has been extensively revised and updated, including all-new notes, bibliography, plus videocassette and DVD information.
Customer Reviews:
With a select bibliography on the Italian Cinema.......2001-07-04
Now in an expanded and fully updated third edition, Peter Bondanella's Italian Cinema From Neorealism To The Present continues to be the premier single volume reference to Italian films available to an English readership. From the silent movie era and the fascist period, through the various masters of neorealism, down to the present day, this comprehensive reference is an essential, core addition to any personal, professional, or academic film reference library. Of special interest are the select bibliography on the Italian Cinema, the information on locating Italian films on videocassette and DVD, and a comprehensive index.
An Extraordinary Panoramic Postcard of Italian Cinema.......2001-06-12
Bondanella offers a superb overview of the Italian national cinema, and explains the central contribution of Italian auters and artists to this quintessentially 20th Century artform. With encyclopedic sweep, the reader is served bite-sized portions of every major Italian film in a series of full-length chapters. The narrative is crisp and well-paced. The morsels may be bite-sized, but in the end, the reader is treated to an enormous feast of gourmet cinema.
Organized in a roughly chronological framework, Bondanella takes us from the humble beginnings of cinema in the Italian peninsula through to the present day. The discussion of the Neorealist moment, for example, traces the artistic and social roots of the movement, and touches upon it's profound (and continuing) influence within Italy and around the world. The 3rd Edition revises some of the text, and updates the final chapters on the most recent developments in Italian filmmaking.
The discussion is organized most often as a series of capsules addressing nearly every major Italian film. The result is a combination between historical exposition and film encyclopedia. I haved repeatedly turned to Bondanella's book to gain a quick insight or two into a film I may be lucky enough to be able to rent, see in one of New York's innumerable film venues, or catch on cable. Professor Bondanella could have possibly done more at times to explain the context in which these films were made. The political and social backdrop of the Italian peninsula has been an important determinant of the artistic output of it's people. It is not that these details are ignored --- in fact they are very well represented at many points in the narrative, and much more detail in a volume as compact as this one would likely have undermined the project as a whole --- but the reader may need to consult other sources at times to gain a more contextualized understanding or to clear up a confusing point here and there.
But this criticism should be made with a caveat. Bondanella sets out to provide the reader with a coherent narrative of the breathtaking accomplishments in film art in Italy. He succeeds in that task brilliantly. The panorama of 20th Century Italian film presented is as awe-inspiring as the most idyllic Tuscan villa or the Alpine vistas of the Alto-Adige. Reader's wishing to gain an appreciation of the central importance of Italian cinema will not be disappointed.
Book Description
In the mid-1960s an unknown Italian film director named Sergio Leone was given $200,000 and some leftover film stock, and he went to make a Western. With an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood and a script based on a samurai epic, Leone wound up creating A Fistful of Dollars, the first in a trilogy of films (with For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) that was violent, cynical, and visually stunning. Along with his later masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, these films came to define the "Spaghetti Western," a genre that has influenced such contemporary filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino.
Written by the preeminent Leone scholar, this is the first illustrated book to focus on his Westerns, illuminating his visual style, offbeat sense of humor, and sophisticated, elliptical way of telling stories. Augmenting the text are a wealth of visual materials, as well as interviews with Leone, Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Bernardo Bertolucci, composer Ennio Morricone, designer Carlo Simi, and others. The book accompanies an exhibition with the same title opening in July 2005 at the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting.......2007-01-09
Really good purchase for S.Leone estimators.Interesting pages about behind the scene and some funny screenshots from the set.
Comprehensive and Enjoyable.......2006-07-25
This book is like an encyclopedia of Leone's Italian westerns. The detail on each film is exceptionable, and Frayling writes in a style that always keeps your interest. The research that went into this book must have taken years. Thanks for filling us in with all the behind the scenes material. Excellent job!
Great book for Leone's western fans.......2006-03-27
Highly recommended for fans. DVD owners will recognise Frayling as the man who provides some history & comments on the DVDs. The book contains interviews with actors, crews and later directors who were influenced by Leone. Also lots of posters (those days they were artwork) from different countries, production sketches & photos.
Note that this book concentrates on Leone's spaghetti westerns with only brief mentions of his other movies so it is not an autobiography. FYI, his first few movies were sword and sandals stuff.
In general, this is like the bonus materials of the DVDs but in a gorgeously printed format.
Once Upon a Time kn Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone.......2006-01-31
A great book for anyone who loves Sergio Leone, the true master of the spaghetti western and his great characters. I liked learning about my favorite The Man With No Name and Clint Eastwood the actor who portrayed him. Plus the other great characters he created like Tuco, Eli Wallach, and Colonel Morterimer, Lee Van Cleef.
It was very interesting to see how he put his heart and soul into his movies, and how a man from Italy gave us the most realistic view of America's most remarkable time, the old west.
Wonderful book, for a wonderful price.......2005-09-20
I bought this book as a gift for a man that did all the barbequing and grilling for a birthday party I threw for my daughter's birthday.
This guy is an avid collector or anything and everything connected with Sergio Leone and his great westerns. He's got the music from the films, the biographies of all the actors in the films, location info, costumes facts, etc.,etc.
When I handed him the book and he glanced down at it, he actually teared up. He is now taking it to bed and reading the book every night. He tells me that it is a fabulous book, the pictures are great, many he's never seen before. The text is complete with many indepth interviews.
Customer Reviews:
Very informative.......2006-04-26
I am only a sophomore in High School but I did read this book for a biography project I had to do and it was very informative for a biography paper. It had its moments of boredom but overall i dont consider it a "Bad" book like some have in the past. There are not that many things written on Sophia that can be compared. So overall I think it was a pretty good book and packed full of in formation. Its a biography what more do you want and wild crazy fantasy romance story?
A tragedy!.......2003-11-21
This bio is a tragedy. Poor written, no history, just jive, gossips. An insult to Sophia Loren and to all her fans as well.
This horrible book, maybe the worst biography ever written, is a bad collage of information, a lack of journalistic bearing.
Mr. Harris' personality takes center stage even if the book is about Sophia. Barbed comments abound which instead of shedding light on the book's subject matter, seem to be included to ridicule its subject. Urgh...!!!
The essentials.......2002-10-30
There aren't many Sophia Loren biographies out there, and so fans often can't afford to be picky. So Warren G. Harris's "Sophia Loren" is an interesting read, if a somewhat plain vanilla one. Good photos, some amusing anecdotes and a basic summary of Sophia's life are what readers will find.
It traces her life from a scrawny illegitimate baby (whom a wet nurse described as looking like a rat, and who was later nicknamed "Toothpick"), whose mother was abandoned by her father, leaving her alone with two children. But Sophia Scicolone (later Sophia Lazzaro, and then Sophia Loren) rapidly bloomed into a beautiful woman, becoming a beauty contest champ and then an actress. Despite a string of flops and a controversial relationship with a divorced man, Sophia became one of the most beautiful and women in the world, and the first Oscar winner of a performance in a foreign-language film.
The best description of this book is "adequate." It's not amazingly written, researched or presented. Rather it presents the basics of Sophia's life up the 1990s, which seems to have been a fairly straightforward, open one. There isn't really much that is new in this, but what is there is usually presented in an entertaining manner. Between the "battle of the bosoms" and Frank Sinatra teaching Sophia some obscene questions in English, we hear some funny events as well as a few bittersweet ones. And unlike many biographies, this one gives detailed summaries of her various movies.
Sophia herself is presented as a warm and sweet person, who cabled flowers to Clark Gable's widow and befriended nearly every costar (entrancing a few as well). The pictures are not well-chosen, as there aren't as many as there could have been, and quite a few seem to focus on Sophia in various stages of undress (ranging from her see-through prostitute gown to her merry widow to her topless dance number in "It's Him -- Yes Yes!"). Carlos Ponti, her husband, is a nebulous figure -- we don't learn much about him. Sophia's family and friends are better defined, such as her never-say-die mother Romilda, her commitmentphobe father, and the extremely emotional Cary Grant.
It's not outstanding, but it's a big plus for fans of the amazing Sophia Loren. For the basics on her life, this is a good place to start.
fleshy with filmography.......1999-05-15
If you are looking for an in depth expose of a magnificent film legend - you've come to the wrong place. This book is really spare with the good jive but incredibly detailed in the film jive.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful break down of the giallo film.......2007-09-09
While portions of this excellent treatise on the ultra violent Italian filone known as the giallo are dry and, imo -best left for academia than print- what makes Koven's book special are the chapters on what elements constitute a giallo film.
From the amateur detectives to the killer(s), inventive set-pieces and everything in between, this portion of Koven's book makes my gialli viewing experiences all the more fun.
The First English Language Study of the Giallo.......2007-05-18
Mikel J. Koven's academic study of the Italian genre known as giallo is destined to become an important part of the discourse surrounding this much maligned culturally specific form. This book is the first of its kind, an English language study which takes a broad approach to the genre, and doesn't just centre in on a few exceptional directors and films. The first few chapters are the most interesting and add to the debate around popular European cinema and the possible reasons for its dismissal and marginalisation. Koven proposes the term 'vernacular cinema' rather than popular, and argues that giallo films were constructed formally and thematically for a working class rural audience. Therefore the language of these films is one that is formed by and recognisable too a certain type of audience in Italy. An audience which would have both a fascination and ambivalence toward the chic cosmopolitan modernity represented by these films. Koven further argues this was a distracted and unfocused audience, hence the giallo's reliance on punctuating dull narrative exposition with graphic and violent set pieces. I would suggest that it is in Koven's discussion of the reception and consumption of giallo that holds the greatest interest. The remainder of the book is a broad, but extremely well written exploration of the formal and thematic conventions of giallo, for die hard fans of these films this will seem familiar, but its very nice having it written down in academic terms for future reference. Koven's discussion of the set piece is also noteworthy, in that he suggests the set piece, which seems to continue long after its narrative justification, is very close to Pasolin's concept of poetic cinema. It is hard to argue for these films in the terms of art cinema, but Koven pulls it off. This is certainly not the last word on giallo within academic terms of reference, but it is an excellent starting point and will become a crucial book for students of popular European cinematic forms.
Book Description
Focusing on contemporary Italian films, this book offers Italian-language teachers an exciting opportunity to incorporate authentic language in their classrooms. The book is adaptable for any level of language instruction and devotes one chapter to each of ten entertaining movies-among them Cinema Paradiso, La vita e bella, Mediterraneo, and Il postino. Pre-viewing, viewing, and post-viewing activities appropriate to the various films are included in each chapter. The exercises range in difficulty from elementary to highly sophisticated and are designed to enhance students' vocabulary and cultural awareness as well as oral and written skills. Because the film chapters are arranged chronologically and not in order of increasing difficulty, teachers may place particular films in their syllabi at any stage of language instruction. Drawing on a fine selection of relevant Italian films, this inviting book effectively fosters a deeper understanding of both Italian language and culture.
Book Description
When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that ãCinema is the strongest weapon,ä he was only telling half the story. The first English-language anthology devoted to this subject, Re-viewing Fascism examines just how many films failed as ãweaponsä in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture.
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The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge Film Classics)
Peter Brunette
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Similar Items:
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Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World
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L'Avventura - Criterion Collection
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La Notte
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The Films of Ingmar Bergman (Cambridge Film Classics)
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The Passenger
ASIN: 0521389925 |
Book Description
The Cambridge Film Classics series provides a forum for the revisionist studies of the classic works of the cinematic canon from the perspective of the "new auteurism, " which recognizes that films emerge from a complex interaction of bureaucratic, technological, intellectual, cultural, and personal forces. Each volume provides a general introduction to the life and work of a particular director, followed by critical essays on several of the director's most important films, and a filmography.
Customer Reviews:
Perfect Antonioni primer.......2006-03-10
Quite simply, this book is the perfect starting point for someone trying to understand the often-confusing and richly layered and textured films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Brunette devotes a chapter each to six of Antonioni's signature films: "L'avventura", "La notte", "L'eclisse", "Red Desert", "Blow-Up", and "The Passenger". While this list is far from comprehensive, it gives a very thorough analysis of the "classic Antonioni". Even those familiar with Antonioni will find this book to be very useful. An excellent addition to any film-lover's library, no matter if s/he is a novice or a film professor. Also look for Brunette on the commentary track of the "Blow-Up" DVD.
Book Description
In terms of migration, Italy is often thought of as a source country - a place from which people came rather than one to which people go. However, in the past few decades, Italy has indeed become a destination for many people from poor or war-torn countries seeking a better life in a stable environment. Graziella Parati's Migration Italy examines immigration to Italy in the past twenty years, and explores the processes of cultural hybridization that have occurred.
Working from a cultural studies viewpoint, Parati constructs a theoretical framework for discussing Italy as a country of immigration. She gives special attention to immigrant literature, positing that it functions as an act of resistance, a means to talk back to the laws that regulate the lives of migrants. Parati also examines Italian cinema, demonstrating how native and non-native filmmakers alike create parallels between old and new migrations, complicating the definitions of sameness and difference.
These definitions and the complexities inherent in the different cultural, legal, and political positions of Italy's people are at the heart of Migration Italy, a unique work of immense importance for understanding society in both modern-day Italy and, indeed, the entire European continent.
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