Learning on ScreenCinema Italiano
IB Tauris, 2011. 328 pages. ISBN: 978-1848856073 (hardback), price: £45. ISBN: 978-1848856080 (paperback), price: £14.99.
About the author: Dr Russ Hunter is a lecturer in Film and Television at Northumbria University and author of An Introduction to European Horror Cinema (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press) and editor, with Alexia Kannas, of The Cinema of Dario Argento (Wallflower press, forthcoming).
The past two decades has seen a welcome, if gradual, move to recognise the contribution that Italian genre cinema has made to its country’s film history and European film culture more generally. Following Christopher Frayling’s long engagement with the work of Sergio Leone, Christopher Wagstaff’s seminal 1992 work on the spaghetti western, A Forkful of Westerns, marked an important turn in the study of Italian cinema, representing a slow shift towards recognition of a wider spectrum of Italian cinema that went beyond the previous focus on neo-realism and ‘commedia all-italiana’ allowed for. Up until that point histories of Italian cinema had been typified by Peter Bondanella’s excellent but canon-focused Italian Cinema: From Neo-Realism to Present, a book that is representative of the way overviews of Italian cinema have tended to focus upon core of critically–lauded Italian films and tended to either briefly reference examples of genre cinema and its stars or ignore them altogether. Bondanella’s more recent A History of Italian Cinema was thus a valuable to corrective to this tendency, examining not just the spaghetti western but also encompassing the giallo, Italian horror film and polizieschi (Italian police films of the 1970s) in its more inclusive overview of Italian film history. A further broadening of approaches to the study of Italian cinema that further helps develop our understanding of the sheer variety of Italian cinema is therefore to be welcomed.
There will still be some that see Italian genre cinema as being too populist, too abundant, too lowbrow or even too non-Italian …
There will still be some that see Italian genre cinema as being too populist, too abundant, too lowbrow or even too non-Italian (given the amount of co-productions it includes) to merit detailed analysis, viewing it as nothing more than an easy-to-dismiss example of exploitation cinema. But the idea that authors such as Hughes do more traditionally explored (and lauded) forms of Italian cinema a disservice by setting them cheek-by-jowl with more populist examples of its cinematic output appears increasingly out-of-date. Indeed, there will be those that see value in exploring what has been termed the ‘underside’ of Italian cinema, as part of a broader drive towards a more all embracing overview of Italian film culture. The existence of books like Hughes’s neither represent a threat to the status of Italian art cinema nor do they suggest it should be forgotten. Rather Cinema Italiano goes some way to redressing an imbalance in the way Italian cinema has traditionally been conceived, offering a broader, more inclusive picture of an industry that was both more prolific and dynamic in the post-war period than historical accounts have heretofore allowed for.
