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A cinema of poetry : aesthetics of the Italian art film

Title
A cinema of poetry : aesthetics of the Italian art film / Joseph Luzzi.
Author
Luzzi, Joseph
Publication
  • Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
  • ©2014
Supplementary Content
Book review (H-Net)

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TextUse in library MFL 14-7036Performing Arts Research Collections - Theatre

Details

Description
xiv, 211 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relationship between film and literature, such as the cinematic adaptation of literary sources, and more generally the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relationship between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression--what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry." While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film--its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art--have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history, which lends to this national cinema its unique aesthetic perspectives. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably "Italian"? --Provided by publisher.
Subjects
Genre/Form
History.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-204) and index.
Contents
Part 1. Neorealist rhetoric and national identity -- The chorus of neorealism -- Beyond beauty: cinematic allegory and the question of Italy -- Part 2. Cinemas of poetry -- Rossellini's cinema of poetry: voyage to Italy -- Poesis in Pasolini: theory and practice -- Part 3. Aesthetic corsi and ricorsi -- Threat of the real: fact and image in Antonioni -- Chiasmus, Italian style: rhetoric and ideology in the leopard and the conformist -- Verbal montage and visual apostrophe: Zanzotto's "Filo" and Fellini's Voice of the moon -- Epilogue: Art film redux: cine-poetics in the new millennium.
Call Number
MFL 14-7036
ISBN
  • 9781421411668
  • 1421411660
  • 9781421419848
  • 142141984X
LCCN
2013033053
OCLC
857743817
Author
Luzzi, Joseph, author.
Title
A cinema of poetry : aesthetics of the Italian art film / Joseph Luzzi.
Publisher
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Copyright Date
©2014
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-204) and index.
Connect to:
Book review (H-Net)
Research Call Number
MFL 14-7036
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