Daniele Fioretti

Fulvio Orsitto

Italian Americans in Film and Other Media examines the representation of the Italian immigrant experience from D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Italian Dramas (1908-1913) to the present day. Building on the editors’ previous volume Italian Americans in Film, this collection broadens their scope to address marginalized aspects of Italian Americanness, including the work of women directors and depictions of same-sex relationships. The book consists of three parts. Part I, “The Immigrant Experience”, focuses on feature films and is divided into two sections: “Silent Films” (which analyses some of Griffith’s early films and Barker’s The Italian, 1915), and “Revising Gender Perspectives”, which includes chapters focusing on single films – such as Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete (1949), De Michiel’s Tarantella (1995), and Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007) – and survey essays that discuss the Italian American ‘celluloid closet’ and some of Savoca’s films. Part II, “Italian Americans in Other Media”, offers a wide range of essays informed by different approaches that investigate the immigrant experience in terms of transmediality and transnationality. The types of media examined in this section include television and graphic novels as well as puppetry, Instagram, and Internet memes. Part III contains interviews with Italian American scholars, movie directors, and performers. Together, the contributions to this collection demonstrate the vitality, mutation, and persistence of Italian Americanness in visual media.

The Immigrant Experience from Silent Films to the Internet Age

Italian Americans in Film and Other Media

Mark Epstein

Andrea Righi

This collection represents a tool to broaden and deepen our geographical, institutional, and historical understanding of the term totalitarianism. Is totalitarianism only found in ‘other’ societies? How come, then, it emerged historically in ‘ours’ first? How come it developed in so many countries either in Western Europe (Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Spain) or under implicit Western forms of coercion (Latin America)? How do relations between individual(s), mass and the visual arts relate to totalitarian trends? These are among the questions this book asks about totalitarianism. The volume does not impose a ‘one size fits all’ interpretation, but opens new spaces for debate on the connection between the visual arts and mass-culture in totalitarian societies. From the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, from Western Europe to Latin America, from the fascism of the early 20th century to contemporary forms of totalitarian control, and from cinema to architecture, the chapters included in TotArt bring expertise, historical sensibility and political awareness to bear on this varied range of phenomena. This collection offers international contributions on visual, performing and plastic arts. The chapters range from examination of comics to study of YouTube videos and American newsreels, from Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Uruguayan cinemas to more contemporary American films and TV series, from painters and sculptors to the study of urban spaces.

Fulvio Orsitto

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