Italian Ecocinema Beyond The Human

Download or read book Italian Ecocinema written by Elena Past and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism and film studies unite in this examination of five Italian films and the environmental questions they raise. Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, Elena Past examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. She uses these films—Red Desert (1964), The Winds Blows Round (2005), Gomorrah (2008), Le quattro volte (2010), and Return to the Aeolian Islands (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing environmental questions such as cinema’s dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema’s ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world. “[Past] uniquely and innovatively combines film studies and material ecocriticism with a focus on Italy. Such weaving of tales brings the films to life and reads them as ecological documents and Italian stories.” —Heather I. Sullivan, author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works “A timely and incisive study that interrogates a new, though growing, trend in film criticism and makes an important and rich contribution to Italian film studies, Italian cultural studies, and ecocriticism.” —Bernadette Luciano, author (with Susanna Scarparo) of Reframing Italy: New Trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking “Part memoir, part close analysis of the films themselves, and illustrated with numerous excellent frame grabs, Past’s book casts a dreamlike spell as it contemplates the past, present, and future of the cinema and moves smoothly between environmental issues and aesthetic and practical concerns.” —Choice

Download or read book Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human written by Elena Past and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, Elena Past examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. She uses these films—Red Desert (1964), The Winds Blows Round (2005), Gomorrah (2008), Le quattro volte (2010), and Return to the Aeolian Islands (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing environmental questions such as cinema's dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema's ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world.

Download or read book Methods of Murder written by Elena M. Past and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in English, Methods of Murder examines works by major authors both popular, such as Gianrico Carofiglio, and canonical, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda. Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria’s Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist Criminal Man. Through her examinations of these texts, Past demonstrates the links between literary, philosophical, and scientific constructions of the criminal, and provides the basis for an important reconceptualization of Italian crime fiction.

Download or read book Wandering Women written by Laura Di Bianco and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives. Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. The unusual emptiness of the cities that the nomadic female protagonists traverse highlights the absence of, and their wish for, life-sustaining communities. Laura Di Bianco contends that women's urban filmmaking—while articulating a claim for belonging and asserting cinematic and social agency—brings into view landscapes of the Anthropocene, where urban decay and the erasure of nature intersect with human alienation. Though a minor cinema, it is also a powerful movement of resistance against the dominant male narratives about the world we inhabit. Based on interviews with directors, Wandering Women deepens the understanding of contemporary Italian cinema while enriching the field of feminist ecocritical literature.

Download or read book Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean written by Franco Cassano and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valerio Ferme is the Harold and Edythe Toso Endowed Chair professor in Italian Studies at Santa Clara University. --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics written by Krishanu Maiti and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique focuses on the interface of the Anthropocene, sustainability, ecological aesthetics, multispecies relationality, and the environment as reflected in literature and culture. This book examines how writers have addressed ecological crises and environmental challenges that transcend national, cultural, political, social, and linguistic borders. It demonstrates how, as the environmental humanities developed and emerged as a critical discipline, it generated a diverse range of interdisciplinary fields of study such as ecographics, ecodesign, ecocinema, ecotheology, ecofeminism, ethnobotany, ecolinguistics, and bioregionalism, and formed valuable, interdisciplinary networks of critique and advocacy—and its contemporary expansion is exceptionally salient to social, political, and public issues today.

Download or read book Slow Cinema written by Tiago de Luca and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focused on a body of films bound together through a cinematic aesthetic of slowness, this book is a pioneering effort to situate, theorise and map out slow cinema within contemporary global film production and across world cinema history.