| This study looks at the Italian cinema (particularly of the 60s) through the lens of Italy's "economic miracle," to show the ways in which the well-known films of this period are inflected by the postwar reorganization of capitalism around consumption, and by the emergence of a new technology of vision in the form of television. The Italian cinema of the 60s thus becomes a highly charged historical conjuncture in which we may see, retroactively, the emergence of the most pressing questions in critical theory, cultural studies, and theories of the image, questions which persist to the present.The study begins with an examination of the discourses of neorealism, since the period around 1960 saw a revival of the neorealist impulse, precisely as a way to visualize and understand the radical social transformations in the nation. By taking the neorealist "aesthetic of reality" to various limits, filmmakers of the 60s found an aesthetic correlative to the unrepresentability of the historical transformation around them.The study then posits that Pasolini and Antonioni represent two dialectically related poles in the process of connecting aesthetics to history. The centrality of the body in Pasolini's work moves him towards a kind of cultural studies while Antonioni's relentless formalism, at first glance modernist, in fact announces the dimension of the postmodern sublime.Finally, the study looks at the ways in which the concerns of the Italian cinema of the 60s continue to animate not only recent Italian cinema, but also key works in other national cinemas attempting to address the problems of economic modernization.Central to the entire study is an emphasis on space and its transformation. This study takes as an assumption the proposition of Henri Lefebvre that space is always a heterogenous "superimposition" of concrete historical moments and practices. The spaces of Italy provide a unique vantage point for the investigation of postmodern geographies, insofar as Italian space is subject simultaneously to the deformations of the new "global space" and to the "inertia" of an urban space overloaded with traces of the past. |
