Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema (Indiana University, Bloomington,April 14-16)

Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema

The second annual Simposio sul Cinema Italiano Moderno e Contemporaneo (Symposium on Modern and Contemporary Italian Cinema) will take place April 13-16, 2011, at Indiana University in Bloomington. The event, organized by IU's Department of French and Italian, will feature several films, documentaries, and shorts as well as numerous presentations. Scholars and film fans from across the country and around the world will discuss many aspects of modern and contemporary Italian production.

Staging the Outlandish and Clowning the Lyrical Legacy and Transformation of the Commedia dell’Arte (Toronto, January 22, 2011)

Conference Sponsored by The Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies and The Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto

9:00 AM Welcome

9:15 AM Session 1
Erith Jaffe-Berg, University of California – Riverside
"Mediterranean Cartographies in Commedia dell'Arte"

Clarissa Hurley, University of New Brunswick
"The Lyrical Ugly: Commedia dell'Arte and the Aesthetics of the Grotesque"

Rosalind Kerr, University of Alberta
"Flaminio Scala's Fake (Lesbian) Husbands and Palimpsestic Performance Texts"

10: 45 AM Break

11:00 AM Session 2
Kyna Hamill, Boston University
"Venetians Don’t Ride Horses!"

Paul Stoesser, University of Toronto
"Harlequin's Slapstick"

Keith Johnston, University of Toronto
"Commedia dell'Arte in Music? The Case of the Comic Intermezzo"

12:30 PM Lunch

1:30 PM Session 3
Elisa Segnini, Dalhousie University
"On Ephemeral Theatre. Reflections on the Author-Actors of Early Twentieth Century Pantomime"

Veronika Ambros, University of Toronto
"Commedia dell’Arte in Bohemia. Transformations and their Functions"

Gabrielle Houle, University of Toronto
"Of Masks and Legacy: Giorgio Strehler's 1990 Staging of The Servant of Two Masters"

3:00 PM Break

3:15 PM Session 4
Guillaume Bernardi, Glendon College-York University
"Commedia dell’Arte and French Classical Tragedy: Between Historically Informed Performance and Directorial Vision"

Gian Giacomo Colli, Franklin and Marshall College
"Performing Commedia dell'Arte: Practicing vs Rehearsing"

Donato Santeramo, Queen’s University
"Gordon Craig: The Übermarionette and The Commedia dell’Arte"

Caryl Clark, University of Toronto
"Revising Pantalone: Jewish Representation in Goldoni's and Haydn's 'Lo speziale'"

5:15 PM Closing Remarks Domenico Pietropaol

January 22, 2011
9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Robert Gill Theatre
Koffler Student Centre
214 College Street, 3rd Floor

Amnesia and Remembrance (Boston, January 30, 2011)

A commemoration of Italian Holocaust Remembrance Day will feature the critically acclaimed 2003 Italian film "Facing Windows," starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno e Massimo Girotti. Before the film, Professor Nancy Harrowitz (Boston University) will present a lecture entitled, "Making the Past the Present," and Professor Virginia Picchietti (Univeristy of Scranton) will speak on 'Memory of Italian Shoah and Ferzan Ozpetek's "Open Windows."'
The film will be shown at 12:45 and followed by a round table discussion with Virginia Picchietti, Nancy Harrowitz and John Bernstein.

January 30, 2011
11-3:15

Boston University, George Sherman Union Conference Auditorium
775 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

Sponsorred by Boston University and the Consulate General of Italy in Boston, in collaboration with the American Jewish Committee and the Consulate Heneral of Israeel to New England.

Italian students protest against education reforms

* dossier [Repubblica.it]
* videos [Unita'.it]
* pictures [LeMonde.fr]

Una pagina bianca per l'Istruzione - Scriviamola insieme (Ferrara, 11/20/10)

"L’iniziativa “Una pagina bianca per l’istruzione_ scriviamola insieme” nasce dalla collaborazione tra Rete Universitaria Attiva – Unione degli Universitari di Ferrara e il poeta e art performer ivan, con il patrocinio del comune di Ferrara.
La pagina bianca rappresenta, come racconta lo stesso ivan, “un gesto pubblico che dia la possibilità a tutti di esprimersi attraverso l’arte e la poesia in un dialogo costante con la città”. Ed è proprio sfruttando questo dialogo tra tutti i soggetti coinvolti e non all’interno del mondo dell’istruzione della città di Ferrara che si è deciso di dare vita ad una pagina bianca grande quanto l’intera piazza della Cattedrale.
Argomento comune: Le eccellenze del mondo dell’istruzione pubblica. Tutti potranno partecipare e contribuire, scrivendo, disegnando, lasciando un semplice segno. Bambini, insegnanti, studenti, genitori, docenti, semplici passanti e curiosi saranno gli attori principali di questa performance artistica in grado di esaltare gli aspetti positivi e le tante eccellenze del territorio ferrarese, dalla scuola dell’infanzia all’università e alla ricerca. L’iniziativa verrà poi replicata nei 20 Atenei confederati con l’UdU (Unione degli Universitari) nel periodo compreso tra la fine di novembre e gli inizi di dicembre. I tasselli che compongono questo mosaico italiano verranno poi ricongiunti a Roma in un grande evento culturale nazionale che si svolgerà a Roma che vedrà l'opera ferrarese come centro dell'iniziativa.
Ci teniamo e puntualizzare che lo scopo dell'iniziativa non è affatto una contestazione, nè una manifestazione di piazza, ma nasce dallesigenza di sensibilizzare la cittadinanza e di valorizzare il carattere pubblico del mondo istruzione e quindi di esaltare la propria eccellenza, nello specifico quella ferrarese che negli ultimi anni ha fatto grandi salti di qualità;
Le sperimentazioni e l’ormai consolidata qualità del sistema di istruzione primaria e dell’infanzia ferrarese (ed emiliana in generale) non solo sono diventati oggetto di studi e analisi da parte di nazioni, ipersensibili al tema della formazione, come la Svezia, la Danimarca e gli Stati Uniti, ma vengono ormai presi a modello in tutto il mondo per l’avanguardia della programmazione e delle attività didattiche. [...]"

* slideshow [repubblica.it]

Una Conversazione con Simone Sarasso e Jadel Andretto (Wellesley, November 13)

Una conversazione in Italiano con gli autori

SIMONE SARASSO & JADEL ANDREETTO

a COLLINS CINEMA

WELLESLEY COLLEGE

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 13TH

2.00-4.30

Introduzione: David Ward, Italian Studies, Wellesley College


Simone Sarasso, “Solve et coagula: Il futuro della letteratura italiana per come lo vedo io”

Jadel Andreetto, “La curva sinusoidale della narrativa italiana”

Sarasso & Andreetto, lettura di brani da nuove opere



Sarasso is author of Turkemar (Effequ, 2007), Confine di Stato (Marsilio, 2007), Settanta (Marsilio, 2009), as well as a graphic novel entitled United We Stand (Marsilio, 2009), J.A.S.T (Just another spy story) (Marislio, 2010), written with Lorenza Ghinelli and Daniele Rudoni, and Slittamenti progressivi della Rai (effequ, 2010). In addition, along with Daniele Rudoni, Sarasso has written the story for a TV police series Il cacciatore, which Canale5 will air in 2011.



Carlo Lucarelli has recently hailed Sarasso as “Il nuovo maestro italiano del noir.”
Andreetto is part of the Kai Zen writing collective that has published Spauracchi and La Potenza di Eymerich (both Bachilega Editore, 2005), La strategia dell’Ariete (Mondadori, 2007), and the forthcoming Delta Blues (Verdenero, 2010).

The web sites associated with the collective’s work are:

www.lastrategiadellariete.org/

www.kaizenlab.it

and

www.romanzototale.it

Intercollegiate Italian Summit at Harvard (Cambridge, October 2)

The Intercollegiate Italian Summit of Boston
Uniting Italian-American university students and recent graduates across the greater Boston area
The Intercollegiate Italian-American Summit of Boston (IIS) is a FREE annual conference organized by the Harvard College Italian American Association ( http://www.harvarditalianamerican.org/) to foster community among Italian-American university students and recent graduates across the Boston area.

Keynote Speaker
Mr. Stephen Pagliuca, Co-Owner of the Boston Celtics and Managing Director at Bain Capital
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Time: 11:30 am-5 pm
Location: Boylston Hall
Address: Boylston Hall, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA

RSVP
MORE DETAILS AT: http://iisboston.weebly.com/

The Complete Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Harvard Film Archive (September 3 to September 27)

Celebrated the world over as one of the central figures of the postwar Italian cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) is recognized in his native land as arguably the most important Italian artist and intellectual of the twentieth century. A gifted writer and penetrating thinker, Pasolini was already renowned as a poet, novelist, critic and screenwriter before he directed his first film, Accattone, in 1960. Pasolini remained prodigiously industrious as a writer and political activist throughout his career, even as his films brought him greater celebrity – and notoriety – during the last fifteen years of his life, often overshadowing other facets of his remarkably diverse accomplishments. An outspoken but unorthodox leftist, Pasolini attracted controversy from all sides of the political spectrum, with his often sexually explicit and willingly perverse films drawing the frequent ire of Italian censors. With his penchant for political critique and stylistic reinvention, Pasolini is in some ways the Italian counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard. Despite his obvious glee in shocking the bourgeoisie, Pasolini was also a thoughtful, even philosophical, filmmaker who bridged the gap between the post-neorealist group led by Fellini and Antonioni and the generation of Young Turks that included Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio.

Pasolini’s cinema is perhaps best remembered today for its unbridled sexual imagination and its often shocking depictions of violence and unorthodox sexuality. Equally important to his oeuvre, however, is Pasolini’s adamant rejection of the contemporary world. A profound nostalgia for a pre-modern way of life is expressed across Pasolini’s films, in which the magical and the pagan supersede rationality and religion, and an anarchic, polymorphous eroticism replaces what Pasolini regarded as the sharply alienated and alienating state of modern existence. Pasolini refined an extraordinary visual style to express this worldview, favoring static frontal shots evocative of pre- and early Renaissance painting. Most of all, however, Pasolini prized a mode of radical stylistic impurity, using Bach and Vivaldi, for example, as the unlikely yet profoundly fitting soundtrack to his visions of life in the Roman slums. This daring juxtaposition of “high” and “low,” a poetic version of the Marxist dialectic, remained one of Pasolini’s most influential stylistic touches.

During his career a major source of Pasolini’s notoriety was his open homosexuality, a then-rare position that he actually had little choice in establishing. In 1949, while living and teaching as a regional poet in northeast Italy, Pasolini was outed and promptly charged with corrupting a minor, resulting in the loss of both his teaching post and his membership in the Italian Communist Party. The subsequent scandal prompted Pasolini to flee to Rome and, in retrospect, may have inadvertently hastened his rise to prominence in Italian literature. Today Pasolini’s grisly and still unsolved murder, perhaps at the hands of a teenaged hustler, has permanently linked his homosexuality to his public profile.

Pasolini announced his unique style and approach to narrative with his first three works– Accattone, Mamma Roma and The Gospel According to Matthew – which each offer a reworking of the legacy of postwar Italian neo-realism. In the mid-1960s Pasolini made an abrupt turn by attempting to create his own version of a popular cinema, casting the comic star Totò in a group of films, most notably Hawks and Sparrows, using humor and allegory to critique the changes brought about by Italy’s economic and industrial boom. The tepid response to these unusual comedies inspired Pasolini to proclaim allegiance to “unpopular cinema,” and turn to the melding of myth and scathing political critique that resulted in Oedipus Rex, Medea and Pigsty. Pasolini changed course again with his “Trilogy of Life,” an unprecedentedly accessible series of literary adaptations – The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights – until finally rejecting these films with the savage Salò, the ultimate film maudit, which he finished just days before his premature death. This retrospective covers all of the many phases of Pasolini’s filmmaking by including each of his thirteen features and his most important shorts, as well as a reconstruction of La rabbia, a film long considered lost.

Special thanks: Cineteca di Bologna; Liborio Stellino, Consul General of Italy, Boston.

Teorema
Friday September 3 at 7pm
Sunday September 12 at 7pm
A radically streamlined and elliptically simple film, Teorema remains one of Pasolini’s most mysterious works. The story of a sexually magnetic stranger, played by a mesmerizing Terence Stamp, who methodically disrupts the well-ordered household of a wealthy Milanese industrialist, Teorema’s hidden tensions are brought to the surface with a shocking suddenness that remains as inexplicable as it is inevitable. Meant as a merciless savaging of the bourgeoisie, Teorema features a pair of well-known Italian actors as the subjects of its critique—Massimo Girotti and Silvana Mangano as husband and wife— as foils to the alluring stranger, who may be angel or demon, or something else entirely.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky
Italy 1968, 35mm, color, 98 min. Italian with English subtitles

Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re)
Friday September 3 at 9pm
Pasolini turned to myth in the search for a “primal cinema” that occupied the late stage of his tragically shortened career, choosing Oedipus Rex to delve into perhaps the most primal myth of all. Yet Pasolini explicitly rejected any Freudian trappings of the myth, offering an Oedipus less a man scarred by his forbidden intimacy with his mother than a cautionary emblem of willful ignorance. Pasolini transforms the myth into a critique of innocence, not as an absence of guilt but rather as an avoidance of knowledge. Pasolini Oedipus is not a crusader for truth brought down by fate and hubris but rather a man who blunders into his fate precisely by refusing to confront it. Pasolini’s second film set in antiquity and his first in color, Oedipus Rex explores a noticeably more elaborate art direction and costumes than his previous evocations of a vanished ancient world.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene
Italy 1967, 35mm, color, 104 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Gospel According to Matthew (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo)
Saturday September 4 at 7pm
Pasolini’s disarmingly straightforward version of the life of Christ secured his reputation as a filmmaker, rather than simply a poet dabbling in cinema. Aiming to strip away the sanctimony typical of screen adaptations of the Gospels, Pasolini sought to recover the rough poetry of the original texts, pointedly omitting the “Saint” from his title to secularize Matthew. Pasolini’s Christ emerges as much a political revolutionary as a religious figure, addressing the problems of the poor and undermining the patriarchy of the traditional family. With a visual style heavily influenced by Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), the film contains a number of frontal, static shots that reveal Pasolini’s love for early Renaissance painting and point toward the radical classicism of his late films.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susanna Pasolini
Italy 1964, 35mm, b/w, 137 min. Italian with English subtitles

Love Meetings (Comizi d’amore)
Saturday September 4 at 9:30pm
The remarkable Love Meetings is nothing less than a cinema-vérité Kinsey Report – with occasional Godardian touches – on Italian sexual mores in the 1960s. Traveling across Italy, Pasolini and his camera interview people on the street, sunbathers at the beach and soccer players on the pitch about their attitudes towards marriage and divorce, homosexuality, prostitution, machismo and gender roles. While a notable consensus agrees that things are changing it remains less clear what, if anything, these changes mean. In one of his few essays on cinema, Michel Foucault wrote admiringly of the film’s ability to capture the complex ambiguity of reactions to the so-called “sexual revolution.”
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Musatti.
Italy 1964, 35mm, b/w, 92 min. Italian with English subtitles

Medea
Sunday September 5 at 7pm
In the figure of Medea, the sorceress seduced and abandoned by the adventurer Jason, Pasolini saw an allegorical emblem, both for the defeat of the irrational by the rational and for the colonization of the ancient world by an expansionist West. In a series of nearly wordless sequences, Pasolini brilliantly conjures the primal realm of magic and sacrifice which Medea naively leaves to follow Jason, only to realize that she has become a steppingstone for his worldly ambitions in a coldly rational milieu of political power plays. Pasolini drew his inspiration for his second adaptation of a Greek myth, not from the canonical theatrical dramatization of Medea, but from anthropological accounts of the history of religion. In her only dramatic onscreen appearance, the opera star Maria Callas is riveting in the title role.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Maria Callas, Laurent Terzieff, Massimo Girotti
Italy 1969, 35mm, color, 110 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Walls of Sana’a (Le mura di Sana)
Monday September 6 at 7pm
Pasolini’s rarely screened documentary short explores the incredible architecture of the almost 3,000 year old Yemenese city of Sana’a. With its direct appeal to the spectator to help save these fragile structures, The Walls of Sana’a is offers a moving testimony to Pasolini’s deep attachment to the ancient world.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1971, 35mm, color, 13 min. Italian with English subtitles

Followed by
Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana)
While shooting Medea, a film about the subjugation of the ancient world to an alienating modernity, Pasolini developed the idea to make a companion piece about another Greek myth – the story of Orestes. This story would end more happily, with the archaic making way for a different kind of modernity, built not on exploitation but on communalism. Encouraged by emerging socialist governments in post-colonial Africa, Pasolini hoped to shoot his film there, and so he went to Uganda and Tanzania to scout for locations and actors. That footage became the basis for this film, with Pasolini explaining his ideas on the soundtrack. A perfect example of leftist intellectual auto-critique, the film climaxes with Pasolini discussing his plans with a group of African students in Rome. The discussion hovers somewhere between tragedy and farce as one by one, the students calmly and kindly offer numerous reasonable objections to Pasolini’s idea, all of which he seems to take in stride. The Oresteia project was never made. Little-seen and little-discussed, the film is essential viewing for understanding Pasolini’s political thinking and his attachment to myth.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1970, 35mm, color, 63 min. Italian with English subtitles

Accattone
Friday September 10 at 7pm
Pasolini’s magnificent directorial debut, a chronicle of the life of a petty criminal and pimp, reveals the young director’s indebtedness to postwar Italian neo-realism with its episodic narrative, location shooting on city streets and use of nonprofessional actors. Much remarked at the time was Pasolini’s then-startling use of stately music by Bach on the soundtrack to accompany contemporary urban squalor and the static frontal shots that often evoke early Renaissance painting and immediately stamp Accattone with Pasolini’s distinctive style. In his first screen appearance, Franco Citti as the pimp establishes himself as the most important member of Pasolini’s ensemble of actors.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini
Italy 1961, 35mm, b/w, 116 min. Italian with English subtitles

Pigsty (Porcile)
Friday September 10 at 9:15pm
In both Theorem and Pigsty, Pasolini seeks to synthesize the mythic strain that surfaced in Oedipus Rex with the stridently political filmmaking emerging in Europe in the second half of the 1960s and epitomized by Godard’s film. In a nod to the French director, Pasolini reunites the lead couple from La Chinoise, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky, who appear in one of Pigsty’s two parallel plots, this one set in the present, with Léaud as the son of a wealthy businessman whose lack of interest in his fiancée betrays an unorthodox sexual predilection. The other story takes place in an unspecified prehistoric past, where a brutish barbarian scrounges for food in an archaic landscape ravaged by primitive warfare. Pigsty acts as a crucial missing link between the critique of Theorem and the darker depictions of savagery to come.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Pierre Clementi, Anne Wiazemsky
Italy 1969, 35mm, color, 98 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Rage of Pasolini (La Rabbia di Pasolini)
Saturday September 11 at 7pm
In 1962, Pasolini was invited by an Italian newsreel producer to create a feature-length film essay from his company’s library of footage. Inspired by diverse wealth of imagery, Pasolini set out to make a film as “a show of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world.” Assembling images from the Soviet bloc and various anti-colonial movements as complement and contrast to the newsreel footage, Pasolini crafted a remarkable tour de force of politically trenchant commentary on the modern world, climaxing in a moving meditation on the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fearing controversy and box-office failure, the producer ordered Pasolini to cut the original version to less than an hour and then promptly added a right-wing counterpart by the filmmaker Giovanni Guareschi, packaging the two parts as one film. Disowned by Pasolini, this version was indeed a failure. Although Pasolini’s original version remains lost, an ambitious reconstruction was recently completed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna using the shot list and a dialogue transcript from the first version, as well as Pasolini’s notes on music for the film.
Directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1963/2008, 35mm, b/w and color, 83 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Decameron (Il Decameron)
Saturday September 11 at 9pm
In an attempt to turn away from the more experimental direction of his late 1960s work and create a “popular cinema,” Pasolini turned to the beloved collection of alternately bawdy and tender tales of star-crossed lovers, randy nuns and pedophile pickpockets written by Boccaccio in the fourteenth-century. The result is one of the director’s most accessible films, filled with early Renaissance imagery, plentiful nudity and earthy eroticism. While Boccaccio used a range of different narrators to tell each story of romantic attachments and ribald misadventures, Pasolini replaces this framing device with a series of brief interludes featuring himself as a Giottoesque painter. To Pasolini’s dismay, the film’s international popularity inspired a number of soft-core imitations.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ninetto Davoli
Italy 1971, 35mm, color, 110 min. Italian with English subtitles

La Ricotta
Monday September 13 at 7pm
For his contribution to the omnibus film RoGoPaG – comprised of episodes by himself, Rossellini, Godard and Ugo Gregoretti – Pasolini fashioned an ingenious fable that is both a satire on filmmaking and a tribute to Italian Mannerist painting. Although Orson Welles stars as a director filming the crucifixion, the real protagonist is an unassuming middle-aged man working as an extra to feed his family. The extraordinary meeting of three worlds—high art, moviemaking and all-too-real poverty—leads to a collision with tragicomic consequences, a “collage,” as Pasolini called it, that allows him to effectively critique the distance between ethics and aesthetics.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Orson Welles, Mario Cipriani, Laura Betti
Italy 1963, 35mm, b/w and color, 35 min. Italian with English subtitles

Followed by

Seeking Locations in Palestine for the Film “The Gospel According to Matthew” (Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il film “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo”)
Pasolini had originally planned to shoot The Gospel According to Matthew in the approximate locations referred to in the Bible: Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem. With this in mind he visited the area—including other parts of Israel, Jordan and Syria—with a newsreel photographer, filming both the landscape and its inhabitants. Edited by The Gospel’s producer for potential funders and distributors, Pasolini added a semi-improvised commentary as the only soundtrack to his footage, including his musings on Jesus and his teachings and on the difficulty of finding suitable locations for his project, while avoiding the subject of Israel and Palestine. An evocative behind-the-scenes glimpse into Pasolini’s creative project, the film serves as testimony to his idiosyncratic views of Jesus as a historical figure and his distinctions between the ancient and modern worlds.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Italy 1965, 35mm, b/w, 52 min. Italian with English subtitles

Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte)
Sunday September 19 at 7pm
In his version of the Middle and Near Eastern tales called the Arabian Nights, Pasolini revels in the sheer joy of storytelling, elaborately intertwining a series of meandering episodes that lend the film a rich narrative complexity. Eliminating the storyteller Scheherazade, Pasolini instead embeds the nested stories within a framing narrative about a poor young man searching for the escaped slave girl who is his lost love. Like The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, the film abounds in nudity and scenes of sexuality, although cast now in a far sunnier mood than those two films, perhaps an expression of Pasolini’s declaration to have “liberated” himself by shooting for the first time in distant non-European disparate locales, from Ethiopia to Nepal, and using a cast combining Pasolini regulars with nonprofessional actors found on location.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Tessa Bouché, Ninetto Davoli
Italy 1974, 35mm, color, 129 min. Italian with English subtitles

Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini)
Monday September 20 at 7pm
Pasolini regarded il Boom – the massive economic and industrial development of postwar Italy and the wave of rapid social change that followed – as a tragic catastrophe, a sweeping away of Italy’s last vestiges of pre-modern culture by replacing them with the depredations of consumer capitalism. Alternately caustic and gently comic, this melancholy film offers a parable of those changes, tracing the odyssey of a father and son through a landscape of degradation and exploitation as they follow a talking crow that delivers a Marxist critique of the situation. A homage to silent comedy, Hawks and Sparrows proved to be Pasolini’s parting shot at contemporary Italy before he turned to his cycle of mythic films.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi
Italy 1966, 35mm, b/w, 86 min. Italian with English subtitles

Mamma Roma
Friday September 24 at 7pm
Monday September 27 at 7pm
Inspired by his work on the screenplay for The Nights of Cabiria, Fellini’s spirited fable about a Chaplinesque prostitute, Pasolini offered his own portrait of a Roman streetwalker, replacing Fellini’s whimsy with a clear-eyed and unflinching look at the lives of the urban poor. In one of her signature roles, the indomitable Anna Magnani captures the stubborn pride and vulnerability of the title character, a woman fiercely protective of her son, who is himself a classic version of the Pasolinian ragazzo, living large on the streets and drifting inevitably toward a life of crime. Pasolini’s juxtaposition of the Fascist-era housing block that is home to mother and son against the nearby ruins of an ancient aqueduct reveals his lifelong attraction to the archaic and his lasting distrust of the modern.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofalo, Silvana Corsini
Italy 1962, 35mm, b/w, 105 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Canterbury Tales
Friday September 24 at 9pm
For his follow-up to The Decameron, Pasolini selected Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the other great fourteenth century collection of stories. If the world of Pasolini’s Decameron is that of the dawning of the Renaissance, the world here is decidedly medieval, with a concomitant emphasis on the vulgar and the grotesque. Although the “Trilogy of Life” was conceived as a celebration of the body, this middle piece marks a palpably darkening mood. Returning to the episodic structure so central to Pasolini’s cinema, the film recounts a series of amorous misadventures with a sharp emphasis placed more on sex than on love, lust or desire. Climaxing with a wildly scatological vision of Hell, The Canterbury Tales is propelled by notably cruel humor, a violence more pointed than The Decameron and an even more raw sexuality.
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Franco Citti, Laura Betti, Ninetto Davoli, Josephine Chaplin
Italy 1972, 35mm, color, 110 min.

Salò
Sunday September 26 at 7pm
Disillusioned by the sexual revolution, which he felt had only entrenched sexuality in consumerism and bourgeois rationalism, Pasolini disowned his “Trilogy of Life,” the three early 1970s films intended as erotic celebrations of the body, and responded with his most notorious and final film, Salò. Set in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini’s reign, the film liberally adapts Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, using the tale of amoral libertines who kidnap young victims for a sacrificial orgy to launch a ruthless and wide-ranging attack on modernity as a whole. Setting up equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism and consumerist alienation, Salò delivers a trenchant political allegory that tends to be overshadowed by its explicit nudity and images of sexual sadism. The film’s ultimately extreme violence and deviant sexuality have earned it the reputation as arguably the first “artsploitation” movies, a precursor to the likes of Funny Games (1997, 2007) and Irreversible (2002).
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Paolo Bonicelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Franco Merli
Italy 1975, 35mm, color, 116 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
617-495-4700
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa
Tickets are $9 for the General Public, $7 for Non-Harvard Students, Seniors, Harvard Faculty and Staff
Harvard students free
The HFA does not sell advance tickets. Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time at the HFA box office.

Gallery Talk on ANVERSA E GENOVA: RUBENS’S GENOESE CONNECTION (Sackler Museum, Cambridge)

Gallery Talk by Edward Wouk, PhD candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.

This talk, related to the installation Rubens and the Baroque Festival, places the artist’s decoration for the entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Spain into Antwerp (1635) in the context of a long- standing relationship between that bustling metropolis in the north and Genoa, an important Mediterranean harbor in Italy. Rubens and the Baroque Festival is one of a series of rotating thematic installations on display in conjunction with the ongoing exhibition Re-View.

The exhibition is on view March 19 through August 28, 2010 at the Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

Free with the price of admission. Open to the public. Gallery talks are informal and include discussion. Limited to 25 participants; please arrive early.

Vittorio De Sica Program at the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge, MA June 5-14, 2010)

Vittorio De Sica – Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy
June 5 – June 14 at the Harvard Film Archive

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
617-495-4700
http://hcl.harvard.edu
Tickets are $9 General Admission, $7 Seniors and Students

The Films
Shoeshine (Sciuscia)
Saturday June 5 at 7pm
Sunday June 6 at 9pm
De Sica’s heart-wrenching portrait of two impoverished shoeshine boys uses the ever-present Allied soldiers and bombed ruins as a constant reminder of the still reverberating devastation of war. De Sica and Zavattini’s interest in symbols and, increasingly, fantasy, is legible in the figure of the horse that becomes the boys’ sole source of happiness and, almost simultaneously, despair. Rarely screened today, Shoeshine stands with Bunuel’s Los Olviadados as one the great films about children.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Rinaldo Smordoni, Franco Interlenghi, Anniello Mele
Italy 1946, 35mm, b/w, 93 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli)
Saturday June 5 at 9pm
In this delightful episodic comedy about Naples, De Sica pays tribute to the city where he spent his childhood. Loosely structured around four short vignettes and featuring some of Italian cinema’s biggest stars – including De Sica as an upper-class gambler - this anthology showcases the lyric beauty of Naples and De Sica’s evident love for its people and places while subtly plumbing the depths of the human heart.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Totò, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano
Italy 1954, 35mm, b/w, 107 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano)
Sunday June 6 at 7pm
A searing portrayal of familial disintegration vividly told from the perspective of a five-year-old abandoned by his mother, De Sica’s proto-neorealist masterpiece foregrounds a thematic concern that recurs throughout his oeuvre – the troubled distance between children and adults as an echo of a dysfunctional society destabilized by fascism and war. As a vital witness to the callousness and ingratitude pervasive throughout society, the young boy’s struggle to ascribe moral values to the world offers both an indictment and an ambiguous vision of hope.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Luciano De Ambrosis, Isa Pola, Emilio Cigoli
Italy 1943, 35mm, b/w, 85 min. Italian with English subtitles

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Monday June 7 at 7pm
The story of a wealthy Jewish family willfully shut off from the rest of the world and in reckless denial of fascism’s hold on the Italian people, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is narrated by Giorgio, a frequent guest of the family and the only one who foresees the impending and unstoppable forces that will shatter their cloistered world. Combining luminous flashbacks with the present, the film’s structure resembles De Sica’s own comeback: the once great director who was written off in the 1960’s re-emerges out of the past with this late, luxuriant masterpiece.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Dominique Sanda, Lino Capolicchio, Helmut Berger
Italy 1970, 35mm, color, 93 min. Italian with English subtitles
Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano)
Friday June 11 at 7pm
Sunday June 13 at 9pm
An off-beat and entrancing entry in De Sica’s neorealist canon, Miracle in Milan is an extraordinary fable that bends towards magic realism to imagine a place where society’s most downtrodden can find purchase and possible escape from misery. Set within a fantastically theatrical shantytown, Miracle in Milan constructs an alternate world from De Sica and Zavattini’s fascination with marginalized perspectives. One of De Sica’s unsung masterpieces, Miracle in Milan’s unusual use of deliberate artifice and spectacle rekindles the Meliesian, magical aura of early cinema.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa
Italy 1951, 35mm, 96 min. Italian with English subtitles

Terminal Station (Stazione termini)
Friday June 11 at 9pm
Following a fraught collaboration, producer David O. Selznick – without De Sica’s knowledge or consent – re-edited their film and released his bowdlerized version as Indiscretion of an American Wife. De Sica’s version – his last true neorealist work – stars Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, as a married American whose attempt to end an affair with an Italian academic occurs in real time in the eponymous station. Delicately portraying the vulnerability of the lovers, Terminal Station sensitively explores the powerful pull of desire and the conflict between personal happiness and familial duty.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Jennifer Jones, Montgomery Clift, Gino Cervi
US/Italy 1953, 35mm, b/w, 90 min.

Umberto D.
Saturday June 12 at 7pm
A powerful diary of loneliness and old age written by the palsied hand of slow suffering, Umberto D tells the story of an elderly man struggling for dignity and survival in a society indifferent to the needs of its frailest members. Cruelly marginalized and eventually forced onto the streets, with only his dog for companionship, Umberto is victim to an impersonal, uncaring state and a petty, hardhearted society. With minimal dialogue and a small cast of nonprofessionals, De Sica uses Carlo Battisti’s devastating performance as Umberto, the atmospheric streets of Rome and G.R. Aldo’s brilliantly crepuscular cinematography to etch an emotionally resonant portrait of societal breakdown as a quiet yet terrifyingly absolute disintegration.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari
Italy 1952, 35mm, b/w, 89 min. Italian with English subtitles

After the Fox (Caccia alla volpe)
Saturday June 12 at 9pm
De Sica’s late comedy shines with a witty screenplay co-written by Neil Simon and a playful film-within-a-film structure with a hilarious Peter Sellers at its center. Although seemingly an unlikely project for De Sica, After the Fox returned to his roots in sophisticated comedy, where he is able to cleverly manipulate milieu and story – a band of thieves smuggling gold from Cairo – into a biting satire of a fluttering, superficial world of disguises and postures. With a wickedly funny turn by Victor Mature as an aging, egotistical actor and its affectionate skewering of narcissistic directors – including De Sica himself in a cameo – After the Fox is a biting repart to the decadence of the 1960s Italian film industry.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Victor Mature
Italy 1966, 35mm, color, 103 min.

The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)
Sunday June 13 at 7pm
De Sica’s best known film and a foundational work of the neorealist movement, The Bicycle Thieves uses nonprofessional actors and incredible location shooting on the streets of a war-ravaged Rome to tell the gripping story of a downtrodden man whose quest to reclaim a stolen bicycle sends him on a spellbinding tour through the city’s working class neighborhoods with his young yet wise son. A heartbreaking work of redemption and hope in the face of overwhelming despair, The Bicycle Thieves is a richly insightful examination of the human condition.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Italy 1948, 35mm, b/w, 87 min. Italian with English subtitles

Two Women (La Ciociara)
Monday June 14 at 7pm
A heartbreaking story of survival during WWII, a preternaturally beautiful Sophia Loren stars as a young widow returning to her native village, fleeing Rome and the Allied bombings with her teenage daughter. An operatic and devastatingly intense story of family ties and societal hypocrisy, Two Women is one of the greatest film melodramas of all time. When the small town proves no safer than the city, both mother and daughter must reach far deeper into the well of human suffering than seemingly imaginable.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica. With Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleonora Brown
Italy 1960, 35mm, b/w, 105 min. Italian with English subtitles

Lauro de Bosis Italian Colloquium, Spring 2010

Lauro de Bosis Italian Colloquium, Spring 2010


Harvard University
Wednesday 4-6pm. Boylston 403


1/27 L. Pertile: Presentazione del programma

2/3 Francesco Erspamer. “Come si scrive una recensione”

2/10 Stanislao Pugliese. Bitter Spring. A life of Ignazio Silone, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 426 pp. (amazon $ 20.79)

2/17 Peter Bondanella. A History of Italian Cinema. Continuum, $29.95 (amazon 19.77)

2/24 Jane Tylus. Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others University of Chicago Press, $45.00 (amazon $35.96)

3/3 Francesco Erspamer. La creazione del passato, Sellerio 2009

3/10 Chiara Cappelletto. Neuroestetica. L’arte del cervello. Laterza, euro 12.00

3/24 Maggi, Armando. The Resurrection of the Body. Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Saint Paul to Sade. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2009.

3/31 Emanuela Mora. Fare moda. Esperienze di produzione e consumo, Bruno Mondadori, euro 17.00

4/7 William Wallace. Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times. Cambridge - New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010.

4/14 Jon Snyder. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. University of California Press, $45.00 (amazon $40.46)

4/21 Horodowich, Elizabeth. Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice. Pp. xii, 245. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008.

TBD A Brief History of Venice. Constable & Robinson, 2009

Federica e-Learning

* An overview: video
* Project: video
* Podcast
* Living Library: video
* campus 3D: video

Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema at Indiana University 2010

Symposium on Contemporary Italian Cinema at Indiana University 2010

April 7-10, 2010

Call for Papers on Contemporary Italian Cinema

Submissions are being accepted for original research on the importance of new directors and trends in Italian cinema. Topics may include: recent research on directors, regulation and funding with regard to film production in Italy, individual film analysis, the influence of international cinema on contemporary Italian cinema, the influence of Italian cinema on international cinema, the importance of photography or music in contemporary Italian cinema, the representation of family and gender, the issue and experience of otherness, the search for cultural and spiritual identity, and cinema as a pedagogical tool in the foreign language classroom.
Proposals on Italophone cinema are also encouraged: namely, the cinema of North and
South America, Australia, the Mediterranean world and Africa, that deal with the Italian experience outside of Italy.
A major contemporary Italian filmmaker will be present as keynote speaker.
Papers should be written in the language with which the reader feels most comfortable
(Italian or English) and should be limited to no more than 18 minutes (8-9
doubled-spaced pages). One-page abstracts should be sent electronically (Word attachment only) by Dec.
31, 2009 or before to Antonio Vitti (ancvitti@indiana.edu), to Colleen Ryan-Scheutz
(yancm@indiana.edu) and to Andrea Ciccarelli (aciccare@indiana.edu).

OpenCourseWare on Dante and Boccaccio

Some day ago, "la Repubblica" published an article by Alessio Balbi about an imminent change in high-education. The article quoted prof. David Wiley who said that Universities "will be irrelevant in 2020" [Deseret News].
The Italian journalist mentioned as an example MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW), an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone and anywhere.
"As of August 2008, of the over 1800 courses available, only 26 included complete video lectures, and not all of these have complete lecture notes. The lack of lecture notes makes it difficult to follow some lectures, for example, when the lecturer is referring to slides being projected in the lecture hall. The selection of available courses is somewhat incomplete. For example, prerequisite classes for a given course are frequently not available. However, the quality of those courses which include complete materials is very high, and many of the lecturers are extremely compelling. The video is available in streaming mode, but may also be downloaded for viewing offline, though the procedure for downloading is not explicitly given. Many video and audio files are also available from iTunes U." [Wikipedia]
Among all 1800 courses, I found the course 'Medieval Literature: Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer' - Spring 2005 - prof. James Cain
Other universities offering open courses can be found at OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Italy in the Age of Pinocchio

Professor Carl Ipsen of the University of Indiana, will present a lecture entitled "Italy in the Age of Pinocchio." Respondents will be Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg and Provost David Kertzer, both of Brown University.
April 29 at 5:30

Brian Room in the Maddock Alumni Center, followed by a reception in the Heritage Room

For precirculated papers:
blogs.brown.edu/project/it_colloquium/

For password:
Mona_Delgado@brown.edu

Fascism and the Italian Roots of Radicalism

On April 27, Professor Rita Sodi of Yale University will present a lecture
entitled "Fascism and the Italian Roots of Radicalism."
Sponsored by the Boston University Interdisciplinary Italian Studies Program
CAS Building, Room 313
325 Commonwealth Avenue
7:00
Reception to follow in Room 200
Free and Open to the Public

The Future of the Universities (Rome, 4/20/2009)

Conference The Future of the Universities
"In the global market for innovation the future of Italian and European universities is closely linked to their ability to adjust to internationalization: Vision addresses this topic during the annual conference on universities, organized in conjunction with Nova, Air and Urania, with the help of recent data provided, among others, by OECD and the Lisbon Council. Universities are the object of continuous assessments measuring their prestige and results. Moreover, universities can no longer be considered independently of the national, regional and thematic environement, in which they operate."

Italian Filmmakers at the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge, April 17-19)

Bodies, Images, Histories: Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi
April 17 – April 19

Milan-based filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are renowned for their accomplished work with archival footage, which is principally from the 1910s and 1920s and typically re-photographed. Thoughtfully juxtaposing images through editing, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi also invariably adjust the film’s speed, add tinted color and spare soundtracks, and reframe the image to focus on key details. Such meticulous manipulation encourages spectators to read the selected footage, instead of simply watching it, so as to consider not only what the images mean, but how. Much of the work is explicitly political, and grounded in the idea of the cinematic apparatus as a detached observer of modernity’s vast upheavals: Colonialism, World War One, statelessness. To what extent, the films ask, is this dispassionate gaze able to critique modernity, and to what extent is it complicit in the upheavals, or at least complacent?

Such questions about the function and resonance of the cinematic image are given particular force by the physical decay of the aging footage preferred by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi. Often foregrounding the incomplete or distorted parts of the image, the filmmakers point to the contrast between the apparently implacable gaze of the camera and the vulnerability of its material support, a disparity that, in turn, reveals the gap between the compulsive force of political power and ideology on the one hand, and the bodies of the workers, soldiers and colonized submitted to it, on the other. The seeming imperviousness of the cinematic apparatus and the ideologies that deployed it—colonialist powers, authoritarian states—all depend nevertheless on a mutable material base, and on the contingencies of history.

The spare and intense films of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi wring both irony and a strange, mournful beauty from the bodies on display in the images they select, bearing witness to the ravages of time and the destructive power of the European nations and their armies.

This program is presented in conjunction with a conference by Harvard’s Center for European Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures on Italian Futurism. Special thanks to Ara Merjian.

Directors Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi in Person
Special Event Tickets $10
Oh! Man (Oh! Uomo)
Friday April 17 at 7pm
Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s powerful survey of the irreparable damage to human lives caused by World War One derives its exclamatory title from a quote by Leonardo da Vinci arguing that the very sight of the horrors of war is capable of awakening and renewing the human conscience. Unflinchingly organizing the archival footage which comprises the film, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi create two broad categories—of displaced, sick, orphaned and malnourished children and of severely disfigured veterans. Forcing the audience to systematically confront, all at once, the ravages of war, the seemingly unruffled gaze of the camera, and the filmmakers’ own tolerance for the images, forms a devastating and almost numbing meditation on man’s will to destruction. A sharp retort to complacent spectatorship, Oh! Man is also a bold testament to the power of the moving image to awaken the viewer and to objectify the camera’s subject.
Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.
Italy 2004, 16mm, color, 71 min.

Preceded by
The Flower of the Race (Il fiore della razza)
This short film highlighting the glorification of the body by Italian fascism skillfully contrasts footage of staged athletic events with home movies of weddings and family celebrations.
Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.
Italy 1991, 16mm, color, 20 min.

Directors Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi In Person
Special Event Tickets $10
From the Pole to the Equator (Dal polo all’equatore)
Saturday April 18 at 7pm
From the Pole to the Equator is the name given to a documentary compiled in the late 1920s by filmmaker Luca Comerio, which drew on footage from around the globe to celebrate the vitality and achievements of European colonialism – most of all Italian fascism. Using this material, as well as other footage shot or collected by Comerio, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi refashioned Comerio’s work in order to tease out the ideology written upon –and between–every image. The fact that so much of the film had begun to decay gives it a layer of abstraction and serves as a comment on the contingent nature of the images and their ideology and, in Gianikian’s words, “on the violence of colonialism as it plays itself out in different situations and spheres.”
Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.
Italy 1986, 16mm, color, 101 min.

People, Years, Life (Uomini, anni, vita)
Sunday April 19 at 3pm
Using images shot in Russia and Armenia from World War I to the 1930s and retrieved from a Soviet film archive, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi constructed a meditative film about the status of Armenians as a people without a state. Inspired by the diary of Gianikian’s father, People, Years, Life uses rare footage depicting the region’s major historic events: the end of Tsarist Russia, violence in the Caucasus during World War I, the 1918 Armenian exodus from Azerbaijan. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s treatment of the material manipulates the speed of the images, adds color and music, and magnifies various parts of the image, so that the movement of bodies across the frame begins to carry the weight of exile, mourning, dispossession.
Directed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.
Italy 1990, 16mm, color, 70 min.

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center for the Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
617-495-4700
The HFA does not sell advance tickets. Tickets are available at the HFA box office 45 minutes prior to show time.

CFP: Metamorphosing Dante

Call for Papers: Metamorphosing Dante
ICI-Berlin, 24-26 September 2009
Organizers: Manuele Gragnolati (Oxford/Berlin), Fabio Camilletti (Berlin), Fabian Lampart (Freiburg)

"After almost seven centuries, Dante persists and even seems to haunt the present. Dante has been used, rewritten, and metamorphosed through manifold media and cultural productions; the image itself of Dante has provided many paradigms for being (or performing the role of) a poet, indiscriminately shifting from the civic to the love poet, from the language experimenter to the engaged poet-philosopher, or from the bard of a ‘sublime’ Inferno to that of heavenly rarefaction. This conference will investigate what so many authors, artists and thinkers from such different artistic, political, geographical, and cultural backgrounds have found in Dante in the 20th and 21st centuries. Certainly, Dante’s work can provide multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters and stories, thereby allowing a wide range of possibilities to be evoked and re-activated. However, after the somewhat a-critical, sometimes Kitsch tribute paid to Dante during the Romantic period – excesses against which the scholarly tradition of Dante studies intentionally constituted itself – Dante’s oeuvre has become a more challenging and interrogative presence. It has become a floating, sometimes subterranean, certainly complex influence, and each re-appropriation also inquires, somehow moving forward with a backwards gaze, into its own Weltanschauung, including such crucial elements as subjectivity, language, politics, desire, and utopia.

The hypothesis that this conference seeks to pursue is that the 20th and 21st centuries have found in Dante a field of tension, in which they can mirror, explore, and question the tensions of their own realities. Situated itself on critical points of tension (sermo humilis/sublimis, lyric/epic, life/afterlife, human/divine, present/future…), Dante’s aspiration towards totality remains a daunting presence in the age of fragmentation. After the ‘death of the Author’, Dante’s work seduces precisely as the site of a powerful production of authorship: in its own critical engagement with biblical and classical works, it gives birth to the author in a modern sense by appropriating their authority and charging it with a strongly subjective dimension imbued with experience, memory, and desire. The conference invites scholars and artists coming from different disciplines and cultures to explore what the 20th and 21st centuries have looked for in Dante’s works, and the ways in which they have engaged with them through rewritings, dialogues, and transposition in order to reflect upon their own tensions.

Metamorphosing Dante is conceived within the frame of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry’s core project Tension/Spannung, whose aim is to explore the manifold role of tension from a pluridisciplinary approach through the interactions of artists and scholars from different backgrounds. This conference aims to investigate Dante’s tensions with the same openness in inquiry, focusing on their adaptability to all possible metamorphoses undergone by Dante in the 20th and 21st centuries."

Symposium: Dante's Pluringualism (Berlin, April 2-4)

AUTHORITY, VULGARIZATION, SUBJECTIVITY

Symposium: Dante's Pluringualism: Authority, Vulgarization, Subjectivity
ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, April 2-4, 2009
Organizers: Sara Fortuna, Manuele Gragnolati, Jürgen Trabant

"Already in 1929 Erich Auerbach highlighted the innovative character of Dante's oeuvre which, in contrast with its traditional interpretation as the culmination and summa of a medieval Weltanschauung, he associated with a modern representation of the human being in its individuality and historical reality. This conference gathers scholars from different disciplines (literary studies, history, linguistics, philosophy, queer theory, theatre) to discuss the role that language plays for Dante. In particular, the question with which this conference engages is to what extent Dante’s linguistic theory and praxis, which can be understood in terms of a strenuous defense of the vernacular language, in tension with the prestige of Latin, both informs and reflects a new constellation of authority, knowledge and identity, which is imbued with a significant element of subjectivity and opens up towards modernity. The conference will also include a dialogue with Giorgio Pressburger on his recent Nel regno oscuro and a performance based on Dante and Pasolini."

Participants: Albert Russell Ascoli (Berkeley), Zygmunt Baranski (Cambridge), Emma Bond (Oxford), Gary Cestaro (Chicago), Sara Fortuna (Berlin), Stefano Gensini (Roma), Carlo Ginzburg (Pisa), Manuele Gragnolati (Oxford, Berlin), Agnese Grieco (Berlin), Ruedi Imbach (Paris), Giulio Lepschy (Cambridge), Laura Lepschy (London, Cambridge), Bettina Lindorfer (Berlin), Elena Lombardi (Bristol), Franco Lo Piparo (Palermo), Lino Pertile (Harvard), Giorgio Pressburger (Trieste), Irène Rosier-Catach (Paris), Francesca Southerden (Oxford), Mirko Tavoni (Pisa), Jürgen Trabant (Berlin, Bremen).