At the crossroads of Italian studies; film studies; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, my dissertation investigates a group of films by Italian women filmmakers whose narratives center on women and unfold in constrained spaces. Confinement is generally considered antithetical to feminist projects that imagine emancipation to be synonymous with freedom of movement. Why would women filmmakers, then, making films in the new millennium choose to stage their narratives in cloistered spaces? I find that the spatial restrictions are not responding to familiar dialectics. First feature films Benzina (Gasoline, Monica Stambrini 2001), Aprimi il cuore (Aprimi il cuore, Giada Colagrande 2002), and Via Castellana Bandiera (A Street in Palermo, Emma Dante 2013) find ways to place us snugly inside a familiar space, a space that comes with a standardized set of expectations and associations: the apartment with the nuclear family; Rome’s GRA (grande-raccordo anulare; Rome’s ring road) with travel around the capital; the narrow street as a classically Italian impasse. But when the films have us “overstay our welcome,” these spaces no longer align with our original understanding, instead, we begin to see the kinds of exclusions that have come to define those standardized narratives. And so, the films queer space, and by queering space we might come to see that the world we inhabit is much more dynamic than our traditional narratives might have us believe. I begin by analyzing the only documentary in my project, Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, Alina Marazzi, 2007). This film is a launching pad from which to establish a more robust backdrop of feminist history, philosophies, and concepts that re-emerge in subsequent chapters. Vis-à-vis the historiography I provide, I argue that each of the films’ restricted spatial configurations incite tense interpersonal dynamics within female pairings that dramatize both local and global political tensions within real feminist and lesbian collectives. Allusions to these long-lasting tensions in women’s political history provide not only an image of its past but also of its present, and perhaps its future. In other words, the films are a hard mirror to look into for feminist and lesbian activists and for women whose lives are affected by their (in)decisions, inclusions, and exclusions.

At a time of major political disruption in Italy, this dissertation aims to explore the landscape of contemporary Italian Cinema in connection with the nation’s new demographic trends and social configurations. Focusing on a selected, inherently representative group of filmmakers, the current study proposes a new form of film theory that sees the emergence and recognition of multi-ethnic filmmaking in a hitherto largely monocultural context as an indicator of a profound cultural transformation rather than a mere aesthetic tendency. The critical terminology I propose, “punctuated identitties,” document the characteristics of contemporary filmmakers, since they cannot be easily defined under the categories established by previous critical vocabularies. While these multi-ethnic filmmakers are part of a larger trend in European filmmaking as a whole, and hence constitute a case study of the evolution of a particular trend within individual national cinemas, my aim is to show how their punctuated identities complicate and color the Italian mediascape, and perhaps add a pluralistic dimension to the most recent chapter in the story of one of the most influential national cinemas. The filmmakers analyzed are selected according to specific elements and not on any categorization as first-and-second-generation immigrants. The present analysis includes two immigrants who have consciously chosen Italy as their homeland (Ferzan Özpetek and Jonas Carpignano), a migrant other who rejects nationality (Laura Halilovic), a political exile who relishes a certain sense of freedom in his Italian sojourn (Fariborz Kamkari), and a naturalized son of immigrants (Suranga Katugampala). All move in a fluid and conceptual space that creates a new path inside the traditional domain of national cinema, establishing the validity of others’s points of views and proving that coexistence can enrich even established and influential art forms. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-232). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This dissertation examines food tropes in Italian films of the Economic Miracle, investigating moments of continuity with prewar gastronomic traditions, as well as denoting drastic breaks with the familiar. The kitchen is a place of traditional culinary practices and ingredients, and from which sensations of hominess and conviviality are continually generated; yet, the kitchen is where the changes to the postwar foodscape are most visible. In my analysis of films released from 1954 to 1973, the kitchen is treated as a site of both recognizability and unrecognizability: the feeling that someone does not belong among the people, objects, and rituals part of that changing arena; alternatively, they might not be recognized themselves. In the readings that follow, these directors, actors, and writers grapple with such unrecognizability by way of the stomach: the organ with which to digest food and, moreover, to process the changes that that gastronomy represents. This dissertation is divided into four chapters, or, rather, two halves: first, continuity and desire, and later, rupture and violent rejection. These halves represent continuities and breaks, respectively, as this project follows the transformation of Italy’s “rosy” cinema into dark, nihilist auteurism. At the center of the first half are two stars: Totò (Chapter Two) and Sophia Loren (Chapter Three). In the work of Totò, the visceral hunger that he experiences matches that of the very recent past, and in particular, that of the South. When food became readily available, however, a new hunger emerged: a hunger for what was, as Totò upheld the dietary routines to which he was long accustomed. Meanwhile, Sophia Loren embodies the multivalence of hunger. As Cesira in La ciociara (1960), Loren portrayed a mother struggling against la carestia of occupied Italy; hunger is once again a physical sensation. But through later roles, as well as the authorship of her own cookbook, not only is the stomach satisfied, but there is now a sexual dimension to hunger. Loren softened both the hunger pangs and the blows of the changing sociopolitical arena, leaving her viewers to desire simultaneously her body and the food she prepares, ultimately inviting us to eat with her. Chapter Four, meanwhile, uses the cinema and narrative theories of Pier Paolo Pasolini to explore the connections between continuity, rupture, and “revolution.” Revolution is, in the Marxist sense, the proletariat contending with exploitative forces, as seen through Stracci in La ricotta (1963). It is also the turning of a wheel, emblematic of a progression in a cycle back to naturality and austerity. Despite violent eating and existential crises, the characters of Luna (Uccellacci e uccellini, 1966) and Emilia (Teorema, 1968) reveal a continued relationship with the earth, within which seeds – signs of new life – are planted. This project also suggests a turn towards the tenets of 1940s neorealism, particularly the notions of survival and rebirth. In Marco Ferreri’s La grande abbuffata (1973), the subject of Chapter Five, four wealthy protagonists gather for the ultimate “gastronomic seminar”: a weekend during which they are suicided by overconsumption, choosing to abandon a world so deeply unrecognizable from the traditions and virtues of decades past. Yet, in bequeathing the world to Andréa, there is a reawakening. Andréa is left to perpetuate not only the rich traditions and rituals of previous generations, but also a world of anxieties, unsure of what the future holds.