ISBN: 0801868475 9780801868474

Category: History / Europe / Italy

Page count: 377

<p>Premio Flaiano given by the Istituto Italiana di Cultura</p><p>Over the past twenty-five years, Italy's film industry has produced a remarkable number of award-winning international art-house hits, among them <i>Cinema Paradiso</i> and <i>Life Is Beautiful</i>. Despite these successes, Italian cinema is in a state of crisis: ticket sales for domestic films, which plummeted in the l980's, are only now beginning to recover; television deregulation has engendered a popular culture largely dependent on American programming; and the passing of an entire generation of brilliant auteurs—Rossellini, Viscounti, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Fellini—extinguished the revolutionary impulse which had characterized Italian filmmaking since the Second World War.</p><p>In <i>After Fellini</i>, Millicent Marcus contends that in the late 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of Italian filmmakers has transcended these obstacles and reasserted Italy's importance in world cinema. Through in-depth critiques of such acclaimed films as <i>The Last Emperor</i>,<i>Caro Diario</i>, and <i>Stolen Children</i>, as well as the immensely popular <i>Cinema Paradiso</i> and <i>Life Is Beautiful</i>, Marcus details how today's auteurs have both reflected and resisted Italy's shifting social, political, and cultural identity, and created a body of work that signals a new beginning for Italian cinema.</p>