This cinema history illuminates the role of southern Italian performance traditions on American movies from the silent era to contemporary film. In Napoli/New York/Hollywood, Italian cinema historian Giuliana Muscio investigates the significant influence of Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors on Hollywood cinema. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, Muscio demonstrates how these artists and workers preserved their cultural and performance traditions, which led to innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies. In doing so, she sheds light on the work of generations of artists, as well as the cultural evolution of “Italian-ness” in America over the past century. Muscio examines the careers of Italian performers steeped in an Italian theatrical culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance, acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story—that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema—is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.

Fleeing a Hollywood that spurned him, Orson Welles arrived in Italy in 1947 to begin his career anew. Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, his six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile's book depicts the artist's life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of Othello. Drawing on revelatory new material on the artist's personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italy also chronicles Italian cinema's transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the cold war.

The story told in this book, which analyzes the presence of Italians in California in the early decades of the twentieth century and the influence they exerted in various sectors (from architecture to art, from crafts to the burgeoning film industry), began in 1915, the year Salvatore Ferragamo arrived in the United States and soon after moved to the sunny West Coast. That same year the Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco, where Marcello Piacentini's Italian Citadel made waves and marked the beginning of the powerful and lasting influence of the Renaissance style on the local architectural language. Against the backdrop of Italian emigration to the States - the fil rouge running through the entire book - and of a Hollywood on its way to becoming the world capital of the young film industry, the volume tells of personalities who were already myths in their day, such as Enrico Caruso, Rudolph Valentino, Lina Cavalieri, and Tina Modotti; cinematic milestones like Cabiria , Ben-Hur , and Romola ; the star system and iconic directors; the important part played by Italian musicians in the birth of jazz; and the thousands of Italians who worked "behind the scenes," making a vital contribution to the creation of the Hollywood myth. This complex story, told both in words and in images, paints a varied and multifaceted picture of the "set" on which the Shoemaker of Dreams began his thrilling creative adventure in America.

DIVA study of the cultural policies of the Italian communist party following the collapse of fascismand the struggle with popular consumer culture that led to its demise in 1991./div

"This book is a celebration of nearly a century of images of Italians in American motion pictures and their contribution to popular culture." "Hollywood Italians covers the careers of dozens of stars including Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Marisa Tomei, James Gandolfini, and many others. In addition, the book reviews the work of such Italian American directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese." "In all, Hollywood Italians discusses scores of films with a concentration on the most important, including their literary and European-cinematic roots. The book is capped by a comprehensive examination of The Godfather and its two sequels, as well as the international television phenomenon The Sopranos."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference. Focused on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945, this book examines the development of an Italian star system and evaluates its place in film production and distribution. The performances and careers of several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari, and Alida Valli, are closely analyzed in terms of their relationships to the political sphere and broader commercial culture, with consideration of their fates in the aftermath of Fascism. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema.

Giorgio Bertellini examines the historical and aesthetic connections of some of Italy's most important films with both Italian and Western film culture.

"Avoiding the sometimes sterile and by now often futile debate concerning stereotypes, Hollywood's Italians is instead an act of loving archeology: digging in the past and assembling a colorful kaleidoscopic mosaic of tesserae. It is a pointillist portrait of a collective community. Each chapter is devoted to a theme, be it Italians who made their way to Hollywood, the transition from stage to screen, the symbiotic interaction between television and film, music on the screen, food and family, and peopled with dozens of mini-biographies that reveal often surprising bits of information. The appendix, listing all Italian American Academy Award winners and nominations, is invaluable as a historical document. Readers will bask in the wonderful nostalgia while being simultaneously entertained and enlightened." - - Stanislao G. Pugliese, Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies, Hofstra University

Italian cinema gave rise to a number of the best-known films of the postwar years, from Rome Open City to Bicycle Thieves. Although some neorealist film-makers would have preferred to abolish stars altogether, the public adored them and producers needed their help in relaunching the national film industry. This book explores the many conflicts that arose in Italy between 1945 and 1953 over stars and stardom, offering intimate studies of the careers of both well-known and less familiar figures, shedding new light on the close relationship forged between cinema and society during a time of political transition and shifting national identities.

Italian cinema triumphed globally in the 1960, with directors such as Rossellini, Fellini, and Leone, and actors like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni known to audiences around the world. But by the end of the 1980s, the Italian film industry was all but dead. The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry traces the rise of the industry from its origins in the 19th century to its worldwide success in the 1960s, and its rapid decline in the subsequent decades. It does so by looking at cinema as an institution – subject to the interplay between the spheres of art, business, and politics at the national and international level. By examining the roles of a wide range of stakeholders (including film directors, producers, exhibitors, the public, and the critics) as well as the system of funding and the influence of governments, author Marina Nicoli demonstrates that the Italian film industry succeeded when all three spheres were aligned, but suffered and ultimately failed when they each pursued contradictory objectives. This in-depth case study makes an important contribution to the long-standing debate about promoting and protecting domestic cultures, particularly in the face of culturally dominant and politically- and economically-powerful creative industries from the United States. The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry will be of particular interest to business and economic historians, cinema historians, media specialists, and cultural economists.