Center for Italian Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania

presents

The Third Annual Joseph and Elda Coccia
Centennial Celebration Conference

Traces and Symbols
in Italian Neorealism
In celebration of the centenary of the birth of Italian filmmakers
Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti

Saturday, December 2, 2006
9:30 am - 6:30 pm

401 Fisher Bennett Hall
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19014

Conference Program

9:30 am
Welcoming Remarks
Fabio Finotti
Director, Penn Center for Italian Studies
Timothy Corrigan
Director, Penn Cinema Studies Program

9:45 am
Millicent Marcus
Yale University
Return of the Referent
Focusing with special intensity on scenes which feature still photographs in Blow Up, Three Brothers, and The One Hundred Steps, this paper traces a progressive return to the neorealist call for a cinema of truth-telling on the threshold on the new millennium.

10:30 am
Peter Brunette
Wake Forest University
Was Visconti Ever a (Neo-)realist? The Test Case of La Terra Trema
The conventional narrative of postwar Italian cinema has Visconti as precursor of neo-realism (Ossessione), zenith of neo-realism (La Terra Trema), and traitor to neo-realism (Senso). In this paper, it is argued that the director was never a neo-realist or, for that matter, any sort of realist at all. Instead, this “opera queen” used a pro-filmic reality (the grizzled visages and the famous dialect of Aci-Trezza, for example, in La Terra Trema) like bits of tesserae with which to construct his self-aggrandizing mosaic of grand, passionate spectacle, which was always his primary interest. All this becomes easier to understand if reference is made to the director’s contemporaneous work in the theater, which film critics have rarely done.

11:15 am
Daniela Bini
University of Texas at Austin
Cultural Intersections: Pasolini Between Cinema and Sceneggiata,
Shakespeare and Puppet Theater, Pirandello and Modugno
In "Che cosa sono le nuvole?" (1968) Pasolini incorporates in 22 minutes a variety of genres and discourses in order to convey a threefold message: the cancellation of the hierarchies between high and low art, the inadequacy of the word, that is, of the written text, with the consequent choice of the image, that is, cinema, and finally the self- referentiality of the work of art. These discourses are intertwined magisterially in the short film, and Pasolini's intertextuality is at times, declared and others, hidden.

12:30 - 2:00 pm
Lunch Break

2:15 pm
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
Princeton University
Establishing of Physical Reality in Rossellini's Francesco, giullare di Dio
and Liliana Cavani's Francesco di Assisi
An exploration of the rich visual language in which Roberto Rossellini and Liliana Cavani express the cultural icons that constitute their style and images. In their retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi, these filmmakers thrive to depict the tension of daily existence, the conjunction of body and soul. The question becomes how their attention to physiognomy and behavior renegotiates our current thinking of Italian neorealism.

3:00 pm
Noa Steimatsky
Yale University
Neorealism’s Backlot: The Double Life of Cinecittà
This paper describes the use of Cinecittà as refugee camp between 1944-1950, attending to the infrastructure and daily life of the camp, where old movie sets were used as elemental housing materials, as well as to its political and economic contexts. This astonishing overlapping of spaces and histories in Cinecitta' sheds new light on our understanding of Neorealism.

4:15 - 4:30 pm
Coffee Break

4:30 pm
Mark Shiel
King's College London
The City as Trace and Symbol from Bellissima (1951)
to Viaggio in Italia (1954)
This paper will explore the various ways in which Rossellini and Visconti represented the urban landscape, paying particular attention to the disparity between the actual city, the city as ruin, and the city not yet built which is evident in a selection of their films of the early 1950s: Visconti's Bellissima (1951) and Senso (1954), Rossellini's Europa '51 (1952) and Viaggio in Italia (1954). These films will lead to suggest that an interest in the fragility and durability of the city, as metaphor for modernity as a whole, is present throughout these works but that Visconti and Rossellini nonetheless differ in their responses to the city in important ways.

5:15 pm
Antonio Vitti
Wake Forest University
An Anti-globalization Journey with a Rossellian Gaze:
Gianni Amelio's La stella che non c'è
The essay explores how director Gianni Amelio worked on Eramanno Rea’s story "La dismissione" and turned it into his own cinematic masterpiece. In spite of the fact that the film is completely different from the novel, Amelio was able to preserve some of the essential feelings from the novel rewriting its message in a cinematic language using a Rossellinian gaze and anti-globalization approach.

401 Fisher Bennett Hall
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19014

Open to the public. Admission free.