Italy and Italian Cinema: Global Contexts, Past and Present

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to the exceptionality of Italian cinema. Students will become familiar with the poetics and histories of Italian cinema while developing perspectives on Italian history from the twentieth century to the present. In the first part of the semester students will watch several films and learn to identify key features of Italian cinema, while also exploring twentieth-century Italian history. In the second part of the semester students will discuss and compare these films with contemporary Italian ones that overtly assume motifs, themes and styles of previous Italian “classical” films, considering how these newer films relaunch the force of the previous poetics in and for our contemporary globalized time. Across the course, students will be exposed to a panoramic presentation of Italian cinema, illuminating both its specificity and its impact at a global scale. Focal topics will include work, inequality and economic “miracles,” climate change and ecology, question of genre, feminism and the gendered gazes, and immigration and migration. Taught in English, the course will fulfill the Global and Thematic Pathways/UB Curriculum.