The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Abstract

The essay discusses contemporary Italian filmmakers’ sustained interest in the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony. Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodramas, Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto Saviano and Salvatore Settis.

Keywords:

• Contemporary Italian cinema
• Italian landscape
• space
• environment
• tutela del paesaggio
• Protezione civile
• Mario Martone
• Luca Guadagnino
• Sabina Guzzanti

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Journal’s readers, particularly Norma Bouchard, for key suggestions and crucial feedback, and Alberto Zambenedetti for bibliographic references. This is for Amelia Cocconi.

Notes

1 A few days after the publication of the Le Monde piece, La Repubblica published an article by sociologist Ilvo Diamanti who furthered the discussion on film representations with statistics about the immigration phenomenon (cf. Diamanti, 2011).

2 In the past few years, the volume of film criticism on Italian cinema and migration has grown exponentially. See: Cigognetti and Servetti, 2003; Cincinelli, 2009; Ardizzoni and Ferrari, 2010; and Russo Bullaro, 2010. I have reflected on the century-old relationship between Euro-American cinemas and migrations in Bertellini, 2012 (forthcoming).

3 I am here referring to Rossellini’s film, Viaggio in Italia (1954).

4 On the cinema of this period, see Miccichè, 1998; and, in relationship to the 1990s, see Sesti, 1994 and 1996.

5 “La Repubblica promuove lo sviluppo della cultura e la ricerca scientifica e tecnica. Tutela il paesaggio e il patrimonio storico e artistico della Nazione” (Costituzione italiana, art. 9). Cf. Settis, 2010: 128.

6 For examples of these activities, Settis (2010) refers also to Sansa, 2010.

7 In this vein consider also the Rosi-like documentary Sangue e Cemento (2009), an adaptation by Gruppo Zero of the eponymous 2009 volume by Marco Travaglio.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giorgio Bertellini

Giorgio Bertellini is Associate Professor in the Departments of Screen Arts and Cultures and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Editor of The Cinema of Italy (2004; 2007) and Silent Italian Cinema: A Reader (forthcoming), he is the author of Emir Kusturica (1996; 2011) and of Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Indiana University Press, 2009), which received the 2010 AAIS Book Award for Film. His next book-length project is entitled Divo/Duce: Hollywood Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America.