This volume offers an open, transdisciplinary living space (also green) through which to explore the different connections between Basilicata and Southern Italy, cinema, and ecology, and thus to reflect on the different forms through which the historical, cultural, and social contexts of Southern Italian regions have been variously identified and represented. In order to explore these connections, the volume embraces a wide range of perspectives that may all be grouped under the key term film ecocriticism, offering the reader a thorough analysis not only of the different ways of representing reality but also of the processes of signification through which reality itself can be understood, rethought, and transformed. This is the general framework within which the authors consider film as a proper, effective medium for ecocritical and ecophilosophical reflections concerning not only Basilicata (to which the greater part of the volume is dedicated) but also Southern Italy and, therefore, its history and its territories, communities, and identities. Furthermore, in an even more general sense, Basilicata and Southern Italy reconnects with the very idea of the South, and of all Souths, to which this volume is dedicated.
Author(s): Alberto Baracco, Manuela Gieri
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 296
City: Cham
Foreword
The Environmental Turn in the Italian Studies
Preface
Acknowledgments
About This Book
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: For a New Ecology of the Gaze in Contemporary Italian Cinema
Toward South
References
Part I: Travels, Paths, Narrations
Chapter 2: Exordium
References
Chapter 3: Petroculture, Southern Thought, and Itinerant Cinematic Resistance in Basilicata
Oil Cultures and the Cinematic Road
Petroculture Beyond Eboli
Road Trips, Wounded Landscapes, and Petroleum Speed
Southern Thought, Slow Cinema, and Thinking on Foot
Itinerant Cinema in Contemporary Italy
References
Chapter 4: Southern Realities and Emotions: Francesco Rosi’s Cultural Voyages
Views from the South
Cultural Socio-Geographies: A Witness to the Times
On Location in Lucania: An Emotional Journey
References
Chapter 5: Lucania, Land of Fairy Tales and Cinema: Gigi Roccati’s Lucania and the Eco-Fairy-Tale Film
Giambattista Basile, Fairy-Tales, and Lucania
Fairy-Tale Cinema
The Eco-Fairy-Tale Film
The Case of Gigi Roccati’s Lucania
A New Film Genre?
References
Part II: Places, Landscapes, Relations
Chapter 6: Exordium
References
Chapter 7: Basilicata Inside and Outside. Lucanian Landscape and Postwar Nonfiction Cinema
Internal/External
Christ Did Not Stop at Eboli
Documentarists and Photographers in Lucania
In the Bowels of Southern Italy
References
Chapter 8: The Aesthetics of Ghost Towns in Basilicata. Nicola Ragone’s Cinema Between Art, Ecology and Marginality
Introduction
Vado Verso Dove Vengo: A Story Without Nostalgia
Conclusions
References
Chapter 9: Rewritings of the Meridian Landscape in Contemporary Italian Cinema
Meridian Thought and Cinema
The New Urban Aesthetics of Naples
Rediscovery of a Peripheral Imaginary: Basilicata and Irpinia
Conclusions
References
Part III: History, Memories, Identities
Chapter 10: Exordium
References
Chapter 11: Rocco e i suoi fratelli: Luchino Visconti’s Lucania Between Real and Imaginary
From Southern Italy, Looking for Luck
Visconti’s Journey to Basilicata
References
Chapter 12: Meridian Landscape and Documentary Image: Luigi Di Gianni’s Short Movies
The Landscape
The Meridian Landscape Between Land and Sea
A Comparison Between Di Gianni’s and De Seta’s Works
References
Chapter 13: Isabella di Morra’s “Valle Inferna” Between Myth and Reality. About the Movie Sexum Superando
A Sentimental Journey to Discover Isabella di Morra
Sexum Superando: Images, Places, and Reality
References
Part IV: Conflicts, Traumas, Reconstructions
Chapter 14: Exordium
References
Chapter 15: Wounded Realities: Remedial Gestures and Silence of the Myths in the Lucania of Nonfiction Cinema During the 1950s and the 1960s
Myths, Rites, and New Horizons
Ancient Southern Souls
Ancient Forms and New Objectives
Collapses and Escapes
Conclusions
References
Chapter 16: Southern Italy’s Petronarratives: A Few Notes on Contemporary Italian Ecodocumentaries
Southern Italy’s Industrial Landscapes
The Sicilian Triangle of Death
Basilicata, Texas
References
Chapter 17: Past and Future of a Region: Basilicata Through Documentary Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s
Basilicata and the Southern Question After WWII
A Critical Eye
The Magnifying Glass
Conclusions
References
Chapter 18: Conclusion: Ecophilosophy and the Human/Nonhuman Relation in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Alberi
Transdisciplinarity and the Relationship Human/Nonhuman
Michelangelo Frammartino’s Video Art
References
Filmography
Index
