Monday 19 March 2007

Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre



“Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focussing on melodrama, commedia all'italiana, peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored from a gender standpoint which takes into account the historical and socio-economic context of cinematic production and consumption. An interdisciplinary feminist approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of film.”

As the synopsis suggests, this is a heavy-duty academic study of Italian filone film and does not address the giallo specifically, pretty much ending just as it was taking over at the box office. Nevertheless, any book which has a cover image from Freda's Lo Spettro and discusses Duccio Tessari's rules for the peplum gets my recommendation.

1 comment:

Michael said...

Oh oh oh, thanks for the heads-up on this book. It looks like just the sort of thing I could do with the build up my reading list for my PhD research.