From such films as La Dolce Vita and Bicycle Thieves to Cinema Paradiso and Dear Diary, Italian cinema has provided striking images of Italy as a nation and a people. In the first comprehensive study of Italian cinema from 1886-1996, Pierre Sorlin explores the changing relationship of Italian cinema and Italian society and asks whether the national cinema really does represent Italian interests and culture.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat provides the first in-depth study of feature and documentary films produced under the auspices of Mussolini’s government that took as their subjects or settings Italy’s African and Balkan colonies. These "empire films" were Italy's entry into an international market for the exotic. The films engaged its most experienced and cosmopolitan directors (Augusto Genina, Mario Camerini) as well as new filmmakers (Roberto Rossellini) who would make their marks in the postwar years. Ben-Ghiat sees these films as part of the aesthetic development that would lead to neo-realism. Shot in Libya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, these movies reinforced Fascist racial and labor policies and were largely forgotten after the war. Ben-Ghiat restores them to Italian and international film history in this gripping account of empire, war, and the cinema of dictatorship.

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

Since its beginning and during periods of great transformations, movie-going for both men and women was akin to going to a fashion parade. Before the explosion of digital technology and its enchanted world, access to fashion was only accessible on the big screen. Fashion and style became reachable for the masses through cinema. And, with the genre of the fashion film, this continues today. Focusing on a number of crucial films and directors from the silent era to the present, this study will offer, for the first time, an in-depth exploration of the interaction between fashion and Italian cinema. The study, however, will privilege the golden age of Italian cinema, especially the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s during which, through the marriage of fashion and film, Italian fashion and style were launched globally. Through the lens of fashion, the study will revisit the films of some of Italy's most important film-makers, such as Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti and others and films as old as Mario Oxilia's silent Rapsodia Satanica (1917) to Luca Guadagnino's I am Love (2009).

"This study considers Italian filmmaking during the Fascist era and offers an original and revealing approach to the interwar years. Steven Ricci directly confronts a long-standing dilemma faced by cultural historians: while made during a period of totalitarian government, these films are neither propagandistic nor openly "Fascist." Instead, the Italian Fascist regime attempted to build ideological consensus by erasing markers of class and regional difference and by circulating terms for an imaginary national identity. Cinema and Fascism investigates the complex relationship between the totalitarian regime and Italian cinema. It looks at the films themselves, the industry, and the role of cinema in daily life, and offers new insights into this important but neglected period in cinema history." -- Book cover.

Italian Cinema presents an overview and analysis of one of the most prolific and influential of national cinemas. Italian film has always drawn on a wide range of popular themes - from ancient history to the mafia, the family, the Risorgimento, terrorism, corruption and immigration - and on an equally diverse range of film genres - from comedy to westerns, horror, soft-porn, epics and thrillers. Commercial constraints, state and European funding, international competition, as much as cultural and political trends, have all influenced the sorts of film that get made and exported. Outlining the artistic, cultural, technical and commercial context of film, Italian Cinema presents a history from silent to contemporary film. As well as illuminating the work of classic directors such as Visconti, Fellini, Rossellini, Antonioni and Rosi, the book explores the interaction between art and popular cinema, visual style and spectacle, space and architecture, gender representations and politics.