Leverhulme Lecture: Vito Zagarrio: Film & History in Italian Film: from Fascism to the New Italian Cinema

Location
Strathcona Building Lecture Theatre 1
Dates
Wednesday 28 February 2018 (17:00-20:00)
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Professor Vito Zagarrio 

Followed by a screening of Tre giorni d’anarchia
(Three Days of Anarchy, 2005, Italy, Vito Zagarrio)

In the New Millennium, the relationship between Film & History has become a crucial question for Film Theory, leading to the emergence of a range of new publications and approaches. This lecture will address the lengthy history of Italian cinema’s engagement with the representation of the Italian society as a case study for how one might think about this relationship. Beginning with some examples of how the Fascist Regime interpreted History, the lecture will then move on to consider how Fascism itself was represented in post-war Italian cinema, before concluding with some case studies of how History and Ideology are treated in the New Italian Film.   

Tre giorni d’anarchia. Is a historical drama documenting impact on a small Sicilian village of the power vacuum created by the arrival of the American army in July 1943. It was directed in 2005 and is Vito Zagarrio’s third feature film. It will be screened in a new restoration, in Italian with English subtitles. 

Professor Zagarrio is one of Italy’s leading and most prolific film scholars, the author of a dozen monographs and the editor of over thirty edited collections, including books on the cinema of the Fascist era and on Italian cinema of the Nineties and the New Millennium. He is a recognised expert on Italian cinema; film, history and the representation of Fascism; classical and contemporary Hollywood filmmakers; and film direction and the Italian film industry. He is also an established filmmaker with three feature-length films, nine medium-length/television fiction films and over three dozen documentary and compilation films to his credit. His directorial credits include La donna della luna (1987), Bonus Malus (1993) and Tre giorni d'anarchia (2006). He is currently Professor of Cinema and Television at University of Rome 3, and this term is a Visiting Professor at the University of Kent.

The Leverhulme TrustThis lecture was made possible by the award of a Visiting Professorship to the University of Kent by the Leverhulme Trust.