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| Giorgio Bertellini |
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Areas
Silent Film; Italian, North American, and Eastern European Cinema; Intersections of Gender and Racial Culture; Immigration, National Identity and International Film Culture Interests and Current Work My research and teaching interests revolve around two interrelated methods of discussing film culture. On the one hand, I approach international silent film culture as a multimedia aesthetic phenomenon. Silent films’ debt to literary, theatrical, audiovisual, and oral cultures –high and low-- affected how they were made, how they circulated, and how they were experienced. Specifically, I am now researching the aesthetic articulation of gender and racial identity in pre-1930 Italian and American films. On the other hand, I link two frequently disconnected themes of film history: national cinemas’ assumption of distinctive narrative and stylistic features vs. the multinational, multiracial, and multilingual dimension of individual films (i.e. Metropolis, Battle of Algiers, Fitzcarraldo, Lamerica, Buena Vista Social Club), selected film genres (i.e. horror and western films), and larger aesthetic frameworks (i.e. realism and melodrama). I am currently working on a book-length project, titled Devils in Paradise: Southern Italians and Film Culture from Italy to New York (1870-1920), based on the manuscript that was awarded the 2002 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award. I recently completed the editing of an anthology, 24 Frames: The Cinema of Italy (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), which I plan to use in my classes on Italian cinema. Recent and Selected Publications Emir Kusturica (Milan: Castoro Edizioni, 1996; 2nd expanded
ed., 2005) |