Cinematic Melodrama in Italian Postwar Cinema

In this course we shall first study the rhetorical and sentimental cinematic melodramas of the 1930's and 1950's, and thus a ‘generic’ tradition, no matter how ambiguous and unstable. The course shall focus on investigating the term ‘melodrama’ as a new style which came to be at a precise moment in history, and precisely in the 1950’s, which anchored itself to a specific genre, “cinema melò”, but then subverted the characteristics of the genre, or rather undermined them, as suggested by Emiliano Morreale (Donzelli 2011). Such a novel and profoundly modernist style pursued diverse formal strategies, a different rapport between word and image, as well as between music and image, and unmistakably stated the impossibility for cinema to express, fully and unambiguously, its relationship with Reality. Then, in Italy the 1950s bring a new awareness of the mechanisms lying at the foundation of a new interpretation of melodrama, one by which the dualism between voice and body, apparently resolved in early film melodrama, seems to be superseded by subtraction and becomes a memory, a trace filled with nostalgia, something to be longed for, or rather, the source of a profoundly desperate feeling of loss—as it happens, for instance, in many of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinematic melodramas.

Required Texts:
*Note:* Students should have a history of Italian cinema.
- A. Moravia, L’amore coniugale, 1949.
- E. Morreale, Così piangevano. Il cinema melò nell’Italia degli anni cinquanta, Rome, Donzelli, 2011.
- L. Cardone, Il melodramma, Rome, Il Castoro, 2012.
- S. Pesce (ed.), Imitazioni della vita. Il melodramma cinematografico, Recco (GE), Le Mani, 2007.
- A study of Roberto Rossellini
- A study of Michelangelo Antonioni
* A reader will be provided by the instructor.

FILMOGRAPHY:
Mamma (1941), Carmine Gallone
Senza pietà (1948), Alberto Lattuada
Catene (1949), Raffaello Matarazzo
Riso amaro (1949), Giuseppe De Santis
Anna (1951), Alberto Lattuada
I figli non si vendono (1951), Mario Bonnard
La peccatrice dell’isola (1952), Sergio Corbucci
Vergine moderna (1954), Marcello Pagliero
L’angelo bianco (1955), Raffaello Matarazzo

DAL NEOREALISMO AL MODERNISMO ATTRAVERSO IL MELO’: ROSSELLINI E ANTONIONI
1. ROBERTO ROSSELLINI
Roma città aperta (1945), Roberto Rossellini
Desiderio (1946), Marcello Pagliero e Roberto Rossellini
L’amore (1948), Roberto Rossellini
Stromboli, terra di Dio (1950), Roberto Rossellini
L’amore in città (1953), Roberto Rossellini et al.
Siamo donne (1953), Roberto Rossellini et al.
Viaggio in Italia (1954), Roberto Rossellini

2. MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI
Cronaca di un amore (1950)
I vinti (1953)
La signora senza camelie (1953)
L'amore in città - episodio Tentato suicidio (1953)
Le amiche (da un soggetto di Cesare Pavese) (1955)
Il grido (1957)
L'avventura (1960)
La notte (1961)
L'eclisse (1962)
Il deserto rosso (1964)
I tre volti - episodio Il provino (1965)
Blow-Up (da un soggetto di Julio Cortázar) (1966)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Professione: reporter (da un soggetto di Mark Peploe) (1975)
Il mistero di Oberwald (da un soggetto di Jean Cocteau) (1980)
Identificazione di una donna (1982)
Al di là delle nuvole (codiretto con Wim Wenders) (1995)