Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human

Elena Past

Description

Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, Elena Past examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. She uses these films—Red Desert (1964), The Winds Blows Round (2005), Gomorrah (2008), Le quattro volte (2010), and Return to the Aeolian Islands (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing environmental questions such as cinema's dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema's ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world.

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation

On Location: Italian Ecocinema

1. Hydrocarbons, Moving Pictures, Time: Red Desert

2. Location, Dirty Cinema, Toxic Waste, Storytelling: Gomorrah

3. Posthuman Collaboration, Cohabitation, Sacrifice: The Wind Blows Round

4. Silence, Cinema, More-than-Human Sound: Le quattro volte

5. Volcanoes, Transgenerational Memory, Cinema: Return to the Aeolian Islands

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Themes
• Subjects
• HISTORY
• Película fotográfica
• Italy
• History of Europe
• History of film
• My Last Duchess
• Film
• Nature
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253039514
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ITALIAN ECOCINEMA BEYOND THE HUMAN
NEW DIRECTIONS IN NATIONAL CINEMAS
Robert Rushing, editor
ITALIAN ECOCINEMA BEYOND THE HUMAN
Elena Past
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Elena Past
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03947-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03948-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03949-1 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
In Memory of Nino, Lucy, and Sydney
For Ray and Ana
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
On Location: Italian Ecocinema
1 Hydrocarbons, Moving Pictures, Time: Red Desert
2 Location, Dirty Cinema, Toxic Waste, Storytelling: Gomorrah
3 Posthuman Collaboration, Cohabitation, Sacrifice: The Wind Blows Round
4 Silence, Cinema, More-than-Human Sound: Le quattro volte
5 Volcanoes, Transgenerational Memory, Cinema: Return to the Aeolian Islands
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A N ACADEMIC PROJECT. A LABOR OF LOVE. A journey. A long walk through thick intellectual woods, sometimes dark and hopefully deep. Fr d ric Gros (2014, 19-20) writes that books need to be able to walk, and they need to be conceived while walking: Books by authors imprisoned in their studies, grafted to their chairs, are heavy and indigestible. . . . Think while walking, walk while thinking, he urges.
Although I frequently feel myself to be grafted to my chair, my notebooks are full of metro cards and train tickets, reminding me that this book relies on collaborations and ideas formed while moving about Italy, talking with friends, attending the conferences of the American Association for Italian Studies and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, conversing with a growing community of ecocritics in Italian studies, walking and thinking with my students in Detroit and Abruzzo.
In Italy, conversations with members of the cast and crews of the films in this study were transformative. Most of these contacts would not have been possible without the help of the gifted Giovanna Taviani, whose generosity during my stay in Rome I will always cherish. The names are numerous, and I hope that I am remembering them all: Carlo Di Carlo ( Red Desert ); Gennaro Aquino, Paolo Bonfini, and Greta De Lazzaris ( Gomorrah ); Pierangela Biasi, Roberto Carta, Mario Chemello, Anamaria del Grande, Katia Goldoni, Rocco Lobosco, and Fredo Valla ( The Wind Blows Round ); Paolo Benvenuti, Michelangelo Frammartino, Simone Paolo Olivero, and Marco Serrecchia ( Le quattro volte ); Antonino Allegrino, Antonio Brundu, Franco Figliodoro, Flavia Grita, Janet Little, Pietro Lo Cascio, and Antonino Paino ( Return to the Aeolian Islands ). There were additional members of the film community who offered insightful perspectives on how films in Italy are made, taking the time to share a coffee and a slice of cinematic life: nicol* angrisano, Iaia Forte, Paola Randi, Piero Sanna, and Piero Spila. Roberto Marchesini and Eleonora Adorni welcomed me at the Scuola d Interazione Uomo Animale. I learned so much from all of these people, and from their artistry, candor, and generosity.
My work was supported by a Research Enhancement grant from Wayne State University s Office of the Vice President for Research. Wayne State s Foreign Language Technology Center, led by Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan, and the Humanities Center, directed by Walter Edwards, generously backed various aspects of the project. The Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia offered an exceptional array of resources, and the staff there was knowledgeable and accommodating without fail.
Anne Duggan, Pierluigi Erbaggio, Victor Figueroa, Dana Renga, and Thibaut Schilt all read and offered discerning feedback on sections of the manuscript, as well as encouragement along the way. Damiano Benvegn , Enrico Cesaretti, Alina Cherry, Raffaele De Benedictis, Matteo Gilebbi, Silvia Giorgini-Althoen, Jim Michels, Kate Paesani, and Monica Seger are exceptional colleagues, collaborators, and friends who enrich my thinking and my life via conversations over Skype, espresso, and happy hours. Writing days with Tracy Neumann kept me focused, no matter how crazy the semester. Francesca Grandi and Sara Amoroso made Ed and me feel at home in Rome. Robert Rushing, series editor at Indiana University Press, and Janice Frisch, acquisitions editor, have made it highly rewarding to work with the Press, and the anonymous readers of my manuscript were insightful and extremely helpful.
Millicent Marcus taught her graduate students the importance of sisterhood in the academy. I am indebted to her for showing us an affirmative, sustainable intellectual path. Deborah Amberson, Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, and Serenella Iovino tirelessly support and respond to my work, shape my thinking, and make me grateful every day that academics is a collective endeavor. My sister Mariana Past looks out for me in the most generous of ways, intellectual and affective. My parents Al and Kay Past inspire me with their writing projects and ask enthusiastically about mine. My partner Ed Slesak has walked many miles with me as I worked on this project, and sometimes he carried me, too.
Parts of Chapter Four were published in Italian in Animal Studies: Rivista italiana di antispecismo 11 (2015): 56-76, in an article titled Il cinema e il suono del silenzio: Le quattro volte . Some of Chapter Five appeared in L analisi linguistica e letteraria XXIV.2 (2016): 135-146 with the title Volcanic Matters: Magmatic Cinema, Ecocriticism, and Italy. My thanks to the editors of the journals for allowing me to reprint my work here.
NOTE ON TRANSLATION
P UBLISHED TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS IN ITALIAN OR OTHER languages are listed in the bibliography and cited in the text. Otherwise, all translations from original Italian texts, as well as translations of my interviews with film crew members, are my own.
ITALIAN ECOCINEMA BEYOND THE HUMAN
ON LOCATION: ITALIAN ECOCINEMA
I SPENT A SEMESTER IN ROME CONDUCTING RESEARCH for this book about Italian ecocinema and doing a lot of walking, especially to libraries, cinemas, and interviews. It seemed appropriate to work on a project about Italy, film, and the environment while walking, and not only because less petroleum was burned in the process. Italy, after all, is the land where renowned scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini theorized cinema as pedinamento, or tailing the film s subject on foot with a camera. 1 From our apartment, my partner and I mapped inevitably winding routes on medieval streets, Roman roads, and imperial Fascist boulevards, and we walked until we reached our destination (when we had one), even if it took hours. We wore out our shoes during the rainy winter of 2013, calloused our feet, and experimented with the different cultural etiquette of bodily distance from others on Italian sidewalks. We learned some routes and never learned others, got lost nearly every day, and almost never minded. We made friends, some of them dogs. We came home to Michigan and tried to keep walking Roman distances in the Detroit suburbs, our legs eager to tire, our minds eager to wander. In A Philosophy of Walking , Fr d ric Gros (2014, 7) says that the freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. 2 Instead of being someone(s) in the dizzying stream of life immemorial that courses through every layer of Rome, we were somewhere, in a city of (among many other things) cinema. We were on location.
In his lyrical book titled The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot , Robert Macfarlane (2012, 161) writes that there are kinds of knowing that only feet can enable, as there are memories of a place that only feet can recall. I begin by recalling rambles during a semester spent in Rome to acknowledge that this book is grounded in a way of knowing enabled by feet, memories, places: my feet, my memories, but also those of my many interlocutors. Macfarlane elaborates, regarding footsteps on the earth, that touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one (161). This book explores ecocritical case studies of a series of Italian films that were shot on location rather than in studio, and it examines these films as and also by way of such gestures of exchange. That is to say, I trace some of the impressions Italian film productions have left on the world, while also documenting part of the process of doing this research. Five films feature in this study: Deserto rosso ( Red Desert, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), Gomorra ( Gomorrah, dir. Matteo Garrone, 2008), Il vento fa il suo giro ( The Wind Blows Round, dir. Giorgio Diritti, 2005), Le quattro volte (dir. Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010), and Fughe e approdi ( Return to the Aeolian Islands, dir. Giovanna Taviani, 2010). 3 These films, which focus on geographically diverse locations across Italy, constitute significant case studies because of the prominent roles different no