UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the engagement of post-1989 Italian cinema with (im)migration from the global south and multiculturalism in Italy within Europe. Focusing on a selection of films from 1990 to 2010, I argue that Italian cinema of immigration is constructed and maintained through constant erasures of Italian histories and desires. As films of social engagement, cinema of immigration is about the “here” and the “now,” namely Italian problems after the end of the Cold War. However, it also operates within older and broader frameworks, engaging different aspects of Italian/European society, history and culture. This dissertation unfolds those aspects and articulates connections between Italian cinema of immigration, Italy’s misremembered colonial past, neorealism, Europe’s project of supra-national integrations, and economic networks of exchange.

Despite the fact that the cinema of immigration has become one of the most recognizable ‘sub-genres’ of Italian cinema since Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990), scholarship on this subject is relatively recent and still taking shape. For that reason, the first half of my dissertation examines the history of Italian cinema, and engages the points of contact between the mobility of people and the moving image. In my introductory chapter, I historicize the representation of racialized others by focusing on certain key moments of interplay between the spectacular and the real, scenes that demonstrate the endurance of Italian orientalist ideologies. I then focus on the rhetorical move of equating immigrants from the global south with Italian migrants from the postwar era, and argue that even though the analogy was mobilized to create a sense of empathy, those representations are actually based on pre-existing models of alienation and discrimination. The second half of my research looks to Europe and beyond, and situates Italian cinema of immigration within synchronic networks. For example, my third chapter looks at the global circulation of the cinema of migration, and shows that seeming peripheral networks of distribution are, in fact, central to its existence. My final chapter compares English, French and German accented cinemas, which is the production of first and second-generation immigrant filmmakers, in order to postulate the existence of an Italian accented cinema and delineate its possible, though constantly changing, and contours.