California Italian Studies

The success of films like the Oscar-winning La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino), the family-friendly comedy Sole a catinelle (Buckets of Sunshine, Gennaro Nunziante) and the poetic documentary Sacro GRA (Sacred GRA, Gianfranco Rosi), all released in 2013, confirms the continued and perhaps surprising vitality and variety of Italian cinema. This variety tended to be ignored in what might be called the Standard Model of Italian cinema history, which emphasized the realist and auteurist traditions in Italian cinema. In this article I range across contemporary, classic and lesser-known Italian cinema by analyzing the means and priorities that have been employed when studying it in the Anglophone academy. My title, “What is Italian cinema?,” intentionally recalls Bazin (and I refer also to Deleuze and “world cinephilia”), but an additional clause might read, “and how do we think we know?”. The second half of the article considers the contents of three edited companions to Italian cinema (one recently published and two forthcoming) in order to grasp the current concerns of Italian cinema studies and so to signpost the state of knowledge about Italian cinema, at least as it exists in English. I suggest throughout some methods and approaches for better grasping the variety of Italian cinema over its history, but I finish by noting that the Pantheon of World Cinema has also distilled Italian cinema to neorealism and the “golden age” auteurs and so has obscured both the range and the particularity of Italian cinema.