Overview

Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs.

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9781349487042

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Reviews

Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space offers a rich history of Italian comedies during the 'boom years' of the mid-century. This eminently readable study is timely in its appearance and will join in the debate concerning not only the way the field of Italian Screen Studies is constituted, but also - and significantly - how it is taught. This book will also join explorations of Italian cinema that take into account gender as a constitutive and conditioning element. I suspect that scholars will find the book rife with useful information, thought-provoking, and very, very teachable. - Ellen Nerenberg, Hollis Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Wesleyan University, USA This book makes a ground-breaking contribution both to Italian film history, and to wider debates in Film Studies on genre, gender and space. Its novel focus on interactions of gender and space within a large corpus of films demonstrates how Comedy, Italian style participates in social change. Rich in detailed analysis of stardom and performance, it challenges entrenched critical ideas in an exciting re-evaluation of one of Italy's most celebrated film genres. - Catherine O'Rawe, Senior Lecturer, Italian Cinema, University of Bristol, UK Fullwood's study looks carefully at a genre that has, in a sense, been hiding in plain sight. While there have been isolated attempts to study the commedia all'italiana, this book combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the films themselves with a historical and theoretical precision that allows us to understand this body of filmmaking as an index of historical change and a vital site of ideological conflict. - John David Rhodes, Lecturer, Film Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space offers a rich history of Italian comedies during the 'boom years' of the mid-century. This eminently readable study is timely in its appearance and will join in the debate concerning not only the way the field of Italian Screen Studies is constituted, but also - and significantly - how it is taught. This book will also join explorations of Italian cinema that take into account gender as a constitutive and conditioning element. I suspect that scholars will find the book rife with useful information, thought-provoking, and very, very teachable. - Ellen Nerenberg, Hollis Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Wesleyan University, USA This book makes a ground-breaking contribution both to Italian film history, and to wider debates in Film Studies on genre, gender and space. Its novel focus on interactions of gender and space within a large corpus of films demonstrates how Comedy, Italian style participates in social change. Rich in detailed analysis of stardom and performance, it challenges entrenched critical ideas in an exciting re-evaluation of one of Italy's most celebrated film genres. - Catherine O'Rawe, Senior Lecturer, Italian Cinema, University of Bristol, UK Fullwood's study looks carefully at a genre that has, in a sense, been hiding in plain sight. While there have been isolated attempts to study the commedia all'italiana, this book combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the films themselves with a historical and theoretical precision that allows us to understand this body of filmmaking as an index of historical change and a vital site of ideological conflict. - John David Rhodes, Lecturer, Film Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Information

Natalie Fullwood is a language tutor in Italian at the University of Leeds, UK.

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