Overview

In this, the first comprehensive book on Liliana Cavani, Gaetana Marrone redraws the map of postwar Italian cinema to make room for this extraordinary filmmaker, whose representations of transgressive eroticism, spiritual questing, and psychological extremes test the limits of the medium, pushing it into uncharted areas of discovery. Cavani's film The Night Porter (1974) created a sensation in the United States and Europe. But in many ways her critically renowned endeavors--which also include Francesco di Assisi, Galileo, I cannibali, Beyond Good and Evil, The Berlin Affair, and several operas and documentaries--remain enigmatic to audiences. Here Marrone presents Cavani's work as a cinema of ideas, showing how it takes pleasure in the telling of a story and ultimately revolts against all binding ideological and commercial codes. The author explores the rich visual language in which Cavani expresses thought, and the cultural icons that constitute her style and images. This approach affords powerful insights into the intricate interlacing of narrated events. We also come to understand the importance assigned to the gaze in the genesis of desire and the acquisition of knowledge. The films come to life in this book as the classical tragedies Cavani intended, where rebels and madmen experience conflict between historical and spiritual reality, the present and the past. Offering intertextual analyses within such fields as psychology, history, and cultural studies, along with production information gleaned from Cavani's personal archives, Marrone boldly advances our understanding of an intriguing, important body of cinematic work.

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9780691031934

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Reviews

Winner of the 2000 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, Italian Literary Studies

Marrone provides detailed analyses of Cavani's films within the framework of the history of ideas and convincingly argues for the depth and seriousness of the director's art. . . . Informed by interviews with Cavani and materials from the director's own archives, this title is recommended for all readers. * Choice * The Gaze and the Labyrinth will become the benchmark for any further work on Liliana Cavani. Gaetana Marrone is among the first to put the entire subject of Cavani's cinema into order, and does so in a way that is clear, lucid, and pleasing. This is a book built upon many years of careful research-research that is marked by a solid understanding of Italian culture, language, and European intellectual history. -Peter Bondanella, Indiana University Winner of the 2000 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, Italian Literary Studies This is the definitive work in English on Liliana Cavani, whose rightful place in the ranks of Italian cinematic auteurs is hereby critically established. The prodigious learning that Gaetana Marrone brings to this study shows the cultural and technical richness of cinema in general and of Italian art cinema in particular, with Liliana Cavani as one of its foremost practitioners. Marrone's total immersion in the subject produces a critical study from within, at once deeply engaged in all aspects of the filmography, and intellectually rigorous in its approach. -Millicent Marcus, University of Pennsylvania

Marrone provides detailed analyses of Cavani's films within the framework of the history of ideas and convincingly argues for the depth and seriousness of the director's art. . . . Informed by interviews with Cavani and materials from the director's own archives, this title is recommended for all readers.

Marrone provides detailed analyses of Cavani's films within the framework of the history of ideas and convincingly argues for the depth and seriousness of the director's art. . . . Informed by interviews with Cavani and materials from the director's own archives, this title is recommended for all readers. -- Choice

Marrone provides detailed analyses of Cavani's films within the framework of the history of ideas and convincingly argues for the depth and seriousness of the director's art. . . . Informed by interviews with Cavani and materials from the director's own archives, this title is recommended for all readers.--Choice The Gaze and the Labyrinth will become the benchmark for any further work on Liliana Cavani. Gaetana Marrone is among the first to put the entire subject of Cavani's cinema into order, and does so in a way that is clear, lucid, and pleasing. This is a book built upon many years of careful research--research that is marked by a solid understanding of Italian culture, language, and European intellectual history. --Peter Bondanella, Indiana University This is the definitive work in English on Liliana Cavani, whose rightful place in the ranks of Italian cinematic auteurs is hereby critically established. The prodigious learning that Gaetana Marrone brings to this study shows the cultural and technical richness of cinema in general and of Italian art cinema in particular, with Liliana Cavani as one of its foremost practitioners. Marrone's total immersion in the subject produces a critical study from within, at once deeply engaged in all aspects of the filmography, and intellectually rigorous in its approach. --Millicent Marcus, University of Pennsylvania Winner of the 2000 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, Italian Literary Studies

Author Information

Gaetana Marrone is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of La drammatica di Ugo Betti: Tematiche e archetipi, which won the American Association of Italian Studies Triennial Best Book Award in 1990, and the editor of New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Annali d'Italianistica 17 (1998). Marrone has also produced two award-winning films, Woman in the Wind, starring Colleen Dewhurst, and Princeton: Images of a University.

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