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If any film has gone the distance, it's Rocky (1976), which spawned one of the longest running franchises in film history. Released in America's bicentennial year, Rocky, based on an original screenplay by then-unknown writer and actor Sylvester Stallone, surprised everyone. Shot on a shoestring budget by director John Avildsen, the film became a blockbuster and Academy Award-winning best picture, In addition to spawning a lucrative franchise and spin-offs, Rocky propelled the careers of Stallone and Talia Shire, raised interest in boxing and sports movies, and placed Philadelphia and its architecture in the popular consciousness. Rocky has always been a contested text, raising questions about race, gender, and class in America, as well as debate about genre, storytelling, and film art--questions which are addressed at length in this rich collection of essays. As the contributing scholars show, Rocky and its sequels retain their power to rouse audiences well into the twenty-first century and continue to inspire audiences, athletes, and filmmakers.
This book examines how Italian Americans have been represented in cinema, from the depiction of Italian migration in New Orleans in the 1890s (Vendetta) to the transition from first- to second-generation immigrants (Ask the Dust), and from the establishment of the stereotype of the Italian American gangster (Little Caesar, Scarface) to its re-definition (Mean Streets), along with a peculiar depiction of Italian American masculinity (Marty, Raging Bull). For many years, Italian migration studies in the United States have commented on the way cinema contributed to the creation of an identifiable Italian American identity. More recently, scholars have recognized the existence of a more nuanced ...
Italian Americans in Film and Other Media examines the representation of the Italian immigrant experience from D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Italian Dramas (1908-1913) to the present day. Building on the editors’ previous volume Italian Americans in Film, this collection broadens their scope to address marginalized aspects of Italian Americanness, including the work of women directors and depictions of same-sex relationships. The book consists of three parts. Part I, “The Immigrant Experience”, focuses on feature films and is divided into two sections: “Silent Films” (which analyses some of Griffith’s early films and Barker’s The Italian, 1915), and “Revising Gender Perspectives...
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Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future reconsiders Robert Casillo’s definition of Italian-American cinema as “appl[ying] to works by Italian-American directors who treat Italian-American subjects” to expand this classification. Contributors situate Italian-American cinema and media within the contemporary and intersectional debates about ethnic identity, including race, class, gender, and sexuality studies. This book links past scholarship to theoretical underpinnings with new hermeneutical approaches in television and film to establish new interpretations concerning Italian Americans on screen. Scholars of film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.
Approaches Italian American literature from new critical perspectives and explores contemporary and understudied voices from both the United States and Canada. Italian Americans on the Page fills a significant gap in Italian American and Italian diaspora studies, particularly literature, as it explores four genres—fiction, poetry, memoir, and theater—from a variety of critical perspectives. The first section of the book offers reconsiderations of two canonical authors, Helen Barolini and Don DeLillo, while the other three sections bring new attention to understudied Italian American and Italian Canadian writers, including women and LGBTQIA+. These include Mary Jo Salter, Peter Covino, Lo...