Flavia Brizio-Skov
 Associate Professor of Italian
 University of Tennessee

Fascism & Resistance in Italian Literature & Cinema

Fascism, Nazism & Francoism in Literature & Cinema

The Italian Women's Movement: Divas, Directores, Writers

home

“Festa Italiana” at the International House.

Spaghetti Westerns & Italian Pop Fiction

M 2:30/3:30 HSS
W 2:30/5:30 Hodges Library-Audiovisual

“Unlike all the other popular Cinecittá genres of the 1960s - the sentimental weepy, the commedia all'Italiana, the peplum, the horror film, the spy story etc. - the Spaghetti Western was almost exclusively concerned with a masculine universe in which men strutted their stuff and did nasty things to one another, usually in homo-social spaces such as saloons or gun duels or hideouts in the desert. Spaghetti Westerns were a celebration of a masculine world where men were men andwomen - on the rare occasions they appeared - seemed to like it that way: the understated masculinity of the classic Hollywood Western had turned into in-your-face close-ups of rugged faces, twitching hands and fetishised weaponry, maleness as spectacle and style, and sometimes into extraordinary feats of athleticism and grace. The women were usually madonnas or whores and sometimes both at once... Italian formula films of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly popular, and were the product of an industry which seems to have been directly in touch with its audience: Italy was producing over 2000 feature films a year, could support nearly 13,000 cinemas and registered over 540 million million cinema attendances per annum. ”(C. Frayling)

The course will address the following questions: why formula cinema?, why such a success? what are the politics of the Spaghetti Westerns (SW)? what do SW reveal about Italian society of the 1960s and 1970s?, what is the legacy of Sergio Leones's films? did SW deepen and reshape the understanding of the Western as a genre? why so much violence? but was it violence or self- irony?... We will examine the most important films by Sergio Leone, Corbucci, Tessari etc., and we will read some popular novels of the same period. The course will meet twice a week: Monday for one hour and Wednesday for a three hour session to allow for film viewing and discussion. The course is designed for both non-majors and majors of Italian (Italian majors will read the literary works in Italian). All the films are in Italian with English subtitles and all the literary texts are in translation. There are no prerequisites. Requirements will include a mid-term, one final exam and one class presentation. For further information contact Flavia Brizio-Skov, Dept. of Modern Foreign Languages: fbrizio@utk.edu. (Because the content of this course changes, students may take it twice, for up to 6 credits).

Textbooks: photocopy materials; The Italians by Luigi Barzini (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996) and a novel by Giovanni Guareschi (see Reserve Desk list). For the students of Italian: Fratelli d’Italia (1963) by Alberto Arbasino or Il cinema italiano degli anni ’60 by Lino Micciche' (see Reserve Desk list).