Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

A new book by Harvard Associate Professor of Romance Languages Giuliana Minghelli looks to be of interest to ecocinema scholars. While it is another example of a work that closely relates to ecocinema studies without directly saying so, Minghelli’s Landscape and Memory in Post-Facist Italian Film (Routledge, 2013) may be useful to those interested in the relationship between film, environment, and history particularly discussions of landscape as a space situated within the liminal border between the human and non-human.

Here is the full description of the book posted by on the publisher’s website:

This study argues that neorealism’s visual genius is inseparable from its almost invisible relation to the Fascist past: a connection inscribed in cinematic landscapes. While largely a silent narrative, neorealism’s complex visual processing of two decades of Fascism remains the greatest cultural production in the service of memorialization and comprehension for a nation that had neither a Nuremberg nor a formal process of reconciliation. Through her readings of canonical neorealist films, Minghelli unearths the memorial strata of the neorealist image and investigates the complex historical charge that invests this cinema. This book is both a formal analysis of the new conception of the cinematic image born from a crisis of memory, and a reflection on the relation between cinema and memory. Films discussed include Ossessione (1943) Paisà (1946), Ladri di biciclette (1948), and Cronaca di un amore (1950).