Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion

M. Wayne Cunningham is the director, Academic and Career Programs at the
College of the Rockies/East Kootenay Community College in British
Columbia.

In this scholarly treatise, Manuela Gieri explores the influence of the
cinematic theories of playwright and author Luigi Pirandello on such
notables of Italian filmmaking as Federico Fellini and Ettore Scala.

The volume contains a multiplicity of still photos, 36 pages of
explanatory notes, a 21-page bibliography, and an index. Casual readers
may be driven to their dictionaries by sentences like the following:
“This tradition, or rather, countertradition, finds its privileged
linguistic expression in metadiscourse, a discourse that is, by its very
nature, self-reflexive and self-referential as well as extremely
ambivalent.”

In keeping with the book’s scholarly credentials, quotations appear
in the original Italian (followed by the English translation in
parentheses), allowing academics to verify the authenticity of the
translation but at the same time disrupting the flow of the text for the
general reader.

Contemporary Italian Filmmaking is recommended for film historians but
not for the average filmgoer.