On the occasion of the “XVII Settimana della lingua Italiana nel mondo“, that will have as a theme “L’italiano al cinema, l’italiano nel cinema“, under high patronage of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, the Institute, in collaboration with the Cinémathèque québécoise and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures di McGill University, is pleased to announce the conference : Valerio Zurlini’s Cinema of Understatement. Introduction to the Retrospective dedicated to Valerio Zurlini at the Cinémathèque Québécoise (October 18-29, 2017) by Giuliana Minghelli.
Wednesday October 18, 2017, 6pm
Cinémathèque Québécoise
335, boul. De Maisonneuve Est
Free Admission
Conference in English
Valerio Zurlini was nineteen in 1945. Younger than the generation of De Sica, Visconti, Rossellini and even Fellini, Zurlini seems to have arrived on the cultural scene at once too late and too early. He did not start his career under fascism like all the other great post-war auteurs, and instead underwent a long apprenticeship before claiming a place among the new generation of filmmakers. Zurlini came of age as a director in the Fifties, and from that decade he seems to have absorbed the silences, repressions and unresolved tensions. His cinema looks back – through the two adaptations of Vasco Pratolini novels, Le ragazze di San Frediano and Cronaca familiare, the autobiographical Estate violenta and Le soldatesse – to the years of Fascism and its war. And it looks inward. The contained energy of his vision is similar to the timid, yet stubborn and resilient courage of his male characters: the young lover in La ragazza con la valigia, and the delicate, sick, but loyal brother in Cronaca familiare (played by Jacques Perrin) or the diminutive and gentle Jean-Luc Trintignant in Estate violenta. The cinema of Zurlini has a staying power as it speaks poetically of a world of hopes, quite desperation and short-lived joys that have found expression nowhere else in Italian cinema except, perhaps influenced by his work, in the early Bertolucci of Prima della rivoluzione. Zurlini’s legacy as an unrecognized master of a cinema of historical critique and psychological excavation is due for rediscovery and reevaluation.
Giuliana Minghelli studied German and English literature at the University of Pisa. From Italy she transferred to the Johns Hopkins University where she received the MA and the PhD in Italian Studies. Before arriving at McGill, she taught at the University of Wisconsin Madison, the University of Colorado Boulder and Harvard University. Presently, she is Associate Professor in LLC with a specialization in Italian and European cinema and culture. Working at the intersection of literature, cinema and photography, she is interested in the ways various media engage with modernism, post-war culture, and the colonial/postcolonial. Questions of history, ethics and memory inform her work on visual and popular culture. Her latest book Cinema Year Zero: Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film appeared with Routledge in 2013. A new book, Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography and the Meanings of Modernity, appeared with University of Toronto Press in 2015. Focusing on photography as artistic medium, everyday practice and cultural object, this edited volume explores the relations that Italian culture entertained with technology and modernity from the Unification to the contemporary moment. She previously explored the dialogue between photography and other media in a 2009 edited volume: The Modern Image: Intersections of Photography, Cinema and Literature in Italian Culture. Her first book, In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism (University of Toronto Press, 2003), is a study of gender and the ethics of modernism. She is currently working on a book on shame, historical forgetting and modern media as technologies of memory in post-war culture. She is a practicing photographer; a sample of her work is on view on her web site www.giulianaminghelli.com
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