Special Issue, Modern Italy (22:2) History and Memory in Italian Cinema

The international and interdisciplinary collaborations developed there led to a partnership with the Italian Cinemas/Italian Histories Project, led by Alan O'Leary at the University of Leeds and designed to determine the variety and specificity of how Italian cinema has constructed a relationship with the past by radically broadening the corpus of film considered.1 Focusing on Italy as a case study that is both emblematic and anomalous, the articles here investigate how the nation's cinema has contributed and responded to Italy's struggle to construct a shared narrative of its modern history. From the hair of a young dead girl in Eisenstein's October to the prostheses of the double amputee in William Wyler's Best Years of Our Lives, to the tangled corpses of the Fosse Ardeatine filmed in Visconti's Giorni di Gloria, the human body works as an interface that connects the part and the whole, 'latching us, as spectators, to the greater history on the level of experience'. [...]implicitly or explicitly, the debate about a 'canon' of Italian historical films is never far away: the articles tackle well-known and lesser-known films, inviting us to move on from canons and anti-canons, to broaden radically the corpus of Italian historical films studied. [...]without prior coordination, the articles turn out to share a fascinating emphasis on affect, emotion, imagination, absence and gesture - suggesting the imperative to widen not only the range of films, but also the modes and devices we consider as cinematic engagement with history.