Another world of Others!
I belatedly discuss in this post the content of my keynote paper on 15 June at ‘Echi Oltremare. The Other Inside and Out: Italy and the Mediterranean’, a conference in Rome, 14-16 June 2012, organized by Fulvio Orsitto and Sonia Massari, with the help of Giovanni Spani, Chiara Ferrari and Gloria Pastorino. They were very generous to invite me to speak, particularly given that commitments at Leeds meant I couldn’t attend the rest of the event.
The generous Fulvio Orsitto, introducing O’Leary in his only suit
In their call for papers the organizers wrote that the ‘conference [would] focus on the exploration of Otherness and its facets […], a topic that could be studied and interpreted from several perspectives such as, for instance, women studies, gender studies, and queer studies’. I wanted to offer a slightly critical take on this conference rationale, and my title was ‘”Capite cosa vuol dire? Un altro mondo“ The cinepanettone audience as Other’.
Vacanze di Natale (1983): Instant Nostalgia
‘Le madeleines di Proust sono ora prodotte in serie.’ (Emiliano Morreale)[1]
Here I continue to extract some material from a forthcoming article written for the first issue of a new Italian journal of history and cinema edited by Christian Uva, entitled ‘Nostalgia per un decennio disprezzato: appunti sul primo cinepanettone’.
In an interesting book on nostalgia in the cinema, Emiliano Morreale argues that nostalgia in its ‘postmodern’ form was born in Italy in the 1980s. He locates to the years around 1980 the emergence of a ‘nostalgia mediale e di massa’ that finds its motifs and Madeleines in lowbrow culture.[2] Morreale signals Sapore di Mare (Carlo Vanzina, 1983) as a key text of the ‘new’ nostalgia, a film which releases a ‘fenomeno centrale’ of the period, that of the ‘filone “giovanilista-nostalgico”’ in Italian cinema.[3]
