Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema [Paperback]

Marcia Landy examines the history of Italian celebrity culture and ponders the changing qualities of stardom in the 20th and 21st centuries. She considers the historical conditions for the rise of stardom in the context of various media, from the silent era to contemporary media, tracking how stardom shapes national and international identities.

The phenomenon of the diva in the early European cinema, the invention of new stars in the sound cinema, the postwar impact on stardom through the introduction of changing forms of narration in popular genres, and the contributions to the changing faces of stardom through the films and the personas of suchauteursas Rosselini, Visconti, Fellini, and Pasolini are examined inStardom, Italian Style.Landy's genealogy of Italian star images identifies their connections to social history, landscape and geography, conceptions of femininity and masculinity, the physical and virtual body, regionalism, technology, and leisure.

Writing on the nexus of aesthetics and politics, Landy (Univ. of Pittsburgh) prefers the filmic text over extra-filmic elements. She describes how in the Italian silent cinema, the diva and divo bridged tradition and modernity; how, in 1930s sound films, the star fired popular culture fascination but was de-idealized; and how Mussolini used cinema to project his virile image. Then, writes the author, as neorealism reworked old genres it remade old stars and reconceived the male and female body. Anna Magnani typified the resurgence of stardom. In the popular genres in the 1950s, stars embodied the quest for national identity in the changing social milieu. In discussing the 1960s, Landy looks at the social concern of comedies and how international stars (e.g., Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti) showed commonsense surviving in a threatening climate. Landy also discusses television, co-productions, the spaghetti western, horror films, l³P