The Photoromance

The Photoromance PDF Author: Paola Bonifazio
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A fascinating feminist reading of an often scorned medium: the storytelling, cross-platform success, and female fandom of the photoromance. Born in Italy and successfully exported to the rest of the world, photoromances had a readership of millions in the postwar years. By the early 1960s, more than ten million Italians read a photoromance each week. Despite its popularity, the photoromance—a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings—was widely scorned as a medium, and its largely female audience derided as naive, pathetic, and uneducated. In this provocative book, Paola Bonifazio offers another perspective, making a case for the relevance of the photoromance for both feminism and media culture. She argues that the photoromance pioneered storytelling across platforms, elevated characters and artists into brands, and nurtured a devoted fan base. Moreover, Bonifazio shows that female readers—condescended to by intellectuals, journalists, and politicians of both the left and the right—powered the Italian photoromance industry's success. Bonifazio examines the “convergence culture” of Italian media as photoromance magazines dispersed their content across multiple formats, narrative conventions, editorial and business strategies, and platforms. The plots of photoromances often resembled the storylines of romantic films, and film stars themselves often appeared in photoromances. Bonifazio discusses the media habits of photoromance readers; the use of photoromances to promote political, religious, and social agendas, including a campaign for “birth control in comics”; and long-term fandom. While publishers built lifelong relationships with their readers, the readers built a common identity and culture.

The Photoromance

The Photoromance PDF Author: Paola Bonifazio
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fascinating feminist reading of an often scorned medium: the storytelling, cross-platform success, and female fandom of the photoromance. Born in Italy and successfully exported to the rest of the world, photoromances had a readership of millions in the postwar years. By the early 1960s, more than ten million Italians read a photoromance each week. Despite its popularity, the photoromance—a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings—was widely scorned as a medium, and its largely female audience derided as naive, pathetic, and uneducated. In this provocative book, Paola Bonifazio offers another perspective, making a case for the relevance of the photoromance for both feminism and media culture. She argues that the photoromance pioneered storytelling across platforms, elevated characters and artists into brands, and nurtured a devoted fan base. Moreover, Bonifazio shows that female readers—condescended to by intellectuals, journalists, and politicians of both the left and the right—powered the Italian photoromance industry's success. Bonifazio examines the “convergence culture” of Italian media as photoromance magazines dispersed their content across multiple formats, narrative conventions, editorial and business strategies, and platforms. The plots of photoromances often resembled the storylines of romantic films, and film stars themselves often appeared in photoromances. Bonifazio discusses the media habits of photoromance readers; the use of photoromances to promote political, religious, and social agendas, including a campaign for “birth control in comics”; and long-term fandom. While publishers built lifelong relationships with their readers, the readers built a common identity and culture.

The Belgian Photonovel, 1954-1985

The Belgian Photonovel, 1954-1985 PDF Author: Clarissa Colangelo
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462703701
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The Belgian photonovel is the missing link in the amazing history of the photonovel, a comics-inspired form of visual narrative that combines elements from very different genres and media, ranging from literary melodrama, cinema, and of course comics. This monograph discloses the specific Belgian contribution to the genre, in close connection with the singularities of the Belgian women’s and general magazines where these photonovels appeared. If the photonovel is generally considered a typically French or Italian genre, this study demonstrates the importance of a different tradition, which appropriated the foreign models in a very original way. Belgian photonovels are distinct, not only because they tell other kinds of stories, but also because they interact with other types of magazines in ways that are very different from the mainstream forms of the genre in Italy and France. Finally, this lavishly illustrated study is also the first in scrutinizing the technical aspects of magazine printing techniques in the development of the photonovel.

Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture

Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture PDF Author: Michael Caesar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351196014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance - theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play - make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and premeditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration. The challenge of writing down what is spoken is partly technical, but also political and philosophical. How do young writers represent the spoken language of their contemporaries? What are the rules governing the transcription of oral evidence in fiction and non-fiction? Is the relationship between oral and written always a hierarchical one? Does the textualization of the oral destroy, more than it commemorates or preserves, the oral itself? Twelve wide-ranging essays, the majority on contemporary Italian theatre and literature, explore these questions in the most up-to-date account of orality and literacy in modern Italian culture yet produced. With the contributions: Michael Caesar, Marina Spunta- Introduction Michael Caesar- Voice, Vision and Orality: Notes on Reading Adriana Cavarero Arturo Tosi- Histrionic Transgressions: The Dario Fo-Commedia dell'Arte Relationship Revisited Gerardo Guccini- Le poetiche del 'teatro narrazione' fra 'scrittura oralizzante' e oralita-che-si-fa-testo Richard Andrews- Composing, Reciting, Inscribing and Transcribing Playtexts in the Community Theatre of Monticchiello David Forgacs- An Oral Renarration of a Photoromance, 1960 Alessandra Broccolini- Identita locali e giochi popolari in Italia tra oralita e scrittura Marina Spunta- The Facets of Italian Orality: An Overview of the Recent Debate Kate Litherland- Literature and Youth in the 1990s: Orality and the Written in Tiziano Scarpa's Cos'e questo fracasso? and Caliceti and Mozzi's Quello che ho da dirvi Elena Porciani- Note su oralita e narrazione inattendibile Marco Codebo- Voice and Events in Manlio Calegari's Comunisti e partigiani: Genova 1942-1945 Hanna Serkowska- Oralita o stile? La trasmissione orale e le modalita narrative ne La Storia di Elsa Morante Catherine O'Rawe- Orality, Microhistory and Memory: Gesualdo Bufalino and Claudio Magris between Narrative and History"

Love, Honour, and Jealousy

Love, Honour, and Jealousy PDF Author: Niamh Cullen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192576755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Love, Honour, and Jealousy investigates the impact of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s on intimate life. Just as Italy was rapidly forged into an urban, industrial nation in these years, the ways in which Italians thought about family, love, and marriage were transformed by migration and modern consumer culture. At the core of this book lies the investigation of almost one hundred and fifty unpublished diaries and memoirs written by ordinary men and women who were coming of age during these years. These personal testimonies reveal unique insights into the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of those who came of age against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Italy. The personal stories are explored alongside the films, magazines, and music of the time, which were saturated with both new and old ideas of romance. Films and magazines encouraged young Italians to put romantic love and individual desire over family, contributing to changing expectations about marriage, and often resulting in family tensions. At the same time popular love stories were frequently laced with jealousy, hinting at the darker emotions that were linked in many minds, to love. This darker side was a significant part of the story of changing ideas about intimacy in post-war Italy, as was the growing desire to marry for love. Control and violence against women was closely linked to southern ideas about family honour but also to anxieties about Italy's changing society, which manifested itself in romantic jealousy. Through its exploration of courtship, marriage, honour crime, forced marriage, jealousy, and marriage breakdown, Love, Honour, and Jealousy traces the ways in which the lives both of individuals and of the nation itself, were shaped by changing understandings of romantic love and its darker companions, honour and jealousy.

Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War

Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War PDF Author: David A. Forgacs
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253219485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 754

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Book Description
From the 1930s to the 50s in Italy commercial cultural products were transformed by new reproductive technologies and ways of marketing and distribution, and the appetite for radio, films, music and magazines boomed. This book uses new evidence to explore possible continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War II.

Black Cultural Life in South Africa

Black Cultural Life in South Africa PDF Author: Lily Saint
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Under apartheid, black South Africans experienced severe material and social disadvantages occasioned by the government’s policies, and they had limited time for entertainment. Still, they closely engaged with an array of textual and visual cultures in ways that shaped their responses to this period of ethical crisis. Marshaling forms of historical evidence that include passbooks, memoirs, American “B” movies, literary and genre fiction, magazines, and photocomics, Black Cultural Life in South Africa considers the importance of popular genres and audiences in the relationship between ethical consciousness and aesthetic engagement. This study provocatively posits that states of oppression, including colonial and postcolonial rule, can elicit ethical responses to imaginative identification through encounters with popular culture, and it asks whether and how they carry over into ethical action. Its consideration of how globalized popular culture “travels” not just in material form, but also through the circuits of the imaginary, opens a new window for exploring the ethical and liberatory stakes of popular culture. Each chapter focuses on a separate genre, yet the overall interdisciplinary approach to the study of genre and argument for an expansion of ethical theory that draws on texts beyond the Western canon speak to growing concerns about studying genres and disciplines in isolation. Freed from oversimplified treatments of popular forms—common to cultural studies and ethical theory alike—this book demonstrates that people can do things with mass culture that reinvigorate ethical life. Lily Saint’s new volume will interest Africanists across the humanities and the social sciences, and scholars of Anglophone literary, globalization, and cultural studies; race; ethical theories and philosophies; film studies; book history and material cultures; and the burgeoning field of comics and graphic novels.

The Non-Professional Actor

The Non-Professional Actor PDF Author: Catherine O'Rawe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501394371
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Provides the first critical overview of acting, stardom, and performance in post-war Italian film (1945-54), with special attention to the figure of the non-professional actor, who looms large in neorealist filmmaking. Italian post-war cinema has been widely celebrated by critics and scholars: films such as Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Paisan (Rossellini, 1946) remain globally influential, particularly for their use of non-professional actors. This period of regeneration of Italian cinema initiated the boom in cinemagoing that made cinema an important vector of national and gender identity for audiences. The book addresses the casting, performance, and labour of non-professional actors, particularly children, their cultural and economic value to cinema, and how their use brought ideas of the ordinary into the discourse of stars as extraordinary. Relatedly, O'Rawe discusses critical and press discourses around acting, performance, and stardom, often focused on the 'crisis' of acting connected to the rise of non-professionals and the girls (like Sophia Loren) who found sudden cinematic fame via beauty contests.

Stars

Stars PDF Author: Lucy Fischer
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415278935
Category : Fame
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
From two distinguished academics, this book includes contributions from top scholars such as Richard Dyer, and brings together key writings and new perspectives on stars and stardom in cinema across the world.

Global Bollywood

Global Bollywood PDF Author: Sangita Gopal
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816645787
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Bollywood movies and their signature song-and-dance spectacles are an aesthetic familiar to people around the world, and Bollywood music now provides the rhythm for ads marketing goods such as computers and a beat for remixes and underground bands. These musical numbers have inspired scenes in Western films such as Vanity Fair and Moulin Rouge. Global Bollywood shows how this currency in popular culture and among diasporic communities marks only the latest phase of the genre’s world travels. This interdisciplinary collection describes the many roots and routes of the Bollywood song-and-dance spectacle. Examining the reception of Bollywood music in places as diverse as Indonesia and Israel, the essays offer a stimulating redefinition of globalization, highlighting the cultural influence of Hindi film music from its origins early in the twentieth century to today. Contributors: Walter Armbrust, Oxford U; Anustup Basu, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Colorado College; Edward K. Chan, Kennesaw State U; Bettina David, Hamburg U; Rajinder Dudrah, U of Manchester; Shanti Kumar, U of Texas, Austin; Monika Mehta, Binghamton U; Anna Morcom, Royal Holloway College; Ronie Parciack, Tel Aviv U; Biswarup Sen, U of Oregon; Sangita Shrestova; Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, Shippensburg U. Sangita Gopal is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon. Sujata Moorti is professor of women’s and gender studies at Middlebury College.

Traveling Auteurs

Traveling Auteurs PDF Author: Luca Caminati
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253069564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
What tensions characterized the relationships between cinema, European Leftists, and emerging postcolonial ideologies after World War II? In Traveling Auteurs, author Luca Caminati analyzes the work of influential Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as they engaged politically and aesthetically with the global landscapes and politics of the Cold War period. As documentaries, the films considered in this book record specific manifestations of political sensibilities of the twentieth century. As bodies of work, they reveal that the traveling auteurs who made them were symptomatic actors in complex geopolitical networks. As cultural objects reflecting and shaping contemporaneous debates, they provoke a complex afterlife at home and abroad. In the three chapters dedicated to Rossellini in India, Pasolini in Africa and the Middle East, and Antonioni in China, Caminati pays particular attention both to the reception that these films had in the countries where they were shot and to their legacies in Italian film history. As it follows the entanglements of filmmakers, artists, and activists involved as allies or direct witnesses to momentous political change, this book sheds new light on anticolonial struggles, the reaffirmation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party.