Screening the Souths through Southern Eyes

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on Italian cinema from the 1980s onward. Although a brief discussion of the cinematic traditions that precede it— notably, neorealism, comedy, and docufiction—is in order, our analysis explores the work of a limited number of directors who vividly express the tension between Western and Mediterranean imagining. While many more have participated in these representations (and we will reference their filmography), those we discuss enable us to cover a wide gamut of perspectives vis-à-vis this geophilosophical tension. Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, for example, screen the horrors of modernization and its corrupted developments in postapocalyptic images of the island of Sicily. Gianni Amelio and Matteo Garrone are equally critical of the disappearance of values enacted by modernization and the concomitant loss of difference between northern and southern cultures. Edoardo Winspeare, instead, strives to recover the fragments of the cultural traditions of the Salento region after its devastating encounter with globalized modernity. Likewise, Emanuele Crialese brings to light the sites and locations of cultural traditions and forms of knowledge that have survived Western epistemologies; while at times he teeters toward idealized representations, he also reminds viewers of a Mediterranean existence marked by emigration and immigration as well as natural and social upheavals.