Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema

Contributions by Axel Andersson, Eleanor Andrews, Linda Belau, Maria Letizia Bellocchio, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Anthony Cristiano, Amy M. Davis, Alessandro de Stefanis, Maurizia Natali, Avishek Parui, Francesco Rabissi, Sandra Waters Edited by Francesco Pascuzzi, Bryan Cracchiolo

Publication date:

21 January 2015

Length of book:

206 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Francesco Pascuzzi, Bryan Cracchiolo

1. Dreamed Cinema, Cinematic Dreams: Dreamscape, Neurosis and Desire in Federico Fellini’s 8½
Avishek Parui

2. The Uncanny and Mannequins: The Dream-Like Qualities of Two Italian Gothic Films, Il mulino delle donne di pietra and Lisa e il diavolo
Fernando Pagnoni, Amy M. Davis

3. Massimo Fagioli’s Influence and Psychoanalysis in Marco Bellocchio’s Il diavolo in corpo
Alessandro De Stefanis

4. The Visionary Realism of Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, note
Francesco Rabissi

5. The Ironic Oneiric: Nanni Moretti and the Cinematic Challenges of the 1970s
Axel Andersson

6. Life Is But a Dream: Reveries, Nightmares and Other Worlds in the Films of Nanni Moretti
Eleanor Andrews

7. Sublimation, Myth and the Work of Dreams: Radical Nostalgia and Melancholic
Attachment in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo Re
Linda Belau

8. The Cinedream in Pasolini and Cassavetes
Anthony Cristiano

9. Gradivae and Nymphs: Walking Women in the Dreamscapes of Italian Cinema
Maurizia Natali

10. Dreams, Nightmares, and Hallucinations in Francesca Comencini’s Cinema
Letizia Bellocchio

11. The Nightmarish in Dario Argento’s Mother Trilogy: Spatial Oddities and Family Ties
Sandra Waters

List of Contributors

Index