Volume 28, Issue 11-12 / November–December 2024

More Festivals, Landscape & Nature, and Italian Made Cinema

The last issue of 2024 is composed of several mini themes, starting with two more festival reports carrying over from the several festival reports of the last issue. Here we happily showcase the vital Etheria Film Festival which dropped by for a visit in Montreal at Concordia University (reported on by Charlotte Mancone). And Philip Gillett's report covering the Leeds International Film Festival and the Southend Film Festival. The next theme grouping is on Italian films. Or films made by Italians, or in one case, stretching the theme a little, featuring an important Italian-American popular culture icon. The first articles are paired, introducing readers to the uncompromising work of London-based, Italian born filmmaker Guerrilla Metropolitana, with an article discussing his recent short films, The Censor-A British Horror Tale of Real Politics and Social Moral-Code (2021), Corporate Torment (it burns like hell), and (the featurette) Dariuss (2023), and an accompanying video (Zoom) interview with the director, Guerrilla Metropolitana. Divy Tripathi writes on one of the most popular of the leftist political strains of spaghetti westerns, Damiano Damiani's A Bullett for the General, borrowing from the political writing of Antonio Gramsci. Hannah Ferguson examines Luca Guadagnino's much discussed remake of Suspiria (1977, 2018), focusing on a feminist, psychoanalytical reading of the film's treatment of the female body. Ferguson argues that the film bypasses the usual standardized male gaze trope and ultimately subverts Barbara Creed's seminal notion of the 'monstrous feminine' by accepting and in fact indulging in the messy 'leaky' female bodies on display. The final article in the Italian themed section admittedly stretches the theme by looking at one of the most successful Italian Americans of the 20th century, singer-actor Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was a second generation Italian American who along with other successful pop culture figures like Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Frank Capra, and Dean Martin, were figures held in high esteem by generations of first and second generation Italian-Americans by proving that they too could scale the ladders of success and social respectability in America. Frank P. Tomasulo, who has co-edited an anthology on film performance, concentrates on Sinatra the actor in his essay "Frank Sinatra: Jazz Actor." The final threesome of articles are linked by the theme of landscape & nature. In Julian Malandruccolo's audio-visual essay "When Nature Becomes Nurture: Werner Herzog and Man’s Struggle Against The World" Herzog's tempestuous relationship to nature as both a destructive force and source of ecstatic exuberance is traced to the Fall of the Third Reich, German Nationalism, and the horrors of World War 2. Peter Rist reviews the recent major DVD box-set release of films by the Swedish (mostly) short, documentary filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff (1917–2001). According to Rist, Sucksdorff pioneered the hybrid documentary and fiction and made some of the most beautiful, lyrical and progressive nature films. The final essay by Cole Diment "Landscape and Politics in the Films of Chris Welsby" looks at the 1970s experimental works of British filmmaker Chris Welsby.  Diment looks at how Welsby's formal approach to weather systems shapes traditional landscape painting and cinema and offers the possibility of a radical ecological approach to landscape cinema. To paraphrase Diment, "The body is involved in the image in a way that the purely optical register of landscape painting and early landscape film typically negates. Thus, the body of the spectator is involved in the affective ecology of that which has been filmed. Welsby’s films thus border on a possibly radical vision of landscape and nature."

(Donato Totaro, ed.)