Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space

Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs.

"Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space offers a rich history of Italian comedies during the 'boom years' of the mid-century. This eminently readable study is timely in its appearance and will join in the debate concerning not only the way the field of Italian Screen Studies is constituted, but also - and significantly - how it is taught. This book will also join explorations of Italian cinema that take into account gender as a constitutive and conditioning element. I suspect that scholars will find the book rife with useful information, thought-provoking, and very, very teachable." - Ellen Nerenberg, Hollis Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Wesleyan University, USA

"This book makes a ground-breaking contribution both to Italian film history, and to wider debates in Film Studies on genre, gender and space. Its novel focus on interactions of gender and space within a large corpus of films demonstrates how Comedy, Italian style participates in social change. Rich in detailed analysis of stardom and performance, it challenges entrenched critical ideas in an exciting re-evaluation of one of Italy's most celebrated film genres." - Catherine O'Rawe, Senior Lecturer, Italian Cinema, University of Bristol, UK

"Fullwood's study looks carefully at a genre that has, in a sense, been hiding in plain sight. While there have been isolated attempts to study the commedia all'italiana, this book combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the films themselves with a historical and theoretical precision that allows us to understand this body of filmmaking as an index of historical change and a vital site of ideological conflict." - John David Rhodes, Lecturer, Film Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

Auteur
Natalie Fullwood is a language tutor in Italian at the University of Leeds, UK.

Contenu
PART I: CONTEXTS 1. Cinema, Space, Gender 2. Comedy, Italian Style PART II: SPACES 3. Bodies, Bikinis, and Bras: Beaches and Nightclubs in Comedy, Italian Style 4. Masculinity at Work: Offices in Comedy, Italian Style 5. Driving Passions: Cars in Comedy, Italian Style 6. Recipe for Change: Kitchens in Comedy, Italian Style