The Istituto Italiano di Cultura presents a lecture by Professor Millicent Marcus from YALE UNIVERSITY
Yale University
“Non capisci che non puoi più andare a scuola?”: Representations of Fascist Anti-Semitism and the Racial Laws in Italian Cinema (1970-2001)
This study is built around a montage of scenes from Italian films which enact the effects
of Fascist anti-Semitism and the Racial Laws on private lives. De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Montaldo’s The Gold-Rimmed Glasses, Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, and Scola’s Unfair Competition merit close scrutiny for the way in which they translate the abstract assaults of Mussolini’s racial policies into the flesh-and-blood reality of the individuals who suffered their consequences. The talk will include the screening of clips to be analyzed according to the powerful, ethically charged relationships established between the films’ spectators and the victims of this searing historical episode.
BIO Millicent Marcus Professor of Italian:
Millicent Marcus (Ph.D. Yale, 1974) specializes in Italian culture from the interdisciplinary perspectives of literature, history, and film. She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron, (Stanford French and Italian Studies, l979), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, l986), Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Johns Hopkins, l993), After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Johns Hopkins, 2002), and Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (University of Toronto, 2007), as well as journal articles and encyclopedia entries on her fields of interest. Because literacy in the 21st century must be broadened to include the mass media as well as the written text, she brings a cultural studies approach to her teaching and research.