Department of French and Italian

Ten years, ten filmmakers, countless intellectual exchanges. The symposium “New Trends in Modern and Contemporary Italian Cinema,” was an international gathering of film scholars, directors, and journalists at Indiana University Bloomington that took place annually in April from 2010 through 2019. Organized by Professors Antonio Vitti and Andrea Ciccarelli, it was an unusual hybrid between a scholarly conference and a film festival. The event was a wonderful opportunity for our own graduate students and put Bloomington on the map for those interested in Italian film.

Professor Antonio Vitti, who retired this summer, came to IU from Wake Forest University in 2009 as a specialist in Italian cinema studies. He had organized a film festival that was held at Wake Forest and in Venice in alternate years, and he sought to continue the tradition in a new way at IU. Partnering with Professor Andrea Ciccarelli, the IU symposium launched in April 2010. It was organized around a certain theme each year, and a guest director was invited to fit in with that theme.

This year’s guest director was Wilma Labate, whose works (both documentaries and feature films) deal with labor and the working class, feminism, the Mafia, and the way social changes of the last 40 years have impacted everyday Italians. Papers read at this year’s conference dealt with similar themes: feminism in Italian-American film, The Sopranos HBO TV series about an Italian-American Mafia family, and contemporary immigration issues in Italy.

For Ciccarelli, the most important aspect of the symposium is that it brought Italian directors to the U.S., not just to IU where our students and faculty could learn from them, but to other universities and Italian cultural centers, as most combined their trip to Bloomington with other U.S. stops. The symposium even gained recognition and coverage from two major Italian newspapers, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera.

As cited above, IU students benefited from the incomparable educational opportunities the symposium brought to campus. Mimmo Calopresti, the guest director in 2011, conducted a workshop for students on how to shoot video on a smart phone. He later allowed a student he met at IU to visit him on set in Italy. Roberto Andó, the guest director in 2017, “loves the pedagogical aspect of being a director,” says Ciccarelli. Since he is also a well-known drama writer and director of theatrical productions, his broad knowledge of Italian culture led to many interesting conversations with students and various cultural connections. “Andó is also a foodie,” says Ciccarelli. “When I asked him how the food was at the conference, he said, very diplomatically, ‘different than in Italy.’”

While we couldn’t offer gourmet food that met Italian standards, the Department of French and Italian, largely through its graduate students, was a friendly and engaging host. Many, if not most, Italian graduate students in recent years have given papers at the symposium and have subsequently published their scholarly work in Vitti’s online journal, Rivista Luci e Ombre. Marzia Bagnasco (M.A. ’17), Giorgio Losi (M.A. ’19), Pantalea Mazzitello (M.A. ’18), Francesco Samarini (M.A. ’18), and Carlotta Vacchelli (M.A. ’17) have all read papers in recent years.

Leonardo Cabrini (M.A. ’17), a Ph.D. candidate in Italian who is working in the field of Italian film, recently reflected on the impact of the symposium on his development. “As a scholar, I had the chance to be part of the last four conferences, develop my own research on the history of Italian film criticism, and exchange interesting opinions with other scholars and friends.” Although the symposium will not continue, the connections made between scholars will carry on and enrich the field of Italian film studies for years to come.