Annabelle incontrera biography of rory gilmore

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3/16/2011 8:06:40 PM

Hughes_Prelims.indd vi

3/16/2011 8:06:40 PM

ART AND ARTIFICE AN INTRODUCTION TO ITALIAN CINEMA

‘For what we see’, Bazin said, ‘the cinema substitutes a world that conforms to our desires’. Cinema Italiano is the story of that world.

I

n its heyday – beginning in the late 1950s and lasting for over 20 years – Italy was second only to Hollywood as a popular film factory, exporting cinematic dreams worldwide. Italian filmmakers, backed by international finance and fielding multinational casts, crafted dramas, horror films, westerns, spy movies, sword and sandal epics, costume adventures, war movies, crime films, science fiction, political thrillers and comedies with equal gusto and in inimitable style. Many of these films became great international successes, but the cliché of Italian cinema is that it predominantly fed off other movies, adopting found ideas, plots and actors, and making whole genres its own. A common criticism of Italian genre filmmakers is that their films are not as good as the Hollywood films they imitate, when in many cases they are actually superior to the ‘genuine article’. Cinema