|
II |
|
Autumn 2009
|
|
Elisabetta Girelli, Beauty
and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema, Bristol, Intellect, 2009,
pp. 240. |
|
Review by Anna Viola Sborgi |
|
While the area of studies on the
representations of Italians and Italo-Americans within American film and
television is extremely rich in bibliography, little attention has been so
far given to the representations of Italianness in British film. If the Godfather series and similar movies
gave a great contribution to create a strong, immediately recognizable and
stereotyped representation of Italian identity within American cinema,
culture and imagination, the overall presence of Italians in British cinema
seems to be more marginal. However, reading Elisabetta Girelli’s book makes
one realize the pervasive role of the Italian community in Britain throughout
the twentieth century both in terms of the rootedness of Italian immigration
and in the way Italianness as a cultural construct has been defined in the
British imagination. |
|
Beauty and the Beast analyses cinema
as a complex system of production and a powerful means of representation
shaping national identity and imagination, a critical approach which is
common in British Film studies, but less frequent within Italian critique,
still more concerned with issues of authorship. Drawing both on a variety of
archival sources and literary texts, Girelli situates the stereotypes
associated with Italy and Italians in Britain within a rich textual
background which forms the nucleus for plural and flexible identities in
different moments of British history: the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and the
Thatcher era. Moreover, Girelli combines this cultural approach with the use
of categories until recently belonging to the field of Post-colonial studies
and attempts to apply them to the different realm of the representation of
nationality out of a specifically colonialist context. Although this might
initially seem forced, concepts such as “situational identity” and “textual
attitude” are effectively brought up to define a flexible and at the same
time deeply articulated representation of Italianness. These two expressions
seem to be particularly fit for this kind of study, where the representation
of identity is an ongoing process and not a static one. The textual attitude, a notion the author
derives from Said, helps her situate the stereotypes about Italians within
the textual corpus represented by British literature, from the well-known
equation of the Italian as the villain in the wake of the reception of
Machiavelli’s works to the standard representation of Italy as the land of
vice and intrigues in Elizabethan theatre, to the later choice of Italy as an
ideal setting for Gothic novels. Girelli argues that any reconfiguration of
Italian identity in different social and historical contexts is rooted in
these long-debated stereotypes, which were never abandoned completely.
Moreover, it must be added that Nationality in Italian culture is a more
fluid construct when compared to Britishness and Englishness, (it is often
claimed that Italy as a nation is much younger than other European states and
thus the regional divide often takes on a more significant shared identity
than the country as a whole). This fracture only taken into account from a
geographic point of view, since certain regions emerge with their own
specific imagery while, Girelli argues, the representation of the average
Italian is leveled. |
|
The first
introductory chapter maps the major phases and the extent of Italian
immigration into the United Kingdom, and, more importantly, traces back the
different functions performed by Italian immigrants that coincide with, but
are not limited to, the different professions they chose throughout different
centuries. From organ-grinders, to ice-cream sellers to key players in the
catering system, Italians were associated with different issues depending on
different periods in British history, seen in contrast with British identity.
For instance, in Victorian London the problem of noise seemed to be a
prerogative of Italian organ-grinders and a public alarm on the hygienic
conditions of food that regarded the bad conditions of conservation in glass
containers in general was confined to the ice-cream trade. These new
stereotypes were thus added up to previous ones and formed a corpus of
multiple associations which filmic representations would later rely on for
their depiction of Italian characters and settings. |
|
The second chapter
deals with the perception of Italian identity during the different phases of
the Second World War following the transformation of Italians from enemies to
victims. Girelli examines two large groups of material: on the one hand she
goes through war footage, where the most frequent image of Italians is their
ineptitude at war, and on the other, she analyses the highly popular genre of
Gainsborough melodrama, where a completely different representation is given.
Through an in-depth analysis of characters, settings, costumes and narrative
developments, Girelli demonstrates how the three films considered under this
category (Madonna of the Seven Moons,
The Magic Bow and Blanche Fury) express, though in slightly different ways,
a vision of Italianness as depravity, in opposition to English
respectability. Although the triumph of passion and irrationality often
brought death to the characters who had inadvertently succumbed to it, this
genre was largely praised by the majority of cinema-goers, Girelli points
out. In this way the freedom associated with Italian characters and settings
brought within it a counter-discourse that was certainly more appealing to
the audience than the dull representation of virtue characterising
constructions of British nationality in those days. |
|
Gender appears
throughout the book as the main site where the negotiation of cultural
stereotypes takes place. In carrying out her analysis, Girelli draws back on
Laura Mulvey’s well-known theorization of visual pleasure, though her
critique is not limited only to the objectification of women’s bodies on the
screen, but is also concerned with the interplay between desire and distance,
identification and objectification of the Italian male. |
|
That is why the
third chapter analyses the representation of masculinities within British
cinema of the 1950s, a period in which previous notions underwent a crisis
after men came back from the front and had to adapt to civilian life anew:
men were now split between persisting conservative models and a new concept
of manhood which required adaptation to the new role women had acquired in
the professional field during the war. Male narratives took centre stage
within the films of the time and Italian men are often feminized in order to
reinforce by contrast equally stereotyped models of Britishness such as the British tough guy. Furthermore Italian
men are often characterized as either losers or crooks. This makes them unfit
as role models and again reinforces British troubled masculinity. Both
tendencies suggest a more or less disguised racist feeling which was vastly
shared by the British population of the time and not only directed towards
Italians, as the anti-black riots of the period well show. |
|
The fourth chapter
goes through British cinema between the mid 1950s and the 1960s, when
Italianness radically changed its cultural significance thanks to the
glamorization of Italian lifestyle, brands and food, an association that,
Girelli reminds us, was nothing new with respect to the traditional view of
Italy as a producer of art, culture and beauty, though dissociated from its
uninteresting and primitive inhabitants. Girelli also delineates the economic
and social conditions that made this shift in representation possible. Vespas
and Lambrettas were now all the rage and Italian stars peopled the British
screen, from Gina Lollobrigida to Sophia Loren. The glamour of Italian
stardom, the critical success of Italian cinema and a liberated sexuality
which took on the one hand the form of the exaltation of the typical Italian
womanizer and on the other was expressed by the powerful feminine sex-symbols
of the time represented the ingredients for success of Italian culture in
that period. |
|
Finally, the fifth
chapter leads us to the bleaker period of Thatcherism. British film of the
Thatcher era has been often considered a battlefield where different notions
of Britishness and Englishness were constantly negotiated: on the one hand
those deployed by the establishment and on the other those who were brought
up as an alternative, both in the well-known trend of Social Realism and in
the more underground Art Cinema. It would thus seem that British film would
be saturated enough with representation of British national identity – let’s
just think of Derek Jarman’s The Last
of England (1987) and the more conservative, though not unproblematic,
visions of nationality expressed by heritage cinema – to be interested in
foreign identities. However, it is precisely in those films which most insist
on a certain “proper” idea of Britishness and Englishness that the Other
enters the screen, especially through the unsettling experience of passion
often associated with Italianness. Girelli then analyses two heritage
classics: Charles Sturridge’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) and Merchant-Ivory’s A Room with a View (1986). The latter in particular has always
been considered an encyclopaedia of stereotypes concerning a romanticized
vision of Italy as the land of emotions as opposed to the cold and repressed
view of relationships associated with Englishness, and Girelli confirms this
prevalent interpretation. She also shares the idea, common among critics of
British cinema of the Thatcher Era, that this unsettling representation of
Italianness ambivalently undermines the same concept of Britishness which the
film and, in general, heritage cinema, aims to reinforce. At the same time, however,
the author argues that where Italy as a destabilizing place is opposed to a
rigid, normative view of being British, it is essentially a tool for
discovering a more subjective and freer interpretation of brutishness itself.
|
|
A different and
equally problematic representation of nationality appears in another classic
of the period analyzed by Girelli, Michael Radford’s Another Time, Another place (1983), where a similar scheme is enacted – the Italian PoWs bringing
chaos within the little rural Scottish community in which they arrived – and
italianness is deployed to create an opposition with a Scottish identity
which is in turn alternative to Englishness but not less problematic.[1] |
|
National identity is therefore
always created through the negotiation taking place by juxtaposition or
association with different kinds of otherness. This process is never univocal
or binary but is enacted through multiple negotiations which can be read only
within the liminal space of borders. Recent contributions in Cultural Studies
have defined these “transit zones”
as “porous” and the “outcome of historical
and cultural clash and compromise”[2]. The fluidity of representations of national identity and, at the
same time, the connectedness among the different representations of otherness
from a temporal perspective are well-expressed in Girelli’s book, which opens
new grounds and stimulates further research. |
|
v Anna Viola Sborgi, Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Genoa 2007, is a
part-time lecturer in English Culture and Literature at the University of
Genoa, Italy. Her main research interests include inter-arts and
modernism studies, film and television and audiovisual translation
(linguistic and cultural translation of TV series). She has published both on
film (Derek Jarman, Antonioni, British Film of the 1980s) and literary
portraiture in the work of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Fernando
Pessoa, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Ford Madox Ford. |
|
Return to the Table of
Contents |
