On March 22-23, in the setting of The Ohio Union, one of the most iconic buildings in the main campus of The Ohio State University, the “Italian Cinema(s) Abroad” two-day conference took place. The event was organized by The Ohio State University and sponsored by various institutions both from Italy and the United States, such as the University of Bologna, the Catholic University of Milan, the Sapienza University of Rome, and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago. The conference featured six panels and one roundtable and engaged in a lively debate about the state of Italian national cinema outside of national borders, approaching this broad topic from different perspectives and methodologies. The idea was to decompose the broad topic of “Italian cinema(s) abroad” from the point of view of its circulation, distribution, marketing, audiences, reception, locations, specific case studies and so on. In fact, the twenty-two speakers who presented their research at the conference offered a thorough overview on these themes and opened the floor for future discussions and reflections upon the concept of Italian cinema in a transnational perspective.
Several topics of interest emerged already during the first day. After introductory remarks from Dana Renga, chair of the Department of French and Italian, Luca Peretti (The Ohio State University), and Damiano Garofalo (Catholic University of Milan), Giorgio Bertellini (University of Michigan), Christopher Hite (Allan Hancock College), Jessica Lenora Whitehead (Ryerson University), and Erik Scaltriti (The Ohio State University) offered their take on the presence of Italian cinema in North America from a historical perspective. Their works involved research in archives both in Italy, the U.S., and Canada. In the afternoon, the second panel saw Marco Cucco (University of Bologna), Michael R. Gott (University of Cincinnati), Lauren DeCamilla (The Ohio State University), and Alfo G. Aguado (New York University) presenting their works involving Italian co-productions of films in an European context. Their research was realized thanks to both archives and more contemporary data analysis about the current situation of Italian cinema in Europe. After the first day of the conference, speakers and audience gathered together at Renga’s home for a reception in which people kept talking about the interesting panels of the first day in a more informal way.
The second day of the conference, started with a roundtable during which Massimo Scaglioni (Catholic University of Milan), Paolo Noto (University of Bologna), and Emiliano Morreale (Sapienza University of Rome) presented their ongoing project about the circulation of Italian cinema abroad, a work which can be accessed at the website italiancinema.it. After the roundtable, Elena Past (Wayne State University), Robert Rushing (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Damien Pollard offered their takes on various aspects of the Italian presence in a transnational context, by addressing topics such as Italian celluloid production, Italian (trans)national superheroes, and the role of dubbing in the case of the Italian Giallo cinema. The fourth panel saw Gianmarco Mancosu (University of Warwick), and Richard Fletcher (The Ohio State University) analyzing, although from different perspectives, the role of Italian cinema in the context of the exportation of Fascism during the twentieth century.
The second to last panel involved a debate about Italian cinema in the context of “Third-Worldism.” Luca Caminati (Concordia University), Kaitlyn Zozula (Concordia University), Charles Leavitt (University of Notre Dame), and Rocco Giansante (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) all highlighted the relevance of Italian cinema in the struggles for independence and recognition of the “Third World,” as well as the influence that Italian film directors had in Israel or for the minorities in the U.S. thanks to films such as The Battle of Algiers. The last panel switched the focus to the less explored area of Italian TV studies. With respect to this topic, Luca Barra (University of Bologna), Sean O’Sullivan (The Ohio State University), and Dana Renga presented their studies on the presence of Italian productions on digital platforms, Italian seriality in comparison to American productions, and the cases of the worldwide success of the Italian TV series Gomorrah, Suburra, and My Brilliant Friend.
What emerged from this two-day conference on “Italian cinema(s) abroad” overall is a bittersweet situation. On the one hand, the high participation of the conference, both in terms of speakers and audience, and the interdepartmental and international cooperation between Italian and U.S. institutions to make it happen, proved that the academic field of Italian cinema is thriving. However, on the other hand, several works presented at the conference highlighted a situation in which contemporary Italian cinema is struggling both financially and in relation to its recognition beyond borders. This recognition, in fact, appears to be still very influenced by the heritage of Neorealism, that is, the Golden Age of Italian cinema. This two-day conference also opened the possibility of it becoming a recurrent event involving many U.S. institutions and many scholars all eager to keep working to maintain the relevance of the field of Italian cinema (and TV) with a transnational goal in mind.
