Description
Provides the first critical overview of acting, stardom, and performance in post-war Italian film (1945-54), with special attention to the figure of the non-professional actor, who looms large in neorealist filmmaking.
Italian post-war cinema has been widely celebrated by critics and scholars: films such as Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Paisan (Rossellini, 1946) remain globally influential, particularly for their use of non-professional actors. This period of regeneration of Italian cinema initiated the boom in cinemagoing that made cinema an important vector of national and gender identity for audiences.
The book addresses the casting, performance, and labour of non-professional actors, particularly children, their cultural and economic value to cinema, and how their use brought ideas of the ordinary into the discourse of stars as extraordinary. Relatedly, O'Rawe discusses critical and press discourses around acting, performance, and stardom, often focused on the 'crisis' of acting connected to the rise of non-professionals and the girls (like Sophia Loren) who found sudden cinematic fame via beauty contests.
An examination of the actor, and the non-actor, in post-war Italian cinema-a crucial moment for the Italian film industry-when cinema became an important vector of national identity and of individual identification with figures on the big screen.
About the Author
Catherine O'Rawe is Professor of Italian Film and Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Stars and Masculinities in Italian Cinema (2014), and co-author of Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Divi: la mascolinita nel cinema italiano (2015). She has published widely on stardom, gender, performance, and audiences.
Reviews
A brilliant and comprehensive exploration of the role of the non-professional in Italian and world cinema, this book is sure to become indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in realist cinema as well as casting, acting and stardom. * Stephen Gundle, Professor of Film & Television Studies, University of Warwick, UK *
Catherine O'Rawe's book offers a compelling counter-history of film acting through the disruptive figure of the non-actor. She excavates a myth of neorealism and its progeny - the idea that 'authentic' non-professionals, plucked from the street and projected on screen, can puncture cinema's fakery and capture something of the 'real' - and gleans from it illuminating insights into children and stardom, voice and body, labour and performance, casting and reception, and much more besides. * Robert S. C. Gordon, Serena Professor of Italian, University of Cambridge, UK *
There are books that consolidate scholarly subjects and then there are those that basically design new research fields by combining scholars' insights and findings. O'Rawe has given order to the study of the non-professional actor by enlightening its historical dimensions (from the colonial cinema of Fascist Italy and neorealism to the global present), performative patterns and theoretical affordances in a marvelously researched, remarkably argued and beautifully illustrated intervention. Her work will be the key reference for scholars in Italian and world cinema for years to come. * Giorgio Bertellini, Professor of Film, Television and Media, University of Michigan, USA *
Book Information
ISBN 9781501394393
Author Dr. Catherine O'Rawe
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic USA
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
