The history of cinema, and notably that of post-war Italian cinema, can only be understood adequately in the context of other contiguous cultural disciplines. World literature, including that of France, Germany, and Russia, played a key role in the development of post-war Italian film and the cinematic technique it has come to embody.

The Time of the Crime interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the sixties and seventies: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scene—the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated.

Since World War II, aesthetic impulses generated in Italy have swept through every film industry in the world, and in her book Mira Liehm analyses the roots in literature, philosophy, and contemporary Italian life which have contributed to this extraordinary vigor. An introductory chapter offers a unique overview of the Italian cinema before 1942. It is followed by a full and profound discussion of neorealism in its heyday, its difficult aftermath in the fifties, the glorious sixties, and finally by an analysis of the contemporary cinematic crisis.

ITALIAN HORRORS covers Italian horror films released between 1979 and 1994. Why those years?

In this consummate portrait of the Italian people, bestselling author, publisher, journalist, and politician Luigi Barzini delves deeply into the Italian national character, discovering both its great qualities and its imperfections. Barzini is startlingly frank as he examines "the two Italies": the one that created and nurtured such luminaries as Dante Alighieri, St.

Gary P. Cestaro's Queer Italia includes essays on Italian literature and film, medieval to modern, and attempts to define a queer tradition in Italian culture. Contributors explore the multiform dynamics of sexuality in Italian texts and aim not to promote the mistaken notion of a single homosexuality through history; rather, they upset and undo the equally misguided assumption of an omnipresent heterosexuality by uncovering the complexities of desire in texts from all periods. Somewhat paradoxically, a kind of queer canon results.

Italy's great films are as rich and surprising as life, full of humor, tragedy, tenderness, passion, cruelty, and love. Great Italian Films is a superior introduction to the Italian cinema, acquainting the reader with major directors such as De Sica, Rossellini, Monicelli, Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti. The volume's scores of gorgeous photographs and stills make very clear why Silvana Mangano, Marcello Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina, Anna Magnani, Alain Delon, and so many other of Italy's bigger-than-life stars became international sensations.

This is an encyclopedic reference and filmography to the nearly 5,000 people, Italians and foreigners, who have been involved in Italian filmmaking since 1896. Each entry provides brief biographical information on the person, along with full filmographic data on his or her films in Italy or for Italian filmmakers. The annotated title index includes Italian titles (and year) and English-language titles and alternate titles where appropriate.

The last decade has witnessed an outpouring of Italian films that deal with Fascism, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This would appear to mark a distinct change from the postwar reluctance to represent such an infamous history. Roberto Benigni?s popular Life is Beautiful (1997) is an obvious example, but there have been a number of other works that have not been exported that also attest to a distinct tendency within Italian domestic production to address the issue.