In the 1960s and 1970s, Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) forged a cinematic language that reflected a changed, postwar world. His early successes, including L'avventura (1960) and La notte (1961), reshaped film drama by focusing so intently on characters (particularly couples) that plot was often a secondary concern. He also moved away from the social realism of his Italian peers. His most notable English-language films, from Blow Up (1966) to Zabriskie Point (1970), engage contemporary politics and modern social alienation.

“A filmmaker is a man like any other; and yet his life is not the same. . . . This is, I think, a special way of being in contact with reality.” Or so says Michelangelo Antonioni, the legendary filmmaker behind the stark landscapes and social alienation of Blow-Up and L’Avventura, who here reveals his idiosyncratic relationship with reality in The Architecture of Vision.

Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the great visual artists of the cinema. The central and distinguishing strength of Antonioni's mature films, Seymour Chatman argues, is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things and a rejection of explanatory dialogue. Though traditional audiences have balked at the "opacity" of Antonioni's films, it is precisely their rendered surface that is so eloquent once one learns to read it.

Marcia Landy examines the history of Italian celebrity culture and ponders the changing qualities of stardom in the 20th and 21st centuries. She considers the historical conditions for the rise of stardom in the context of various media, from the silent era to contemporary media, tracking how stardom shapes national and international identities.

Born in Bologna in 1922, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most controversial European intellectuals of his time. Pasolini believed the ?authentic? Italy ? with its many languages and subcultures, its ancient roots and idiosyncrasies ? to be disappearing before his eyes, and he used his films to denounce the social and ideological forces he felt were responsible for this detrimental change. Rather than campaign with overtly political films, however, Pasolini vested ideological impetus in key film characters, many of whom were women.

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Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects – Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino – as well as the documentary Italianamerican.

Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court?s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini?s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ?business?