New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema

The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. Chapters in the book address aspects of industry and spectatorship and the varied film psychology of infancy, childhood and adolescence, as well as genres as diverse as silent cinema, contemporary teen movies, melodrama and film ethnography. The contributors engage with a wide range of modes and theories including neorealism, auteurism and contemporary postfeminism. The book maps out new roles for gender, the transnational, loss and mourning, and filmmaking itself, leading to a revised understanding of the child in Italian cinema.

Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter. She is currently completing a monograph on gender and prostitution in postwar Italian cinema. Other research projects include an AHRC-funded project on Italian cinema-going audiences of the 1940s and 1950s.
Roger Pitt was awarded his PhD by the University of Exeter in 2012. His AHRC-funded doctoral research project, ’Italian Cinema’s Missing Children’, explored the topos of the lost or endangered child in works by six contemporary Italian filmmakers.