Italian Americans in Film and Other Media : The Immigrant Experience from Silent Films to the Internet Age

Italian Americans in Film and Other Media examines the representation of the Italian immigrant experience from D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Italian Dramas (1908-1913) to the present day. Building on the editors’ previous volume Italian Americans in Film, this collection broadens their scope to address marginalized aspects of Italian Americanness, including the work of women directors and depictions of same-sex relationships. The book consists of three parts. Part I, “The Immigrant Experience”, focuses on feature films and is divided into two sections: “Silent Films” (which analyses some of Griffith’s early films and Barker’s The Italian, 1915), and “Revising Gender Perspectives”, which includes chapters focusing on single films – such as Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete (1949), De Michiel’s Tarantella (1995), and Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007) – and survey essays that discuss the Italian American ‘celluloid closet’ and some of Savoca’s films. Part II, “Italian Americans in Other Media”, offers a wide range of essays informed by different approaches that investigate the immigrant experience in terms of transmediality and transnationality. The types of media examined in this section include television and graphic novels as well as puppetry, Instagram, and Internet memes. Part III contains interviews with Italian American scholars, movie directors, and performers. Together, the contributions to this collection demonstrate the vitality, mutation, and persistence of Italian Americanness in visual media.