What I’m Reading: ‘Italian Film Directors in the New Millennium’

I haven’t finished it yet but I am really enjoying William Hope’s Italian Directors in the New Millennium (who I will be reaching out to after I’ve finished), a collection of essays about the new Italian directors that I talk about every day.

William Hope completed a doctorate in Italian literature and film at the University of Birmingham and lectures at the University of Salford. His main research area is modern Italian cinema, he is a member of the editorial board of Studies in European Cinema, and is currently co-ordinating an AHRC-funded project entitled A New Italian Political Cinema? His publications include Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006) and the edited volume Italian Cinema – New Directions (Peter Lang, 2005).

In the books foreword, film scholar Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s metaphorical description of new Italian cinema struck a chord:

“If one imagines the old cinema as a well-ordered garden with its showpiece auteurs and its solidly rooted genres, and the 1980s a period in which it had all gone to seed, with a couple of new auteurs like Nanni Moretti or Gianni Amelio popping up in different corners and very little genre activity other than soft-core porn, then the more recent period is one with a lot of new growth but little in the way of an overall pattern.”