This richly comic work, long recognized as the most important expression of the director's views about himself and his art, communicates to its viewers an understanding of the processes of filmmaking itself.

In these poems, objects are occasions in outline. Dogs, cats, pianos, cappuccino, hair dye, snowshoes, parsley, and black raspberries do not simply lie there. They act upon one another and upon us. They demonstrate the laws of time. One birthday is a hundred birthdays. One city disappears into another.

A New Guide to Italian Cinema, with co-author Carlo Celli, is a complete reworking and update of Marga Cottino-Jones’ popular A Student’s Guide to Italian Film (1983, 1993). This guide retains earlier editions’ interest in renowned films and directors but is also attentive to popular cinema, the films which actually achieved box office success among the Italian public. The Guide introduces the Italian cinema not just as a 20th century phenomenon but as an expression of the deeper roots of Italy's historic, cultural and literary past.

Given the centrality of Africa to Italy's national identity, a thorough study of Italian colonial history and culture has been long overdue. Two important developments, the growth of postcolonial studies and the controversy surrounding immigration from Africa to the Italian peninsula, have made it clear that the discussion of Italy's colonial past is essential to any understanding of the history and construction of the nation.

Using semiotics as a theoretical foundation, this book reexamines the notion of the hyphenate writer. It argues for an analogous set of categories no longer chronologically or generationally based, but cognitively based, so that the traditionally considered "first-stage" or first generation hyphenate writer now figures as an "expressive" writer who is not necessarily part of the immigrant or first American-born generations.

Very nicely illustrated catalog for the Florence Film Festival at Carnegie Hall. A 60 page tribute to Alberto Sordi.

Twentieth-century Italy was marked by a profound and often convulsive transformation in both society and culture, accompanied at various stages by war, violence and dictatorship. This was Italy’s ‘difficult’ entry into modernity. The voices of Italian literature responded to this transformation with a bewildering combination of excitement and anxiety, from the loud embrace of the new in Futurism to melancholy laments for tradition. In the process, some of the greatest works of modern literature were created.

“Invites Italian-Americans of all backgrounds to the family table to discuss how mob-related movies and television shows have affected the very notion of what their heritage still means in the 21st century.” —Allen Barra, The New York Sun