Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema: Politics, Histories and Cultural Value

Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first study of how ideology shapes film festivals' perception of art cinema, offering a new approach to ideology critique. It examines the shared economic, geopolitical, and cultural histories of European A festivals and their role in canonizing Italian films.

Format: Hardback
Length: 308 pages
Publication date: 14 December 2023
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first systematic study of the role ideology plays in film festivals’ construction of dominant ideas about art cinema.

Film festivals are considered the driving force of the film industry outside Hollywood, disseminating ideals of cinematic art and humanist politics. However, the question of what drives them remains highly contentious.

In a rare consideration of the European competitive film festival circuit as a whole, this book analyses the shared economic, geopolitical and cultural histories that characterise ‘European A festivals’. It offers, too, the first extensive analysis of such festivals’ role in the canonisation of select Italian films, from Rome, Open City to The Great Beauty and Gomorrah.

The book proposes a new approach to ideology critique, one that enables detailed examination of how film festivals construct ideas about not only contemporary art cinema, but assumptions about gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

Weight: 686g
Dimension: 240 x 161 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789463720366