Orienting Italy: China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers

Orienting Italy explores Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese, from documentary to fictional films, with a focus on the works of Carlo Lizzani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gianni Amelio, Stefano Incerti, Andrea Segre, Riccardo Cremona, and Vincenzo De Cecco.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 02 March 2023
Publisher: State University of New York Press

Winner of the 2022 Book Award for Performance and Visual Culture presented by the American Association of Teachers of Italian, Orienting Italy: Exploring Contemporary Italian Filmmakers' Fascination with China and the Chinese in Documentary and Fictional Films, delves into the captivating exploration of Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese. The book begins with the works of Carlo Lizzani (Behind the Great Wall, 1958) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Chung Kuo—China, 1972), who ventured to China with the aim of documenting new, yet physically and culturally distant, realities. Their documentary investigations yielded to fictional portrayals, from the lavish view of a historical Middle Kingdom by director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, 1987) to the stark consideration of Italian economic exchange with contemporary China by Gianni Amelio (The Missing Star, 2006). The wave of Chinese migration to Italy in the late twentieth century created a new sense of otherness within Italy as Chinese migrants became the subjects of fictional narratives and documentaries in the works of Stefano Incerti (Gorbaciof, 2010) and Andrea Segre (Shun Li and the Poet, 2011) and Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco (Miss Little China, 2009). In the twenty-first century, a new chapter in the relationship between Italy and China has emerged in the form of transnational collaborations in the art and business of filmmaking.

Weight: 314g
Dimension: 228 x 152 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781438490601