Monica Boria has just delivered a paper on contemporary Italian comedy in a post-national context at the AATI Conference in Strasbourg.
The context for her paper is the so-called ‘cinema of migration’ in Italy, in which the comedy
mode has rarely featured and comedy films have only recently began to
emerge. These films were all made in the last decade and have so far
received scant attention. In her paper she presented the
preliminary results of her investigation of a body of approximately 15
films where the comedy mode and the theme of a multicultural Italy can
be considered predominant. Initial analyses shows that, in contrast with the realist films, which
tend to offer an intimate and deeper take on the migrant as subject, the
comedies revolve mostly around Italian identities, which the
juxtaposition with the immigrant ‘other’ makes stand out with ridicule.
Her methodology brings together the analytical tools typically employed
within screen studies, with those offered by humour studies. She also
attempts to frame this new production within the wider debate of
so-called ‘accented’ cinema and referred to concepts of displacement and
deterritorialization. Typical research questions include: how is
migration represented through the lenses of humour? Has the
unprecedented context of multicultural Italy affected the mechanisms of
the production of humour? Do these comedies offer new or alternative
discourses to mainstream realist film? Monica uses several comedies to illustrate hwe findings, but she
focuses on two especially poignant and innovative examples: Che bella
giornata (2011) by Gennaro Nuziante and Checco Zalone and Into Paradiso
(2011) by Paola Randi.
Monica Boria, 'Contemporary Italian Comedy in a Post-national context', AATI Conference, Strasbourg, 30 May - 4 June 2013
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