TY - JOUR TI - (A)morality of kinship in Italian cinema (1960-2010) DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T30C4T7G PY - 2014 AB - In the wake of Paul Ginsborg’s historical studies that investigate twentieth-century Italian history in the light of the institution of the family, my research will provide a major contribution to reconsider Italian film history in the light of the relationship between filmic depictions of the family since 1960 and those of the state, and civil society. Despite the vast sociological, anthropological, and historical bibliography on relationships and behavioral patterns of the Italian family, no study has been entirely dedicated to the cinematic depiction of these dynamics. I am interested in how the behaviors of family members are represented in order to determine whether they can be traced to a shared sense of civicness or whether they are symptomatic of a different morality: that of the family. The first part of my research examines the image of the traditional family and its implications for the concept of amoral familism in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), and Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best Youth (2003). The second part focuses on the breakdown of the traditional family, and on the condition of new social configurations (same-sex families, single parents) in the normative and conventional structures of contemporary politics. Films by Francesca Comencini, Cristina Comencini, Gianni Amelio, Daniele Luchetti, Gabriele Salvatores, Ferzan Özpetek, Kim Rossi-Stuart, and Francesco Bruni play a crucial role in my analysis. I address the following questions: How has the depiction of the family changed since 1960? How are these representations related to amoral familism? What effects have liquid modernity and New Capitalism had on the representations of contemporary Italian families? How has film language helped to define these changes? The large body of films considered has enabled me to shed light on the tension between tradition and innovation in the filmic construction of the politics, practices, and symbolic values of the Italian family from the Sixties to today. KW - Italian KW - Motion pictures--Italy--History KW - Families--Italy--20th century KW - Kinship--Italy LA - eng ER -