Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television
This is the first English-language collection dedicated to the prolific director, who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European cinema. International contributors—from the UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Israel, Canada, and the US—offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work in film and television. In an invaluable contribution to the existing literature, they examine Sorrentino’s recurrent grand themes, offer new perspectives and cues for discussion, and challenge established notions about the filmmaker and his career.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Giancarlo Lombardi
Introduction: The Creative and Artistic Trajectory of Paolo Sorrentino
Annachiara Mariani
Part one: Examining and Deconstructing Sorrentino’s Ethos
Chapter 1: Private Pain/Public Places: Sights, Sightings, and Sounds of Nostalgia in Youth and The Young Pope
Ellen Nerenberg
Chapter 2: Against Postmodernism. Paolo Sorrentino and the Search for Authenticity
Mimmo Cangiano
Chapter 3: A Journey from Death to Life: Spectacular Realism and the ‘Unamendability’ of Reality in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty
Monica Facchini
Chapter 4: Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinematic Excess
Lydia Tuan
Part two: Sorrentino’s Real and Symbolic Spaces
Chapter 5: Posthuman Sorrentino. Youth and The Great Beauty as Ecocinema
Matteo Gilebbi
Chapter 6: Interpolating the ‘blah, blah, blah’: Rome’s Vocalization Through Architecture in The Great Beauty
Alex Gammon
Chapter 7: The Great Beauty: A Journey Through Art and Relations in Search for Beauty
Michela Barisonzi
Chapter 8: The Urban Dimension as Film Character: Rome in The Great Beauty
Carla Molinari
Part three: A Journey into Sorrentino’s Psyche
Chapter 9: The ‘Primal Scene’: Memory, Redemption and (The Image of) ‘Woman’ in the Films of Paolo Sorrentino
Russel Kilbourn
Chapter 10: Anxiety (of Influence) and (Absent) Fathers in Paolo Sorrentino
Sandra Waters
Chapter 11: ‘È solo l’alito di un vecchio’. Obscenity, Exchange Regimes, and the Catastrophe of Aging in Loro.
Nicoletta Marini-Maio
Part four: Sorrentino’s Postsecular Pope
Chapter 12: The Young Pope’s Credit Sequence: A Postsecular Allegory in Ten Paintings.
Russell Kilbourn
Chapter 13: The ‘Fabrication’ of Religion in The Young Pope: the Double Irony of Post-Secular Iconicity
Monica Jansen and Maria Bonaria Urban
Chapter 14: The Young Pope Between Television and Celebrity Studies
Anna Manzato and Antonella Mascio
Interview with Carlo Poggioli (costume designer of Paolo Sorrentino)
Annachiara Mariani
Bibliography