Italian Cinema

Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on melodrama, commedia all'italiana , peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored from a gender standpoint which takes into account the historical and socio-economic context of cinematic production and consumption. An interdisciplinary feminist approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of film.

Maggie Gunsberg is Professor of Italian in the Department of Italian Studies at Manchester University, UK. Her research interests include women's writing, Italian cinema and Italian drama. She has published several books in these areas including Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni; The Epic Rhetoric of Tasso: Theory and Practice; Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present and Patriarchal Representations: Gender and Discourse in Pirandello's Theatre.