Revisiting the belly of Naples: The body and the city in the films of Mario Martone

Screen

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 239-256

  O'Healy, Áine ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63849293757     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/40.3.239     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. I borrow the term 'psychogeography from lain Chambers, who in turn extrapolated this concept from the Situationists. Arguing against the necessity of reading Naples as the sign of a unique, rational, firm referent, Chambers invokes the model of psychogeography in his description of the city's capacity for dispersal, thus escaping predictable categorizations. See Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 106
2. Mario Martone, Teatro di guerra: un diario (Rome: Bompiani, 1998), p. 267
3. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, La filosofia del rotto (Naples: Alessandra Carola, 1991), p. 21
4. Gustaw Herling, Volcano and Miracle (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 2
5. Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, p. 107
6. Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, 'Naples', in Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), pp. 167-76
7. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 28
8. Giuliana Bruno, 'City views: the voyage of film images', in David B. Clarke (ed.). The Cinematic City (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 47-8
9. Neapolitan filmmakers of the silent era were renowned for their realistic deployment of scenes from everyday life in the city, coupled with a flair for melodramatic narratives. This was in sharp contrast to the epic or 'colossal' style for which Roman filmmaking from this period is best known. For a discussion of Neapolitan cinema during the silent era, see Giuliana Bruno's book on the pioneering work of filmmaker Elvira Notari, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
10. Cited in Mirco Melanco, 'Italian cinema since 1945', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 15, no. 3 (1995), p. 388
11. See Pier Paolo Pasolini, 'Pasolini commenta il suo film tratto dal Decameron', L'Espresso (December 1970), p. 47
12. Pasolini expressed his view of Naples in a variety of contexts, but particularly in a series of 'letters' addressed to a fictional Neapolitan youth, Gennariello, which appeared as a regular column in Corriere della sera in 1975, and was later republished in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1983), pp. 17-18
13. Martone, Teatro di guerra, p. 263
14. With his characteristic idealization of the archaic and the primitive, Pasolini compared Neapolitans to communities in contemporary Africa that refused to adapt to the so-called civilized world: 'The people of Naples are like the great tribes of people such as the Tuareg or the Boia who have allowed themselves to die out, resisting the new system of power'. Georgette Ranucci and Stefanella Unghi (eds), Mario Martone (Rome: Script/Leuto, 1995), p. 49
15. See Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 177
16. and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 251
17. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror an Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)
18. Pile, The Body and the City, p. 177
19. For a discussion of the discursive feminization of southern Italians, see Vito Teti, La razza maledetta: origini del pregiudizio antimeridionale (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1993). Teti cites Alfredo Niceforo's view of the Neapolitans, expressed in 1898: 'No other group of Italians is as light, fickle, and restless as the Neapolitans. Their lightness is truly feminine.... Alongside the manly populations, such as the northern Italians, the Germans, and the English, the Neapolitans are a womanly people' (p. 73)
20. Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle' (1920), in On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library, 1984), Volume 2, pp. 283-6
21. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), ch. 4
22. See Luisa Muraro, L'ordine simbolico della madre (Rome: Riuniti, 1991)
23. and Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, trans. Serena Anderlini D'Onofrio and Áine O'Healy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)