Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies - Call for Papers

 

 Giallo! The Long History of Italian Television Crime Drama

Special issue edited by Luca Barra (Università di Bologna) and Valentina Re (Link Campus, Rome)

 Most of the Italian television drama able to circulate internationally belongs to the multifaceted crime genre, both in some sparse examples from the past and in growing contemporary productions (from premium channels and digital platforms to public service and commercial broadcasters). However, for many decades, only a limited range of titles has been given scholarly attention, drawing a useful yet partial account of an otherwise dense and multi-layered history. Moreover, exceptions have often been studied far more than the most conventional crime series in the ‘giallo’ spectrum: most police procedurals are deemed too formulaic, or too popular, to be distinguished. Therefore, this special issue intends to overcome these limits by focusing on the historical evolution of the crime genre inside the development of Italian television, from the early stages to the latest mainstream and niche successes, and by highlighting the many crime titles that have become familiar to large Italian audiences.

 Through the Italian crime drama and its evolution over the decades, an original history of Italian television and media can be easily outlined, where ‘giallo’ would often mark changes of pace, innovations, successes and failures. Already in the first twenty years of the so-called paleo-television and monopoly period, crime drama was facilitating the Italian ‘sceneggiato’’s turn towards a medium-long seriality: the investigations of ‘tenente’ Sheridan (from 1959 to 1972, first with Giallo club. Invito al poliziesco and later with Ritorna il tenente Sheridan, Sheridan squadra omicidi and Le donne del tenente Sheridan) or Le inchieste del commissario Maigret (1964-1972), starring Gino Cervi; or Nero Wolfe (1969-1971). Further on, it was crime drama that marked the transition—even the lexical transition—from ‘sceneggiato’ to ‘fiction’, with the great success of La Piovra (1984-2001). It was crime television that punctuated the golden age of public service fiction in the late Nineties: Il maresciallo Rocca (1996-2008), Il Commissario Montalbano (1999-), La squadra (2000-2007) and the reassuring Don Matteo (2000-). It was crime drama that underlined the innovations of commercial networks: Distretto di polizia (2000- 2012), RIS. Delitti imperfetti (2005-2009) and Squadra antimafia. Palermo oggi (2009-2016). Once again, it was the crime genre that marked the arrival of premium original productions, first with Sky – Quo vadis, baby? (2008), Romanzo criminale. La serie (2008-2010) and Gomorra. La serie (2014-) – and later with Netflix – Suburra. La serie (2017-2020). Lastly, crime is one of the main battlegrounds for the return of Rai and Mediaset competition, innovating genres and aesthetics and establishing global partnerships, with titles like Non uccidere (2015-2018), Rocco Schiavone (2016-), La porta rossa (2016-), I bastardi di Pizzofalcone (2017-), Maltese (2017), Il Cacciatore (2018) and Il Processo (2019). In Italy, as in many other countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the entire nation is reflected in the history of its TV crime drama, mixing the reverberations of a changing society – which experiences new tensions and conflicts in terms of economic insecurity, political uncertainty, family and gender norms – with formal experiments and the shared imageries of a long-lasting, rich and always new genre.

 The editors encourage submissions that cover, but are not limited to, the following subjects and topics:

 1. The genre and its polymorphism. How has Italian TV, across its entire history, interpreted the many subgenres of ‘giallo’ (noir, police procedural, legal drama, detective story, crime, etc.)? How are these subgenres related to different periods, specific formats, channels and platforms?

 2. The familiar hybridizations with comedy and melodrama. What are the strategies to ‘balance’ the roughness of crime in the Italian tradition? How have these interacted with the crime genre?

 3. The less familiar hybridizations with other genres. How have popular genres like fantasy, the supernatural, gothic, science fiction and thriller impacted the ‘giallo’ traditions and innovations?

4. The geography of Italian crime. How have the places represented in the Italian ‘giallo’ changed in television history (center vs. peripheries; urban vs. rural stories)? How have locations affected the narrative developments, the production and the national and global circulation of these series?

 5. Literary adaptations and original productions. How has the frequent adaptation of literary investigators (i.e. Maigret, Nero Wolfe, Montalbano, etc.) influenced the narratives, characters, production and promotion strategies of Italian TV dramas? How do fully-original stories differ?

6. The Italian ‘giallo’ as a transmedial phenomenon. How have crime dramas hybridized languages, figures, characters and topics from different media, such as radio, comics and cinema?

7. Mainstream dramas and quality ‘giallo’. How has ‘quality’ or ‘complex’ TV impacted Italian crime by featuring ambiguous heroes and antiheroes, multiple storylines, unconventional locations and a sophisticated visual style? And what is the role of more traditional, mass-oriented crime?

8. From amateur to professional female investigators. How have crime dramas, from Laura Storm to Thou Shalt Not Kill’s Valeria Ferro, shown an increasingly strong interest in female detectives? How does this help us understand, question and renegotiate evolving gender and genre norms?

9. The reality and fiction of Italian ‘giallo’. How have Italian crime dramas reinterpreted or hinted at the news of ‘cronaca nera’, in a complex entanglement between unsolved cases and judiciary truths? In which ways has the recent explosion of serial true crime also impacted fictional series?

10. The international circulation of Italian crime. After the first success of La Piovra, in recent years more and more national productions have met with foreign acclaim. What are the elements that facilitate this international circulation, and what are the effects on narratives and productions?

11. Italian ‘giallo’ and the past: national history and national memory. How has the Italian ‘giallo’ tradition been proven capable of turning our gaze on the past and addressing unresolved social and political conflict? How do ‘gialli’ contribute to a shared national memory of mysteries and traumas?

12. Italian ‘giallo’ and the present: social tensions and moral dilemmas. From financial issues to terrorism, from immigration to the ties between politics, corruption and organized crime, how has the contemporary crime drama contributed to narrating conflict and fear in our societies?

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 30 April. Interested contributors should send the following materials to the guest editors Luca Barra, Università di Bologna (luca.barraATunibo.it) and Valentina Re, Link Campus, Rome (v.reATunilink.it): a 500 word abstract in English of original and unpublished articles, outlining the topic, approach and theoretical bases with a relevant bibliography and filmography; and  a 200 word biographical note. The accepted proposals will be notified by 31 May; completed articles should be sent by 15 October for peer-review; authors will be notified of the results of the peer-review by 15 December 2021.

 

Calls for Chapters: Women Who Kill in English-speaking Cinema and TV Series of the Postfeminist Era

--> Within the fields of film and television studies, feminist critics and  scholars of the 1980s and 1990s have extensively analysed the figures  of women murderers in classical film genres like film noir and  melodrama, as well as in less savoury genres like the horror films of  the 1970s and 1980s. Such figures, often adapted from literary sources  (The Maltese Falcon, Leave Her to Heaven, Whatever Happened to Baby  Jane?, Tess of the D’Urbervilles), have existed since the silent era.  Yet what may have been an exception seems to be becoming more common.  Women who kill abound in contemporary films and TV shows, including  Butterfly Kiss (Michael Winterbottom, 1995), The Wire (HBO,  2002-2008), Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004), Monster (Patty  Jenkins, 2003), Lost (ABC, 2004-2010), Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama,  2009), Bathory (Juraj Jakubisko, 2008), Luther (BBC, 2010-), The  Hunger Games (2012-2015), The Americans (FX, 2013-), Orange Is the New  Black (Netflix, 2013-), Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve, 2013) and Gone  Girl (David Fincher, 2014). The increasing number of these characters  probably goes hand in hand with the increasing number of strong female  heroines. Far from displaying gratuitous violence by women, some of  these contemporary works justify or, at least try to explain, why the  murders happened in the first place (as an act of revenge, an answer  to their oppression, a way to fit in their environment, an expression  of their psychotic personalities, and so forth), while others tend to  question these very motives. Seeing as many of today’s producers,  filmmakers and screenwriters have gone through film school, it is more  than likely that many are aware of the theses developed in feminist  film and television studies; Diablo Cody, for instance, admitted  having Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine in mind when writing the  screenplay for Jennifer’s Body. The series and films are also, no  doubt, reacting to discourses that have been widely circulating in the  media, and that testify to the impact queer, gender and feminist  studies have had on popular culture at large. Another contemporary  phenomenon that must be taken into account is postfeminism, a  “market-led phenomenon” which, by promoting female success stories,  seems to “lead to the conclusion that the time for feminism is past”  (Gamble 42-44). These women who kill may simply be symptomatic of postfeminist trends.

--> This collected volume will explore several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilises order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. It will also aim at assessing the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from this perspective, but more importantly perhaps, at analysing the politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by postfeminism.

--> Proposals must include a 300-500-word abstract, a short bibliography and a bio, and should be sent to the editors by December 31, 2016:

Zachary Baqué: zachary.baque@univ-tlse2.fr

Cristelle Maury: cristellemaury@gmail.com

David Roche: mudrock@neuf.fr

Selected Bibliography

Andrin, Muriel. Maléfiques, le mélodrame filmique américain et ses héroines, 1940-1953, Bruxelles, Berne, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2005.

Birch, Helen, ed. Moving Targets Women Murder and Representation. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Burfoot and Lord, eds. Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and  Violence. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier, 2006.

Cadiet, Loïc, ed. Figures de femmes criminelles : De l'Antiquité à nos  jours. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010.

Cardi, Coline and Geneviève Pruvost, eds. Penser la violence des  femmes. Paris: La Découverte, 2012.

Clover, Carol. J. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.

Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir: a Reader. Ed.  Joan Copjec. London and New York: Verso, 1993. 121-65.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

---. Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005.

De Laurentis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and  Postfeminism. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

-->

Grant, Barry Keith, ed. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.

Grossman, Julie. Rethinking the Femme Fatale: Ready For Her Close-Up.  London: Palgrave, 2009.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of  the Monster. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

---. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1998.

Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London and New York: I. B. Tauris 2008.

Hanson Helen and Catherine O’Rawe. The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts. London: Palgrave, 2010.

Hildenbrand, Karen, ed. Cycnos 23.2 (2006) “Figures de femmes assassines, représentations et idéologies.”  <http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=618>.

Hooks, Bell. Real to Reel: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies. New York and London: Routledge, 2009 [1996].

Inness, Sherrie A. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.

---, ed. Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Kaplan E Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: BFI, 1978.

Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 1993.

Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Nalepa, Laurie and Richard Pfefferman. The Murder Mystique: Female Killers and Popular Culture. Wesport, CO and London: Praeger, 2013.

Parker L. Juli, ed. Representations of Murderous Women in Literature,Theatre, Film and Television: Examining the Patriarchal Presuppositions Behind the Treatment of Murderesses in Fiction and  Reality. Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2010.

Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and  the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001.

Rosalind, Gill. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds. New Femininities:Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Basingstone, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

Seal, Lizzie. Women, Murder and Femininity: Representations of Women Who Kill. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Stables, Kate. “The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan.  London: BFI, 1998. 164-82.

Tasker Yvonne.  “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Ed. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.

---. Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since World War II. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011.

Walker, Janet. “Hollywood, Freud and the Representation of Women: Regulations and Contradiction, 1945-early 60s.” Home is Where the Heart is, Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film. Ed. Christine  Gledhill. London: BFI, 1994. 197-214.

Wallace, Marilyn. Sisters in Crime. New York: Berkley Books, 1989.

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference: Gender in the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1996: 15-34.