BOOK DATA Mauro Resmini, Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023. $28.00 paper. 293 pages.
Conflict is at the heart of Mauro Resmini’s new book, Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68. Populated with self-contradictory figures and dialectical theoretical frameworks, Italian Political Cinema brings 1968 back to life through its defining conflicts: between workers and capitalists, housewives and patriarchy, youths and parents, saints and demons, specters and presences. Questioning long-held assumptions about cinema’s ability to effectively engage in radical politics, Resmini argues that there is a fundamental impasse between politics and cinema that suggests that Italian films of the 1960s and ’70s should not be read as direct representations of the country’s political situation.
Resmini begins with a provocation: “What if instead of signaling a connection between cinema and politics, political cinema actually designated a nonrelation between these...
University of California Press