Speaker: Rinella Cere, Reader in Communication Studies, SHU

Rinella Cere has been a member of Sheffield Hallam since 1995. During that time she has published extensively on various areas of culture and media. Her first monograph was on European and national identities in news media, followed by an international study on national museums of cinema, involving four European museums and a North American one (in press with Routledge). In between the two monographs she has co-edited with Ros Brunt a collection of essays on post-colonial media culture in Britain and has published numerous articles in journals and books on film museums, digital underground cultures and female ultras. Her latest effort is a contribution to a new edited collection on postcolonial media culture: 'Hegemony and counter-hegemony in postcolonial media theory and culture' (Forthcoming with Routledge) and partly the reason for a return to study fascism and anti-fascism in Italian cinema.

Title: Latent and Manifest Anti-Fascism in Italian Cinema

This talk will take a comparative look at early neorealist films with their manifest anti-fascist theme, films such as Roma città aperta, 1945 (Rome, Open City) and Paisà, 1946 and later productions, Una giornata particolare, 1977 (A special day) and more recently La Concorrenza sleale, 2001(Unfair competition), films where anti-fascism is latent rather than manifest but which suggests that anti-fascism is still a strong political theme in Italian cinema and has not been completely absorbed by recent revisionist perspectives on the Italian Fascist past.