School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemGen. Italia: Class, Sexuality and the Melodrama of Migration in Italian-Australian Cinema( 2004)In Kate Woods’ Looking for Alibrandi (2000), Serafina (Leanne Carlow), is telling the heroine, Josie (Pia Miranda) and Anna (Diane Viduka) about her new boyfriend – dark roots emerging from her bottle-blonde hair:His name’s Massimo and his family’s from the north of Italy and his mum’s like, ‘you know, that’s why we have blonde hair’. I mean, can you believe it ? So I said, ‘Excuse me, Signora, I mean, look at my hair and my parents are from Calabria. This is a joke, and partly a self deception, but on one level this anecdote communicates the way the Looking for Alibrandi represents ethnicity and the importance of self- definition to its notion of ethnicity. Like categories of gender and sexuality in postmodern multicultural society, ethnicity and ethnic identity are exposed in Looking for Alibrandi as, in part, cultural constructions which shun fixed and established ethnic categories. My concern here is the way notions of cultural heritage and self-definition compete in Looking for Alibrandi and how the film problematises traditional representations of Italian-Australian ethnicity in Australian cinema. Considering Looking for Alibrandi as the most recent, and perhaps the most widely known film of Italian-Australian cinema, I want to demonstrate how Looking for Alibrandi engages with some key themes common to Italian-Australian cinema since the 1950s. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s writings on cultural alienation and estrangement in Strangers to Ourselves as well as the work of sociologists Maria Palotta-Chiarolli and Zlatko Skribis, I consider the way Looking for Alibrandi responds to established tropes of class, sexuality and film genre as set out in two films about second generation Italian-Australian experience, Moving Out (1983) and Fistful of Flies (1997), and in Italian-Australian cinema generally.
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ItemMy Victims, My Melancholia: Raging Bull and Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and The Beautiful(Cambridge University Press, 2005)
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ItemScorsese's men: melancholia and the mob(Pluto Press, 2004)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe 'age of innocence'(UNIV CALIF PRESS, 2004-12-01)Abstract Through an analysis of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, this article proposes a psychoanalytically based theory of male melancholia. Grounded in the cultural ambiguities of loss and masculinity, melancholia is revealed as an essential tool for reading Scorsese's film and for understanding representations of male desire in the cinema.