Gen. Italia: Class, Sexuality and the Melodrama of Migration in Italian-Australian Cinema
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2004
Source Title
Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence
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Melbourne Authors
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Arts: Department of English with Cultural Studies
Arts: School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology
Arts: School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology
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Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)
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Nicholls, Dr Mark (2004) Gen. Italia: Class, Sexuality and the Melodrama of Migration in Italian-Australian Cinema, in Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence, 2(1)
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Open Access
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Description
Deposited with permission of the Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence
Abstract
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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Keywords
Cinema Studies, Italian-Australian Cinema, Looking for Alibrandi, Moving Out, Fistful of Flies