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School of Modern Languages & Cultures

Visual and Performance

Forthcoming Events

All meetings will take place in room A56 unless otherwise stated. Please email Kerstin Oloff k.d.oloff@dur.ac.uk with any questions.

Thursday 28 February 2013 5.00pm

‘Queer sexualities in contemporary Spanish film and popular culture’

Room ER207

Professor Brad Epps (University of Cambridge/ Harvard University/ IAS Durham), Dr Alejandro Melero (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid), Professor Chris Perriam (University of Manchester); Respondent: Dr Santiago Fouz Hernández (Durham)

Contact santiago.fouz@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.

Wednesday 13 March 2013; 12.00-2.00

Alan O'Leary, University of Leeds http://leeds.academia.edu/AlanOLeary

'Studying the Italian Christmas Film'


Non-Hollywood cinema is often discussed in terms of auteurs or in terms of ‘national’ cinema, tacitly defined as that cinema of which a country is proud and which it can export. Genre films designed primarily for intra-national consumption have often been ignored. The Italian Christmas farce, the so-called cinepanettone (‘film-Christmas-cake’), is Italy’s most important cinema genre of the last thirty years, though many may be loathe to admit it. The films are ensemble pieces with elements of the commedia dell’arte, screwball, gross-out and cartoon comedy. For years, the cinepanettone was part of the ritual Christmas celebrations and the films were regularly among the year’s most successful (the first was released in 1983 and the last – possibly – in 2011). Still, the genre is almost unstudied even as it and its audiences are regularly deplored. One critic writes of the cinepanettone as ‘an embarrassing Italian phenomenon [that] causes indignation at its every appearance to a good part of society and which has become synonymous with superficiality, with banality, with vulgarity’. Perhaps needless to say, the films are lively, hilarious, continuously inventive and intensely interesting: we need Bakhtin to explain their carnivalesque appeal, and Bourdieu to explain their low cultural status. This paper analyses the reasons both for their appeal and for the particular virulence they inspire, and links both to what is certainly the films’ central theme: the fragility of the normative white Italian heterosexual male identity.