As a visual historian, I am interested in film aesthetics in the context of the dense artistic and cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. In my first book in English, “Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque” (2009), I followed the historical and geographic journeys of an aesthetic form, the picturesque, from 17th century paintings and 18th century prints to turn-of-the-20th-century films, and from the Italian to the North American racial culture. In the process, I also followed the picturesque’s original subjects, Southern Italians, as both protagonists and consumers of picturesque works. In the end, my research sought to recast established time-centered notions of cinematic modernity by mobilizing equally pressingly modern notions of geographic variance, racial difference, and migration.
In my current project, “The Divo and the Duce: Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America,” I am focusing on a historically narrower type of Atlantic exchange, the 1920s American popularity of Hollywood star Rudolph Valentino and dictator Benito Mussolini. Based again on a wide variety of sources and documents, “Divo/Duce” seeks to unearth the historical convergences of celebrity culture, charismatic leadership and national sovereignty and in the process identify the affinities between star studies and political theory. While the bulk of the research relates to the North American scene, for comparative purposes a substantial portion will also be devoted to the repercussions of the Divo/Duce’s transnational fame in Italy and Argentina—two Latin, predominantly Catholic, cultural settings.
Over the years, I have published essays in a dozen scholarly journals and three dozens anthologies. I have also edited volumes for both pedagogical and scholarly use, from “Emir Kusturica” (Rome, 1995), “The Cinema of Italy” (London: 2004; 2007), and “Early Cinema and the National” (London, 2008; with Richard Abel and Rob King) to the newly released “Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader” (London-Bloomington, 2013), published with the support of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone). More recently I have revised and expanded my 1996 monograph on Bosnian film director Emir Kusturica, for the series Il Castoro Cinema (Milan, 2011), to appear in English in the Contemporary Film Directors Series of the University of Illinois Press.
