Introduction: For a New Ecology of the Gaze in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Abstract

Over the last few decades, Italian cinema has undergone a fairly apparent transformation, and yet one that was somewhat announced in the 1990s, where we find a frequent tendency to rewrite space, both the one we inhabit in a difficult daily relationship between inside and outside, city and country, culture and nature, and the one we are inscribed in as a generally termed Southern space of the world in its diverse articulations, as landscape and as environment in both natural and cultural terms. Such reinvention and true rewriting of space has been accompanied by a general reassessment of time, and this has often provoked a thorough rethinking of narrative structure with a necessary overcoming of traditional notions of genre, characterization, and so on. Thus, since the early 1990s, Italian cinema has revitalized itself and produced a number of nontraditional narrations that often seem to be delving and flourishing on all that had been discharged before as useless, unimportant, irrelevant—basically, a waste. In light of these changes, the present essay proposes a thorough renewal of the manners in which we think and approach Italian film and its evolution over time, by resorting to both Meridian thought and ecocriticism; the meridian thought attempts to identify ways to bypass binary oppositions such as North-South and West-East, while ecocriticism, by applying the findings of scientific environmentalism to literary and filmic objects, gives centrality to categories such as “place” and “environment” that are pivotal for cinema and its complex system of signification.