Once Upon A Time in America: For A History of Italian Cinema in The United States

In 1946 Roberto Rossellini's Open City was released in the United States. Programmed in a small art-house theater in downtown New York, it is the first non-American film in history to gross more than a million dollars in the U.S.  The adventurous history of Italian cinema in the United States begins with the North American success of the first Neorealist films, which will be reconstructed by this lecture using a dual perspective: on the one hand, a focus on places, modes, and spaces of distribution of Italian cinema in the U.S.; on the other, the critical reception and discourses generated by these films in the North American press. After addressing the circulation of Neorealism, the lecture will be focused on the "golden season" of Italian auteur cinema: the films of Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini contributed to the creation of a specific image of Italy in the American public. This imaginary is complicated both by the circulation of popular Italian cinema (comedies, but also Westerns, poliziotteschi, and horror films) and by the processes of Americanization of Italian cinema (Once Upon a Time in America, Cinema Paradiso, Life is Beautiful). The lecture will conclude with a reflection on the crisis of Italian cinema in the United States over the past two decades.

Damiano Garofalo is an Assistant Professor in Cinema & Television History at Sapienza University of Rome. After having obtained a BA in Historical Studies and an MA in Contemporary History, in 2015 he discussed his Ph.D. dissertation in Cultural History at the University of Padova, with a thesis on the history of early Italian television audiences. He worked as an Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Padova, Udine, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Cassino, and the Catholic University of Milan, where he was also a Post-doctoral researcher between 2017 and 2019. In 2016 he was hosted as a Visiting Lecturer by McGill University in Montreal, and in 2019 he was a Visiting Scholar at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. In 2021 he won a research fund as a Coordinator Unit for the project ATLas - Atlas of Local Televisions in Italy (1976-1990), funded by the Italian Minister of University Research (PRIN 2020). He's actually the Principal Investigator of two research projects: Sport Politics. Football, Media and National Identity in Italy (1968-2006), also funded by the Italian Minister of University Research (PRIN 2022), and Politics of Culture in Italy: The Institutionalisation of Cinema, Theatre and Performing Arts (1935-1965), funded by Sapienza University of Rome. In his latest book, C'era una volta in America. Storia del cinema italiano negli Stati Uniti (2023), he studied the distribution and reception of Italian cinema in the United States from the postwar period to the present.

To attend this lecture in person, please complete the online registration.

This lecture will be livestreamed on the Department's YouTube channel.

All times stated in Eastern time.