Home Page
What's New
Who We Are
Museum/Virtual Tour
Community Affairs
Academic and Cultural Programs
Research and Education
Career Counseling
Italy Exchange
Italics TV Magazine
Library and Archive
The Italian American Review
Italian American Studies
Links
Contact Us

John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

Section: What's New


Institute's Up Coming Events

 

 

 

Documented Italians

 

This screening takes place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 36th Streets, in the Martin E. Segal Theatre, Manhattan. 

 

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Buddy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Notorious Mayor

(2007), 86 min.

Cherry Arnold, dir.

 

As the longest-serving mayor in recent history, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci of Providence, Rhode Island remains one of the country’s most controversial political figures. Cianci’s unflagging popularity and extraordinary career comebacks have baffled political analysts and frustrated federal investigators. Brilliant and aggressive, charming and ruthless, Cianci is described by supporters and critics alike as a political survivor. From Buddy’s early promise as an attorney prosecuting organized crime to his success overseeing Providence’s “renaissance,” the film Buddy tracks Cianci’s entanglements with city council opposition, union skirmishes, personal scandals, and criminal indictments. The result is a fascinating study of American local politics and a surprising tale of a man who been said to have “a city as his mistress.”

 

Post-screening discussion with the director led by Douglas Muzzio, Baruch

College.

 

 

Writers Read Series

 

Monday, September 15, 2008

Karen Tintori reads Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family (St. Martins Press. 2007).

 

Unto the Daughters is a historical mystery and family story that unwraps layers of family, honor, memory, and fear to reveal an honor killing in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. The book began with a genealogical quest that led to a reluctant revelation about Frances Costa, Karen Tindori’s great-aunt who had been systematically eradicated from family history. Frances emigrated from Sicily with her parents and siblings who worked together to create a new home for themselves in industrial Detroit. At age sixteen Frances fell in love with a young barber but her father had arranged for her to marry an elderly mafioso so as to help his sons with their mob connections. When Frances eloped with her lover in 1919, her fate was sealed. Tindori traces the history of her Sicilian immigrant past to expose the fetid secret of Frances’s brutal murder at the hands of her own brothers fiercely guarded for nine decades.

 

 

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

 

Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Intrepid Giuseppe Pitrè and his Collection of Sicilian Folk Tales

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota, and Joseph Russo, Haverford College

 

The true treasures of European folklore are buried not in Germany, but in Sicily, and the greatest European folklorist of the nineteenth century was Giuseppe Pitrè (1841-1916). Pitrè was born into a family of fishermen in Palermo and became a medical doctor, councilman, and professor. He wrote over forty books and collected hundreds of fairy tales, legends, anecdotes, riddles, and myths and published them in Sicilian dialect. Indeed, his collection is the most important nineteenth-century collection of tales in dialect. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo translated the tales and edited a two volume collection The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (Routledge, 2008). They will discuss the significance of Pitrè’s life and works, and read from the collection.

 

 

Documented Italians

 

This screening takes place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 36th Streets, Room C198, Manhattan. 

 

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Beyond Wiseguys: Italian Americans and the Movies

(2007), 58 min.

Steven Fischler, dir.

 

Filled with clips from classic films and an all-star list of interviewees, Beyond Wiseguys: Italian Americans and the Movies takes a comprehensive look at the changing and diverse roles Italian-Americans have played on the silver screen.  Selections from early films reveal the images that helped shape negative public opinion, while movies like Scarface, The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Do the Right Thing demonstrate how the violent “wiseguy” image developed and evolved into nuanced portraits seen today. The issue of stereotyping isn’t a facile one.  Commercial formulas also serve as wellsprings for creative expression for Italian-American film artists and this documentary offers compelling insights into how Italian-Americans use their art to transcend the stereotypes.  Featured in the film are Ben Gazzara, Spike Lee, Isabella Rossellini, Susan Sarandon, Martin Scorsese, Paul Sorvino, Marisa Tomei, John Turturro, and Jack Valenti, among others. 

 

Post-screening discussion with producer Rosanne de Luca Braun led by Anthony Julian Tamburri, Calandra Institute.

 

 

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

 

Monday, October 20, 2008

From “Terrone” to “Extra-comunitario”: The Evolution of Racism in Italian Cinema

Grace Russo Bullaro (Lehman College)

 

In films of the New Italian Cinema such as Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), and Ciao, Professore! (1992), the “Southern question” takes on the cast of racism, with racial and cultural differences often overlapping. After the watershed years of the 1980s and 1990s, the discourse on racial identity and new definitions of ethnicity became full-blown with a spate of films that explored and redefined the boundaries of culture, ethnicity and otherness.  What does it mean to be “Italian” in today’s multicultural Italy?  This presentation will provide an overview of the current “migration cinema,” tracing the evolution of the discourse of “racism” from the 1950s to the current wave of films by directors such as Gianni Amelio, Carlo Mazzacurati, Francesco Munzi, and Ferzan Ozpetek. 

 

 

Writers Read Series

 

Monday, October 27, 2008

Marisa Labozzetta reads from At the Copa (Guernica, 2007).

 

With humor and poignancy, these stories expose the social and sexual turmoil of men and women in “the old age of youth.” In “The Knife Lady,” a seemingly happily married suburbanite receives a jolt of sexual panic with the visit of a woman selling knives. The husband in “Future Games” encourages his wife to have an affair with another man to save their floundering marriage, and the resulting drama is parsed through the uncomprehending eyes of their young daughter. A restless dentist on a visit to a bizarre charlatan discovers an unlikely cure to what’s ailing him. These are a few of the stories whose primary fault zone is the seemingly stable, often secretly troubled, middle-class marriage seen from various views.

 

Documented Italians

 

This screening takes place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 36th Streets, Room C198, Manhattan. 

 

Monday, November 10, 2008

Poetry in Action: A Portrait of Vincent Ferrini

(2000), 58 min.

Henry Ferrini, dir.

 

Poem in Action captures the world of poet Vincent Ferrini and his commitment to the unity of art and life in what he called “the living poem.”  The film portrays the forces that shaped this artist’s life: his immigrant parents; factory work; the Great Depression; the Communist Party; and the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts where he lived until his passing in December 2007.  The filmmaker and poet’s nephew Henry Ferrini captured the idiosyncrasies of the man and the ever-changing landscape of their town of Gloucester.  Vincent’s passion, magnetic presence, and unyielding creativity make for an energizing portrait of an artist and his community, a poet who is also teacher, historian, spokesman, and social activist.

 

Post-screening discussion with the director led by Fred Gardaphé, Queens College.

 

 

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

 

Monday, November 17, 2008

Magic in the Mezzogiorno: The Anthropology of Ernesto De Martino

Dorothy Louise Zinn (Università degli Studi della Basilicata)

Ernesto De Martino (1908-1965) is widely acknowledged to be a founding figure of cultural anthropology in Italy, and yet his work remains almost entirely unknown in English-speaking countries. A brilliant and eclectic thinker, De Martino conducted several research expeditions in Southern Italy and the ethnographies he wrote remain classic works in Italian humanities. Employing a multidisciplinary perspective, De Martino’s approach to potions and healing charms, and the dancing frenzy induced by the bite of the Apulian taranta, embraced religious history, folklore, ethnopsychiatry, and ethnomusicology. Anthropologist Dorothy Louise Zinn, who translated and annotated De Martino’s The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism (Free Association, 2005), will discuss his research on the magical world of Southern Italian peasantry.

 

 

Writers Read Series

 

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Suze Rotolo reads from A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008)

 

A Freewheelin’ Time is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand account of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and her relationship with Bob Dylan. Rotolo grew up during the Cold War and McCarthyism as the daughter of Italian working-class Communists from Queens. As a teenager, she met new friends in Greenwich Village who, like her, were interested in the arts and politically active. Then in July 1961, 17-year-old Rutolo met 20-year-old Dylan, a rising young musician. While they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.  Rotolo recounts the story of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressures of growing fame. She also writes about her involvement with the civil rights movement and the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated culture. A Freewheelin’ Time is a vibrant, moving memoir of the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and of a vital subculture at its most creative.

 

“A welcome, page-turning perspective conspicuously absent from the plethora of books on Dylan and the folk era of the 1960s: that of a woman witnessing it all from its cultural and political epicenter.”

—Todd Haynes, director of I’m Not There

 

 

 

 

Documented Italians

 

This screening takes place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 36th Streets, Room C198, Manhattan. 

 

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Se la pietra sapesse parlare/If Stone Could Speak

(2007), 67 min.

Randy Croce, dir.

 

Thousands of stonecutters emigrated from northern Italy to Barre, Vermont, the “Granite Capital of the World.” These scalpellini carved impressive sculptures that still grace public spaces, churches, and cemeteries across America. This documentary follows the artisans and their families from quarries, workshops, and schools in Italy to granite carving sheds in New England. It chronicles the magnificent monuments of these master carvers, as well as their life and death struggle with silicosis.  The film portrays the immigrants’ distinctive community in America and their continued ties with their areas of origin, as stonecutter families continue to move between the two countries and seek their own identities, choosing what to keep and what to cut away from their American and Italian legacies.

 

Post-screening discussion with the director led by visual artist B. Amore.

 

 

Writers Read Series

 

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Robert Tinnell presents Feast of the Seven Fishes (Allegheny Image Factory, 2005)

 

A 2006 Eisner Award-nominee for “Best Graphic Album: Reprint,” Feast of the Seven Fishes is hardcover collection of the online strip serialized in 2004-2005 by writer Robert Tinnell and artists Ed Piskor and Alex Saviuk. A romantic comedy, the Feast storyline revolves around an Italian-American family’s celebration of the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. The time is 1983 and one of the younger members of the family, who reside in a north-central West Virginia mining and mill town, brings home a blonde, blue-eyed Protestant girl to share in both the cooking and eating. Their path to romance, however, is not an easy one. This collection incorporates recipes from the families of Tinnell and his wife, Shannon.

 

 

The Philip V. Cannistraro Seminar Series in Italian American Studies

 

Monday, December 8, 2008

Italy Today: Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium

Mario B. Mignone (Stony Brook University)

 

Based on his book Italy Today: Facing the Challenges of the New Millennium (Peter Lang, 2007), Mario Mignone will present on post-World War II Italy to address the revolutionary years of the1970s and 1980s and the complexities of a postindustrial nation.  How is Italy negotiating the challenges created by industrial, economic, and cultural globalization? The presentation will place special emphasis on discussing immigration to Italy and its impact on the country’s economy, politics, and culture.

 

 

 

All events are free.

 

 

Building management requires people attending events after business hours to pre-register with the Calandra Institute by calling (212) 642-2094.  You will need to show a photo ID to the building’s concierge.

 


[Return to the What's New page.]


© John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. All rights reserved.