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