Conference Participants

Gianfranco Angelucci

received his doctorate in Art History from the University of Bologna with a thesis on Federico Fellini. He collaborated with Fellini in various capacities until the year of Fellini's death (1993). He wrote the screenplay for Intervista, one of Fellini's most celebrated films (1987) which won the Special Prize at Cannes and First Prize at Moscow Film Festival. Angelucci directed the film Miele di donna (A Woman’s Honey) in 1981 (with Fernando Rey, Catherine Spaak, Clio Goldsmith, and Luc Merenda) which competed at the Nice Film Festival. An author of novels, he has published L’Amore in corpo (Love in the Body) (1984) and Federico F (2000). As an essayist, he has published various works on cinema, including Amarcord, Casanova, E la nave va, Ginger and Fred, and A Director's Notebook. He has also authored the photo essays La Dolce Vita and Un regista a Cinecittà (A Director at Cinecittà). An author of film treatments, screenplays and television programs, he has created documentaries on cinema, including a TV movie on Fellini's Casanova (1967) and two documentaries dedicated to Fellini's work: Gli attori di Fellini (Fellini's Actors) and Fellini nel cestino (Fellini in the Trash Bin) (1984). In 1998 he directed a theatrical production at the Acropolis of Athens entitled Sei arrivato come un sogno (You Came Like a Dream), an international musical with Tolis Voskopulos.

For ten years Angelucci has worked in advertising and has created and managed campaigns for important national companies with the assistance of well known celebrities. In 1993/94, at the behest of Fellini himself, Cinecitta International asked Angelucci to supervise the reissue of the director's entire opus (23 films). These were presented at the Lincoln Center in Autumn of 1993.
From 1997 to 2000, Angelucci was appointed by Fellini’s family and the City of Rimini as Director of the Fondazione Federico Fellini. His duties included the organization of conferences, publications, film festivals, as well as the creation of a research center and archive in order to preserve the memory and promote the study and appreciation of this great director.

Peter Bonadella

Peter Bondanella is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at Indiana University. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lilly Foundation, has been President of the American Association for Italian Studies, and for a decade was Chairman of the Department of West European Studies at Indiana University. He has published numerous essays, translations, editions, and books on Fellini and Italian cinema, including: Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, 3rd revised (Continuum International Publishers, 2001); The Films of Federico Fellini (Cambridge UP, 2002); Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture (Cambridge UP, 1997); Perspectives on Federico Fellini, ed. with Christina Degli-Esposti (GK Hall/Macmillan, 1993); The Films of Roberto Rossellini (Cambridge UP, 1993); The Cinema of Federico Fellini (with an Introduction by Federico Fellini) (Princeton UP, 1992; translated into Italian and Chinese); Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism (Oxford UP, 1978); The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (U of North Carolina P, 1987); “La Strada”: Federico Fellini, Director, ed. with Manuela Gieri (Rutgers UP, 1987). He has translated many Italian classics, including works by Machiavelli, Boccacio, Giorgio Vasari, and Benvenuto Cellini. At present, he is completing a book entitled Hollywood's Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos.

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure, is an Assistant Professor of English in Paris, France (Lycee Saint-Louis) and a training psychoanalyst (Espace Analytique, Paris). Her publication record in Europe and in the United States includes articles and book chapters on film, especially Italian cinema (Fellini) and Italian-American cinema (Scorsese). She received the 1995 Romance Languages Annual Lorraine K. Lawton Award for her article “Restrained Women and Artistic Emancipation: Authority and Resistance in Fellini's Giulietta degli spiriti and John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence.” Her current research is devoted to psychoanalytic theory and to the complex intertextual links between Martin Scorsese’s cinema and the Italian film tradition.

Frank Burke

Frank Burke is Professor of Film at Queen’s University (Canada). He is the author of Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern (Twayne/Macmillan, 1996) and Federico Fellini: Variety Lights to Dolce Vita (Twayne/G.K. Hall, 1984) and has co-edited (with Marguerite R. Waller) Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives (U of Toronto P, 2002). He has published numerous essays on Italian and North American cinema and done extensive film editorial work for the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory and Film/Literature Quarterly. He is currently in Italy on a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, preparing a book on popular film and culture in 1960s Italy. His principal film interests at the moment are peplum, spaghetti western, and Italian horror films of the 1960s.

Peter Brunette

Peter Brunette is Professor of English and member of the interdisciplinary programs in Film and Media and in Cultural Studies at George Mason University, and is recognized nationally and internationally as a film scholar and critic. He has written or edited six books on film, most recently The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge UP, 1998) and Martin Scorsese: Interviews (UP of Mississippi, 1999). His 1987 book Roberto Rossellini (republished by U of California P in 1996) remains the definitive study in English on Rossellini’s films. His scholarly work has centered chiefly on European cinema and the application of poststructuralist literary theory to film. He is the editor of two series of books, the Society for Cinema Studies Translation Series (Indiana UP) and Conversations with Filmmakers (an interview series published by UP of Mississippi). His other writing includes numerous articles in scholarly journals, scores of interviews, and hundreds of film book reviews. He is a weekly film critic for Film.com, and just in the last year, he served on panels at the Palm Springs Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Rotterdam Film Festival. He is also the artistic director of the Key Sunday Cinema Club with branches in six cities.

Jane Campion

Jane Campion is a celebrated New Zealand director and writer. The daughter of an actress and a director, she earned diplomas in Anthropology and Fine Arts before focusing her efforts on film. While still attending the Australian Film and Television School, Campion wrote and directed numerous award winning shorts. Notable early works include Passionless Moments, Girl's Own Story and Peel, which was awarded the Palme d’Or for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. Campion’s ability to create complex, nuanced portraits of women living on the margins of society was showcased in her first feature film, 1989’s Sweetie, which earned the director the LA Film Critics’ New Generation Award. Her 1990 release, An Angel at My Table, a study of the troubled life of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, solidified Campion’s reputation for directing forceful, unconventional female leads.

In 1992, The Piano, which centers on a strong willed mute woman chafing against an arranged marriage in colonial New Zealand, unleashed a flood of critical praise. Campion both wrote and directed the film, which garnered dozens of awards: Best Actress (Holly Hunter), Best Supporting Actress (Anna Paquin), and Best Screenplay awards at the Sixty-sixth Academy Awards; Best Director accolades from the LA Film Critics’ Association and the New York Film Critics’ Circle; and the Palme d’Or for Best Film at Cannes (Campion was the first, and remains the only woman to receive this honor). Campion went on to direct a 1996 adaptation of the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, and, most recently, the 1999 feature Holy Smoke. Her current project, In the Cut, starring Meg Ryan, is due to be released on October 22, 2003.

Alberto Farina

Alberto Farina started off as a film editor and assistant on a number of documentaries, and then worked as a producer for TV commercials. In 1999 he founded “Coming Soon Television,” a satellite TV station entirely dedicated to movie promotion, which he directed for two years. During this period he created and hosted shows such as “Review” and “Dogma.” In 2001 he co-created and hosted the weekly show “Shortvillage Magazine,” dedicated to short films. In addition to numerous articles published in magazines in Italy, France and England, he is the author of John Landis (1995), a critical essay on the works of the director of “the Blue Brothers,” and Sparate sul regista!-personaggi e storie del cinema di exploitation (1995), a book on the B-movie phenomenon. He has also translated into Italian a number of books about movies, including Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Frayling’s Sergio Leone-Something To Do About Death and James Monaco’s How to Read a Film. He currently teaches Film Analysis at Instituto Superiore di Comunicazione in Rome.

Manuela Gieri

Manuela Gieri is Associate Professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature and theatre in the Department of Italian Studies, and Professor of film studies in the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Toronto. She is also an Associate member of the Centre for Comparative Literature, and the Director of a graduate program in Semiotics. Her main areas of interest are: Italian cinema; Pirandello; modern and contemporary Italian literature and theatre; visual and cultural semiotics and issues of identity and representation; and contemporary Italian women studies. She is the author of Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion. Pirandello, Fellini, Scola, and the Directors of the New Generation (U of Toronto P, 1995) and co-editor of Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives (U of Toronto P, 1999). She also co-edited (with Peter Bondanella) Federico Fellini, Director (Rutgers UP, 1987). Gieri has published numerous essays and edited several volumes on Italian cinema, Pirandello, and contemporary Italian women's writing. She is currently working on a book on Federico Fellini and popular culture, on a volume on strategies of oblivion and historical memory in contemporary cinema, and on a project on issues of representation and desire in cinema, television and advertising.

Ben Lawton

Ben Lawton is Chair of the Interdisciplinary Italian Studies Program and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Film Studies Program at Purdue University. He is author/editor of Literary and Sociopolitical Trends in Italian Cinema (CIS, UCLA, 1975), the first Italian cinema textbook published in the United States. His translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Heretical Empiricism (1988) was selected by Choice as “Outstanding Academic Book” for that year. Professor Lawton was one of the co-founders of the Purdue University Film Conferences and co-founder and co-editor of the Film Studies Annual (1989-2001). He also co-founded the Italian Cultural Studies conference (1999) and is co-editor of Italian Cultural Studies (1999 to present). He was editor of H-ITAM, the Humanities and Social Sciences Network list serve of the American Italian Historical Association (2002) and serves as consultant on Italian film for various publishing houses in the United States and abroad. Among his various teaching awards, he won Purdue’s 1977-78 AMOCO Foundation [university wide] Outstanding Teacher Award and was honored by being selected as a Founding Fellow of the Purdue University Teaching Academy in 1997. He was Visiting Professor at Indiana University in 1987 and at Dartmouth College in 2000 and spent several summers directing the Purdue University Studies Abroad Program in Florence, Italy, which he co-founded.

Millicent Marcus

Millicent Marcus is Mariano di Vito Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Centre of Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her specialization includes cinema and medieval literature. She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the ‘Decameron’ (Anma Libri, 1979), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton UP, 1986), Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literari Adaptation (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), and most recently, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Johns Hopkins UP, 2002). She has also published numerous articles on Italian literature and film, and is now conducting research on the rise of regionalism in contemporary Italian media culture.

Gavriel Moses

Gavriel Moses is Professor of Italian Studies and of Rhetoric Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely on representational theories from the 16th century to the present, cultural politics of Italian Studies, and literature and film. He is the author of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Eclipse”: Opening Sequence (1975) and The Nickel Was for the Movies: Film in the Novel Pirandello to Puig (1995). He is currently working on several books, including The Bible as Cultural Object [s] in Cinema; Speechless in Seattle, a book about the articulation of self, identity and individuation by intersecting discourses in cinema; The Apparatus to Come, a book about the evolution of the representational apparatus as it moves from Renaissance Italy to the rest of Europe and towards cinema; and Phileas in the Mist, a book about film theory in the context of Italian Modernist Art. Between 1981-1990, Professor Moses was a cultural correspondent for America Coast to Coast, the Italian National Radio, and RAI Radio3.

Giuseppe Natale

Giuseppe Natale is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada where he teaches Italian literature, culture and film, and graduate seminars in Translation Studies. Originally from Turin, Italy, he received his M.A. in Italian (with a thesis on Dante’s Divine Comedy) and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (with a dissertation on poetry and translation) from the University of Washington. Natale has translated into Italian several major American novels, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar and Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow. Natale has also worked as a consultant for various publishing companies, contributing his expertise in Italian literature, American literature, and the fine arts.

Aine O’Healey

Aine O’Healey is Professor of Italian and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at Loyola Marymount University. She has published widely in the area of contemporary Italian literature and film. Her essays have appeared in Screen, Spectator, Cinefocus, Annali d’italianistica, Italian Culture, Italica, Romance Languages Annual, Women’s Studies Review and in numerous critical anthologies. She is currently completing a book on the construction of subjectivity and national identity in contemporary Italian cinema.

Roberto Oelsner

Roberto Oelsner MD, formerly Professor of Psychopathology at the Institute of the Buenos Aires Pscyhoanalytical Association, is a training and supervising analyst and full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He held visiting appointments as Professor of Psychopathology at the British Institute of the Rosario Psychoanalytical Society, the European Institute of Psychoanalytical Studies in Madrid, the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society Study Group and the Northwest Family Development Center in Seattle. He is also a coordinator of the London Clinical Seminars. Dr. Oelsner has published well over 60 papers and is co-author of the book Bion conocido/desconocido (Bion known/unknown). Early in 2003, he took up residence in Seattle, establishing a private practice in adult, child and adolescent psychoanalysis.

Nicola Piovani

Nicola Piovani, Italian composer born in Rome in 1946, has contributed to over 120 film soundtracks. He studied under the Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis, and launched his career as a composer of film music with his score for Silvano Agosti’s 1969 N.P. il segreto followed by Marco Bellocchio’s 1970 Nel nome del padre. Piovani has since collaborated with numerous directors from Italy and elsewhere, including Mario Monicelli, Nanni Moretti, Giuseppe Tornatore, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Ben Von Verbong, Bearnard Favre, Pal Gabor, Dusan Makavejev, Michel Sibra, Jean Jacques Adrien, Maroun Bagdadi, Bigas Luna and John Irvin. Most recently he composed the score for Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio (2003). Piovani was also among Federico Fellini’s collaborators: Piovani wrote the award winning soundtrack for Ginger e Fred (1986) and scored the director’s final two films, Intervista (1987) and La voce della luna (1990).

Soundtracks account for only part of Piovani’s oeuvre. He has also written chamber and choral music and has worked in television and theatre, composing the scores of various “racconto musicali,” including Il signor Novecento (1992), as well as that of the ballet Fellini for the choreographer Micha Van Hoecke.

Piovani has garnered numerous accolades for his work, among them a 1999 Oscar Award and a 2000 Grammy nomination for his score to Roberto Benigni’s La vita é bella and a 2001 Ciak d’oro award for his work on Nanni Moretti’s film La stanza del figlo.

Steven Ricci

Steven Ricci is Director of UCLA’s new graduate program in Moving Image Archive Studies. As Head of Research and Study at the UCLA Film and Television Archive for fifteen years, he was responsible for developing programs that widen access to the Archive’s collections and oversaw its educational publications, workshops, seminars and film retrospectives. Ricci is currently Secretary General of the International Federation of Film Archives.

Since 1990 he coordinated the Interactive Technologies Analysis Project, an international effort to evaluate the use of new technologies for media research, teaching and publication. He has authored numerous digital applications that make use of archival collections. Over the past twenty years, Ricci has accumulated wide experience as a programmer and conference organizer. In 1980 he organized the first international conference on the relationship between the film and television institutions at Italy’s Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema. In 1985 Ricci became Associate Director of Television for the American Film Institute and was director of the AFI’s National Video Festival. He frequently collaborates with Italian initiatives and has curated retrospectives for the film festivals in Pesaro, Venice, and Salsomaggiore. He has recently completed a study of Italian film from 1922 to 1938 and has also published essays on both American genre and independent cinemas.

Ricardo de Mambro Santos

A native of Brazil, Ricardo de Mambro Santos came to Italy to study art and received his Ph. D. in art history from the University of Bologna. He is currently a Professor of Art History at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, teaching the history of modern art and literature. He has published widely on artists and writers of the 15th and 16th century from Renaissance to Mannerism (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari) as well as Dutch authors such as Karel van Mander, and on the relationship of authors such as Giovan Battista to Galileo Galilei. His numerous books and articles include La Civil Conversazione Pittorica. Riflessione estetica e produzione artistica nel trattato di Karel van Mander (Rome, 1998); Ai margini del concreto e dell’astratto.Introduzione al percorso stilistico di Roberto Delle Cese (San Paolo, 1998); Le Vite degli illustri pittori fiamminghi, olandesi e tedeschi raccolte e raccontate da Karel van Mader (Roma, 2000); Arcadie del vero. Arte e teoria nella Roma del seicento (Roma, 2001); Opera al bivio. Alle radici della moderna storiographia critica dell'arte (Roma, 2002). Currently Professor Santos has a forthcoming a book on Picasso (Picasso. Ironie della forma) and is working on a volume dedicated to the creative method of Federico Fellini titled La Forma Fellini.

Vivian Sobchack

Vivian Sobchack is Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Film and Television and Associate Dean of the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1997), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), and, with Thomas Sobchack, An Introduction to Film (1980; 1987). Her edited collections include The Persistence of Memory: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (1996) and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (2000).

Barbara Steele

Barbara Steele, English actress made her screen debut with a big part in the 1958 British comedy Bachelor of Hearts, but it was her starring role in the 1960’s Black Sunday (La Maschera del Demonio) which set her on the road to achieving cult status as a “Scream Queen.” Black Sunday, Mario Bava’s first directorial effort, cast Steele as a witch returned from the grave to seek vengeance—the first of many memorable horror roles for the actress. Steele’s first American feature, Roger Corman’s 1961 adaptation of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, furthered Steele’s reputation as a mistress of horror.

In 1962, Steele responded to an open casting call and landed a small but significant part in Federico Fellini’s 8½. Steele continued acting in feature films throughout the next two decades, appearing in Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat (1974), David Cronenberg’s They Came from Within (1975), and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978), among others.

After Steele retired from the screen following the 1980 death of her ex-husband, screenwriter James Poe, she found success as a producer. The 1983 ABC mini series Winds of War, Steele’s first US producing credit, garnered high praise; the sequel series War and Remembrance (1988) earned Steele an Emmy for her talent as producer.

Marguerite R. Waller

Marguerite R. Waller is professor of English and Women’s Studies at UC Riverside, where she teaches in the Film and Visual Culture Program. She is the author of Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (U of Massachusetts P, 1980)—which located vernacular poetry in relation to the poetics of allegory and mimesis it challenges--and co-editor (with Jennifer Rycenga) of Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance (Routledge, 2000)--which details the work and thought of new feminisms evolving in militarized situations around the world. Her book Contemporary Perspectives on Federico Fellini, co-edited with Frank Burke (U of Toronto P, 2002), examines the life work of the Italian director in relation to the contemporary critical discourses on subjectivity, gender, sexuality, representation, globalization and mass media. She has also published widely on Italian cinema, Renaissance literature, virtual reality, border art, and feminist theory, Chicana performance art, Hungarian film, and the intertextuality of Dante and Italian film. She is currently editing two volumes, Toward a New Feminists Imaginary and Sexualities and Knowledges.