The Italian Cultural Institute in New York is pleased to welcome iconic Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani for a Round table discussion focused on her three films dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi: Francesco d’Assisi (1966), Francesco (1989) and Francesco (2014).
March 31, 2023 | 4PM
Istituto Italiano di Cultura
686 Park Avenue, NY
Please RSVP at: cavani.rsvpiicny@gmail.com
Opening remarks by:
Fabio Finotti
(Director of IIC-NY)
Round table discussion with
Liliana Cavani
in conversation with:
Flavia Laviosa
(Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College),
Millicent Marcus
(Sarai Ribicoff Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University),
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia
(Professor of Italian Studies at Princeton University).
Moderator: Maria Di Battista
(Charles Barnwell Straut 1923 Professor of English at Princeton University)
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The screening of “Francesco d’Assisi” (1966)
will follow the roundtable
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The initiative is part of “Celebrating Liliana Cavani’s Life and Films” a whole week of activities (film screenings, seminars with students, lectures) organized with – and co-sponsored by – Princeton University, from March 27 to 31.
Liliana Cavani began her professional career making historical documentaries between 1961 and 1965, which included “History of the Third Reich”(1962–1963) “The Stalin Years”; “The Woman in the Resistance” (1965),”Philippe Pétain: Processo a Vichy”, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice film festival in 1965 in the documentary section.
Her first full-length feature is “Francis of Assisi”, actually the first film made by RAI television in 1966. Acclaimed as the most controversial film of the year, the movie – which got an extraordinary success with about 20 million viewers, presents the charm and complexity of the figure of Francesco.
Numerous other films by Cavani would follow, including “Galileo” (1969), “The Cannibals” (1968), “Milarepa” (1973), “The Night Porter” – the film that gives her international recognition – “The Skin” (1981), “The Berlin Affair” (1985), the second “Francesco” (1989), “Ripley’s Game” (2002) and the third “Francesco” (2014) a miniseries made for the television.
Liliana Cavani has also directed several operas (Verdi, Puccini, Gluck) and plays (Pirandello, Eduardo De Filippo). She is currently editing “The Order of Time”, inspired by the book by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.
About the speakers:
Millicent Marcus is Sarai Ribicoff Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. Her specializations include medieval literature, Italian cinema, inter-relationships between literature and film, and representations of the Holocaust in post-war Italian culture. She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the ‘Decameron’ (l979), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (l986), Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (l993), After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (2002), Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (2007), and Italian Film in the Present Tense (2023). In recent years, she has developed a scholarly interest in neuro-aesthetics (a branch of cognitive neuro-science) and environmental humanities.
Maria DiBattista Charles Barnwell Straut 1923 Professor of English at Princeton University, has written extensively on modern literature, popular and pulp fiction, and film. Her books include Imagining Virginia Woolf, Novel Characters: A Genealogy, and, with Deborah Nord, At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Live from Austen to the Present. Her work on film includes essays on Hitchcock, Lubitsch, and a study of American screwball comedy, Fast Talking Dames.
Flavia Laviosa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College. Her research interests are in Italian women filmmakers. She is the founder and Editor in-Chief of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies and the book series Trajectories. She has authored chapters in several volumes He Was my Father (S. Gastaldi and D. Ward eds., Peter Lang, 2018), The Italian Cinema Book (P. Bondanella ed., BFI, 2014), A New Italian Political Cinema? Emerging Themes (W. Hope ed., Troubador, 2013), and Popular Italian Cinema and Politics in a Postwar Society (F. Brizio-Skov ed., Bloomsbury, 2011). She has also guest-edited the special issue of SEC, ‘Cinematic Journeys of Italian Women Directors’ (2011), and edited the volume Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean (Palgrave -Macmillan, 2010).
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia, professor of Italian Studies at Princeton University, specializes in modern Italian literature and postwar Italian cinema. She is the author of several books, including The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani (2000), and a two-volume Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies (2007). [She has also produced award winning films, among them Princeton: Images of a University, and Zefirino on the artistic evolution of the famed castrati singers.] She has just published a new book, The Cinema of Francesco Rosi (Oxford UP, 2020), awarded the Premio Internazionale Flaiano 2021 and the Premio “Letteratura” 2020-22 by Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Napoli. She is currently working on Eleonora Duse’s American tours.