Books by Jim Carter
Mimesis, 2023
Salvaguardia ecologica e lavoro sono due aspetti fondamentali, purtroppo spesso messi in concorre... more Salvaguardia ecologica e lavoro sono due aspetti fondamentali, purtroppo spesso messi in concorrenza, per garantire la presenza dell’uomo sulla Terra. Finora le occasioni per riflettere in modo organico ed esplicito sul loro rapporto e intorno a come esso venga elaborato nelle rappresentazioni artistico-culturali contemporanee sono state rare e, tranne per alcuni lavori, tale binomio non è stato ancora oggetto di un’analisi sistematica. Mentre l’idea di lavoro, di produzione e perfino quella di progresso stanno rapidamente cambiando messe di fronte all’evidenza dell’impatto ambientale, l’asse “Ecologia e lavoro” del Projet OBERT (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail) ha sentito la necessità di procedere a uno scavo archeologico della cultura artistica italiana, per comprendere come sia cambiata la relazione uomo-lavoro-ambiente dalla Seconda rivoluzione industriale ad oggi.
Peter Lang Press, 2021
This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the... more This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first article of the postwar Italian Constitution states that the Republic is founded on labor. Forces across the political spectrum, from Catholic to communist, invested labor with the power to build a new national community after Fascism and war. The 1950s-1970s saw dramatic transformations, in economic, social and cultural terms, as labor moved from agriculture to industry and a whole generation of Italian writers and filmmakers used literature and cinema to interpret – and influence – these changes and to capture the new experiences of industrial labor. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation’s work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors.
Journal Articles by Jim Carter
Film Criticism, 2024
This article performs a close reading of Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975) together with a speculat... more This article performs a close reading of Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975) together with a speculative reading of how the film seems to address its spectator and what that spectator might think about the film. It argues that Argento's murder mystery invests in the contemporary association between homosexuality and crime to concentrate suspicion in the character of Carlo, who is innocent. The film also exploits the disassociation of old age from crime to divert attention from the character of Martha, who is guilty. The double revelation of Carlo's innocence and Martha's guilt effects a sudden foregrounding of the spectator's own flawed process. Deep Red does not simply unmask the murderer-it unmasks the spectator.
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2021
This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep... more This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953‐61) and feature filmmaking (1961‐2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of ‐ even commenting on ‐ sponsored cinema.
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2021
The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), founded in Rome in 1935, has come to signify Ita... more The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), founded in Rome in 1935, has come to signify Italian cinema education in acting, directing, photography, set design, costume design, screenwriting, sound production, editing, production and film animation (since 1983). The CSC has historically admitted a significant number of international students (more than 13 per cent) in the past 85 years. This collaborative article introduces the first comprehensive list of international students in three CSC disciplines: directing, photography and set design. It begins with historical and artistic perspectives addressing the ideal of diversity, the internationalization of culture and the sociopolitical context of studying cinema in Rome. This article also includes graphs and statistics that give a clear sense of the broad geographical representation of foreigners who studied at the CSC. A comprehensive list of their names, nationalities, specializations and year of their degrees is organized in two formats: one by geography and one by chronology. The aim of this article is also to set new research goals so as to broaden our understanding of whether and how the CSC’s Italian cinematic education impacted world cinema.
Italian Culture, 2019
With the category of the “salaried intellectual,” this article intends to explore what it meant f... more With the category of the “salaried intellectual,” this article intends to explore what it meant for twentieth-century Italian poets, novelists, and other artists to take up employment at the Olivetti company’s modern industrial factories. On the one hand, the economic and political resources of a successful capitalist enterprise seemed to offer the intellectual untold creative possibilities. But on the other hand, these resources seemed to place new limits on the exercise of critical thought, particularly for those intellectuals who aimed to challenge the rule of profit. The article theorizes the paradoxical figure of the salaried intellectual in European society, including their relation to previous analyses by Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. It then offers a close reading of the critical theory and lit- erature of five Olivetti employees: Franco Fortini, Giovanni Giudici, Ottiero Ottieri, Paolo Volponi and Giancarlo Buzzi.
Modern Italy, 2018
The 1952 MoMA exhibition Olivetti: Design in Industry has come to mark the moment when the establ... more The 1952 MoMA exhibition Olivetti: Design in Industry has come to mark the moment when the established art world recognized the cultural legitimacy of mass-produced goods. This article contests such an interpretation by showing how the exhibition was organised and paid for by the Olivetti company. This enables a comparative analysis of the MoMA exhibition with a second New York space, the Olivetti showroom. Located on Fifth Ave, less than a half kilometre from the museum, the Olivetti showroom sold the company's products to the same American public. The article concludes that the MoMA exhibition and the New York Olivetti showroom must be understood together as a clever case of corporate marketing.
Book Chapters by Jim Carter
Ecologia e lavoro. Dialoghi interdisciplinari, 2023
Introduzione al libro Ecologia e lavoro. Dialoghi interdisciplinari (Mimesis, 2023)
Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor, 2021
Introduction to the book Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representati... more Introduction to the book Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor (Peter Lang Press, 2021)
Italian Industrial Literature and Film: Perspectives on the Representation of Postwar Labor, 2021
This chapter glosses Elio Vittorini's 1961 charge that writers are incapable of dealing with indu... more This chapter glosses Elio Vittorini's 1961 charge that writers are incapable of dealing with industrial society as a call to rescue literary language from the realm of consolation and to point it toward emancipation. It reviews the contributions of poets and novelists to Il Menabò's special issue on industrial culture, mapping a discursive space that became a point of reference for a generation of literary and culturaly production.
Book and Media Reviews by Jim Carter
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2023
Review of Derounian, Women's Work in Postwar Italy (2023)
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2023
Book Review of Resmini, Mauro. Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long '68. Minneapolis: Un... more Book Review of Resmini, Mauro. Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long '68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2023
Book review of Fantoni, Gianluca. Book Review: Italy Through the Red Lens: Italian Politics and S... more Book review of Fantoni, Gianluca. Book Review: Italy Through the Red Lens: Italian Politics and Society in Communist Propaganda Films (1948-1979). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2022
Review of Fregonese De Filippo, Patrizia. Che fine hanno fatto i sogni? Kalabrone Film Slr, Archi... more Review of Fregonese De Filippo, Patrizia. Che fine hanno fatto i sogni? Kalabrone Film Slr, Archivio audivisivo del movimento operaio e democratico, 2020.
Annali d'Italianistica, 2021
Recensione di Toracca, Tiziano. Paolo Volponi. Corporale, Il pianeta irritabile, Le mosche del ca... more Recensione di Toracca, Tiziano. Paolo Volponi. Corporale, Il pianeta irritabile, Le mosche del capitale: una trama continua (2020)
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2021
Review of Cappuccio, Eugenio. Fellini fine mai. Aurora TV, Rai Cinema and Rai Teche, 2019.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2021
Book review of D'Aloisio and Ghezzi's volume Facing the Crisis: Ethnographies of Work in Italian ... more Book review of D'Aloisio and Ghezzi's volume Facing the Crisis: Ethnographies of Work in Italian Industrial Capitalism (2020)
Pulp libri, 2020
Recensione di Lima, Eleonora. Le tecnologie dell’informazione nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e ... more Recensione di Lima, Eleonora. Le tecnologie dell’informazione nella scrittura di Italo Calvino e Paolo Volponi: Tre storie di rimediazione (2020)
Italian Studie, 2019
Book review of Diazzi and Tarabochia's 2019 volume The Years of Alienation in Italy.
Encyclopedia Entries by Jim Carter
The Literary Encyclopedia, 2020
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Books by Jim Carter
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Book and Media Reviews by Jim Carter
Encyclopedia Entries by Jim Carter