Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers

Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino

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by Jonathan J. Cavallero

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > United States

Keywords

Italian Americans, Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese, Nancy Savoca, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino

Publishing date

2011

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 264 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-252-07807-1

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Book Presentation:
The roles of ethnicity and cultural identity in the films of Italian American film directors

Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers explores the different ways in which Italian American directors from the 1920s to the present have responded to their ethnicity. While some directors have used film to declare their ethnic roots and create an Italian American "imagined community," others have ignored or even denied their background. Jonathan J. Cavallero examines the films of Frank Capra, Martin Scorsese, Nancy Savoca, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino with a focus on what the films reveal about each director's view on Italian American identities. Whereas Capra's films highlight similarities between immigrant characters and WASP Americans, Scorsese accepts his ethnic heritage but also sees it as confining. Many of Coppola's films provide a nostalgic treatment of Italian American identity, with little criticism of the culture's more negative aspects. And while Savoca's movies reveal her artful ability to recognize how ethnic, gender, and class identities overlap, Tarantino's films exhibit a playfully postmodern engagement with Italian American ethnicity.
Cavallero's exploration of the films of Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino demonstrates how immigrant Italians fought prejudice, how later generations positioned themselves in relation to their predecessors, and how the American cinema, usually seen as a cultural institution that works to assimilate, has also served as a forum where assimilation was resisted.

About the Author:
Jonathan J. Cavallero is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Arkansas.

Press Reviews:
"Cavallero's research is extensive and of high quality. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

"A solidly researched, engagingly argued, and innovative perspective on each one of them, but it also opens up cinematic discourse on (Italian) ethnicity to wider horizons of cultural and political reflections and leaves us with a constructive, dynamic vision of identity."--Italian American Review

See the publisher website: University of Illinois Press