Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema / Italian and Italian American Studies (PDF)

MARGA COTTINO-JONES is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Italian at UCLA, USA.

"Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema is wise and refreshingly readable scholarship that should become a standard reference work for both scholars and students of Italian cinema and culture." - Italian Quarterly

"Cottino-Jones is to be applauded for her huge undertaking: an examination of a hundred years of Italian cinema through the lens of the representation of women. This is an important and necessary study that brings into relief, among other topics, the issue of stardom in order to tackle the issue of female representation." - Giorgio Bertellini, author of Italy in Early American Cinema and editor of The Cinema of Italy

"Cottino-Jones's long awaited Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema is a clear, compelling, and innovative study which offers an exciting paradigm for examining women's issues in Italian cinema from the silent and early sound period to the present." - Carlo Celli, Professor, Department of Romance and Classical Studies, Bowling Green State University

"Rather than a polemical or reductive study of the role of divismo in Italian film and society, this book explores in considerable detail the complex relationship of sexual politics in the social construction of what it means and has meant to be a man or a woman as reflected in and by Italian film. Whether the subject is the semiotics of silent movies, the Neorealism of Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, or Vittorio De Sica, or 'female agency' in modern women filmmakers such as Francesca Archibugi and Cristina Comencini, this book offers insightful and incisive analyses of Italian cinematic history." - Ray Fleming, The John Francis Dugan Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics, The Florida State University