Pietro Marcello's film Martin Eden (2019) was received by critics and the public alike as an innovative approach to adaptation, launching a marginal director of socially engaged documentaries onto the international cinema scene. In this essay, I discuss the political implications of a film that scrambles temporal and spatial references in its reprisal of Jack London's 1909 eponymous classic, transposing its setting from San Francisco to Naples and expanding its historical reach from a main temporality going from the 1910s to the early 1980s. I argue that Marcello uses the posthuman sensibilities allowed by writing, recording, and filming techniques to reveal the transtemporal nature of class struggle. As a successful writer, Martin Eden finally understands that what the ruling classes cannot tolerate is not only economic but also intellectual and artistic emancipation.
The first collection of articles solely dedicated to critical posthumanism in Italian Film, this special issue gathers a group of articles that explore the posthumanist dimension of Italian cinema and other audiovisual media, as a means of escaping a human-centred gaze and the Humanist-masculinist, patriarchal, colonialist, heteronormative-worldview it upholds. This critique takes a variety of unique forms in Italian screen media, inviting multiple theoretical approaches. The articles included in this special issue analyse through a posthumanist lens films by traditional auteurs, such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco, but also by contemporary directors, such as Matteo Garrone and Pietro Marcello. As well as exploring the tropes and themes of posthumanist cinema, this collection aims to categorize the tools of a film language that gestures toward what was heretofore unavailable to physical, affective, or intellectual apprehension, and can be thought of productively in critical posthumanist terms.
This essay analyzes three specific filming techniques employed by Matteo Garrone: camera obstruction in Gomorrah (2008), shallow depth of focus in First Love (2004), and non-human point of view (POV) in The Embalmer (2002). I argue that these uncommon camera framings and movements produce alternative, uncanny, more-than-human points of view that question the privilege, centrality, and independence of the human perspective. These techniques are also essential to understanding central themes in Garrone's oeuvre, in particular the expressionist tension of his cinema that he employs to expose the co-relationality of any life experience.
Establishing an ecology of Italian horror by looking at Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) and Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985)—both of which feature insects’ first-“person” perspective shots, this paper traces the formation and subsequent development of a gaze in these films, one that disrupts the understanding of this gaze as human. From thematic concerns like ecology, entomology, and an emphasis on an anti-anthropomorphic gaze, we can begin to trace a resonance between the two films and their desire to expand vision. Examining early articulations of a posthumanist sensibility and vision in these films, this paper surveys the complex entanglements between Italian formulations of horror and violence, proposing the concept of an ‘insect gaze’ as a mediated gaze before exploring the terror, and possibilities, it engenders. Separated by more than a decade, the films present non-human gazes that trigger deep-seated anxieties specific to their historical context.
