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Italian Films and Music  Tags: italian italy filmography discography  

Last update: Sep 17th, 2009 URL: http://jccc.libguides.com/content.php?pid=15054  Print Guide  RSS Updates

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Feature Films

  • 8 1/2
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 E34
    Fellini's autobiographical film is about a famous film director who loses his inspiration in the midst of making a film.
  • Amarcord
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 A4853
    The film is Director Federico Fellini's lange of memories of episodes about love, sex, politics, family life and growing up in a small Italian town in the 1930's.
  • Benito: The Rise and Fall of Benito Mussolini
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 B4673
    Benito Mussolini's political life and the evolution of fascism is chronicled in this feature film.
  • Bitter Rice
    Call Number: [VHS] 791.43 B6245
    In the rice fields of the Po Valley, a thief on the run meets a girl who tries to steal his loot.
  • Cinema Paradiso
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 C5744
    A young boy in a small Italian village is befriended by the projectionist at the movie theater, the Cinema Paradiso. As the boy grows up, he learns to love films, and is encouraged by his good friend to pursue his dream of one day making movies.
  • Citta Aperta (Open City)
    Call Number: [VHS] 791.43 O614
    Rossellini's classic is representative of neo-realistic cinema. The story takes place in Rome during the Nazi occupation where a priest who is helping the Italian resistance fighters is discovered and arrested by the SS.
  • Grido
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 G8475
    A man is bereft when his married lover of seven years decides suddenly to leave him when her husband dies. He takes their child and wanders for a year, but realizes he can love only her.
  • La Dolce Vita
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 D6621
    This drama is set in Italy in 1938, when This is Fellini's most famous film in which he chronicles the meaningless decadence of Roman high society, aristocrats, performers, the press, etc. In its day, the film was considered shocking. Today its limited nudity seems tame.
  • La Strada
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 S8952
    The film tells the story of a fragile girl who falls in love with a brutal circus performer she was sold to by her mother.
  • Life is Beautiful
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 L7223
    A charming but bumbling waiter who's gifted with a colorful imagination and an irresistible sense of humor has won the heart of the woman he loves and has created a beautiful life for his young family. Then that life is threatened by World War II.
  • Miracle in Milan
    Comedy, satire, and realism are combined in a fantasy about the social conceits of man. An Italian orphan, with the aid of a miraculous dove, combats power and wealth and succeeds in bringing happiness to the inhabitants of a Milanese hobo camp.
  • Nights of Cabiria
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 N6885
    A young prostitute who works in the streets of Rome is continually deceived by men who claim to love her.
  • Seduction of Mimi
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 S4497
    Mimi, a Sicilian laborer, refuses to vote for the Mafia's candidate and consequently loses his job, his wife, and his home. His efforts to defend his honor produce complex comical results.
  • Seven Beauties
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 S49702
    Pasqualino is a lady's man living off his sisters' money until he is arrested and sent to the army. He is captured by the Germans and taken to a concentration camp where he plots his escape by seducing a German officer.
  • Stromboli
    Call Number: [VHS] 791.43 S9213
    A Lithuanian refugee girl marries a poor Sicilian fisherman to escape internment in post-war Italy, but finds herself imprisoned by the primitive and rigidly traditional society when the couple moves to a desert island
  • Swept Away
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 S9747
    A wealthy upper-class capitalist and a proletariat deckhand on her yacht are marooned together on an uninhabited island for several weeks. The woman becomes totally dependent on the man for survival, falls in love with him, and the two temporarily reverse their roles
  • The Bicycle Thief
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 B5838
    This film is the story of an unemployed man and his son in war devastated Rome. The father finds a job pasting up posters, work requiring a bicycle to get around. The bicycle is stolen; panic stricken at being unable to recover his bicycle and at the prospect of losing his job, the father is compelled to steal a bicycle, only to be caught and humiliated in front of his son.
  • The Conformist
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 C7486
  • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 G2185
    This drama is set in Italy in 1938, when Mussolini's anti-Semitic edicts began to isolate the Jews from their communities. Among them were the Finzi-Continis, an aristocratic Jewish family forced for the first time to acknowledge the world beyond its fenced garden.
  • The Postman (II Postino)
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 P8584
    The postman, Mario, enlists the aid of the poet Pablo Neruda to conquer the heart of the beautiful Beatrice.
  • The Tree of Wooden Clogs
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 T7846
    This is a two part film - deceptively simple tale of a small community of peasants in Italy at the turn of the century. It follows four families through the seasons, and shows the seemingly small events that influence their lives and the love they feel for the land and their families.
  • The Wide Blue Road
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 W6393
    This film is set in a fishing village off the Dalmatian coast of Italy. It tells the story of Squarcio, a fisherman who uses dynamite instead of nets and is Gillo Pontecorvo's debut as a film director.
  • Two Women
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 T9747
    Seeking escape from city bombing, an Italian mother and daughter travel war-torn Italy during World War II trying to survive near-starvation, rape by wandering soldiers and other horrors of war.
 

Documentaries

  • Destination Italy
    Call Number: [DVD] 910.02 I883
    The richness of Italy and its people are evident in this video.
  • The Fall of the Leaning Tower
    Call Number: [VHS] 726.04
    The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a 14th-century architectural masterpiece and, to the engineers and architects responsible for keeping it from falling down, it is a monument to frustration. Although the problem is obvious, the solution is not.
  • Florence: Video Portrait of a City
    Call Number: [VHS] 945.02
    This is a guided tour of the city of Florence.
  • Mussolini Italy's Nightmare
    Call Number: [VHS] 920.02 M9895
    From his early days as a journalist to his shocking, renewed popularity in Italy today, this is the definitive look at the life and legacy of Il Duce.
  • My Voyage to Italy
    Call Number: [DVD] 791.43 M9959
    Martin Scorsese directs and narrates this personal documentary about Italian film and select Italian filmmakers and the influence they had on him. It begins with an overview of Scorsese's family history including their Sicilian roots, life in Little Italy, and the filmmaker's recollections of watching neorealist and epic Italian films on television and how those movies acted as a lifeline for the older members of his family, maintaining their connection to the old country.
  • Parla Italiano? Learning Italian - The Basics
    Call Number: [DVD] 458.3 P2523
    Italian alphabet, consonants, vowels, phrases, titles, verbs, nationalities, and other topics. Presented with skits and graphics, in an "approachable" format.
  • Rome and the Alban Hills
    Call Number: [VHS] 941.01
    This travelogue features the art and architecture of Rome, with insights into the ancient Roman world.
 

Operas on Film

  • The Barber of Seville
    Call Number: [DVD] 792.5 R835ba
    For his first opera production, Dario Fo, the theater director known for his brilliant wit, chose to stage Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Netherlands Opera. First mounted in 1987, it was a huge success, and a live recording of its revival has been made
  • Don Giovanni
    Call Number: [DVD] 792.5 M939do
    The story of Don Giovanni centers around a young nobleman who is obsessed with amorous conquests and his encounters with Donna Anna, the woman who plots to destroy him
  • Madama Butterfly
    Call Number: [DVD] 792.5 P977ma
    Puccini's classic story of the young woman loved and abandoned by an American naval officer was recorded at Milan's fabled La Scala Opera House.
  • Rigoletto
    Call Number: [DVD] 792.5 V484ri
    This is Verdi's opera about a hunchbacked jester whose daughter is seduced and abandoned by the local Duke.
  • Turandot
    Call Number: [DVD] 792.5 P977tu
    This is a presentation of Puccini's opera Turandot about the Chinese princess and the young prince, disguised as a beggar, who loves her.
 

Music CDs

  • Calabria
    Call Number: 780.89 C1415
    The work chants of tuna fishermen of Vibo Valentia, the cries of the swordfishermen of Scilla; women, men and children singing songs of work and celebration, of love and scorn; tarantellas; and lullabies; music for bagpipe, tambourine, and drums.
  • Italy: Folk Songs from Naples
    Call Number: 780.89 I883
    The work chants of tuna fishermen of Vibo Valentia, the cries of the swordfishermen of Scilla; women, men and children singing songs of work and celebration, of love and scorn; tarantellas; and lullabies; music for bagpipe, tambourine, and drums.
 

Subject Guide

Profile ImageAndrea Kempf
Contact Info:
Johnson County Community College
Billington Library 229
913-469-3286
fax 913-469-4417
Send Email

Subjects:
Humanities, Literature, Art, Music, Cooking, International Fiction

 
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