Book Celebration for Dr. Mary Ann Carolan

By Mary Ann McDonald Carolan

Please join us in celebrating the publication of Orienting Italy:  China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers by Mary Ann Carolan, who teaches in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures and directs the Italian Studies program.  This book, which won the 2022 book award for performance and visual culture from the American Association of Teachers of Italian, explores contemporary Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese in both documentary and fictional films. Orienting Italy begins by considering documentaries shot in China in the 1950s and 1970s by Carlo Lizzani and Michelangelo Antonioni as a way of offering the West images of this physically and culturally remote land.  The investigation continues with Bernardo Bertolucci’s Academy Award winning view of a historical Middle Kingdom in The Last Emperor (1987) and Gianni Amelio’s stark depiction of Italian economic exchange with contemporary China in The Missing Star (2006). The book concludes with both fictional tales and documentaries that recount the wave of Chinese migration to Italy in the late twentieth century in the works of Stefano Incerti (Gorbaciof, 2010), Andrea Segre (Shun Li and the Poet, 2011), and Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco (Miss Little China, 2009). Today, a new chapter in the relationship between Italy and China has emerged in the form of transnational collaborations in the art and business of filmmaking.

This event, which is sponsored by the Humanities Institute, the department of Modern Languages & Literatures, and the Italian Studies program, is free and open to the public.