20-21 IT3860: Shooting History: Dictatorship, Terror and Crime in Italian Film

This course brings together the study of the topics of Fascism, organised crime and terrorism through film narrative. Students are presented with political and social issues concerning the nature of State authority and the problems of violence, and pay particular attention to how the presence of the State is affirmed by means of fascist violence and to how the State is rendered absent or is annihilated by means of the terroristic means of organised crime and leftist revolutionaries. At the end of the course students will have developed an understanding of all phenomena and of how they are represented in film. They will also acquire familiarity with some of the theoretical strategies for reading film.