Orson Welles in Italy - Hardcover

Anile, Alberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253010411 ISBN 13: 9780253010414

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2013

Fleeing a Hollywood that spurned him, Orson Welles arrived in Italy in 1947 to begin his career anew. Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, his six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile's book depicts the artist's life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of Othello. Drawing on revelatory new material on the artist's personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italy also chronicles Italian cinema's transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the cold war.

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About the Author:

Alberto Anile is an Italian film critic and journalist. He is author of several books and essays about director Roberto Rossellini and comedy actor Tot�. His last book (with Maria Gabriella Giannice) concerns Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard.

Marcus Perryman is editor and translator (with Peter Robinson) of The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni.

Review:

[I]t is remarkable that Alberto Anile has managed to spot a niche that previous biographers have neglected. The gap in the record is the six year period between 1947-53, when Welles was based in Italy... It makes for a tale packed with vivid and intriguing vignettes...By focusing exclusively on this interlude in Welles’s career, Anile manages to capture something of the essence of his talent and personality―that mix of preternatural genius, wit and narcissistic, self-defeating excess―and something too of the fizzing glamour of film and celebrity industries of post-war Rome...The book is highly entertaining and at times illuminating, expertly translated and introduced by Marcus Perryman. (Times Literary Supplement)

[T]his is a fine work. . . . Highly recommended. (Choice)

Orson Welles in Italy recounts, in detail and with great panache, not the beginnings of the myth of the slipping career but its first full development. . .The most interesting aspect of the book perhaps is its account of Welles’s critical reputation in Italy, the way he managed to disappoint and annoy authoritative judges on the right and the left, neither side being ready for what were seen as American excesses of visual style. Meanwhile, back home, Welles was increasingly suspected of engaging in un-American activities. (New York Review of Books)

Alberto Anile’s Orson Welles In Italy is a key corrective resource for an under-examined portion of Welles’s career and life. Anile’s extended examination of the disjointed production of Othello alone―Welles’s only 'Italian' film―is worth the price, as it relates the frustrating, even maddening chaos in which Welles was obliged to work, and in spite of which he was still able to produce such a fine, inventive film. (PopMatters)

Anile's Orson Welles in Italy (translated from the Italian original of 2006) takes us back to the invention of Welles' independent methods after the Second World War. Anile's research into contemporaneous Italian sources adds degrees of nuance to a largely mythical period in Welles' career. (Matthew Asprey Gear Senses of Cinema)

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