Dana Renga
Biographic Data
| ID | 1444856 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dana Renga |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dana |
| FAMILY NAME | Renga |
| SIGNATURE | RENGA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8399-2006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Watching Mean Streets at Fifty
I find it interesting to reflect upon Mean Streets as it somewhat recently celebrated its 50th birthday as I was born two years before the film's 1973 release. For many, Mean Streets can be considered a “family movie,” which is intriguing for several reasons, including of course the multifaceted meanings of mafia family and biological family in the film and also how families across time and space respond differently to the film given its complica…
Observations on Casting Gomorra. La serie
This short piece briefly addresses the casting of Ciro Di Marzio and Gennaro Savastano in Gomorra. La serie, paying particular attention to casting directors Sara Casani and Laura Muccino. The essay is based upon a personal interview with them, and investigates the hidden labour of casting directors in the Italian context who are more often than not women. It also pays special attention to the intricate process of casting two of the series’ focal…
Teaching Italian Film and Television and Videographic Criticism
The Ohio State University in Autumn semester 2019, during which time the two of us co-taught a graduate seminar.In our initial discussions on the content of the seminar (comprising fourteen modules of 2.5 hours each), we had planned to offer a broad but standard introduction to Italian film and television, and had imagined the syllabus might present a kind of critical 'greatest hits' in Italian film and television history and theory.This plan cha…
Internal exile in Fascist Italy
Confino (i.e., internal exile) was a malleable form of imprisonment during the Fascist ventennio. Confinement allowed Mussolini to bypass the judiciary thereby placing prisoners outside magistrates' jurisdiction. The Regime applied it to political dissidents, ethnic and religious minorities, gender nonconforming people, and mafiosi, among others. Recent political discourse in and beyond Italy has drawn on similar rationales to address perceived t…
Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television
Mafia Movies
Chris Wagstaff (1946–2018)
The editors of the Italianist Film Issue wish to express our profound sadness at the death of Chris Wagstaff, on Friday 19 January 2018. Wagstaff was, as Stephen Gundle has said, ‘a great pioneer o
Special Issue, Modern Italy (22
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
The Visibility of Italian Screen Studies in 2017
Coming of Age in the Camorra (‘Gelsomina Verde’, Claudio Cupellini)
Gomorra
In 2014 Giancarlo Lombardi pointed to a recent, albeit limited, body of scholarship in Italian screen studies focusing on Italian television.1 During the last few years, however, substantially more
La polvere dei sogni
‘Dove e come si e depositata la polvere dei sogni nati nel buio delle sale? Come la si puo misurare?’ — Gian Piero Brunetta, Buio in sala‘Il cinema si era impadronito completamente della mia esiste
Of Shite and Time
Why does a young man have sex with a freshly baked apple pie in American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999)? Why do the bridesmaids in the eponymous film (Paul Feig, 2011) suffer diarrhoea and nausea in a pret
Unfinished Business
Made Men
The last twenty years or so have witnessed a considerable growth in publications in mafia studies in fields such as anthropology, history, literature, screen studies, psychoanalysis, feminist and g
Towards an Ecology of Cinema and History
What are the modes, genres, and registers in which Italian cinema has dealt with the history of Italy? An apparently innocuous question, its relevance to this discussion comes from the fact that it has not yet been answered, and its implications are far-reaching for the discipline of Italian screen studies if exhaustedly pursued. Answering it implies rethinking the relationship of Italian cinema to the history of Italy from a descriptive and anal…
Italian Screen Studies in the Anglophone Context
In 2011, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe called for a moratorium on the use of the term ‘neorealism’ for at least half a decade and asked, ‘Let us see what such a moratorium might allow us to reveal in its stead, what our silence on realism might allow us to reveal about other modes and genres.’ In their polemical piece, O’Leary and O’Rawe made the provocative claim that ‘all cinema is popular cultural production’ and suggested, ‘we should not …
Introduction The Banda della Magliana, The Camorra, The ’Ndrangheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita
With its late spring release in 2008, acclaimed hit Gomorra (Matteo Garrone)1 secured a stronghold for the Camorra2 in the international imaginary and provided a visual counterpoint to Roberto Savi
The Phenomenology of the cinepanettone
Against realism
This polemical article objects to the pervasive use of realism as a value or prescriptive term in the writing of Italian cinema history. It also offers a dissenting appraisal of the ‘institution’ of neorealism: the body of critical work and discourse that constructs neorealism as the ethical and aesthetic centre of Italian cinema. The discursive recourse to neorealism has become the essential authoritative gesture: to fail to refer to it is to ri…
Pastapocalypse! End times in Italian trash cinema
Sotto il segno della metafora
Giancarlo De Cataldo, nato a Taranto nel 1956, e Giudice di Corte d’Assise a Roma e uno tra gli scrittori contemporanei piu noti in Italia. E stato reso celebre soprattutto dal libro Romanzo criminale (Einaudi, 2002), a cui e seguito l’adattamento cinematografico per la regia di Michel Placido (2005). Ha pubblicato diversi romanzi, tra cui Il padre e lo straniero (Manifestolibri, 1997), Teneri assassini (Einaudi, 2000), Nelle mani giuste (Einaudi…
Violence and the wretched
After Brunetta
Against realism
This polemical article objects to the pervasive use of realism as a value or prescriptive term in the writing of Italian cinema history. It also offers a dissenting appraisal of the ‘institution’ of neorealism: the body of critical work and discourse that constructs neorealism as the ethical and aesthetic centre of Italian cinema. The discursive recourse to neorealism has become the essential authoritative gesture: to fail to refer to it is to ri…
Gomorra
In 2014 Giancarlo Lombardi pointed to a recent, albeit limited, body of scholarship in Italian screen studies focusing on Italian television.1 During the last few years, however, substantially more
Made Men
The last twenty years or so have witnessed a considerable growth in publications in mafia studies in fields such as anthropology, history, literature, screen studies, psychoanalysis, feminist and g
Pastapocalypse! End times in Italian trash cinema
Sotto il segno della metafora
Giancarlo De Cataldo, nato a Taranto nel 1956, e Giudice di Corte d’Assise a Roma e uno tra gli scrittori contemporanei piu noti in Italia. E stato reso celebre soprattutto dal libro Romanzo criminale (Einaudi, 2002), a cui e seguito l’adattamento cinematografico per la regia di Michel Placido (2005). Ha pubblicato diversi romanzi, tra cui Il padre e lo straniero (Manifestolibri, 1997), Teneri assassini (Einaudi, 2000), Nelle mani giuste (Einaudi…
After Brunetta
Sotto il segno della metafora
Giancarlo De Cataldo, nato a Taranto nel 1956, e Giudice di Corte d’Assise a Roma e uno tra gli scrittori contemporanei piu noti in Italia. E stato reso celebre soprattutto dal libro Romanzo criminale (Einaudi, 2002), a cui e seguito l’adattamento cinematografico per la regia di Michel Placido (2005). Ha pubblicato diversi romanzi, tra cui Il padre e lo straniero (Manifestolibri, 1997), Teneri assassini (Einaudi, 2000), Nelle mani giuste (Einaudi…
Violence and the wretched
The Phenomenology of the cinepanettone
Against realism
This polemical article objects to the pervasive use of realism as a value or prescriptive term in the writing of Italian cinema history. It also offers a dissenting appraisal of the ‘institution’ of neorealism: the body of critical work and discourse that constructs neorealism as the ethical and aesthetic centre of Italian cinema. The discursive recourse to neorealism has become the essential authoritative gesture: to fail to refer to it is to ri…
Pastapocalypse! End times in Italian trash cinema
Introduction The Banda della Magliana, The Camorra, The ’Ndrangheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita
With its late spring release in 2008, acclaimed hit Gomorra (Matteo Garrone)1 secured a stronghold for the Camorra2 in the international imaginary and provided a visual counterpoint to Roberto Savi
Unfinished Business
Made Men
The last twenty years or so have witnessed a considerable growth in publications in mafia studies in fields such as anthropology, history, literature, screen studies, psychoanalysis, feminist and g
Towards an Ecology of Cinema and History
What are the modes, genres, and registers in which Italian cinema has dealt with the history of Italy? An apparently innocuous question, its relevance to this discussion comes from the fact that it has not yet been answered, and its implications are far-reaching for the discipline of Italian screen studies if exhaustedly pursued. Answering it implies rethinking the relationship of Italian cinema to the history of Italy from a descriptive and anal…
Italian Screen Studies in the Anglophone Context
In 2011, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe called for a moratorium on the use of the term ‘neorealism’ for at least half a decade and asked, ‘Let us see what such a moratorium might allow us to reveal in its stead, what our silence on realism might allow us to reveal about other modes and genres.’ In their polemical piece, O’Leary and O’Rawe made the provocative claim that ‘all cinema is popular cultural production’ and suggested, ‘we should not …
La polvere dei sogni
‘Dove e come si e depositata la polvere dei sogni nati nel buio delle sale? Come la si puo misurare?’ — Gian Piero Brunetta, Buio in sala‘Il cinema si era impadronito completamente della mia esiste
Of Shite and Time
Why does a young man have sex with a freshly baked apple pie in American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999)? Why do the bridesmaids in the eponymous film (Paul Feig, 2011) suffer diarrhoea and nausea in a pret
Coming of Age in the Camorra (‘Gelsomina Verde’, Claudio Cupellini)
Gomorra
In 2014 Giancarlo Lombardi pointed to a recent, albeit limited, body of scholarship in Italian screen studies focusing on Italian television.1 During the last few years, however, substantially more
Special Issue, Modern Italy (22
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
The Visibility of Italian Screen Studies in 2017
Chris Wagstaff (1946–2018)
The editors of the Italianist Film Issue wish to express our profound sadness at the death of Chris Wagstaff, on Friday 19 January 2018. Wagstaff was, as Stephen Gundle has said, ‘a great pioneer o
Internal exile in Fascist Italy
Confino (i.e., internal exile) was a malleable form of imprisonment during the Fascist ventennio. Confinement allowed Mussolini to bypass the judiciary thereby placing prisoners outside magistrates' jurisdiction. The Regime applied it to political dissidents, ethnic and religious minorities, gender nonconforming people, and mafiosi, among others. Recent political discourse in and beyond Italy has drawn on similar rationales to address perceived t…
Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television
Mafia Movies
Teaching Italian Film and Television and Videographic Criticism
The Ohio State University in Autumn semester 2019, during which time the two of us co-taught a graduate seminar.In our initial discussions on the content of the seminar (comprising fourteen modules of 2.5 hours each), we had planned to offer a broad but standard introduction to Italian film and television, and had imagined the syllabus might present a kind of critical 'greatest hits' in Italian film and television history and theory.This plan cha…
Observations on Casting Gomorra. La serie
This short piece briefly addresses the casting of Ciro Di Marzio and Gennaro Savastano in Gomorra. La serie, paying particular attention to casting directors Sara Casani and Laura Muccino. The essay is based upon a personal interview with them, and investigates the hidden labour of casting directors in the Italian context who are more often than not women. It also pays special attention to the intricate process of casting two of the series’ focal…
Watching Mean Streets at Fifty
I find it interesting to reflect upon Mean Streets as it somewhat recently celebrated its 50th birthday as I was born two years before the film's 1973 release. For many, Mean Streets can be considered a “family movie,” which is intriguing for several reasons, including of course the multifaceted meanings of mafia family and biological family in the film and also how families across time and space respond differently to the film given its complica…
Art (19 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (18 works) · Italian Literature and Culture (8 works) · Literature (8 works) · Movie theater (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · Humanities (6 works)