21 March 2025: Italian Tutor/LLA Strahinja writes about Italian cinema class
My experience taking an online Italian cinema class
This semester I’ve had the opportunity to take ITAL280, an Italian cultural class dedicated to cinema taught by Professor Chiara Fabbian. The movies we watched come from the rich 20th century, a period of experimentation and innovation during a time of great political and cultural changes. It was extremely enjoyable and every week’s film caught my attention and made me contemplate the topics and motifs the director inserted into the production.
The films start with Cabiria, a silent production that aimed to highlight the greatness and significance of the Roman Republic whose legacy the newly-born Italian state needed to harness for the purpose of nationalism and state-building. However, this nationalism would come to haunt later Italian cinema, as can be seen in the film Bicycle Thief which seeks to criticize Italian society post-World War II for being unequal and a struggle for those less fortunate. Finally, near the end of the class we get to watch the film Lamerica which portrays Italian businessmen in a negative light compared to Albanians, who were seen as an undesirable other, useful only in the context of the Italian colonization of Albania in the 20th century.
This class has enriched my understanding of Italian history and culture, including through various viewpoints and the chronology of ideas that were present and common in cinema in Italy. I would highly recommend students to take this class, as it is only eight weeks long and highly amusing, to the point that I did not see it as much of a “class” at all rather than an opportunity to learn through activities that I engage in on my own for fun. I can guarantee that the class will be extremely enjoyable for all.