Phd in MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS

Research: Forms of Relationship: Identity and Family Myth in New Millennium Italian Cinema

Macro-narrative genres (comedy and tragedy) can be understood as symbolic devices of subjectivation, or aesthetic forms of representation of the relationship between the subject and the historical-social world. Italian cinema has assimilated these narrative structures and, since modernity, has identified in the novelistic a mode that is not bound by the hierarchy of classical genres. This research aims to analyse the role played by the myth – intended as original form of narration – of the family, an intermediate relational structure between the individual and society, in the representation of the relationship between the subject and the world. Through the forms of comedy, melodrama and the novelistic, Italian cinema has questioned the family as a laboratory of identity and has been able to capture and recount the metamorphoses of this institution. The purpose of this research is to investigate the ways in which Italian cinema of the new millennium, through the configuration of narratives, elaborates the tensions between the subject, family and society and offers structures of meaning useful for interpreting the recodifications that affect family relationships in the contemporary world.