New Neapolitan Cinema

Vito and the Others (1991), Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician (1992) and Libera (1993), the debuts of three young Neapolitan filmmakers, stood out dramatically from the landscape of Italian cinema in the early 1990s. On the back of their critical success, over the next decade and a half, Naples became a thriving centre for film production.In this first study in English of one of the most vital and stimulating currents in contemporary European Cinema, Alex Marlow-Mann provides a detailed, multi-faceted and provocative study of this distinct regional tradition. In tracing the movement's relationship with the popular musical melodramas previously produced in Naples, he reveals how contemporary Neapolitan filmmakers have interrogated, subverted and reconfigured cinematic convention as part of a through-going re-examination of Neapolitan identity.

Marlow-Mann produces detailed analyses of a substantial body of films enriched by first-hand insights and interviews with directors, as well as a useful set of appendices charting exhibition statistics, figures relating to production companies and audience location. Marlow-Mann's book is a comprehensive and well-researched discussion of an important cinematic phenomenon whose treatment, in English, has been limited and fragmentary.--Monica Boria "Modern Italy", Scholars of film and Italian Studies will be glad to find this informative, descriptive volume in their libraries...Marlow-Mann's study helps to fill a void in the scholarship on contemporary Naples in the English-speaking world and provides an accurate and extensive record of the body of works produced by the contemporary Neapolitan filmmakers with very useful appendices. --Patrizia La Trecchia "Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studes", The best studies of Italian culture are often written by foreigners so perhaps it's not by chance that The New Neapolitan Cinema, an excellent book by the young English researcher Alex Marlow-Mann, shows up the limitations within which earlier studies of Neapolitan cinema have been carried out... The author works with typically Anglo-Saxon rigour, ferreting through film and book archives; cataloguing films, books and much more besides; compiling and comparing data, percentages, statistics and locations. But he also writes as a scrupulously open-minded historian and critic, offering striking insights and bursts of creativity and avoiding both over- and under-valuation in order to place the phenomenon of the New Neapolitan Cinema back in its correct proportions. (translated from Italian)--Alberto Castellano "Il Manifesto"

Alex Marlow-Mann is Research Co-ordinator at the University of St Andrews.