Filming the Nation: Jung, Film, Neo-realism and Italian National Identity

Italian neo-realism has inspired film audiences and fascinated critics and film scholars for decades. This book offers an original analysis of the movement and its defining films from the perspective of the cultural unconscious.

Combining a Jungian reading with traditional theorizations of film and national identity, Filming the Nation reinterprets familiar images of well-known masterpieces by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti and introduces some of their less renowned yet equally significant films.

Providing an illuminating analysis of film images across a particularly traumatic and complex historical period, Filming the Nation revisits the concept of national identity and its ‘construction’ from a perspective that combines cultural, psychoanalytic and post-Jungian theories. As such this book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of film and psychoanalysis.

Donatella Spinelli Coleman teaches Film and is Honorary Research Fellow at the Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Introduction. Part I: Primo Tempo. The Uninvited Guest: Film, Psychoanalysis and the Jungian Absence. Archetype and Complex: The Paradox of Dynamic Structures. Jung, Film and Nation: Image as Witness of a Process of Becoming. Part II: Intervallo. Italian Neo-Realism and the Unmitigated Darkness of Historical Truth. Part III: Secondo Tempo. 1942-1945: War and Archetypes: An Orphan Nation with a Legacy of Murder. 1942-1943: Leaving the Father’s House. 1943-1945: Towards the End of the War. 1947-1949: Clearing the Debt to the Maternal Between War and Reconstruction. 1949-1952: Redeemers, Tricksters and the Wisdom of the Unconscious. Conclusion.