Sophia Loren, Italian Icon

Ksenia Rappoport and transnational stardom in contemporary cinema

“…This image was directly connected to the image of health and fertility of the nation, and contributed to the metaphor of the national family (Gundle 2007). Long-lasting standards of Italian feminine beauty were established, highlighting the maternal qualities of the female body -and large breasts in particular -as reassuring and natural (Gundle 2007). The ambivalent relationship of Rappoport's film characters with their own motherhood appears to offer a significant challenge to stable notions of femininity and maternity as values based in national identity.…”

“…As Gundle has pointed out, the maternal figure was essential to the construction of the notion of the madrepatria in the nation-building discourse of the Risorgimento (2007). This image was directly connected to the image of health and fertility of the nation, and contributed to the metaphor of the national family (Gundle 2007). Long-lasting standards of Italian feminine beauty were established, highlighting the maternal qualities of the female body -and large breasts in particular -as reassuring and natural (Gundle 2007).…”

“…Finally, I consider how, at the same time that Rappoport's visibility could be read as a symptom of the crisis of national stardom that Landy describes in the epilogue of Stardom Italian Style (2008), her work also opens up new directions and possibilities for a transnational redefinition of the cinema made in Italy. Although her career is still developing and limited to few films, I believe that a careful consideration of Rappoport's work in the Italian cinema helps shed light on the questions of representation of national identity, encompassing definitions of gender roles and standards of beauty (Gundle 2007), with which Italian culture is grappling today.…”

“…Alba, as we have seen, is played by Monica Bellucci, considered an icon of Italian national cinema in the tradition of Sophia Loren (Landy 2008 model of Italian femininity, an idea of beauty that, in the 1950s, was appropriated in 'a concerted program of national building that may be traced through the interrelated discourses of beauty, nationhood, nature, and bounty' (Betz 2009: 128). In the Mediterranean model of femininity that Loren and Bellucci incarnate, bounty is directly connected with the reproductive function (Gundle 2004).…”

Gender and Migrant Roles in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films: Cinema as an Apparatus of Reconfiguration of National Identity and ‘Otherness’

“…As Stephen Gundle remarks, "Anna Magnani poured every possible dose of humanity into this figure whose personal tragedy turns her into an emblem of the suffering of the ordinary Italians" (Gundle 2019, p. 154). Gundle sheds light on Magnani's "[r]ich, larger-than-life personality, her ability to play women outside of the clichés of the cinema of the Fascist period and her capacity to inject emotional intensity into her performances in a way that made it seem as if she was emptying herself into them" (Gundle 2019, p. 152;Gundle 2004).…”