The Department of Italian at the Faculty of Arts, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, Valletta is organising a seminar on Mario Monicelli’s ‘La ragazza con la pistola’ The seminar will be held on Thursday 16 May at 15:00 in LC119, University of Malta, Msida Campus.
The speaker is Professor Giona Tuccini, Associate Professor and Section Head (Italian) with the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town.
The seminar, proposed by Professor Giona Tuccini, on Mario Monicelli’s ‘La ragazza con la pistola’ (‘The Girl with a Pistol’, 1968) will be centred on the momentous changes that disrupted the life of the protagonist, Assunta Patanè (Monica Vitti). The session proposes to explore the various phases of the character’s evolution, as well as their implications within the film fiction and, on a broader level, within the lively cultural context in which the work took root.
Attention will be focused equally on the role played by the other characters in the plot: Assunta’s relatives, Macaluso, John, Professor Osborne, and Frank. The themes in the film will be investigated within the context of the typical features of the ‘Commedia all’italiana’: the representation of places, the use of dialect and the contradictory duos of tradition/modernism, male/female, comedy/tragedy underlying the transgressive (and liberating) experience of a Sicilian woman in London.
