Speaker: Prof. GIONA TUCCINI
Associate Professor and Section Head (Italian) within the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town
The seminar proposed by Giona Tuccini on Mario Monicelli’s La Ragazza con la Pistola (1968) will be centred on the momentous changes that disrupt 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.