Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the role of language in recent Italian cinema, and to examine how a new generation of directors reinvented the concept of realism. Focusing on the cinema of Claudio Caligari and Matteo Garrone, I aim to show how the creation of realistic visions and characters is achieved through a complex mix of languages and space. The symbols of this new realism are the representation of diversity, social paradoxes, a cultural and historical set of problems, the political, social and gender conflicts that underlie the complex system of Italian identities and the interconnection between language identities and urbanity, suburbanity and rurbanity.