Between land and sea: Italian cinema and the “bathing conditionµ
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Abstract
In the filmic imagery the relationship between sea and Italians is anything but resolved and reconciled. At least since the 1950s, we can see on the big screen not so much a “people of navigatorsµ (as Benito Mussolini claimed) but a mass of swimmers placed in the crucial median space between land and sea: the beach. In Italian cinema, the “bathing conditionµ is based on this topos in its quality of theater or set in which the national character lays bare all its historical and irremediable contradictions
Keywords
- Italian Cinema
- Sea
- Beach
