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The Mafia: A Cultural History traces the development of the mafia from its rural beginnings in Western Sicily into what has been described as a 'global multinational of crime.' It follows the mafia's parallel evolution in the public imagination, through its portrayal in cinema, TV, literature and music.

\"Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather films are often considered as two great epics and a disappointing epilogue. The unpopularity of Godfather III has prevented in-depth analysis of the films as a trilogy. To fully appreciate the chronicles of the Corleone Family, it is important not only to distinguish the films from the conventions of the 'gangster' film genre but also to reassess how they constitute a unified whole.\" (Journal of Popular Film & Television) Coppola's Godfather films are analyzed as a trilogy. The films' depiction of \"the rise and fall of an Italian American crime syndicate, the Corleone Family,\" and their \"presiding influence over filmmakers and audiences worldwide\" is explored.

Cover -- The MAFIA: A Cultural History -- Imprint Page -- Contents -- Preface -- One: Of Rustic Knights and Godfathers: The Origin of the Mafia -- Two: From Corleone to Hollywood -- Three: The Far West is Here -- Four: The Godfather -- Five: Prime Time -- Six: Avatars -- References -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgements -- Photo Acknowledgements -- Index

\"Perceived as hypermasculine fare, the gangster picture is generally understood to be popular because of its explosive virility and its close connection to reality. Yet despite these entrenched truisms...the situation is more complex. An extended narrative of the world of fin-de-siecle New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano...'The Sopranos' reveals the media gangster as the core of a highly emotional mode of storytelling in which the pleasures of action and violence exist to speak not only about macho aggressiveness 'ripped from today's headlines,' but also about vulnerabilities that the display disguises and about troubling cultural conditions.\" (Film Quarterly) This exploration of the HBO's \"The Sopranos\" probes why the series \"is clearly an elegiac, self-conscious, tragicomic meditation on America's lost innocence\" and defines the series \"as the unmasking of the heretofore thickly disguised emotional subtext of gangster stories.\"

For observers of the European film scene, Federico Fellini’s death in 1993 came to stand for the demise of Italian cinema as a whole. Exploring an eclectic sampling of works from the new millennium, Italian Film in the Present Tens e confronts this narrative of decline with strong evidence to the contrary. Millicent Marcus highlights Italian cinema’s new sources of industrial strength, its re-placement of the Rome-centred studio system with regional film commissions, its contemporary breakthroughs on the aesthetic front, and its vital engagement with the changing economic and socio-political circumstances in twenty-first-century Italian life. Examining works that stand out for their formal brilliance and their moral urgency, the book presents a series of fourteen case studies, featuring analyses of such renowned films as Il Divo, Gomorrah, The Great Beauty, We Have a Pope, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, and Fire at Sea , along with lesser-known works deserving of serious critical scrutiny. In doing so, Italian Film in the Present Tense contests the widely held perception of a medium languishing in its post-Fellini moment, and instead acknowledges the ethical persistence and forward-looking currents of Italian cinema in the present tense.

Besides big Hollywood productions, like The Godfather trilogy, and video-on-demand productions, like The Sopranos, both filmed in English, new popular Italian productions, based on the linguistic and cultural representation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia, have gained momentum. Nonetheless, the body of academic research on the linguistic traits of the former is larger than research on the latter. This study aims to investigate how and by which strategies the lexicon and the culture-bound terms related to the concept of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia are culturally transferred and subtitled from Italian into English. The TV series Vendetta: guerra nell’antimafia is used as the corpus for both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. Results show that the translation of the Mafia and the Anti-Mafia for the purpose of audiovisual translation, through subtitling, is a simpler and less convoluted form of translation than written legal translation, aimed at conveying complex concepts in a simpler way.

This study examines the changed mythology of crime in the Hollywood gangster genre resulting from new representations of mafia in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. The trilogy will be viewed as a point of departure for new experimentations in the gangster genre in response to the Russian experience of mafia, namely in Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother film sequence. This analysis will discuss the key themes that appear in Coppola’s trilogy including family, masculinity, morality, and identity and consider the extent to which they either translate to or mutate in Balabanov’s sequence. This research will also explore how Balabanov infuses his films with unique Russian stylistic elements from the bylina (fairy-tale) and aesthetics from chernukha (dark cinema) in order to create a reimagined version of the gangster film. This consideration of the filmic depictions of mafia does not attempt to define the mafia in its truly existing form but seeks to understand how two different experiences of mafia and their interpretations can compare on screen, and how this reveals the tension between resisting and accepting the influence of Hollywood and America on Russian cinema and society.

In recent years film has been viewed as the prime vehicle by which anthropologists may engage with the public in an attractive way. But this is not without its pitfalls. In two parts, this article looks back at the making of an anthropological television series, Face Values, in the 1970s, a joint project of BBC TV and the RAI. Some of the reasons for the considerable differences between the author as one of the anthropological consultants, and the production and editing team, are discussed, as are the reactions of the villagers on Mafia Island, who were concerned for their dignity and privacy while being filmed for the series. Part 1 considers the politics of shooting film footage, and the tensions between anthropological and televisual premises. Part 2 is about the politics of circulation and audience, taking account of the views of Mafians as well as UK audiences (both lay and anthropological). While the former liked the film material they saw, some of them later came to find it problematic. In the UK, although the series attracted high viewing figures, it was the object of considerable criticism from both newspaper critics and anthropologists, and soon fell into obscurity. However, some of the issues and problems raised in this case study remain very real today for those who would bring together anthropology and film.

American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired them and the reforms they secured from employers and the state.

This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.