The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child.

The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. Gordon: Pas de Deux: The ‘Situational Ballet’ of Film Fathers-and-Sons – Gábor Gergely: Los Olvidados: A Damning Verdict on Neorealism’s Aesthetic and Moral Positions – Fiona Handyside: Postfeminist (D)au(gh)teurs: Sofia Coppola and the Girl’s Voyage to Italy in Somewhere (2010) – Irene Lottini: From Pinocchio to Cuore: Children in Early Italian Cinema – Louis Bayman: Something Else besides a Man: Melodrama and the Maschietto in Postwar Italian Cinema – Danielle Hipkins: Girls Lost and Found: Daughters of Sin in Italian Melodramas of the 1950s – Roger Pitt: ‘È difficile diventare grandi in Italia!’ The Trauma of Becoming in Nanni Moretti’s La stanza del figlio – Emma Wilson: Un’ora sola ti vorrei: Childhood and Mourning – Alex Marlow-Mann: Subjectivity and the Ethnographic Gaze in Antonio Capuano’s Vito e gli altri – Ella Ide: Boys as Icons of Movement, Potential and Desire in Contemporary Melodramas of Boyhood – Dana Renga: Italian Teen Film and the Female Auteur. Wood: The Uses of Children – Lesley Caldwell: Ragazzo Fortunato? Children in Italian Cinema – Robert S.C.

In this original study, Handyside brings critical attention to a rare female auteur and in so doing contributes to important analyses of post-feminism, authorship in film, and the growing field of girlhood studies.Contents: Danielle Hipkins: The Child in Italian Cinema: An Introduction – Mary P. These characters inhabit luminous worlds of girlish adornments, light and sparkle and yet find homes in unexpected places from hotels to swimming pools, palaces to strip clubs: resisting stereotypes and the ordinary. Chapters reveal a post-feminist aesthetic that offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. Fiona Handyside here considers the careful counter-balance of vulnerability with the possibilities and pleasures of being female in Coppola's films - albeit for the white and the privileged - through their recurrent themes of girlhood, fame, power, sex and celebrity. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, her work carves out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity. She has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, and in 2004 became the first ever American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar.

Sofia Coppola by Fiona Handyside