Volume 46, Number 1, 2025 Critical Posthumanism in Italian Cinema and Media Guest-edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara and Russell Kilbourn

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The first collection of articles solely dedicated to critical posthumanism in Italian Film, this special issue gathers a group of articles that explore the posthumanist dimension of Italian cinema and other audiovisual media, as a means of escaping a human-centred gaze and the Humanist—masculinist, patriarchal, colonialist, heteronormative—worldview it upholds. This critique takes a variety of unique forms in Italian screen media, inviting multiple theoretical approaches. The articles included in this special issue analyse through a posthumanist lens films by traditional auteurs, such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, but also by contemporary directors, such as Matteo Garrone and Pietro Marcello. As well as exploring the tropes and themes of posthumanist cinema, this collection aims to categorize the tools of a film language that gestures toward what was heretofore unavailable to physical, affective, or intellectual apprehension, and can be thought of productively in critical posthumanist terms.

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Establishing an ecology of Italian horror by looking at Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) and Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985)—both of which feature insects’ first-“person” perspective shots, this paper traces the formation and subsequent development of a gaze in these films, one that disrupts the understanding of this gaze as human. From thematic concerns like ecology, entomology, and an emphasis on an anti-anthropomorphic gaze, we can begin to trace a resonance between the two films and their desire to expand vision. Examining early articulations of a posthumanist sensibility and vision in these films, this paper surveys the complex entanglements between Italian formulations of horror and violence, proposing the concept of an ‘insect gaze’ as a mediated gaze before exploring the terror, and possibilities, it engenders. Separated by more than a decade, the films present non-human gazes that trigger deep-seated anxieties specific to their historical context.

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This essay explores the television and cinematographic work of Sicilian filmmakers Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco from a posthumanist perspective with a view to examine the state of exhaustion as the main common denominator within the settings, bodies and gestures of their films. As Rosi Braidotti points out, the state of exhaustion becomes a generative precondition to learn to think differently, and to put an affirmative ethics into practice (Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge 18–19). Reviewing the work of the two Palermitani in a posthumanist key allows us to examine their cynical and dejected world from a new, positive and edifying perspective. Segments of Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco’s television program Cinico TV (1989–96) will be analysed, as well as their film Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn; 1995). My aim is to vindicate the work of two radical but still little-known filmmakers, who are essential to understanding the power of film and television in combating the homogeneity and aesthetic and narrative indoctrination of the media.

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This essay explores Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015) and Pinocchio (2019) as cinematic retellings of folkloric texts that contribute to critical posthumanist discourse. Garrone’s films are specific performances of fairy tales that, via technology, have a defamiliarizing effect on the relation between human and non-human entities, making the films non-human narrations. Through technical codes and mise-en-scène, Garrone highlights how the human needs to be redefined in relation to the non-human world. Moreover, the films depict hybrid entities whose constructedness is emphasized by special effects with the intent of showing the arbitrariness of ontological categories. This idea, which dominates the entities in Tale of Tales, is expanded upon in Pinocchio, where all animal characters have human faces, inviting an ethical discourse on the treatment of animals. The two films, therefore, are technical performances of the defamiliarizing and, by extension, posthumanist, quality of fairy tales.

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This essay analyzes three specific filming techniques employed by Matteo Garrone: camera obstruction in Gomorrah (2008), shallow depth of focus in First Love (2004), and non-human point of view (POV) in The Embalmer (2002). I argue that these uncommon camera framings and movements produce alternative, uncanny, more-than-human points of view that question the privilege, centrality, and independence of the human perspective. These techniques are also essential to understanding central themes in Garrone’s oeuvre, in particular the expressionist tension of his cinema that he employs to expose the co-relationality of any life experience.

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This essay considers the posthuman and ecological tensions pervading the respective filmographies of Matteo Garrone and David Cronenberg. Taking our cue from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, we investigate the recurring motifs and philosophical concerns that emerge from particular filmic ecologies and the characters inhabiting them. By displaying figures that appear dominated by fluxes of desires and passions they neither control nor manage through self-reflection and detached awareness, Garrone’s and Cronenberg’s cinemas challenge any image of rationality ostensibly embedded in the human. The encounters with the material and technological world that surround the individuality of characters do not necessarily define affirmative processes of becoming, but they do help us understand the dynamic nature of subjectivity and the always surprising possibilities for de-subjectivation and creative re-subjectivation. Here we focus on four works: Garrone’s The Embalmer (2002) and Dogman (2018), and Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Crash (1996).

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Pietro Marcello’s film Martin Eden (2019) was received by critics and the public alike as an innovative approach to adaptation, launching a marginal director of socially engaged documentaries onto the international cinema scene. In this essay, I discuss the political implications of a film that scrambles temporal and spatial references in its reprisal of Jack London’s 1909 eponymous classic, transposing its setting from San Francisco to Naples and expanding its historical reach from a main temporality going from the 1910s to the early 1980s. I argue that Marcello uses the posthuman sensibilities allowed by writing, recording, and filming techniques to reveal the transtemporal nature of class struggle. As a successful writer, Martin Eden finally understands that what the ruling classes cannot tolerate is not only economic but also intellectual and artistic emancipation.