On Friday, February 18, Millicent Marcus, Professor of Italian at Yale University, will give a lecture on “the emergence of a contemporary Holocaust discourse” in Italian films over the last decade. The lecture will be followed by a film screening of 50 Italians.

“Ghost Stories: Italian Cinema and Holocaust Memory” considers the reasons behind what Marcus describes as an “outpouring of recent cinematic representations of the Shoah” when such films were relatively absent from Italian cinema for decades after the war.

Citing such possible factors as a gradual calming of collective guilt, a response by filmmakers to the rise of neo-fascism and right-wing extremist groups in the 1990s, and the end of the “rigid historiographies” of the Cold War, Marcus focuses on two recent Italian films—Ricky Tognazzi’s Canone inverso and Ettore Scola’s Concorrenza sleale—to explore “how the traditional genres of melodrama and commedia all'italiana are transformed by their confrontation with Holocaust history."

The lecture will begin with welcoming remarks by Professor Margaret Rosenthal of the USC Department of French and Italian, and an introduction by Professor Michael Renov, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.