Dr. Angelo Restivo was born in the Italian neighborhood of Chicago near Taylor Street.  He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago before obtaining his M.A. from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 1982.  After several years of teaching, Dr. Restivo attended the University of Southern California and there earned his Ph.D. in Critical Studies of Film.  Dr. Restivo's recent book, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film was published by Duke University Press in 2002.

TCR:  What first piqued your interest in the field of film studies?

Restivo:  Film has been an interest of mine since my adolescence.  No specific film really jumped out at me, but when I was a teenager in the 60s I would attend film festivals in Chicago at a time when a lot of French new wave and Italian films were being shown.  So I was initially captured by European cinema, and only when I started attending the University of Chicago did I start to discover all of the American films and directors.  Of course, this was a time when the field of film studies was just beginning to be seen as an academic discipline.  Some friends and I were involved in a film group, which still exists by the way, at the University of Chicago called "Doc Films."  We viewed as many as ten films a week, organized around directors, genres, movements . . . and because we were on the ground floor of this field, there was a lot of terrain to cover.  At the time I was more interested in writing and making films though, so I entered the creative writing program at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

I spent much of my time there making 16mm films. First I was commissioned by Doc Films at the University of Chicago to make a parody of U of C life, so we did a fake trailer for a film Escape from Hyde Park which was a spin-off of John Carpenter's Escape from New York.  Then I made Two Men and a Gun, from an original script; it was an 8-minute response to The Deer Hunter.  Then I did two adaptations of Latin American fiction: The Blue Bouquet, a 10-minute adaptation of a prose poem by Octavio Paz; and Return Trip Tango, a 30-min. adaptation from Julio Cortazar.  Sometime during the 80s while lecturing at UIC, I came to the realization that my work just wasn't commercial enough, and I decided to get my doctorate. My European orientation, my background in films, and the year I spent in Italy, basically all the separate threads in my life, seemed to come together at the end of the decade and resulted in me getting my Ph.D. in film studies several years later.

TCR:  Why is it that you chose the Italian cinema of the 60's as the subject for your book considering the wealth of literature that has already been written on the subject?

Restivo:  The main reason I chose the Italian cinema was because that even though there are a lot of books already written about it, none of them deal in any critical way with the subject of how economic modernization, or the "economic miracle," affected it.  What happens with economic modernization is that you get a huge expansion of the regime of images through advertising and so on, but the truth value of the images starts to erode.  This huge dissemination of images is undermining the whole validity of the image.  So here we have a conundrum that faces the Italian cinema very specifically because the Italian cinema had a tradition of neo-realism  which it was building on . . . the idea that the cinema can access the truth of history through the intrinsic truth value of the photographic image.  That made me think Italian cinema is the place to look at this whole problem of modernization.

TCR:  Have you gotten any feedback from your peers about your book?

Restivo: Not much as of yet, but it's still too new to get any official reviews in academic journals.  I do know that some professors are using it in graduate level film studies courses, which is always heartening, and some people I know are using the first chapter to help with detailing the problems of writing national cinema histories.  Some of these same people are able to apply the theories I'm developing to teach a wide range of cinema.

TCR:  Now that you've gotten this book published, are there any other projects in the works?

Restivo:  I'm looking at several things at the moment.  For the past year or so, I've been looking at 1950s American cinema with a particular focus on Alfred Hitchcock.  I recently finished a long essay on Hitchcock, which I will probably use as the anchor for a book on relating his work to the transformative process the United States underwent during the period from Strangers on a Train up to The Birds.  His films always revolve around objects that have these charges, and each character sees the object from a different perspective and invests that object with an interpretation unlike others in the film.  Though this has been of general critical interest in the past decade, what hasn't been dealt with is how this view of the object might shift once we begin to see it as a "commodity."  Basically, (this is coming out of work by the theorist Slavoj Zizek), you see often completely banal, everyday objects acquiring this enormous "weight" of meaning, solely through the psychic investment of the characters; the objects become a kind of guarantee of the social interaction, a kind of "pact."   Think of the matchbook in North by Northwest (scenes from which I use in every Intro to Cinema class to teach eye-line editing, by the way); the eyeglasses and cigarette lighter in Strangers on a Train; the key in Notorious; the ring in Shadow of a Doubt; etc. etc.  As for the effect of increasing commodification of the 50s and its effect on Hitchcock's use of objects: think now of the coffee cups in The Birds.  What's amazing about that motif is that the coffee rituals, which should serve to cement the social bonds, instead simply highlight everyone's alienation from the others ... and the birds are constantly zeroing in on the coffee cups when they attack!

If this does become a book-length project, I will probably begin in the 50s and end somewhere around 1975 with Taxi Driver.  I think Taxi Driver is a really key film that does a lot to explain the way urban space was being reorganized for the new economy.  This film is right at the fulcrum because it's an image of the urban center in ruins after the white flight of the 50s.

One other project I'm working on developed from reading Linda Williams' book, Hardcore.  Writing from the feminist perspective, she uses close textual analysis of straight porn films to problematize the "old-line" feminist model of pornography as set forth by persons such as Andrea Dworkin.  I've been working with a friend, Richard Cante of UNC-Chapel Hill, on gay pornography and we've published three papers so far on the subject and it looks like there might be more forthcoming.

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Dr. Restivo currently teaches Introductory Film Studies, and this spring he will be teaching a graduate seminar entitled, "Hitchcock and Psychoanalysis."