An English translation of Alberto Anile’s book Orson Welles in Italy is available from Indiana University Press.
Translated by Marcus Perryman, the book looks at Welles’ trek to Italy in 1947 to restart his career.
“Far from being welcomed as the celebrity who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, his six-year exile in Italy was riddled with controversy, financial struggles, disastrous love affairs, and failed projects. Alberto Anile’s book depicts the artist’s life and work in Italy, including his reception by the Italian press, his contentious interactions with key political figures, and his artistic output, which culminated in the filming of Othello,” according to the publisher. “Drawing on revelatory new material on the artist’s personal and professional life abroad, Orson Welles in Italy also chronicles Italian cinema’s transition from the social concerns of neorealism to the alienated characters in films such as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, amid the cultural politics of postwar Europe and the beginnings of the Cold War.”
James O. Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles, said of Orson Welles in Italy, “This is a path-breaking study that will be useful both to Welles scholars and to students of Italian cinema.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Discovering Orson Welles, said, “Anile’s carefully documented and illustrated chronicle promises to overturn—or at the very least, challenge—certain received ideas about Welles’s European reputation by revealing that it was in some ways as checkered and as ambivalent as his reputation in the US.”
The 378-page paperback edition is available through amazon.com (now priced at $25.75) and other retailers.
Alberto Anile is an Italian film critic and journalist. He is author of several books and essays about director Roberto Rossellini and comedy actor Totò. His last book (with Maria Gabriella Giannice) concerns Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard.
Marcus Perryman is editor and translator (with Peter Robinson) of The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni.
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