Film offers a powerful medium for expressing the interior life of individuals and sometimes communities, creating images, sounds and feelings which together articulate a sense of how an individual experiences their environment, relationships, values, emotions, and sense of self in the world. The world of the individual or group is often seen to be in conflict or at odds with a wider view of what society is, and cinema has the capacity to allow the viewer to participate in the individual perspectives of its human subjects.

Italian cinema of the postwar period has a strong and varied tradition of exploring interior experience and idiosyncratic or marginalized perspectives, and of exploiting the opportunities offered by film form and technique to suggest alternative realities. In this module you will explore a range of examples of such films, from sentimental depictions of dispossession associated with neorealism, to auteurist explorations of selfhood and creativity, to studies of individuals in crisis, to the expression of marginalized, gendered, non-normative and queer subjectivities in recent cinema. You will think about how human consciousness interacts with the non-human and with the natural environment, and about how Italy is felt and seen from both 'inside' and 'outside' positions. You will encounter significant figures and moments in Italian cinema history and form a sense of the interactions between them, whilst developing a complex understanding of factors which have influenced and shaped Italian cinema within Italy and globally.