7:30 on Wednesday, April 10th
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
Rapito
(2023, Marco Bellocchio, Susanna Nicchiarelli and Edoardo Albinati, Italy, 134 min, Italian w/ English subtitles)
Set in the mid-19th century, and based on the historical events of Edgardo Mortara’s early life, Bellocchio’s film imagines the experiences of the child, not yet seven years old, forcibly removed from his Jewish family by authorities of the Catholic Church who declare that he had been baptized as a baby. The struggle of the family to resist the Church and to free Edgardo coincides with the rebellion in Rome against the dominion of Pope Pius IX (the “Pope-King”) over not only Christian religious life but over everyone’s civic life as well.
Film Screening
Wednesday, April 10th
Free and open to the public
Introduction by: Daniel Pope (Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Undergraduate Advisor — National and Transnational Cinemas, Questions of film realism, New Media film criticism)
Co-Sponsored by:
Daniel Pope
Daniel Pope is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with a focus in visual culture, Pope pursues a broad array of research and teaching interests across genres, national
boundaries, and cultural histories. His film courses engage international cinemas, such as Latin American, Spanish, French, Korean, and Italian cinemas, as well as topics in
transnational cinemas, questions of film realism, and modes of film criticism, including new media such as videographic essays and film podcasts. His recent teaching centers on film genres, “poetic” and experimental documentaries, enigmatic or “puzzle” films, and speculative fiction films. Pope’s research revolves around his growing interest in videographic scholarship, haptic visuality, issues of diversity in film, and figural approaches to nonfiction narratives. He is the Director of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival and Honors Program Director for the UMass Amherst Film Studies program. Pope has published work in Studies in East European Cinema and a chapter in Searching for Sebald (2007), and he is currently co-authoring an article on the videographic essay and the archive for Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.
Trailer