Traveling Auteurs

"This tour de force interrogation of Antonioni, Pasolini, and Rossellini's nonfiction works, set in unfamiliar non-European milieus and inspired by mid-twentieth century geopolitical shifts, decenters key film historiographic categories such as realism, the modernist auteur, and Italian national cinema. The trio's geographic, intellectual, and affective displacements; translations across singular lifeworlds; and myriad balancing acts between solidarity with the global decolonization project and engrained proclivity for orientalist exoticism: articulating such distinct registers, Caminati develops an understanding of travel as method. Based on its slice of global media history, Traveling Auteurs makes a timely case for travel as passage across incompatibilities, as catalyst for the endlessly deferred mediation between the colonizer and the colonized seeking reconciliation and mutuality."—Bhaskar Sarkar, author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition

"Featuring nuanced analyses and surprising discoveries, Traveling Auteurs takes the reader on a marvelous journey with Italian filmmakers through India, Africa, the Middle East, and China. While expanding the canonical oeuvres of these renowned auteurs, Luca Caminati maps them onto a transnational network of artists and intellectuals politically engaged with the Global South. Rethinking the oriental gaze alongside revolutionary solidarity, this book is an invaluable contribution to the study of world cinema, nonfiction film genres, and the cultural and intellectual history of the Cold War period."—Jie Li, author of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China

"Traveling Auteurs returns us to the documentary work of three Italian filmmakers: Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. These directors are most well known for their key contributions to Italian neo-realism and modernist cinema, but Caminati turns our attention to their post-war documentary/film essay productions in the "Third World," then conceived by Western leftist intellectuals and artists as a space of liberatory possibility. These works are often read as "outside" of these directors' canonical works, but Caminati gives them serious consideration as works of their time, produced during the period of decolonization and revolutionary movements. Rather than see these works as exceptional, Caminati demonstrates that they were formally and theoretically part of these auteurs' broader reflections on cinematic realism and the relation between the West and the non-West. Caminati advocates for a broader consideration of Western auteurism, not solely dedicated to narrative and documentary films produced in Europe, but to understanding how a larger, globalized vision informed each director's oeuvre. An intellectually rigorous and timely contribution, Traveling Auteurs expands our understanding of these Italian auteurs, drawing a broader geopolitical and aesthetic map than has previously been granted these directors."—Shelleen Greene, author of Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema