This book is about a particular moment in the history of Italian cinema when the understanding of what it is to be a man undergoes a radical redefinition. Much has been written about experiences of male disempowerment and vulnerability in film, the emphasis of this scholarship invariably being either on representations of scarred, damaged male bodies or on accounts of male suffering and loss. Less has been written about the opportunities that cinema provides for considering masculinity in relation to an experience of transformation. It is not just that change, with its complexities and contradictions, is difficult to locate and observe. The problem is how the idea of change itself seems to raise immediate suspicion, if not blatant pessimism. Paul Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington, for example, have argued that the image of a new, transformed cinematic man, beyond the oppressive constraints of patriarchy, may merely represent ‘a repositioning or realignment with patriarchal power structures’. Accepting the meaning of change as ‘the process of becoming something different’, one could argue that in studies of masculinity in film too much attention has been paid to considerations about the expected end result (a fully formed new masculinity), rather than to the intricacies of the very process of becoming something different. To consider change does not necessarily mean looking at where this change has already run its course. It also makes sense to pay attention to the points where the change appears less than smooth and where walls hampering the possibility for further transformation spring up. Equally, it may be worth considering the spaces of desire where change has not yet occurred. This is where unfulfilled possibilities for transformation appear most visible and where the potential for becoming something different may be most promising.

Masculinity and Italian Cinema examines one of the most complex and, oddly, under-examined periods in the history of Italian cinema. The 1970s were a decade of innovation and challenging work for Italian filmmakers, one that was marked by radicalism and heated debates about the function of cinema as a political medium and as a mass cultural phenomenon. During these years, Italian cinema experienced a proliferation of sexualised images as never before.