Since it is home to the Roman enclave of Vatican City, Italy is frequently referred to as the religious centre for one billion Catholics worldwide. The Catholic Church is an intrinsic part of the socio-cultural fabric of the Italian peninsula and its people. Thus, in the last decade, various collections of essays, theses, and monographs have been published on the link between religion and Italian cinema. These have investigated the impact of Catholicism on everyday life in postwar Italy, focusing on the complex relationship between the Church and film, on the blatant Church censorship, and on the production companies that were strongly favoured by the Vatican and which attracted the major filmmakers of neorealism such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, and later auteurs such as Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pietro Germi, Ermanno Olmi, Marco Bellocchio, and Roberto Benigni. As Clodagh Brook states, little attention has been given, within the field of Italian Studies, to the interactions between contemporary filmmaking and religion. Moreover, recent critical studies of religion in film, directed towards American blockbusters such as Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels and Demons (2009), and Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ (2004), have neglected the array of Italian film productions. Brook's Screening Religions in Italy aims to fill this gap and to extend particular attention to religions other than Catholicism that are practised today by the inhabitants of the Italian nation, such as Islam, as Italy is home to an established 2.87 million Muslims, that is around 4.8 per cent of the population (p. 15).
Brook's welcome volume, which ‘addresses two questions: how Italian filmmaking reflects and constructs the continuing position of religion in the public sphere and why religion persists on Italian screens’ (p. 17) is divided into four chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of the mechanics of production and distribution of religious media messages; Chapter Two brings to the fore the fascinating iconography and rituals of Catholicism, which are more than mere spectacles and deeply rooted in the community regardless of individual beliefs and creeds. The author refers here to her interesting reversal of Grace Davie's ‘believing without belonging’ into ‘belonging without (necessarily) believing’ (p. 21). Unfortunately, this invaluable concept is never attentively analysed in the book. Chapter Three is dedicated to countercultural Catholic values in the public sphere, a study that seems to be mandatory in order to thoroughly understand why ‘Catholicism remains so deeply embedded in Italy's public sphere and why there is so little space for the peninsula's other religions to circulate’ (p. 67). Brook's focus on the character of the priest, as a David against Goliath figure or an ‘engaged hero’, regardless of the circumstances and reasons for the battle, is of paramount importance, as is her brief study of the charismatic figure of Saint Francis.
In Chapter Four, Brook investigates films dealing with the intricate web connecting the Vatican, the government, the occult, and the Mafia, underscoring some of the recent scandals in the Catholic Church, such as Giuseppe Ferrara's I banchieri di Dio (2002), Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (2008) and Roberto Faenza's La verità sta in cielo (2016). She also looks at films emphasising the clash between religious and secular stances, between religious policies and the wishes and needs of the individual, such as Giovanni Veronesi's Manuale d'Amore 2 (2007), Maria Sole Tognazzi's Io e lei (2015), and Luca Ragazzi and Gustav Hofer's Improvvisamente l'inverno scorso (2008). In this context, the author's sharp comparison between the Italian and the Anglophone market, which has been full of films about abuse by priests and nuns, is very appropriate. Though the author admits the difficulty in pinpointing the reason for the absence of such topics on the Italian screen, she proposes two plausible explanations: widespread resistance to washing one's dirty laundry in public about clerical activities and lack of attention to local controversial cases. In short, as Sorrentino says, ‘abuse is still something that takes place elsewhere’ (p. 112).
Chapter Five focuses on the position of minority religions in Italy, and particularly on the ways these are constructed in contemporary Italian production and how they appear in the public sphere. Brook analyses here not only the works of Italian directors but also of well-known ‘adopted’ filmmakers like Ferzan Özpetek, Mohsen Melliti and Fariborz Kamkari, all from Islamic backgrounds, as she is interested in the path to assimilation. A subsection of the chapter is also dedicated to horror and conspiracy thriller genres, though some of the films selected do not seem to fit these categories.
In spite of the introductory promising references to a corpus of more than two hundred fiction films, Brook returns constantly to two titles – Nanni Moretti's Habemus Papam and Paolo Sorrentino's Young Pope – for obvious reasons – but defeating the avowed purpose of the text. Religion in Italy is not only Catholicism. The casual interchangeability of nouns like religion, Catholicism, Christianity, morality, and values, is a bit unsettling. Overall, however, I would like to commend Brook's work for its humble and effective attempt to serve as a springboard for further research of a topic that should be closely studied and understood within the field of Italian Studies. Understanding a nation's religious identity and individual religious beliefs is indispensable to the interpretation of any cultural and societal contributions, whether collective or independent. I look forward to reading other works that connect religion with film and women's studies as well as with literature and fine arts. Meanwhile, Screening Religions in Italy is a great start for any scholar in European and Italian studies.
