interview with
catherine O'Rawe
You did your undergraduate degree at Oxford University, did you get the opportunity to study much cinema while you were there?
I studied no cinema or popular culture at all while I was there. I did all of that much later. Everything we did at Oxford was literature, starting at Dante and ending around 1950. I came out of my degree with very little knowledge of modern Italy. I think Oxford is still pretty traditional in that sense while here at Bristol, we like the fact that we have more of a range and can study anything from Renaissance literature to contemporary comedy.
What led you to get into cinema in the end?
I’d always loved cinema and I grew up watching a lot of films, especially black and white films, but I never thought it would be part of my academic work, especially when I was an undergraduate! Even when I was doing my PhD at Cambridge, which was on literature, I didn’t realise that cinema was something I could move into. While I was at Cambridge I started doing some undergraduate teaching on some of their courses that involved cinema – classic stuff, like Fellini or Rossellini – which is what got me into thinking about film from an academic perspective. I wrote my first piece on film, on adaptation, specifically, then. My PhD was on the Italian author Luigi Pirandello and I wrote a piece on a 1932 Hollywood adaptation of one of his plays. That really got me into exchanges between Europe and Hollywood and also star studies. I was quite lucky because in my first academic job at Exeter University, we had a lot of dialogue with people in film studies who were working on popular cinema, stars and cultural studies. That was really when I realised you could work on whatever you liked!
Having studied both literature and film a great deal, do you feel that film is becoming more relevant for studying modern Italy than literature? Does television have a role to play here?
I think so. TV and film are the dominant cultural forms over there. That’s partly why I find them so interesting; it’s a real way into the culture and you can talk to a lot of people about it. If you’re giving a paper on a film or a TV programme in Italy, everyone has something to say, while if you were to talk about an author, even a contemporary author, a lot of people would not have read their work and fewer people would have something to say about it. I think one of the most difficult things for us, by which I mean people from the UK who work on contemporary Italian popular culture, it’s difficult to get the same cultural knowledge that Italians have. In Italy, they grew up watching TV and listening to music, and we’re coming from a different angle with less knowledge. An Italian trying to find out more about British popular culture is never going to have the same depth of cultural knowledge as you or me.
I studied no cinema or popular culture at all while I was there. I did all of that much later. Everything we did at Oxford was literature, starting at Dante and ending around 1950. I came out of my degree with very little knowledge of modern Italy. I think Oxford is still pretty traditional in that sense while here at Bristol, we like the fact that we have more of a range and can study anything from Renaissance literature to contemporary comedy.
What led you to get into cinema in the end?
I’d always loved cinema and I grew up watching a lot of films, especially black and white films, but I never thought it would be part of my academic work, especially when I was an undergraduate! Even when I was doing my PhD at Cambridge, which was on literature, I didn’t realise that cinema was something I could move into. While I was at Cambridge I started doing some undergraduate teaching on some of their courses that involved cinema – classic stuff, like Fellini or Rossellini – which is what got me into thinking about film from an academic perspective. I wrote my first piece on film, on adaptation, specifically, then. My PhD was on the Italian author Luigi Pirandello and I wrote a piece on a 1932 Hollywood adaptation of one of his plays. That really got me into exchanges between Europe and Hollywood and also star studies. I was quite lucky because in my first academic job at Exeter University, we had a lot of dialogue with people in film studies who were working on popular cinema, stars and cultural studies. That was really when I realised you could work on whatever you liked!
il dipartimento
Having studied both literature and film a great deal, do you feel that film is becoming more relevant for studying modern Italy than literature? Does television have a role to play here?
I think so. TV and film are the dominant cultural forms over there. That’s partly why I find them so interesting; it’s a real way into the culture and you can talk to a lot of people about it. If you’re giving a paper on a film or a TV programme in Italy, everyone has something to say, while if you were to talk about an author, even a contemporary author, a lot of people would not have read their work and fewer people would have something to say about it. I think one of the most difficult things for us, by which I mean people from the UK who work on contemporary Italian popular culture, it’s difficult to get the same cultural knowledge that Italians have. In Italy, they grew up watching TV and listening to music, and we’re coming from a different angle with less knowledge. An Italian trying to find out more about British popular culture is never going to have the same depth of cultural knowledge as you or me.