Bertellini will study the ways Italian neorealist filmmakers creatively reworked the social imagery of Depression-era American photography and photojournalism in the postwar era. In Italy and elsewhere, the appreciation of neorealism obscured the memory of its foreign sources of inspiration. Misrecognition begets misrecognition, he wrote. Cold War-era American film critics failed to acknowledge that the photographic offspring of Roosevelt-era progressivism had profoundly informed Italy’s most heralded, and unmistakably leftist, cinema. To Bertellini, this notable case of cross-cultural and cross-media spreading of images of poverty constitutes an example of a twice-disowned translation.

Text extracted from Jared Wadley's U Record article "Five U-M faculty members named Guggenheim Fellows," April 11, 2022

photo credit, Mary Lou Chlipala