Investigating the ‘Italy and the mafia’ equation in audiovisual narratives

In today’s saturated media landscape, the cinematographic representations of minorities still play an important role in constructing identity (Ross 2019). A case in point is the American cinema which, since its inception, has highly contributed to shaping society’s (mis) perceptions of ethnic group’s identity, particularly of Italian Americans which have long been one of the most important and influential groups represented onscreen (Erigha 2005). The varied representations of Italian (Americans) mobsters that since the 1906 American silent film ‘The Black Hand: True Story of a Recent Occurrence in the Italian Quarter of New York’ have mushroomed on screens, have contributed to typecasting certain groups, and to generating and then reinforcing cliched and inappropriate ethnic profiling (Mastro 2015). This paper investigates the resulting pervasiveness of stereotyped representations of Italianicity across media formats (Cavaliere 2010, 2012), with a major focus on Mafia screen representations, such as ‘The Godfather’ trilogy, TV series like ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and ‘The Sopranos’, and new portrayals of Camorra and its gangsters, as the one brought about in Gomorrah. More specifically, this study aims to highlight how Mafia and Camorra audiovisual narratives, by drawing upon different screen semiotic modes, interacted with, and contributed towards spreading historically archived stereotypes and socially-shared ‘psychollages’ (Kelly1991; Mancuso 2000).