The ‘primal scene’: Memory, redemption and ‘woman’ in the films of Paolo Sorrentino
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the representation of gender and the marginalization of the female subject in the films of Paolo Sorrentino – especially La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013) and Youth (2015) – and the TV series The Young Pope (2016), to better understand the significance of ‘woman’ for the cinematic and mnemic constitution of the Sorrentinian subject. I situate Sorrentino’s work in the context of the post-war Italian, European and now transnational art cinemas, and the new era of prestige television. Finally, in a shift from the desiring and objectifying intra-diegetic gaze to what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in the context of disability studies calls ‘the stare’, I briefly analyse Sorrentino’s fascination with non-normative identities whose on-screen function as locus of a radical alterity serves in the end to throw an even sharper, more ironic light upon the masculine subject at the centre of each story. From film to film to TV series the treatment of gender grows increasingly complex, particularly with respect to the nexus of memory and whatever secular or post-secular redemption awaits the protagonist.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".