For more information on the published version, visit Intellect's Website. https://www.intellectbooks.com/paolo-sorrentinos-cinema-and-television

Marini-Maio, Nicoletta. ‘È solo l’alito di un vecchio’. Obscenity, Exchange Regimes, and the Catastrophe of Aging in Loro. In Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television, edited by Annachiara Mariani, 179-205. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2021.

Cinema has fashioned many figures from the protean form of Silvio Berlusconi: from Federico Fellini's prophetic Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred) (1986) to Franco Maresco's surreal Belluscone, una storia siciliana (Belluscone, a Sicilian Story) (2014), 34 films have narrated the personal and political story of the Mediaset founder. In this rich corpus, Berlusconi is at times evoked as the omnipresent symbol of power, often parodied, but for the most part is investigated, damned, deformed, deconstructed, captured, killed (and even frozen) and finally made spectral. The diptych Loro 1 and Loro 2 (2018a, 2018b) allow Paolo Sorrentino to add his own authorial flourish to these manifestations, which are symptomatic of the difficulties in representing a subject as puzzling and polysemous as Berlusconi.

Nicoletta Marini-Maio is a professor of Italian and Film Studies at Dickinson College.

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