Film, Memory and Nostalgia in 'Cinema Paradiso' (Film as Text)

Shirley Law explores two parallel stories of 'Cinema Paradiso'. The film uses flashback and other conventional narrative elements to tell the quasi-autobiographical story of the central character. But it also works as a metafilm and metafiction, employing sophisticated self-reflexive devices to tell a micro-historical story about film, film spectatorship, and its relationship to modern Sicilian life.