What Makes a Movie Italian-American?
A cliché of American culture is the metaphor of the melting-pot –a tendency for the children of foreign-born American citizens to blend in, to intermarry with other ethnicities, producing a kind of natural-selection hybrid. In actuality, many ethnic subcultures have retained their separate identities, and the result has been a patchwork quilt of diversity, a source of considerable cultural richness in the United States. A social culture encompasses the traditions, institutions, arts, myths, and beliefs that are characteristic of a given community or population. Any film that is about a certain culture, whether it is deliberate or not, could be considered ethnic. Italian-American films are movies that show the culture of Italian-Americans; the traditions and values that have gone from generation to generation descended from Old Italy.
The Topics of Italian-American Movies
When most people think of Italian-Americans they think of the Mafia. It is as though the world has been taught to automatically assume that all those living in America of Italian descent are gangsters, demonstrating the conditioned reflexes that Pavlov studied. It is a negative evolution that will hopefully change