La ragazza sul divano

Un cineasta, un filosofo e due film che sembrano altrettanti adattamenti di saggi di estetica e ontologia della realtà sociale. Il cineasta è Giuseppe Tornatore, il filosofo è Maurizio Ferraris, i film sono La migliore offerta (2013) e La corrispondenza (2016), i saggi sono La fidanzata automatica (2007) e Documentalità (2009). Una parte della riflessione della filosofia dell’arte è incentrata sul riconoscimento dell’opera e sul suo funzionamento all’interno della convergenza fra intenzionalità e atteggiamento artistici. Il primo dei due saggi di Maurizio Ferraris sopracitati (La fidanzata automatica) crea un’analogia fra un’opera d’arte e una persona: l’opera è un atto iscritto (funziona come un documento) capace di provocare sentimenti. Il film di Giuseppe Tornatore narrativizza il concetto e lo distende lungo un arco di trasformazione del personaggio, un battitore d’asta che nel primo atto del film utilizza l’opera d’arte come una fidanzata, per poi sostituire le opere con una fidanzata in carne e ossa, che però si rivela essere meno vera (e meno fidanzata) dell’arte stessa. La corrispondenza si inserisce nel quadro più ampio della documentalità secondo Ferraris: tutte le opere generano sentimenti e sono atti iscritti, ma non tutti gli atti iscritti che generano sentimenti sono opere d’arte. L’atto iscritto, nel film di Tornatore, sostituisce la relazione in presenza, creando un “fidanzato automatico” che non è un’opera d’arte: un astrofisico e una sua ex studentessa vivono una relazione sentimentale molto profonda, sebbene mediata per la maggior del tempo da telefono e posta elettronica, a causa della distanza geografica che li separa; la morte dell’uomo non interrompe la relazione, perché l’insieme delle scritture da lui preconfigurate sostituiscono la persona. I due film di Tornatore costituiscono in tal senso un’esemplificazione e un rilancio delle questioni filosofiche poste da Ferraris, a partire da una domanda drammaturgica che rimanda al test di Turing: se la scrittura funziona come una persona, al punto da sostituirla, come si distingue la scrittura dalla persona stessa?

Olga V. Solovieva, 2019

Fabio Mauri’s performance Intellettuale, set in the context of the opening of Leone Pancaldi’s new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, summed up a life-long collaboration and controversy between Pasolini and Mauri about the fate of Western art after World War II. Putting this performance in dialogue with Pancaldi’s building, this article discusses Pasolini’s and Mauri’s careers in the light of their aesthetic and philosophical divergences and convergences. In the context of Pancaldi’s building, Intellettuale throws into relief the cultural and ideological project of Pasolini’s film-making and its relation to the body art of the 1960s-70s.

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 2018

At the 2017 Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, we watched the newly restored version of the Film d'Arte Italiana production La tragica fine di Caligula, imperator (Ugo Falena 1918), in which, oddly enough, the evil emperor is not very dominant and only appears in a few closer shots. Instead, prominently displayed is a modest, young Christian girl, who, when forced by the emperor (about two-thirds of the way into the film), dances during a lavish banquet. She starts moderately in a style halfway between archaic and modern, reminding us of Isadora Duncan's 'Greek' dances. Her dance becomes wilder and wilder, 'orgiastic' and Dionysian, one could say. At the climax, the girl collapses in fatigue. It is clear the film's plot is staged to enable this very dance scene. Without it, the film is tame, but the dance scene transforms the film into something rarely seen. The actress herself was a famous dancer, Stacia Napierkowska, who, earlier often acted in Pathe´Fre`res films (this is the founding company of Film d'Arte Italiana). In these films, plots contained dance scenes that justified the display of Napierkowska's dancing talents. From the Italian folkloristic dances recorded by Biograph and others, the tango craze of the early 1910s as expressed in films such as Kri Kri e il tango and Sangue bleu, the oriental dances connected to popular female characters such as Salome´, to the appropriation in film of the modern dance by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, Italian silent cinema has represented dance in a variety of non-fiction and fiction films. So it is remarkable that a book dedicated to this theme-Elisa Uffreduzzi's La danza nel cinema muto italiano-only appears in 2017. In his introduction to the book, Silvio Alovisio explains that for a long period, scholars focused on the context of Italian silent film, undervaluing the aesthetic analysis of these films. In particular, they undervalued the cross-medial roots of this aesthetic. As he further explains, the lack of access to early film was also a stumbling block for decades and partly still is. Today, we well realize the losses of Italy's film heritage, in particular for the silent era. Moreover, research has long focused on what we might term a 'canonical selection' of films. This obstructs insight into the broader panorama of Italian silent film. It is Uffreduzzi's merit to not only start from this broader panorama (and it is this which frames her research question), but to embed her analysis of over 50 Italian silent dance films (that is, films where dance is important) within a

Midwest Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, 5 November 2010.

Session A 1. Teatralizzazione di un romanzo: i costumi di scena degli Indifferenti di Moravia Chiara De Santi, SUNY Fredonia 2. Pasolini e lo strappo nella coscienza dello spettatore Fulvio Orsitto, California State Univerisity-Chico 3. Lina Wertmüller regista-burattinaia Federico Pacchioni, University of Connecticut-Storrs Session B 4. Manzoni’s Count of Carmagnola and Kleist’s Prince of Homburg: History between Fiction and Factuality Maria Giulia Carone, University of Wisconsin-Madison 5. Teatro e teatralità nella poesia del primo Palazzeschi Daniele Fioretti, University of Wisconsin Madison 6. Mario Luzi’s Plays: A Plurality of Voices Ernesto Livorni, University of Wisconsin-Madison Session C 7. Distinctive Nature of Masques of Commedia dell’Arte in their Relationship with Food in 18th Century Paola Monte, Royal Holloway, University of London 8. Arlecchino is Lying: Deconstructing Goldoni’s II bugiardo Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College 9. The Spectator in Dario Fo’s Performances: From the Foyer to the Post-Performance Debates Marco Valleriani, Royal Holloway, University of London

Performing New Media, 1890-1915, 2014

Italian Industrial Literature and Film, Edited by C. Baghetti, J. Carter and L. Marmo, Peter Lang, Oxford-New York, 2021

This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first article of the postwar Italian Constitution states that the Republic is founded on labor. Forces across the political spectrum, from Catholic to communist, invested labor with the power to build a new national community after Fascism and war. The 1950s-1970s saw dramatic transformations, in economic, social and cultural terms, as labor moved from agriculture to industry and a whole generation of Italian writers and filmmakers used literature and cinema to interpretand influence-these changes and to capture the new experiences of industrial labor. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation's work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors. Carlo Baghetti is a postdoctoral fellow at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid (École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques). He holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Aix-Marseille Université and l'Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma. He is the editor of Il lavoro raccontato. Studi su letteratura e cinema italiani dal postmodernismo all'ipermodernismo (2020) and a special issue of Costellazioni (2020) dedicated to representations of work in Europe. Jim Carter is Lecturer of Italian at Boston University. His articles on Italian industrial culture, especially at the Olivetti company, have appeared in journals like Modern Italy and Italian Culture. In 2018-2019, he won a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Lorenzo Marmo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Universitas Mercatorum and also teaches at the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale." In 2017, he was Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo melodramma noir (2018).

Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 2012