Lone Scherfig's "Italian for Beginners"

2007

From the beginning of its conception Dogma 95 manifesto incited several debates related with cinema and other realms of culture. The manifesto became a motivation for a series of internationally acclaimed Danish films alongside it spurred many independent filmmakers from all around of the world. Analyzing the emergence, institutionalization and expansion of the Dogma concept offers many possibilities in understanding the zeitgeist of the last decade of the longest century of history. Politics and aesthetics always went hand in hand in the Dogma program. The main concern of the manifesto was the political economy of filmmaking. Dogma 95 manifesto definitely offered a new filmmaking strategy apart from Hollywood whose visual ideology is determined by the oligopolistic market and international capital structures. Also within the context of the European cinema the Dogma movement was different since it did not closeted itself within a debate between globalization and national cultures. Following Lefebvre's ideas one may argue that Dogma 95 manifesto proposed to construct a new social space for filmmaking which is more inclusive and democratic. Even though the film aesthetics seems to be denied in the manifesto, an analysis based upon the premises of the performance theory shows us the fact that Dogma 95 manifesto proposed a frame within which the political criticism is included, and this frame is not exempt from the realm of aesthetics. Lars von Trier's Idiots can be considered as a critical account on the utopian Dogma project. Through its self reflexivity, inclusive yet provocative nature Dogma 95 manifesto spurs an intellectual interrogation about the very basics and the future of cinema.

Scandinavian Studies, 2011

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?

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The Celebration: Analyzing realism in Dogme 95 Manifesto filmBelieving that the film industry is getting worse by utilizing simple plots and only emphasizing on the editing and the cosmetics, European filmmakers and theorists make their own style of realistic film movements as a reaction to Hollywood’s mainstream filmmaking style. One of which is the famed Dogme 95 Manifesto film movement in Denmark propagated by Lars von Trier. Dogme 95 Manifesto is a set of rules that needs to be followed by filmmakers in order to make a Dogme film. It is believed that by following this rule will restrain the filmmakers’ creativity, focusing more on the realism inside the film, and “purifying” the film industry. In this paper, we analyze realism in Dogme 95 through one of its successful milestones: The Celebration by Thomas Vinterburg through its cinematography and Dogme 95 rules within the film. We argue that as opposed to bringing realistic images on the screen, The Celebration brings atmospheri...

The Italianist , 2020

This article outlines the current state of videographic criticism with special reference to the Italian Studies context, and goes on to report on the experience of teaching our seminar, ‘Italian Film and Television and Videographic Criticism’, at The Ohio State University. Our sense is that videographic criticism is an exciting opportunity for students and scholars of the Italian context, for at least three reasons. The first is because so much videographic activity has focused on anglophone material while what work there is on Italy has tended to focus on male auteurs, exportable filone cinema, and neorealism. This means that our disciplinary expertise on topics less familiar to mainstream and cult cinephilia has the chance to find novel expression in videographic form and to fill some glaring gaps. Secondly, videographic criticism can help to attract students: the chance to make (as well as to study) audiovisual essays is an appealing one for many and may allow students to find an audience for their work more readily than for the standard prose paper. Thirdly, the practice of videographic criticism can allow us to communicate and publicise our work more effectively beyond the academy, again potentially increasing enrolments but also helping to engage communities and constituencies without easy access to our prose scholarship.

Blackwell’s Companion to Nordic Cinema , 2016

19 Nearly 20 years after the issuing of the Dogme 95 manifesto and the "Vow of Chastity," it may at times be difficult to see the originality and audacity of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's movement. Dogme 95 challenged many pre-conceptions about European art cinema and feature filmmaking at the fin du siècle, mobilized both publicity and branding as means of bringing a minor national cinema to the forefront of film culture, combined a prescience about the possibilities of digital technology and nostalgia for earlier European waves and analogue indexicality, and revitalized the very Euro nouvelle vague cinematic traditions that it placed itself in relation to as a call-to-arms. My aim in this chapter is to delineate some of these strands of thought, examining Dogme 95 as the culmination of the European art cinema traditions born out of the end of World War II, in order to consider some of the most salient arguments that have been made about the movement, the films, their impact, and the movement's legacy. Some of these topics include: the roles of rule following and practitioner's agency; Dogme 95's influence on Danish and Nordic filmmaking in subsequent years, especially but not limited to the works of Lars von Trier; Dogme's influence on other, concurrent and post-Dogme 95 European film movements; and the rise of digital aesthetics as a key component of independent cinema. Cinephilia, Death, and Nostalgia Dogme 95 began as a provocation by von Trier and Vinterberg during the celebrations of cinema's centenary, at a time when Susan Sontag famously claimed that the centenary of cinema marked its imminent passing, stating "cinema's hundred years appear to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories, and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline"

The editorial thanks Prof Millicent Marcus of Yale for her work on the Film Issue since its founding in 2009, and goes on to discuss the condition of Italian cinema and media studies, making a polemical call for 'permanent revolution'.

CALL FOR PAPERS Immagine, n. 20, (December 2019) New Excavations: non-theatrical and non-broadcast heritage in Italy (1965-1995) Edited by Diego Cavallotti, Lisa Parolo In the last decade, researches on amateur cinema and, more broadly, on those audiovisual productions not intended for theatrical release, have been focused on the development of a specific object of study, that is to say, the very concept of ‘non-theatrical’ (Streible, Roepke, Mebold 2007). From the publication of the special Film History (2007) curated by Streible, Roepke e Mebold, this notion has become a “semantic container” for different instances such as amateur films, home movies, educational films, useful films (see also Acland, Wasson 2011), industrial films and those underground, experimental and artistic films screened, for example, in exhibiting spaces, art galleries, cinema co-ops, classrooms, or in-home events (Streible, Roepke, Mebold 2007, 342). Nonetheless, while attempting to expand the concept’s range, its productiveness was neglected to be verified, especially concerning the “spaces of technological transition,” which characterized the last part of the XXth century. In fact, if we focus on the transition period between film and video technologies – which started at the end of the Sixties and consolidated during the Eighties – the non-theatrical notion appears insufficient and lacking: it looks necessary to add a reference to the video-analogon of the non-theatrical, the non-broadcast. By using this concept, we mean to address the video production not intended for televisual transmission: narrowcast videos, experimental and artistic videos, amateur videos, home videos (in the double meaning of family video and home video editions of theatrical films), community videos, etc. A similar transition is further modified by the arrival of the digital video, and the beginning of a new phase of overlapping technological networks in the middle of the Nineties. Starting from this perspective, therefore, this call-for-papers aims to investigate these domains – the non-theatrical and the non-broadcast – within different production and consumption contexts, in the times comprised between the emergence of the analog video and that of the digital video: from home movies to cine-clubs (for example, in Italy, in 1982, FEDIC included analog video works in the official selection for the Montecatini Festival), from militant actions to social movements (for example, the Collettivo Cinema Militante of the Seventies), and finally to experimental audiovisual productions. In this regard, we invite submissions directed towards the following topics: 1) The historiographical approach towards non-theatrical, non-broadcast productions and their interrelations. 2) Non-theatrical and Non-broadcast: national maps and genealogies. 3) Non-theatrical and non-broadcast technologies and practices in Italy. 4) Non-theatrical and non-broadcast and the archive: new collections, new preservation frameworks. 5) The Italian society and the new technological networks: the transition towards “the video society.” 6) Productive and distributive structures for non-theatrical and non-broadcast in Italy. Abstracts, either in Italian or English (max. 250 words) to be submitted no later than 25 April 2019 to: [email protected] [email protected] Notification of acceptance due by 5 May 2019. Articles (5-6,000 words max.) can be submitted in Italian, French or English, by 26 August 2019. Final publication expected by December 2019.