Cinema and cultural studies

Film studies - "Italians in Italian Cinemas", 2020

Movies are a well-known universal and wonderful medium for both entertainment and art. In addition to this, movies are an incredibly concrete example of reality can be represented, yet shaped according to someone’s decisions, which are of course the director’s. When it comes to Film Studies, all narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political characteristics of the film can be questioned and analyzed. This is one of the most interesting characteristic of movies: they consist of numerous stimuli for teaching cultural behaviors, attitudes or language uses. This Topic Exploration paper aims to present how “Italianity” can be represented in cinema. In order to proceed with such investigation on what can be regarded as concrete and representative examples of “Italianly-connotated” behaviors, identities and values, some scenes belonging to Roberto Benigni’s (1952) film production present will be taken into account. The conclusion of the author’s is that taking advantage of such stimulating and rich cultural resources like films for future language and culture teaching contexts cannot but be incredibly compelling to present days’ students, now more than ever.

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.

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).

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28.1, pp. 73-77, 2008

2019

Gli atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi "Cinema e identità italiana" (Roma, 28-29 dicembre 2017) mettono in luce la molteplicità delle prospettive con cui può essere affrontato il problema dell'identità nazionale, in un arco temporale che va dai primordi del cinema fino alla contemporaneità. Un gran numero di studiosi di varia età e provenienza si misura con metodologie e punti di vista differenti, intrecciando le dinamiche cinematografiche con la storia culturale del Paese e con il più vasto panorama intermediale.

The questions in this Q+A were asked by Frank Burke (Queen's University, Ontario) for a roundtable piece in a forthcoming companion to Italian cinema studies that Frank is editing for Blackwell. Frank will be able to use only a small proportion of my responses so I am making the complete text available here.

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'.

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?

It is a difficult and stimulating challenge which is waiting for cultural operators. Difficult, because they have to face the hard work of cleaning up the social fabric of the peninsula after decades of cultural degradation identified mostly in this aberrant, shameful phenomenon of lawlessness, corruption, ignorance, vulgarity and other things that Berlusconism has created, fuelled and continues to fuel (unfortunately, the phenomenon is not yet finished). Specifically, one of the biggest difficulties is to create the conditions for making "new look" of the Italian audience and television viewers, healing them from the worst of the "television world"the thirty years of Berlusconi. Stimulating, because each transition and transformation in the history of a country, can be a prevision of something better or unfortunately even of the worst. It's hard to imagine anything worse than living under the regime media's Anointed Lord and his minions in thirty years of this worsening and squalor. In our modest opinion, the prospects of cultural operators should follow two directions: one targeted to the development and actualizatiion of memory, which is the cultural heritage of the past. The other is to turn into offering to public, in an appropriate time and manner, those works and authors characterize the features of this but in our country have so far been marginalized or ignored by the market as the culture industry. As for the cinema and audiovisual is unnecessary to remember which artistic heritage of Italy retain it's archives (film library) wich expressive richness. Aesthetic and narrative has characterized our films mainly from the 40s to the 80s film and how this heritage continues to be ignored or relegated to the margins by the most scandalous TV listings.