Imagining: Serialità, narrazioni cinematografiche e fotografia nella pubblicità contemporanea, Stefania Antonioni (2016) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Published in Adriano D’Aloia, Francesco Parisi (eds.), Snapshot Culture. The Photographic Experience in the Post-Medium Age. In Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies, no. 1, Gennaio-Aprile 2016, pp. 87-92. The possibilities for recombination offered today by digital media tend to blur the boundaries between the stasis of photography and the movement of film. This redefinition suggests that photography no longer focuses exclusively on concepts such as instantaneity and stillness. The cinemagraph is a particular type of animated GIF that is almost entirely static, apart from some small details within the image that move subtly in an infinite loop. Its contemporary emergence seems closely connected with the present reconfiguration of the traditional categories of stillness and movement from the standpoint of interconnectedness and simultaneity. With the loop as its structural principle, based on repetition and brevity, the cinemagraph's iterative operation generates an analytical experience that suggests that it is impossible to look at the image's movement without simultaneously seeing its static 'counterpart', thus confusing notions such as instant and duration. The cinemagraph's loop also implies an 'archaeological' concept of animation that affords the viewer an exquisitely 'monstrative' pleasure that transcends any narrative quality of the image, recalling the attractive compulsion to repetition of pre-cinematic optical toys.
Call for Papers: Immagine. Note di storia del cinema 20 [ITA/ENG]
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: lisa.parolo@uniud.it diego.cavallotti@uniud.it 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.
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?
Studies in Documentary Film, 2022
Focusing on two teenagers grappling with the difficult reality of Naples, Agostino Ferrente’s "Selfie" (2019) is a powerful depiction of an entire community at a significant time, when limited perspectives and the pervasive presence of organized crime – with a value system that is intrinsic to the Camorra – deeply influence the present and the future of a generation. Shot by two 16-year-old boys from the Traiano district (Naples), the film is a powerful example of how self-representation can be a strategic and political tool to immerse in a life and its context. Within the framework of studies on first-person filmmaking and self- representation, and mobilizing concepts from the theory of mobile films, this article argues that, through the filming carried out by the two teenagers, Selfie is able to offer us a wider glimpse of a generation, of its everyday life and imagination, and of its perception of the contemporary media imaginary. I argue that, by employing a reflexive mode of documentary and the linguistic forms of the photographic selfie, the film engages the spectator in an intimate flow of images, questioning authorial instances, the relationship of the iGeneration with filming devices, and the different approaches and aesthetic choices that form the basis of every representation of reality. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/AEW8QQYIWUX8XUEISRWA/full?target=10.1080/17503280.2022.2078062
The relationship between film and philosophy has been a strong presence in theoretical debates since the 1950s. How can films as artefacts contribute to philosophical discourse? The aim of this paper is to explore the convergence between the recent works of a film director (Giuseppe Tornatore) and a philosopher (Maurizio Ferraris). Tornatore's "The Best Offer" is the story of a man who has feelings for female portraits as they were real women; Ferraris thinks that a work of art is a special kind of object that acts like a subject, whom he defines «The Automatic Girlfriend». "The Correspondence" is a romantic drama about a woman who keeps receiving messages, emails, packages from her lover, even after he has died; this issue is deeply connected with some aspects of the documentality theory put forward by Ferraris. The two films by Tornatore work as examples of Ferraris's philosophical questions, in a case of dialectical film philosophy.
FilmForum 2017 XV MAGIS Film Studies Spring School 29 March – 2 April, Gorizia
Nostalgic trends in contemporary TV series. One of the most effective insights of postmodern theory of narrative was that “nostalgia for the present” defined by Jameson in Postmodernism. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In the narrative arts there was a trend of works based on “list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities”; in the field of cinematographic productions, Jameson called this kind of movie “nostalgia film”, citing American Graffiti and Chinatown as exemplary cases of movies set in another era, as historical films, but that cannot be confused with them because the “nostalgia film” focuses on “imaginary style of real past”. In this trend there were also movies which connect past and present (Body Heat, Blue Velvet, Something Wild), showing “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past”. Three decades away from these insights we start again to talk about nostalgia as the hallmark of many contemporary narrative works, especially in the field of television series in which some scholars actually find a strong trend towards the nostalgic. Katherina Niemeyer and Daniela Wentz assert this kind of nostalgia consists of: “reconstructing and reimagining the past visually, discursively and historically by portraying and referring to the key political, social, economic and aesthetic elements of former times”. We can find examples of that sort both in American and European series such as Stranger Things, Mad Men, Narcos, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, Deutschland 83, Aquarius, 1992, The Get-Down, Manhattan and many others. This trend also includes television series set in the present or in the future, because these narratives display a vast amount of time, and try to establish the narrative world’s present on a complex backstory: Daredevil has a vast amount the time to go back and develop the relationship of the hero as a child with his father; Luke Cage can use an entire episode to narrate the origin of the superpowers of Luke. So rethink the postmodernism can mean exploring some intuitions and tools, pondering the topical relation between media and nostalgia.
Narrating Images. The Novel in the Time of Media Converge, by Bruno Pischedda
There is a famed and frequently quoted passage in Epic and No-vel in which the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, uses the terms «novel-ise» and «novel-isation» in order to refer to the overpo-wering embrace that the new narrative model in prose is exercising over other literary genres. From the mid-Eighteenth cen-tury tragedy, epic and, even, lyric poetry were becoming «freer and more plastic», Bakhtin observed. Their language was rene-wing itself and was making room for laughter, irony and a sense of parody. The highlighting of established rhetoric, and the drift that the former were undergoing towards deeper layers of verbal expressionism, accentuated «the problemridden aspect, the spe-cific semantic aperture and the real-life contact with the incomplete and ever-changing contemporary age».
Visual Studies, 2020
Rita Azevedo Gomes’ Correspondências (2016) draws on the epistolary correspondence between Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Jorge de Sena, as well as their respective poetic works, to build an epistolary-poetic, audio-visual and sensory-emotional kaleidoscope based on their reading, reciting and representation in different languages. In this way, the filmmaker generates a kind of phenomenology of reception that uses all the audiovisual possibilities: the different formats, digital and analogue; their multiple textures; and the diverse options of the texts enunciation. The experimentation with their different combinations, also using various image and sound effects, materialises in an epistolary-poetic essay film which reflects on the aesthetic experience and attains a hybrid, complex image defining contemporary cinema: between person and character, diegesis and extradiegesis, digital and analogue images, voice-in and voiceover, private and public, life and work, present and past, absence and presence, that is, between reproduction and representation. Azevedo’s essayistic reflection on creation, exile and absence is generated through parataxic thinking and interstitial thinking that create dialectical and symbolic sentence-images. Thus, Correspondências becomes an avant-garde expression of both contemporary epistolary cinema and contemporary essay film.