The Slanted Mirror: Silent Cinema Looks at Itself, (Pordenone Film Festival, GCM2019 catalogue)

Archivos de la Filmoteca, 1997

Review essay of new books by Mannoni, Pesenti Campagnoni, Barnes, Lange-Fuchs, Guerin, Leuba, others. Covers early cinema and pre-cinema topics and specifically makes the point that the historical dispute is not about who is the true inventor of the cinema, but rather what is the true definition of a moving picture.

2017

This collection is the first to bring together scholars to explore the ways in which various people and groups in Italian society reacted to the advent of cinema. Looking at the responses of writers, scholars, clergymen, psychologists, philosophers, members of parliament, and more, the pieces collected here from that period show how Italians developed a common language to describe and discuss this invention that quickly exceeded all expectations and transcended existing categories of thought and artistic forms. The result is a close-up picture of a culture in transition, dealing with a 'scandalous' new technology that appeared poised to thoroughly change everyday life.

Linguistics and Culture Review, 2021

The paper is devoted to the problems of director's self-fulfilment in the cinematograph of New Hollywood. The study examines such a unique phenomenon of the artistic culture of the 20th century as American author's cinematograph. The relevance of this study is determined by the trends in the development of New Hollywood, which have radically changed the essence of modern cinematograph. The purpose of the study is to identify the specifics of New Hollywood cinema, which resonated in the work of modern Hollywood directors as an influential and competitive area. The main emphasis in this study is placed on the attempts of both historians and film theorists, as well as practitioners themselves to find clear boundaries between American independent and mass Hollywood cinematograph, as well as on the reasons why film critics and culturologists consider a particular American film to be independent, author's, or mass cinema (the so-called mainstream). At the same time, the main a...

2000

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.

The article provides an analysis of media culture in the former Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. It describes the way how media reflected their own past in the 1930s, focusing on coming of film sound and related discourse about the heritage of silent cinema and the need to establish national film archive.

2016