Jonas Mekas, Serpentine Gallery, London, 5 December 2012-27 January 2013

Jonas Mekas turned ninety on 25 December 2012, and the sixty-year career of the Lithuanian-born artist, poet and filmmaker has been at the centre of several events, talks, screenings and exhibitions organised in London and Paris. The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the BFI Southbank in London both presented screenings of Mekas’s older and recent works, and the London Serpentine Gallery programmed a series of seminars and films, coinciding with a central solo show on the life and work of the filmmaker. The Serpentine Gallery presents different elements of the filmmaker’s personal story—such as photographs, printed stills, videos, writing, documents, a selection of poems translated from the Lithuanian, a display of Bolex cameras and even a copy of Mekas’s passport—which are put together in an extensive collage

Performing Authorship: Self-inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema, by Cecilia Sayad

The issue of authorship has been widely discussed in Film Studies. Through phases of critical idealisation, abstraction and even rejection, the figure of the author has attracted sustained interest in film theory debates, giving rise to, for instance, the well-known reflections of the French politique des auteurs, or Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory; and it has survived until today, as evidenced by the recent publication of several contributions, including those by Paisley Livingston, Aaron Meskin, and Berys Gaut. If the “romantic model” looked at the author as the heart of the text, the poststructural revision has focused, to the contrary, on the author’s absence; the theory of the death of the author seemed to establish a “desubjectification”, which was deemed necessary to the analysis of every work of art, as in the contributions of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 16 April-22 June 2014

“Le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus”: this is how Philippe Dubois (5) describes the mysterious figure of Chris Marker, the French filmmaker recently deceased and celebrated in 2014 with a solo exhibition held at the London Whitechapel Gallery. Marker died on 29 July 2012, at the considerable age of 91, and yet his loss has left a feeling of emptiness in the world of cinema and among his admirers. Perhaps this is because during his life the director was always surrounded by an aura of mystery. Marker always looked for anonymity, resisting the exposition of his personal image. His biographical data, along with his real name (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) and the date and place of his birth, are confusing and sometimes contradictory. It is thus possible to talk of a “mystère Marker”, with reference both to the filmmaker’s tendency towards invisibility and to a sort of corresponding silence about him from the critics (Perniola 10)

Sguardi in conflitto: scrittura femminile e memoria collettiva nel documentario italiano contemporaneo

This article aims to analyse how, in recent decades, the documentary has been the preferred space for the affirmation of new female voices in Italy, especially through the use of hybrid practices that include the combination of found footage, amateur film, and home movie. While the contemporary audio-visual scenario is increasingly shifting to autobiography, female writing in Italian documentaries participates in the same focus on subjectivity, nevertheless as an “intersubjective” construction. Autogynography structures relational writing, in which the “we” of the narrator's voice has the primary purpose of building a collective identity, rather than affirming a singularity as in the conventional autobiography

Il documentario italiano: modelli, poetiche, esiti

This issue investigates the Italian documentary film with particular attention to the contemporary production. In particular, it maps some of the main influences that have characterized and that characterize today the Italian documentary, analysing the films of Michelangelo Frammartino, Alina Marazzi, Sabina Guzzanti and Silvio Soldini, among others

"Aging", sessualità e cinema nella cultura italiana del secondo dopoguerra

Special issue on "aging" and sexuality in the Italian culture

Stelle di mezzo secolo: divismo e rappresentazione della sessualità nel cinema italiano (1948-1978)

Special issue on Italian stardom and sexuality