An ontological approach to the study of European popular culture

Like any other field of contemporary scholarly research, the Humanities in general, and Cultural Studies in particular are today confronted with the challenges of complexity at an unprecedented scale. What has been described as the \u201castonishing growth\u201d of academic publications worldwide is paralleled by a similar proliferation of browsable online databases, like digital archives, collections and catalogues, which offer access to an immense and continuously increasing volume of virtually interesting research material, stored in the form of information bytes. As we discussed in Deliverable 2.1, \u201cSorting out the archive for the study of European popular culture\u201d, the problem of how to cope with such an unseizable of virtually relevant sources of evidence is all the more sensible in the case of a project like DETECt, which deals with one of the most prolific narrative genres of contemporary media production, that is, the European crime narrative genre. Not only an exhaustive catalogue of this production could easily count\u2014especially when considered in all of its transnational scope\u2014in thousands of thousands, and even\u2014in historical perspective\u2014millions of items, but the transdisciplinary scope of the studies it has inspired has produced a wealth of research in many domains of knowledge. These difficult challenges make DETECt an ideal laboratory for experimenting new methods to manage complexity in a transnational/transcultural research environment. This methodological experimentation aims to respond to the problem of how to generate effective syntheses of portions and/or aspects of a given knowledge domain in a context of information overload. To this purpose, the ontological approach chosen by DETECt focuses on the application of knowledge mapping techniques to encourage the formulation of partial knowledge syntheses within a \u201crealist\u201d, and even \u201cpragmatic\u201d theoretical framework

Kaleidoscope: Women and Cinematic Change from the Silent Era to Now

Presentation of the volume's contents

Dal cinema alla rete. Ovvero: dal cinema al cinema

Un'analisi delle condizioni di esistenza del cinema nell'epoca della sua de-istituzionalizzazione, sullo sfondo della diffusione dei media digitali

Guy Debord, il suo cinema, il cinema del suo tempo

L\u2019articolo esamina la relazione di Guy Debord con il cinema del suo tempo, e in particolare con gli autori della Nouvelle Vague. L\u2019esordio di Debord nel cinema nel 1951 \ue8 contemporaneo alla nascita dei Cahiers du cin\ue9ma e ai primi passi di Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard e degli altri \u201cgiovani turchi\u201d nella critica cinematografica. Nel cortometraggio del 1959 Sur le passage de quelques personnes \ue0 travers une assez courte unit\ue9 de temps, Debord identifica chiaramente nel cinema d\u2019autore, e in particolare nella sua retorica del piano-sequenza, un\u2019immagine falsa della libert\ue0, uno spettacolo inautentico della vita rappresentato su un piano puramente estetico. La sua critica della cosiddetta \u201cpolitica degli autori\u201d trova il suo bersaglio privilegiato nella figura di Godard. Il saggio discute le divergenze tra la visione politica di Debord e l\u2019approccio cinefilo di Godard attraverso l\u2019analisi di tre articoli pubblicati tra il 1962 e il 1969

Il cinema crudele di Patrizia Vicinelli

Patrizia Vicinelli \ue8 ancora oggi quasi sconosciuta. Eppure negli ambienti \u2013 sempre troppo poco frequentati \u2013 della ricerca poetica, Vicinelli \ue8 da tempo considerata una delle voci liriche pi\uf9 alte del secondo Novecento italiano, una poeta di formidabile potenza espressiva. A lungo ignorata dalla critica mainstream, la sua opera ribelle, provocatoria, corrosiva, \ue8 oggi al centro di una riscoperta che non \ue8 solo storiografica, ma che interessa tanti giovani poeti (e poete), che vi riconoscono una lezione tecnica magistrale. Anche meno noto della sua straordinaria poesia \ue8 il suo rapporto con il cinema. Che tuttavia fu intenso e continuativo, segnato da numerose relazioni amicali e affettive con cineasti della scena sperimentale. Interrogare le tracce lasciate da Patrizia Vicinelli nel cinema significa scoprire una presenza tutt'altro che occasionale e tesa al contrario a un uso consapevole del mezzo, soprattutto nel senso di una consapevole proiezione della propria sensibilit\ue0 e della propria immagine. Ci\uf2 equivale a dire che \ue8 possibile avvicinare i film a cui collabor\uf2 per ricavarne la traccia di una poetica che -- se non \ue8 in prima istanza specificamente cinematografica-- ritrova per\uf2 il cinema in un punto decisivo della sua elaborazione: il punto nel quale la poesia come forma di espressione individuale viene a coincidere direttamente con la vita e, pi\uf9 esattamente, con la vita come esperienza sociale, relazionale e collettiva

Speaking Silently: Women's Voices in Early Italian Film Culture

A question we believe it is time to ask in feminist \ufb01lm studies is: why are women\u2019s names so rare in the history of \ufb01lm theories? Until just a few years ago, women were thought to have been perfectly silent in front of the \ufb01lm experience for an exception-ally long period, from cinema\u2019s early years up to the advent of Feminist Film Theory in the 1970s. Accounts and anthologies of classical \ufb01lm theory offer little room, if any, even to important authors such as Germaine Dulac, Es\ufb01r Shub or Maya Deren, whose names appear sporadically, with little discussion and information about their work. Despite the large amount of documents discovered across the world in the last twenty years, the canon of \ufb01lm theory remains basically impermeable to women\u2019s work

What It Means to Be a Woman: Theorizing Feminist Film History Beyond the Essentialism/Constructionism Divide

Under what conditions can a feminist film historiography be imagined and practised today? How should we conceptualize the relationship between a feminist-oriented historiographical work like the Women Film Pioneers project, and the recent theoretical perspectives such as those raised within the framework of Gender Studies? Or, more precisely, how do we conceive of our work on women film pioneers at a moment like the present, when the very idea of “women” no longer appears to describe a unified, unproblematic reality and emerges instead as an intellectual artifact or a sociocultural construction? The purpose of this paper is then to interrogate our practice of feminist historiography in light of recent gender criticism of traditional sexual categories. This seems an unavoidable task, as one of the most important results of that critique during the last two decades or so has been the deconstruction and even the displacement of what had constituted – and still to my eyes necessarily constitutes – the basic category of any feminist discourse – that is, the concept and category of “women.

Sorting out the archive of contemporary European identity

DETECt investigates how popular culture contributes to shaping European cultural identity as a continuing process of transformation fostered by the mobility of people, products and representations across the continent. By analyzing the crime genre in fiction, film and TV dramas from 1989 to present, the project examines how strategies such as co-production, serialization, translation, adaptation, and distribution support the transnational dissemination of shared representations of European identity. DETECt emphasizes in particular how the representation of borders, transnational networks, gender and ethnic identities in these works reflects on the ability of European narratives to migrate beyond their place of origin and be appropriated elsewhere in different and variegated ways. This ambitious research program requires the development of a complex theoretical and methodological framework taking into consideration the multifaceted nature of the project\u2019s topic and approach. The very existence of an agreed-upon notion of \u201cEuropean popular culture\u201d has indeed often been questioned, which makes the identification of its referents \u2013 i.e. the project\u2019s objects of study \u2013 a challenge in itself. This document aims therefore to elaborate such a shared framework for the DETECt project, allowing all partners to proceed in the collection and organization of the diverse objects of study in a clear and coordinated way. As its title spells out, the goal of the document is therefore to sort out the proliferating, assorted archive of crime narratives produced in Europe with the goal of turning it into a manageable, representative corpus. Only by completing this process will the researchers be able to elaborate some solid interpretive hypotheses on the representation of European identity in the field of popular culture. The content of the document is the result of intense exchanges among the partners in the consortium throughout the first phase of the project. In fact, the discussion about its themes started before the official start date of DETECt, during a meeting of the WP leaders that was held at the University of Bologna on February 26-27, 2018. The preparation for and delivery of the kick-off meeting and the research workshop held in Bologna on April 26-27 further contributed to developing this document, as the key theoretical and methodological challenges continued to be debated via email, Skype calls and in person. In particular, the Project Coordinator and the leaders of Work Package 2 received extensive feedback from all the DETECt researchers about their initial proposals, which offered some guidelines for the approaches to be adopted in the research and for the creation of a list of works to be included in the corpus. Finally, between May and August, the authors and the main contributors posted in the project\u2019s Basecamp platform several drafts of the text, which were extensively commented on and improved by the other partners. The document is therefore the first research outcome of the strong collaborative approach promoted by the project, as it offered the partners an opportunity to test and refine an agreed upon procedure to be implemented for the development of all the planned research deliverables. The scholars responsible for the initial and then final drafts were the leader of WP2 (Baetens) and the Project Coordinator (Dall\u2019Asta), whose comprehensive view of the project framework made it easier to combine the disparate inputs coming from the other 16 partner institutions. Their research assistants (Dejonghe and Pagello) provided useful support for the enrichment, editing and revision of the texts. The leader of WP4 (Hansen) and the task leaders and colleagues responsible for major deliverables in WP4 (Dobrescu), WP5 (K\ue1lai and Keszeg) and WP6 (Morsch) extensively contributed to the text, especially\u2014but not only\u2014as it touched upon the specific sections of the project in which they are involved. The authors and contributors are grateful to the reviewers, two colleagues from KU Leuven and UCLouvain and internationally renowned scholars in the project\u2019s field of research: Prof. Theo D\u2019Haen and Prof. Marc Lits, who also kindly agreed to become members of the project\u2019s Advisory Board

Looking for Myriam

Despite the recent multiplication of studies in found footage cinema, the fog surrounding the figure of Myriam Borsoutsky remains thick. This article elaborates the rare extant information about her work to retrace an important chapter in the history of found footage cinema in France, in which women have played a major role. In an attempt to delineate a specifically female genealogy in the history of French compilation film, Myriam's work is studied alongside that of Nicole Vedr\ue8s, and situated in the cultural context of a net of relationships that includes other women, for instance Denise Tual and Yannick Bellon, as well as such masters of French cinema as Pierre Braunberger, Sacha Guitry, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Andr\ue9 Bazin, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michel Leiris. A detailed analysis of two major works in this genealogy, Paris 1900 (dir. Nicole Vedr\ue8s, 1947) and Bullfight (dir. Myriam and Pierre Braunberger, 1951), draws upon Vedr\ue8s's own writings and Andr\ue9 Bazin's critical notes on the films. The last section addresses the meaning of the neologism neomontage, coined by Bazin in his review of Bullfight to describe Myriam's \u201cdiabolical\u201d editing abilities