Back to the future: the European film studies agenda today

As a critical category, “European cinema” is anything but a recent invention; film history books, indeed, have always included central and substantial sections devoted to it. Of course, this tradition in itself does not presuppose the existence of a continental cinema as a coherent whole or organised structure, or even of an aesthetics that could be described as European, but only that of an interpretative discourse based on the study of a set of historically and geographically contiguous national histories, whose intersections in truth have been rarely foregrounded and investigated (a noteworthy exception being the New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, which have always been described as an interconnected, transnational phenomenon)

Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory

LIKE A DREAM. A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE ONEIRIC METAPHOR IN FILM THEORY I know it's a cliché to say that films are like dreams -- like a collective unconscious,' Terry began, 'but I was thinking that nobody's ever really followed the idea through. There are different sorts of dreams, aren't there? And so obviously there are horror movies, which are like nightmares, and then there are dirty movies like Deep Throat and Emmanuelle, which are like wet dreams... Then there are remakes, and stories which keep getting told again and again, and those are like recurring dreams. And there are consoling, visionary dreams, like Lost Horizon or The Wizard of Oz. But when a film gets lost, and it's never been shown, and the print goes missing and nobody's ever seen it, that's the most beautiful kind of dream of all. Because that's the kind of dream that..

Scopic Drive, Time Travel, and Film Spectatorship

SCOPIC DRIVE, TIME TRAVEL AND FILM SPECTATORSHIP IN GILLIAM'S TWELVE MONKEYS AND BIGELOW'S STRANGE DAYS How can the dream, the bearer of the subject's desire, produce that which makes the trauma emerge repeatedly - if not its very face, at least the screen that shows us that it is still there behind?          Jacques Lacan Sometime around 1895 Albert Einstein, a 16 year-old schoolboy from Ulm, in Germany, began to think about what it would be like to ride on the crest of a light wave -- or, as one could say, to surf it. Ten years later he published 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies', a paper that dramatically changed our way of perceiving space, time, and their relationship. Given that cinema was officially born in that same year 1895, one could wonder if the new invention, with its ray of light clearly visible against the darkness of..

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

Film as architectural theory

Publications on architectural theory have predominantly taken on the form of text-based books, monographs, and articles. With the rise of transdisciplinary and practice-based research in architecture, new opportunities are opening up for other forms of architectural theory, such as film-based mediums, which promise to expand and alter the convention of the written practice of theory. Two possible types of filmic theory are presented here. One follows the method of ethnographic documentary filmmaking inspired by Sarah Pinkfilm-based mediums, which promise to expand and alter thellows the line of art house filmmaking inspired by Kathryn Rameyyn Rameyg inspired by Sarah Pinkfilm-based mediums, which promise to expand ae to expand ad mediums, which promise to expand a convention of the written practice of theory. or constructing knowledge, new discourses on filmic theory can be opened up. It is argued here that film as architectural theory is part of this new discourse, broadening the audience’u engagement with architecture through not only “readership” but also “viewership.

Strade di confine: Italia e Europa orientale nel cinema italiano degli anni Novanta

L’indagine fa parte di un progetto di ricerca dedicato ai ‘road movie’ europei visti come strumento di lettura del ‘movimento’ in e attraverso l’Europa durante il ventennio scorso. Oggetto particolare di studio quattro film italiani degli anni Novanta dedicati alla diaspora post-comunista: “Il toro” (Carlo Mazzacurati, 1994) e “Lamerica” (Gianni Amelio, 1994), “Elvjs e Merilijn” (Armando Manni, 1995) e “Vesna va veloce” (Carlo Mazzacurati, 1996)

James Baldwin’s embodied absence

As an essay on North American history and on the rift between lived experience and ideological images that obfuscate it, I Am Not Your Negro relies on a key motif: the body. I argue that I Am Not Your Negroâ s engagement with Baldwinâ s ideas on the question of Black bodies and their effacement from American history, media, and society becomes the kernel of the filmâ s narrative and discursive strategy. As a documentary, I Am Not Your Negro carries out a historical/biographical work of testimony and assemblage, and is a vehicle for Baldwinâ s ideas; as an essay, it suggests a corporeal fullness to Baldwinâ s textual fragments by giving them a filmic voice. Located between reality and imaginary, present and past, substance and image, the essayistic constitutes itself through voiceover as an embodied absence that carries the weight of the argument in its filmic flesh