Understanding Media Relations in the Age of Convergence: A Metatheoretical Taxonomy

Multimediality, crossmediality, intermediality, transmediality. Over the last three decades, media (as well as comparative) studies have been characterized by the emergence of new categories, aimed at describing and analysing the variety of relations established by different media in the age of convergence. Despite their widespread diffusion in many research fields, however, these categories still lack a shared and stable meaning, having eluded any attempt of theoretical systematization so far. As a consequence, they tend to overlap semantically, making it impossible for scholars to share a common vocabulary. The objective of this paper is to propose a meta-theoretical rearrangement of the abovementioned categories, with the aim of outlining a systematic taxonomy in which each term can find a definition and a position

Understanding Media Relations in the Age of Convergence: A Metatheoretical Taxonomy

Multimediality, crossmediality, intermediality, transmediality. Over the last three decades, media (as well as comparative) studies have been characterized by the emergence of new categories, aimed at describing and analysing the variety of relations established by different media in the age of convergence. Despite their widespread diffusion in many research fields, however, these categories still lack a shared and stable meaning, having eluded any attempt of theoretical systematization so far. As a consequence, they tend to overlap semantically, making it impossible for scholars to share a common vocabulary. The objective of this paper is to propose a meta-theoretical rearrangement of the abovementioned categories, with the aim of outlining a systematic taxonomy in which each term can find a definition and a position

Introduction: non-theatrical film festivals

The idea for this publication stemmed from the Reframing Film Festivals conference that the curators of this special issue were organised in Venice in February 2020, which was conceived to foster research engagement with the histories of film festivals and their relationship with film historiography and canons. During this two-day event, among the contributions dedicated to the micro-histories of a variety of festivals based in Central and Eastern Europe, South America and South-East Asia, several artists, curators, archivists and historians from France, Austria, Italy, Chile and Spain presented research focused on non-theatrical cultures and related festivals. This strand of research ranged 10 from historical analysis of international competitions for amateur filmmakers to theorisations of the festivals dedicated to analog video art and time-based art, from the study of the historical developments of national non-fiction festivals to the mapping of ethnographic film festival circuits. Hence, in this special issue dedicated to non-theatrical film festivals, readers will find a combination of voices representing film cultures that have been developing outside of movie theatres and away from the logic of theatrical distribution, as the title implies

Reframing Film Festivals: Politics, Histories and Agencies

"Reframing Film Festivals: Politics, Histories and Agencies" seeks to foster an interdisciplinary and intersectional reading of film festivals, here conceived as a historiographic “dispositive”, as cultural formations and as financial institutions. Within a single and cohesive research framework, this curated collection makes a two-fold intervention in film festivals studies: on the one hand, it investigates how film festivals, by championing certain discourses of and on cinema and media, contribute to articulate and re-position specific national, cultural, gender identities. On the other hand, it analyses the process by which film festivals add value within the film industry as much as to local touristic economies