Videos by Alan O'Leary
http://mimesisinternational.com/the-battle-of-algiers/
The Battle of Algiers is a figure for lib... more http://mimesisinternational.com/the-battle-of-algiers/
The Battle of Algiers is a figure for liberation and it can still communicate a sense of euphoria to those who experience and study it. The purpose of this book is to account for this power in terms of the film’s complexity and ambivalence– in terms, that is, of the film’s ‘impure’ means. Building on a large body of scholarship, the book focuses on the key themes of location, address and temporality. 12 views
Videographic Criticism and Practice Research by Alan O'Leary
Academic Quarter, 2024
The article provides an introduction to the second of a pair of spe-cial issues devoted to academ... more The article provides an introduction to the second of a pair of spe-cial issues devoted to academic filmmaking, which contains ten video essays and prose guiding texts. The article describes the vari-ety of filmmaking practice in the academy, and some of the venues where examples of the practice are published or exhibited. It ges-tures at the multiple origins of academic filmmaking with special reference to the tradition of the essay film, and finds a key reflexive moment in Eric S. Faden's (prose) “Manifesto for Critical Media” (2008), which articulated the challenge of using “image, voice, pac-ing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm” to create scholarly audi-ovisual work. The introduction goes on to set out the aims for the special issues, and to describe the contents of the video essays and some of the features, concerns or approaches shared between and across those contents. The video essays derive from fields including videographic criticism, anthropology, experimental cinema, and participatory and activist filmmaking.
Academic Quarter, 2024
The article provides an introduction to the first of a pair of special issues devoted to academic... more The article provides an introduction to the first of a pair of special issues devoted to academic filmmaking, which, apart from this in-troduction, contains eleven prose articles. The article describes the variety of filmmaking practice in the academy, and some of the ven-ues where examples of the practice are published or exhibited. It gestures at the multiple origins of academic filmmaking with spe-cial reference to the tradition of the essay film, and finds a key re flexive moment in Eric S. Faden's (prose) “Manifesto for Critical Media” (2008), which articulated the challenge of using “image, voice, pacing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm” to create schol-arly audiovisual work. The introduction goes on to set out the aims for the special issues, and to describe the contents of the eleven ar-ticles in the first issue and some of the features, concerns or ap-proaches shared between and across those contents. The eleven articles deal with themes raging from academic filmmaking as activism, to vulnerability and embodiment, to the challenges of production and publishing and of institutional legitimization.
Short video at https://vimeo.com/947822564.
Made for Evelyn Kreutzer's collection of video essa... more Short video at https://vimeo.com/947822564.
Made for Evelyn Kreutzer's collection of video essays based on poems: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9576546.
With Ingrid Bergman in Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) and Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaischer Torso Apollos (1908) read in the original German by Selma Erklärt and by Brandy Pearson in an English translation by Stephen Mitchell. Also with a setting of Mitchell's translation by Stephen Paulus (1983) sung by Paul Sperry with piano by Irma Vallecillo, and dialogue performed by Gena Rowlands from Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988).
OuScholPo 2024
16:9 filmtidsskrift, 2023
Part of the journal 16:9’s series of 169-second video essays, 2008 - A Crisis Glossary deals with... more Part of the journal 16:9’s series of 169-second video essays, 2008 - A Crisis Glossary deals with two films on the 2008 financial crash, Too Big To Fail (2011) and The Big Short (2015). The video essay ambivalently foregrounds the pleasure that the films provide by granting access to a masculine world of jargon and capital. Financial terms are combined alphabetically for an absurdist experience that perhaps makes a nonsense of its subject.
[in]Transition 10:3, 2023
Winner of the Videographic Criticism category of the British Association of Film, Television and ... more Winner of the Videographic Criticism category of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Practice Research Awards 2024.
Videoessay and creator commentary published in [in]Transition 10:3 (2023).
https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11389/
'Men Shouting' uses a parametric approach to analyse three films on the 2008 financial crisis. These films are treated individually or in combination according to different sets of constraints in each of the video-essay's seven episodes (plus coda). My purpose is to surface the texture of the films' rendition of historical circumstances, something that might elude more conventional means of interpretation.
Video Essay Podcast, 2023
Episode of Video Essay podcast features a conversation with Alan O'Leary, a scholar and artist ba... more Episode of Video Essay podcast features a conversation with Alan O'Leary, a scholar and artist based at Aarhus University. On today's episode, Will DiGravio and Emily Ko discuss Alan's origin story, the videographic "society," academic labor and mode, organizing videographic events, and more. We also discuss Alan's video, "Nebular Epistemics: A Glossary (Scholarship Like a Spider or Spit)," and Kathleen Loock's "Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of the Sequel."
Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, ZfM Online, 2023
Although I discuss one of the more abstract forms of videographic criticism in this piece, so-cal... more Although I discuss one of the more abstract forms of videographic criticism in this piece, so-called ‹deformative› criticism, this video essay is itself closer to the disparaged mode of the illustrated lecture. «Nebular Epistemics» features a costumed persona seated at a desk and flanked by a screen with projected slides and clips. (The allusion, signalled in the music, is to the format of Spalding Gray’s filmed monologue, Swimming to Cambodia.)1 Other elements include extracts from videographic work by Jason Mittell and Jenny Oyallon-Koloski and from a film by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth.2 Their presence is self-explanatory. But the presence of segments from the recording of a car journey in which the maker inexpertly discusses ideas with his partner (dance artist and filmmaker Marie Hallager Andersen) might require some justification (the reason for the use of stills in these segments may be clarified in the credits to the video essay).
I forget where, but I once read a description of the paintings of R. B. Kitaj that praised the artist’s use of ‹first marks› – those clumsy but vivid first lines traced on a canvas to describe a figure or object. A different painter might have painted over or corrected such traces, but Kitaj often retained them, perhaps for their vitality, in work that might otherwise be highly finished and virtuosic. I wanted to adapt this idea of ‹first marks› for a video essay that has been highly worked, in order to acknowledge the process of thought, and in order to make visible some of the labour (the academic’s and his interlocutors’) often obscured in the making of a finished piece.
The hesitant and clumsy thinking recorded in these segments might make the spectator suspect the authority of the video essay’s male speaking persona; the tone of the piece (arch, perhaps) might make the spectator doubt his sincerity. The effect is intentional: part of the nebular ethos set out in the video essay is expressed in the possible unreliability of the speaker. In the quote used at the beginning of the video essay, Adorno suggests that the essay is a form in which «the thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience».3 In a sense, then, the video essay speaker’s reliability is neither here nor there: what matters is the experience enabled by the video essay itself. And so, although it deploys the most formally conservative of modes, the illustrated lecture, I conceive of «Nebular Epistemics» as scholarship in a modernist idiom: an arrangement of strands and fragments designed to be (re-)composed by the spectator.
References
1- Swimming to Cambodia, Dir.: Jonathan Demme, USA 1987.
2- Jason Mittell, Object Oriented Breaking Bad, Vimeo, 2019, https://vimeo.com/336691810; Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Musical Deformations: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort Grid, Vimeo, 2017, https://vimeo.com/231327035; The Five Obstructions, Dirs.: Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, Denmark 2003.
3-Theodor Adorno: The Essay as Form, in: Theodor Adorno: Notes to Literature, New York 1991, 13.
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 9.3, 2022, 2022
Film by based on a text by Oswald Iten, made for Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer's Once Upon A ... more Film by based on a text by Oswald Iten, made for Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer's Once Upon A Screen vol. II. Each filmmaker was invited to make a short video essay based on a text (initially provided anonymously) dealing with a formative screen memory of the writer's. The film riffs on work by Chris Marker and Michael Haneke. Published with a creator's statement, the original text by Oswald Iten, and his response to the film.
Video introduction: vimeo.com/779245820/27550a6b32
Notes on Videographic Criticism, 2022
The symposium ‘Interrogating the Modes of Videographic Criticism’ was held online for nearly fort... more The symposium ‘Interrogating the Modes of Videographic Criticism’ was held online for nearly forty participants (speakers, chairs and respondents) and an audience of about 200 attendees, on 24 and 25 February 2022. Organized by Maria Hofmann (film scholar and video essayist), Kathleen Loock (Leibniz University Hannover), and Alan O’Leary (Aarhus University), the symposium featured emerging as well as established voices in order to build networks and to expand the community of videographic practitioners and researchers.
Day 1 was devoted to interrogating the affordances and knowledge claims of three distinctive modes of videographic practice: Desktop Documentary, Parametric/Deformative/Experimental and Personal Explorations. Day 2 was devoted to five workshops run in parallel (on videographic ‘entanglement’, sound, animation, accessibility and the ‘accented’ videoessay) followed by a closing roundtable which presented a range of perspectives on videographic criticism and the symposium debates.
This report was prepared by students on the Audiovisual Media Production course taught by Alan O’Leary at Aarhus University. It was edited by Alan O’Leary, Alissa Lienhard (Leibniz University Hannover) and Lida Shams-Mostofi (Leibniz University Hannover), with input from Maria Hofmann and Kathleen Loock.
Student Contributors: Matilde Marie Glud Holm, Nikolaj Forsberg Hargaard, Rebecca Hagde, Signe Melhaven Pedersen and Christina Borring Gorsen, Pernille Patima Johansen, Pil Kaadt, Rebekka Thude Nielsen, Sebastian Witt Hammershøj, Sarah Dunne, Caroline Jensen, Daniel Theil, Daniel Gregersen Nielsen, Emilie Rahr Brammer, Marlene Krueger, Emma Cecilie Juelsgaard Rasmussen, Kaj Feddersen, Katrine Degn Buttenschøn, Malene Brix Ley, Maria Munoz Canizares, Peter Bruhn Westergaard, Sofie Klausen, Sofie Mathilde Bech, Trice Camilla Rodi Hansen, Teresa Gracia De Vargas, Asger Langebæk, Cecilie Kusk Clausen, Emma Visti Petersen, Jonas Møldrup, Lydia Baumgartner, Alberte Timmermann, Bastian Lykkebo, Anders Bak Jakobsen, Jetittha Susricharoensuk, Amalie Bonde, Josefine Gyldenløve Knudsen, Mads Lindhard Hulvej, Malthe Storm Blomgren, Marianne Skov Pedersen, Estel la Cantarell Torres, Sørine Skriver Fjeldgaard, Torvald Pockel, Vincent Christopher Winther, Zeynep Metinsoy, Wai Lam Antonio Wong, Sif Stensgaard Hermansen, Simon van Nguyen, Søren Lassen Jensen, Pilar Padron, Hong Yiu Tiffany Yeung, Amanda Rafaelsen Troelsen, Anders Nørdam Søndergård, Claudia Albarrán Muro, Anna-Sofie Abkjer Kofod.
Conference video, 2021
This presentation-manifesto is an adaptation of the article here: <https://tinyurl.com/yf7vz4p6>.... more This presentation-manifesto is an adaptation of the article here: <https://tinyurl.com/yf7vz4p6>. It takes the form of a short film setting out the rationale and context for a videographic criticism that adopts constraint-based or ‘parametric’ procedures.
Videographic criticism refers to the audiovisual study of screen media, usually in the form of video essays. As a medium of scholarly activity and practice research, videographic criticism has grown exponentially over the last decade, but the question of what is its ‘proper’ mode of scholarship and audiovisual rhetoric remains controversial.
By parametric procedures, I have in mind the adoption of more or less arbitrary self-imposed constraints on the selection of elements from the media object(s) or phenomena studied, and on the formal means by which the analysis is undertaken or presented. Such parametric approaches are already widely used and taught but remain under-theorized.
For example, Constraint-based exercises are used to teach videographic criticism at the annual and influential Scholarship in Sound and Image workshops at Middlebury College, workshops that have come to shape a generation of videographic scholars. Middlebury tutors Keathley and Mittell (2019) argue that ‘formal parameters lead to content discoveries’: the adoption of constraints helps the scholar-practitioner to sidestep analytic preconceptions and allows the ‘media object’ of study to be seen and heard anew. This is demonstrably true, but an implication of this is that parametric approaches to videographic criticism may (be developed to) constitute a posthuman mode of knowing, emerging with and from the assemblage of hardware, parametric system, software and organism.
‘We are all chimeras,’ Donna Haraway wrote in her famous ‘Manifesto For Cyborgs’ of 1985, ‘hybrids of machine and organism.’ Since then, we scholars have (e)merged ever more with the digital. The challenge is to imagine a scholarship that speaks from this cyborg position and doesn’t just speak about it. This presentation-manifesto argues that a parametric videographic scholarship can do just this.
NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 2021
This article sets out the rationale for a videographic scholarship (the audiovisual study of scre... more This article sets out the rationale for a videographic scholarship (the audiovisual study of screen media) that adopts constraint-based or 'parametric' procedures, and concludes with a short manifesto composed according to the simple constraint of division into ten equal segments of 50 words each. The article situates a parametric practice in relation to OuLiPo (a group founded in the early 1960s to explore constraint-based approaches to writing), to pataphysics (an absurdist branch of knowledge concerned with what eludes understanding by conventional means), to themes in the digital humanities, and to the posthuman. And it issues a call to forge an 'agonistic society' of videographic scholars who goad each other to greater achievement through the conspicuous and wasteful expenditure of resources of knowledge.
16:9 filmtidsskrift/film journal, 2019
Published in 16:9 film journal at http://www.16-9.dk/2019/09/no-voiding-time/
‘No Voiding Time... more Published in 16:9 film journal at http://www.16-9.dk/2019/09/no-voiding-time/
‘No Voiding Time’ is concerned with the sensorium of Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), the 2014 adaptation of the 2009 novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon. The videoessay adopts a ‘deformative’ approach, meaning that it subjects a digital copy of the film Inherent Vice to a set of parametric procedures in order, as Jason Mittell puts it (2019: 231), to ‘make the original work strange’. The analytical activity of deformative criticism is one of ‘making-strange’ through the creation of a new aesthetic object. In this case, Inherent Vice was divided into its individual component shots and sorted into four screens, with the sound retained but adjusted in volume in relation to each other shot. The result is that Inherent Vice is compressed into just over a quarter of its original length and the time of the film gets ‘folded’ back on itself: responses may precede questions in the dialogue, and a long take may continue to play on one of the four screens long after another scene that follows it in the original film.
The commentary that follows the videoessay places ‘No Voiding Time’ in the context of current videographic work in film studies, especially in relation to deformative approaches, and tries to define the character of the ‘procedural’ knowledge provided by the videoessay and by deformative approaches as such. It describes the parameters through and by which Inherent Vice becomes ‘No Voiding Time’, and sets out the videoessay’s point of references in criticism on Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson, in films like Timecode (dir. Mike Figgis, 2000), and in cubist painting.
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies , 2019
This videoessay is concerned with temporalities in the influential political/historical film The ... more This videoessay is concerned with temporalities in the influential political/historical film The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo). Apart from credits, intertitles and explanatory captions, the essay uses only sounds and images from the film itself. The videoessay presents nine distinct (though related) orders or dimensions of time in sections that vary in form, rhythm and length. This list of temporalities does not pretend to be exhaustive, but the variety signals something of the complexity of the film and the essay's brevity is intended to communicate in a concise manner a sense of the invigorating pace of the original.
http://mediacommons.org/intransition/occupying-time-battle-algiers
The Video Essay Podcast blog, 2020
I admired Matt Payne’s videoessay ‘Who Ever Heard….?’ in [in]Transition (7:1 2020) and wrote abou... more I admired Matt Payne’s videoessay ‘Who Ever Heard….?’ in [in]Transition (7:1 2020) and wrote about it for Will DiGravio’s videoessay podcast newsletter and blog. I think the form of ‘Who Ever Heard….?’ can be useful for other videographic practitioners and I describe what that form is, starting with an analysis of the videoessay itself and giving its form the name ‘Payne’s Constraint’.
Parameters and Practice (https://parametersandpractice.leeds.ac.uk/) is a year-long collaborative... more Parameters and Practice (https://parametersandpractice.leeds.ac.uk/) is a year-long collaborative project between Marie Hallager Andersen and Alan O’Leary designed to lay the groundwork for a hybrid mode of artistic/academic work.
Each week, one of us sets a task for the other. The second person performs the task and records a response, and the following week sets a further task for the first person. And so on throughout the 2018/19 academic year. Task and responses will be posted on the project website on a weekly basis.
The object of this project is to offer a model for artistic/academic collaboration and to develop the mechanisms and protocols for innovative creative research.
The Italianist, 2020
This article outlines the current state of videographic criticism with special reference to the I... more This article outlines the current state of videographic criticism with special reference to the Italian Studies context and goes on to report on the experience of co-teaching a graduate seminar (a one-semester course), ‘Italian Film and Television and Videographic Criticism’, at The Ohio State University. We argue that videographic criticism is an exciting opportunity for students and scholars of the Italian context, for at least three reasons. The first is because so much videographic activity has focused on anglophone material while what work there is on Italy has tended to focus on male auteurs, exportable filone cinema (spaghetti western, horror), and neorealism. This means that our disciplinary expertise on topics less familiar to mainstream and cult cinephilia has the chance to find novel expression in videographic form and to fill some glaring gaps. Secondly, videographic criticism can help to attract students: the chance to make (as well as to study) audiovisual essays is an appealing one for many and may allow students to find an audience for their work more readily than for the standard prose paper. Thirdly, the practice of videographic criticism can allow us to communicate and publicise our work more effectively beyond the academy, again potentially increasing enrolments but also helping to engage communities and constituencies without easy access to our prose scholarship.
Monographs by Alan O'Leary
The film The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966) is a figure for liberation and it can still ... more The film The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966) is a figure for liberation and it can still communicate a sense of euphoria to those who experience and study it. The purpose of this book is to account for this power in terms of the film’s complexity and ambivalence—in terms, that is, of the film’s ‘impure’ means. Building on a large body of scholarship, the book focuses on the key themes of location, address and temporality. What is the precise role of the city of Algiers in the film? What are the consequences of its address to multiple audiences, including those in the old colonizing North? What are the effects of the film’s activity of reenactment and what can these tell us about revolutionary agency? Ultimately, the account here of the power of The Battle of Algiers is intended to shed light on the means and capacities of historical and political cinema as such.
Reviews:
Claudia Radiven (2020). ReOrient. DOI: 10.13169/reorient.5.1.0122
Mani King Sharpe (2022). Transnational Screens. DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2031139
Norma Claire Moruzzi (2022). Journal of Modern Italian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2022.2043668
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, 2019
The first chapter from my book on the classic of historical and political cinema, The Battle of A... more The first chapter from my book on the classic of historical and political cinema, The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966). This introduction to the book surveys existing scholarship on the film, sets out my themes and approach, and describes the content of the other chapters.
I cinepanettoni: film di enorme successo e autentici cult contemporanei. Malgrado ciò rimangono, ... more I cinepanettoni: film di enorme successo e autentici cult contemporanei. Malgrado ciò rimangono, a livello di studio, ancora praticamente inesplorati. Questo libro è una storia analitica di un fenomeno unico per la cui comprensione si offrono vari spunti, mettendo l’enfasi soprattutto sull’aspetto carnevalesco, perfino utopico del filone. Oltre ai capitoli dedicati alla spesso negata varietà di tale produzione filmica, alla diffusa nostalgia sentita per il suo capostipite (Vacanze di Natale del 1983), e all’analisi del consumo dei cinepanettoni condotta mediante questionari in rete, il libro contiene un’ampia e vivace selezione delle numerose interviste condotte dall’autore con attori, registi, produttori, critici e fan.
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Videos by Alan O'Leary
The Battle of Algiers is a figure for liberation and it can still communicate a sense of euphoria to those who experience and study it. The purpose of this book is to account for this power in terms of the film’s complexity and ambivalence– in terms, that is, of the film’s ‘impure’ means. Building on a large body of scholarship, the book focuses on the key themes of location, address and temporality.
Videographic Criticism and Practice Research by Alan O'Leary
Made for Evelyn Kreutzer's collection of video essays based on poems: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9576546.
With Ingrid Bergman in Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) and Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaischer Torso Apollos (1908) read in the original German by Selma Erklärt and by Brandy Pearson in an English translation by Stephen Mitchell. Also with a setting of Mitchell's translation by Stephen Paulus (1983) sung by Paul Sperry with piano by Irma Vallecillo, and dialogue performed by Gena Rowlands from Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988).
OuScholPo 2024
Videoessay and creator commentary published in [in]Transition 10:3 (2023).
https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11389/
'Men Shouting' uses a parametric approach to analyse three films on the 2008 financial crisis. These films are treated individually or in combination according to different sets of constraints in each of the video-essay's seven episodes (plus coda). My purpose is to surface the texture of the films' rendition of historical circumstances, something that might elude more conventional means of interpretation.
I forget where, but I once read a description of the paintings of R. B. Kitaj that praised the artist’s use of ‹first marks› – those clumsy but vivid first lines traced on a canvas to describe a figure or object. A different painter might have painted over or corrected such traces, but Kitaj often retained them, perhaps for their vitality, in work that might otherwise be highly finished and virtuosic. I wanted to adapt this idea of ‹first marks› for a video essay that has been highly worked, in order to acknowledge the process of thought, and in order to make visible some of the labour (the academic’s and his interlocutors’) often obscured in the making of a finished piece.
The hesitant and clumsy thinking recorded in these segments might make the spectator suspect the authority of the video essay’s male speaking persona; the tone of the piece (arch, perhaps) might make the spectator doubt his sincerity. The effect is intentional: part of the nebular ethos set out in the video essay is expressed in the possible unreliability of the speaker. In the quote used at the beginning of the video essay, Adorno suggests that the essay is a form in which «the thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience».3 In a sense, then, the video essay speaker’s reliability is neither here nor there: what matters is the experience enabled by the video essay itself. And so, although it deploys the most formally conservative of modes, the illustrated lecture, I conceive of «Nebular Epistemics» as scholarship in a modernist idiom: an arrangement of strands and fragments designed to be (re-)composed by the spectator.
References
1- Swimming to Cambodia, Dir.: Jonathan Demme, USA 1987.
2- Jason Mittell, Object Oriented Breaking Bad, Vimeo, 2019, https://vimeo.com/336691810; Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Musical Deformations: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort Grid, Vimeo, 2017, https://vimeo.com/231327035; The Five Obstructions, Dirs.: Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, Denmark 2003.
3-Theodor Adorno: The Essay as Form, in: Theodor Adorno: Notes to Literature, New York 1991, 13.
Video introduction: vimeo.com/779245820/27550a6b32
Day 1 was devoted to interrogating the affordances and knowledge claims of three distinctive modes of videographic practice: Desktop Documentary, Parametric/Deformative/Experimental and Personal Explorations. Day 2 was devoted to five workshops run in parallel (on videographic ‘entanglement’, sound, animation, accessibility and the ‘accented’ videoessay) followed by a closing roundtable which presented a range of perspectives on videographic criticism and the symposium debates.
This report was prepared by students on the Audiovisual Media Production course taught by Alan O’Leary at Aarhus University. It was edited by Alan O’Leary, Alissa Lienhard (Leibniz University Hannover) and Lida Shams-Mostofi (Leibniz University Hannover), with input from Maria Hofmann and Kathleen Loock.
Student Contributors: Matilde Marie Glud Holm, Nikolaj Forsberg Hargaard, Rebecca Hagde, Signe Melhaven Pedersen and Christina Borring Gorsen, Pernille Patima Johansen, Pil Kaadt, Rebekka Thude Nielsen, Sebastian Witt Hammershøj, Sarah Dunne, Caroline Jensen, Daniel Theil, Daniel Gregersen Nielsen, Emilie Rahr Brammer, Marlene Krueger, Emma Cecilie Juelsgaard Rasmussen, Kaj Feddersen, Katrine Degn Buttenschøn, Malene Brix Ley, Maria Munoz Canizares, Peter Bruhn Westergaard, Sofie Klausen, Sofie Mathilde Bech, Trice Camilla Rodi Hansen, Teresa Gracia De Vargas, Asger Langebæk, Cecilie Kusk Clausen, Emma Visti Petersen, Jonas Møldrup, Lydia Baumgartner, Alberte Timmermann, Bastian Lykkebo, Anders Bak Jakobsen, Jetittha Susricharoensuk, Amalie Bonde, Josefine Gyldenløve Knudsen, Mads Lindhard Hulvej, Malthe Storm Blomgren, Marianne Skov Pedersen, Estel la Cantarell Torres, Sørine Skriver Fjeldgaard, Torvald Pockel, Vincent Christopher Winther, Zeynep Metinsoy, Wai Lam Antonio Wong, Sif Stensgaard Hermansen, Simon van Nguyen, Søren Lassen Jensen, Pilar Padron, Hong Yiu Tiffany Yeung, Amanda Rafaelsen Troelsen, Anders Nørdam Søndergård, Claudia Albarrán Muro, Anna-Sofie Abkjer Kofod.
Videographic criticism refers to the audiovisual study of screen media, usually in the form of video essays. As a medium of scholarly activity and practice research, videographic criticism has grown exponentially over the last decade, but the question of what is its ‘proper’ mode of scholarship and audiovisual rhetoric remains controversial.
By parametric procedures, I have in mind the adoption of more or less arbitrary self-imposed constraints on the selection of elements from the media object(s) or phenomena studied, and on the formal means by which the analysis is undertaken or presented. Such parametric approaches are already widely used and taught but remain under-theorized.
For example, Constraint-based exercises are used to teach videographic criticism at the annual and influential Scholarship in Sound and Image workshops at Middlebury College, workshops that have come to shape a generation of videographic scholars. Middlebury tutors Keathley and Mittell (2019) argue that ‘formal parameters lead to content discoveries’: the adoption of constraints helps the scholar-practitioner to sidestep analytic preconceptions and allows the ‘media object’ of study to be seen and heard anew. This is demonstrably true, but an implication of this is that parametric approaches to videographic criticism may (be developed to) constitute a posthuman mode of knowing, emerging with and from the assemblage of hardware, parametric system, software and organism.
‘We are all chimeras,’ Donna Haraway wrote in her famous ‘Manifesto For Cyborgs’ of 1985, ‘hybrids of machine and organism.’ Since then, we scholars have (e)merged ever more with the digital. The challenge is to imagine a scholarship that speaks from this cyborg position and doesn’t just speak about it. This presentation-manifesto argues that a parametric videographic scholarship can do just this.
‘No Voiding Time’ is concerned with the sensorium of Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), the 2014 adaptation of the 2009 novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon. The videoessay adopts a ‘deformative’ approach, meaning that it subjects a digital copy of the film Inherent Vice to a set of parametric procedures in order, as Jason Mittell puts it (2019: 231), to ‘make the original work strange’. The analytical activity of deformative criticism is one of ‘making-strange’ through the creation of a new aesthetic object. In this case, Inherent Vice was divided into its individual component shots and sorted into four screens, with the sound retained but adjusted in volume in relation to each other shot. The result is that Inherent Vice is compressed into just over a quarter of its original length and the time of the film gets ‘folded’ back on itself: responses may precede questions in the dialogue, and a long take may continue to play on one of the four screens long after another scene that follows it in the original film.
The commentary that follows the videoessay places ‘No Voiding Time’ in the context of current videographic work in film studies, especially in relation to deformative approaches, and tries to define the character of the ‘procedural’ knowledge provided by the videoessay and by deformative approaches as such. It describes the parameters through and by which Inherent Vice becomes ‘No Voiding Time’, and sets out the videoessay’s point of references in criticism on Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson, in films like Timecode (dir. Mike Figgis, 2000), and in cubist painting.
http://mediacommons.org/intransition/occupying-time-battle-algiers
Each week, one of us sets a task for the other. The second person performs the task and records a response, and the following week sets a further task for the first person. And so on throughout the 2018/19 academic year. Task and responses will be posted on the project website on a weekly basis.
The object of this project is to offer a model for artistic/academic collaboration and to develop the mechanisms and protocols for innovative creative research.
Monographs by Alan O'Leary
Reviews:
Claudia Radiven (2020). ReOrient. DOI: 10.13169/reorient.5.1.0122
Mani King Sharpe (2022). Transnational Screens. DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2031139
Norma Claire Moruzzi (2022). Journal of Modern Italian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2022.2043668
The Battle of Algiers is a figure for liberation and it can still communicate a sense of euphoria to those who experience and study it. The purpose of this book is to account for this power in terms of the film’s complexity and ambivalence– in terms, that is, of the film’s ‘impure’ means. Building on a large body of scholarship, the book focuses on the key themes of location, address and temporality.
Made for Evelyn Kreutzer's collection of video essays based on poems: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9576546.
With Ingrid Bergman in Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) and Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaischer Torso Apollos (1908) read in the original German by Selma Erklärt and by Brandy Pearson in an English translation by Stephen Mitchell. Also with a setting of Mitchell's translation by Stephen Paulus (1983) sung by Paul Sperry with piano by Irma Vallecillo, and dialogue performed by Gena Rowlands from Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988).
OuScholPo 2024
Videoessay and creator commentary published in [in]Transition 10:3 (2023).
https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11389/
'Men Shouting' uses a parametric approach to analyse three films on the 2008 financial crisis. These films are treated individually or in combination according to different sets of constraints in each of the video-essay's seven episodes (plus coda). My purpose is to surface the texture of the films' rendition of historical circumstances, something that might elude more conventional means of interpretation.
I forget where, but I once read a description of the paintings of R. B. Kitaj that praised the artist’s use of ‹first marks› – those clumsy but vivid first lines traced on a canvas to describe a figure or object. A different painter might have painted over or corrected such traces, but Kitaj often retained them, perhaps for their vitality, in work that might otherwise be highly finished and virtuosic. I wanted to adapt this idea of ‹first marks› for a video essay that has been highly worked, in order to acknowledge the process of thought, and in order to make visible some of the labour (the academic’s and his interlocutors’) often obscured in the making of a finished piece.
The hesitant and clumsy thinking recorded in these segments might make the spectator suspect the authority of the video essay’s male speaking persona; the tone of the piece (arch, perhaps) might make the spectator doubt his sincerity. The effect is intentional: part of the nebular ethos set out in the video essay is expressed in the possible unreliability of the speaker. In the quote used at the beginning of the video essay, Adorno suggests that the essay is a form in which «the thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience».3 In a sense, then, the video essay speaker’s reliability is neither here nor there: what matters is the experience enabled by the video essay itself. And so, although it deploys the most formally conservative of modes, the illustrated lecture, I conceive of «Nebular Epistemics» as scholarship in a modernist idiom: an arrangement of strands and fragments designed to be (re-)composed by the spectator.
References
1- Swimming to Cambodia, Dir.: Jonathan Demme, USA 1987.
2- Jason Mittell, Object Oriented Breaking Bad, Vimeo, 2019, https://vimeo.com/336691810; Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Musical Deformations: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort Grid, Vimeo, 2017, https://vimeo.com/231327035; The Five Obstructions, Dirs.: Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, Denmark 2003.
3-Theodor Adorno: The Essay as Form, in: Theodor Adorno: Notes to Literature, New York 1991, 13.
Video introduction: vimeo.com/779245820/27550a6b32
Day 1 was devoted to interrogating the affordances and knowledge claims of three distinctive modes of videographic practice: Desktop Documentary, Parametric/Deformative/Experimental and Personal Explorations. Day 2 was devoted to five workshops run in parallel (on videographic ‘entanglement’, sound, animation, accessibility and the ‘accented’ videoessay) followed by a closing roundtable which presented a range of perspectives on videographic criticism and the symposium debates.
This report was prepared by students on the Audiovisual Media Production course taught by Alan O’Leary at Aarhus University. It was edited by Alan O’Leary, Alissa Lienhard (Leibniz University Hannover) and Lida Shams-Mostofi (Leibniz University Hannover), with input from Maria Hofmann and Kathleen Loock.
Student Contributors: Matilde Marie Glud Holm, Nikolaj Forsberg Hargaard, Rebecca Hagde, Signe Melhaven Pedersen and Christina Borring Gorsen, Pernille Patima Johansen, Pil Kaadt, Rebekka Thude Nielsen, Sebastian Witt Hammershøj, Sarah Dunne, Caroline Jensen, Daniel Theil, Daniel Gregersen Nielsen, Emilie Rahr Brammer, Marlene Krueger, Emma Cecilie Juelsgaard Rasmussen, Kaj Feddersen, Katrine Degn Buttenschøn, Malene Brix Ley, Maria Munoz Canizares, Peter Bruhn Westergaard, Sofie Klausen, Sofie Mathilde Bech, Trice Camilla Rodi Hansen, Teresa Gracia De Vargas, Asger Langebæk, Cecilie Kusk Clausen, Emma Visti Petersen, Jonas Møldrup, Lydia Baumgartner, Alberte Timmermann, Bastian Lykkebo, Anders Bak Jakobsen, Jetittha Susricharoensuk, Amalie Bonde, Josefine Gyldenløve Knudsen, Mads Lindhard Hulvej, Malthe Storm Blomgren, Marianne Skov Pedersen, Estel la Cantarell Torres, Sørine Skriver Fjeldgaard, Torvald Pockel, Vincent Christopher Winther, Zeynep Metinsoy, Wai Lam Antonio Wong, Sif Stensgaard Hermansen, Simon van Nguyen, Søren Lassen Jensen, Pilar Padron, Hong Yiu Tiffany Yeung, Amanda Rafaelsen Troelsen, Anders Nørdam Søndergård, Claudia Albarrán Muro, Anna-Sofie Abkjer Kofod.
Videographic criticism refers to the audiovisual study of screen media, usually in the form of video essays. As a medium of scholarly activity and practice research, videographic criticism has grown exponentially over the last decade, but the question of what is its ‘proper’ mode of scholarship and audiovisual rhetoric remains controversial.
By parametric procedures, I have in mind the adoption of more or less arbitrary self-imposed constraints on the selection of elements from the media object(s) or phenomena studied, and on the formal means by which the analysis is undertaken or presented. Such parametric approaches are already widely used and taught but remain under-theorized.
For example, Constraint-based exercises are used to teach videographic criticism at the annual and influential Scholarship in Sound and Image workshops at Middlebury College, workshops that have come to shape a generation of videographic scholars. Middlebury tutors Keathley and Mittell (2019) argue that ‘formal parameters lead to content discoveries’: the adoption of constraints helps the scholar-practitioner to sidestep analytic preconceptions and allows the ‘media object’ of study to be seen and heard anew. This is demonstrably true, but an implication of this is that parametric approaches to videographic criticism may (be developed to) constitute a posthuman mode of knowing, emerging with and from the assemblage of hardware, parametric system, software and organism.
‘We are all chimeras,’ Donna Haraway wrote in her famous ‘Manifesto For Cyborgs’ of 1985, ‘hybrids of machine and organism.’ Since then, we scholars have (e)merged ever more with the digital. The challenge is to imagine a scholarship that speaks from this cyborg position and doesn’t just speak about it. This presentation-manifesto argues that a parametric videographic scholarship can do just this.
‘No Voiding Time’ is concerned with the sensorium of Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), the 2014 adaptation of the 2009 novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon. The videoessay adopts a ‘deformative’ approach, meaning that it subjects a digital copy of the film Inherent Vice to a set of parametric procedures in order, as Jason Mittell puts it (2019: 231), to ‘make the original work strange’. The analytical activity of deformative criticism is one of ‘making-strange’ through the creation of a new aesthetic object. In this case, Inherent Vice was divided into its individual component shots and sorted into four screens, with the sound retained but adjusted in volume in relation to each other shot. The result is that Inherent Vice is compressed into just over a quarter of its original length and the time of the film gets ‘folded’ back on itself: responses may precede questions in the dialogue, and a long take may continue to play on one of the four screens long after another scene that follows it in the original film.
The commentary that follows the videoessay places ‘No Voiding Time’ in the context of current videographic work in film studies, especially in relation to deformative approaches, and tries to define the character of the ‘procedural’ knowledge provided by the videoessay and by deformative approaches as such. It describes the parameters through and by which Inherent Vice becomes ‘No Voiding Time’, and sets out the videoessay’s point of references in criticism on Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson, in films like Timecode (dir. Mike Figgis, 2000), and in cubist painting.
http://mediacommons.org/intransition/occupying-time-battle-algiers
Each week, one of us sets a task for the other. The second person performs the task and records a response, and the following week sets a further task for the first person. And so on throughout the 2018/19 academic year. Task and responses will be posted on the project website on a weekly basis.
The object of this project is to offer a model for artistic/academic collaboration and to develop the mechanisms and protocols for innovative creative research.
Reviews:
Claudia Radiven (2020). ReOrient. DOI: 10.13169/reorient.5.1.0122
Mani King Sharpe (2022). Transnational Screens. DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2031139
Norma Claire Moruzzi (2022). Journal of Modern Italian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2022.2043668
This is the first monograph in English on terrorism and film in Italy, a topic that is attracting the interest of a wide range of scholars of film, cultural studies and critical terrorism studies. It provides novel analytical categories for an intriguing corpus of films and offers careful accounts of works and genres as diverse as La meglio gioventú, Buongiorno, notte, the poliziottesco (cop film) and the commedia all'italiana. The author argues that fiction film can provide an effective frame for the elaboration of historical experience but that the cinema is symptomatic both of its time and of the codes of the medium itself - in terms of its elisions, omissions and evasions as well as its emphases. The book is a study of a body of films that has elaborated the experience of terrorism as a fascinating and even essential part of the heritage of modern Italy.
"Cinema italiano e terrorismo: un rapporto prolifico, il cui risultato è sempre più oggetto di interesse per gli studiosi non solo italiani, come emerge chiaramente da questo libro e dalla sua bibliografia. Una produzione che attraversa più o meno tre decenni e che costituisce un’ulteriore chiave di lettura di uno dei fenomeni più controversi dell’Italia repubblicana.
Quella di Alan O’Leary è un’analisi articolata, che esplora l’uso funzionale dei vari generi – dalla commedia al thriller, dal conspiracy al road movie – e il significato profondo dell’aderenza o del rifiuto delle convenzioni che caratterizzano ciascuno di essi. Tra tutte le forme di espressione, il cinema si rivela essere uno strumento privilegiato di lettura dell’evoluzione della coscienza collettiva degli italiani rispetto agli episodi traumatici che hanno segnato i nostri anni di piombo. Tra questi, il sequestro Moro ricopre – perlomeno a un livello simbolico – un ruolo chiave, che si riflette anche su opere non specificamente centrate su questo evento.
Il film non è semplicemente un’opera d’autore: rientra piuttosto nella categoria del testo sociale. Il pubblico, riconoscendosi come destinatario del messaggio, assolve a un compito, e da semplice fruitore diventa parte del processo produttivo, coinvolto dagli autori nei complicati e insidiosi meccanismi della Memoria.
Se non esiste un unico genere del terrorismo, è possibile però tracciare una periodizzazione della filmografia che evidenzia alcune fasi nel percorso di elaborazione del trauma, dallo shock iniziale di un Paese paralizzato dalla paura fino ad arrivare agli interrogativi sulla reintegrazione dell’ex terrorista nella nazione.
Il saggio prende in esame non solo tutte le opere che rientrano evidentemente nella produzione interessata, ma anche altri film che in qualche modo risentono dell’atmosfera e delle circostanze create dalla strategia della tensione. La trattazione evidenzia inoltre quanto la produzione dei nostri anni di piombo sia profondamente legata alle radici della cinematografia italiana."
Recensioni su: Tuttolibri de La Stampa 23 febbraio 2008 (Giovanni De Luna), La Rivista del Cinema del Museo del Cinema di Torino maggio 2008 (Silvio Alovisio e Micaela Veronesi), La Nuova Sardegna 12 maggio 2008 (Alessandro Cadoni), L'Indice dei Libri del Mese maggio 2008 (Michele Marangi).
In obsessively returning to key moments and forces in Italy’s history – such as Fascism and the Second World War, terrorism, and the inescapable presence of the Church – Italy’s cinema has both helped and hindered the analysis and assimilation of collective traumas. The articles in this issue examine how cinema has, wittingly or unwittingly, mapped these pervasive yet often elusive Italian particularities. They consist of six case studies and two theoretical interventions designed to stake out a field of investigation. Collectively they pose provocative and inevitably broad questions about the relationship between cinema and history. Rather than aiming to offer definitive answers, they use the Italian case to foster cross-disciplinary debate about the recurrent features, absences, silences, traces and ambiguities of that relationship.
Articles:
Cinema’s poetics of history
Noa Steimatsky
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.19
Back for good: melodrama and the returning soldier in post-war Italian cinema
Catherine O’Rawe
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.18
Deicides, sacrifices and other crucifixions: for a critical reinterpretation of Italian Holocaust cinema
Damiano Garofalo
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.15
Disappearing acts: disability, gender, and the memory of Fascism in Italian film
Sarah Patricia Hill
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.20
‘Io so’: the absence of resolution as resolution in contemporary Italian cinema about the ‘years of lead’
Giacomo Lichtner
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.14
A new dawn on the past: rethinking the ‘years of lead’ through a female-centred cinematic narrative
Susanna Scarparo
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.16
Post-secular identity in contemporary Italian cinema: Catholic ‘cement’, the suppression of history and the lost Islamic other
Clodagh Brook
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.17
History and memory in Italian cinema: a virtual roundtable with Robert Gordon, Giuliana Minghelli and Alan O’Leary
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.23
To describe a film as heritage cinema is to encircle it in a halo of political and aesthetic suspicion. Starting from the negative, some scholars see their task as being to list and condemn those elements in a film or group of films that illustrate and confirm the film or films’ reactionary character. Others acknowledge but resist the negative charge by finding elements of political commentary or ambiguity that contradict the films’ superficially ‘touristic’ vistas. Still others will shift attention to the complexities of audience engagement with heritage films (Monk 2011). My approach here is to see the pejorative connotations and negative charge as essential to what the editors of SCREENING EUROPEAN HERITAGE call in their introduction the ‘heuristic’ of heritage cinema, because heritage itself is never uncontested or uncontaminated. The ‘ownership’ of the past is always at issue in the heritage film, and the authority or right to interpret, employ and enjoy the traces of that past is always one of its key themes. In this chapter, I test this assertion in relation to films from different national (Italy, China, India) and transnational production contexts, moving from heritage cinema in Europe to what I dub ‘world heritage cinema’.
A shorter version of this article appears as a chapter in 'Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the Influence', edited by Michèle Mendelssohn and Denis Flannery (Manchester, 2016), pp. 141-55. The editors didn't like my writing much and made more changes than usual to prose and content, so I’m making longer original draft available here to be downloaded as well as the published chapter.
È mio interesse, in quest'articolo, mettere a tema la questione razziale nei film di Natale o «cinepanettoni». I cinepanettoni spesso sono stati descritti come correlazione del Berlusconismo. Così, Curzio Maltese ha scritto che il cinepanettone «sta al ventennio berlusconiano come i ‘telefoni bianchi’ stanno al ventennio fascista» , mentre uno degli intervistati anonimi di un’inchiesta sui cinepanettoni da me condotta ha affermato che «rappresentando il decadimento culturale e le ‘ideologie’ della destra italiana rappresentata da Berlusconi, il cinepanettone è un genere razzista ». Sono i cinepanettoni film razzisti? Il mio saggio cerca di andare oltre il senso comune proponendo un’analisi più articolata di una forma di cultura popolare che ha intrattenuto per quasi tre decenni un numero considerevole di italiani in tutta la penisola . A mio avviso, l’imbarazzo che provocano i cinepanettoni ha nature diverse e dipende da una serie di fattori. Tra essi, la loro capacità di sfatare la «banal whiteness». Considerando la bianchezza una costruzione normativa e ‘invisibile’, sostengo che la 'banal whiteness', termine che conio, è il risultato del sovvertimento carnevalesco della whiteness, la quale viene de-naturalizzata, messa in primo piano e resa ambivalente (insieme alla mascolinità e alla sessualità). In quanto forma di commedia carnevalesca il cinepanettone è un luogo privilegiato per l’esposizione dell’arbitrarietà dell’identità.
I’m embarrassed to say that the material on THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS fails to mention Carlo Celli's 2005 book on the filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo (Scarecrow Press, 2005), which is the first text to treat the film in terms of the carnivalesque, as far as I’m aware. (I reviewed Celli’s book when it came out, but had forgotten his analysis of the film in those terms.)
It’s also worth reading this film review of the gross-out GRIMSBY (2015), by Henry K. Miller, in tandem and contrast to my piece. Miller is very suspicious of the academic tendency to 'recuperate' low-brow humour, and he dismisses the carnivalesque as a cliche: http://tinyurl.com/z9vtt3m.
Through a variety of inputs from experts in philosophy, literary studies, law, history, media, cinema and theatre, this study outlines how left- and right-wing Italian terrorism has been portrayed
in the arts. As stated by the editors, its main focal point is the re-meditation of the so-called ‘Anni di piombo’ (c. 1969–83), a period in Italy’s recent past that has been described as a ‘minor civil war’. The parallel between the historical situation and its representation is constantly guaranteed by an effective, punctual contextualization largely based on original documents such as news transcripts, excerpts from the victims’ notes or interviews, and passages of terrorists’ confessions. Although the critical and exegetical bibliography on Italian terrorism and its literary and cinematographic transpositions is substantial, this broad-ranging collection of fourteen essays is innovative in offering an extremely rich and multi-faceted portrait of this complex topic. Thanks to the juxtaposition of very different perspectives and interests, the study makes a real contribution to show how terrorist brutality was expressed, encoded and schematized by the people involved in these dramatic events even before the violent actions became the object of rhetorical analysis, and the subject of different kinds of fiction. By considering some of the most emblematic moments of this period alongside peripheral episodes, this research aims also to demonstrate how the wide spectrum of fictional re-thinking of such a traumatic past has become an important means of working through this national trauma.
Editorial
Alan O’Leary
Who wants to be a TV showgirl? Auditions, talent and taste in contemporary popular Italian cinema
Danielle Hipkins
Industry, Co-production and Agency: Gina Lollobrigida in documents
Pauline Small
Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (1960): A cinematic exploration of socially ‘engaged’ post-war criminality
Marco Paoli
Italian male travellers at the borderline: Masculinities and liminal spaces in Lamerica and Il ladro di bambini by Gianni Amelio
Gaoheng Zhang
Unattainable horizons: On history, man and land in the films of Ciprì and Maresco
Monica Seger
Tigre reale, uno e due: Aspetti dannunziani in un film degli anni Dieci
Fabio Andreazza
MISE-EN-SCÈNE
DVD commentaries: Three points of view
Notes on DVD commentaries
Robert S. C. Gordon
‘And there is a commentary track’
Issa Clubb
Paradise lost? Cinema Paradiso and the challenge of the DVD commentary
Millicent Marcus
EDITING SUITE
Project report
Un nuovo cinema politico italiano? Indagine su un contenuto al di là di ogni sospetto
Luciana D’Arcangeli
CINEGIORNALE
Conference report
Film panels and papers at the 2011 American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) annual conference
Erika Nadir and Camilla Zamboni
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies
Flavia Laviosa
Italian Cinema and Immigration Database (ICID)
Franca Pellegrini
The mise-en-scène section of this third dedicated film issue of the Italianist is
intended as a kind of sequel to the ‘Personal Histories’ section of the ‘Thinking
Italian Film’ special number of Italian Studies (63: 2 (2008), 255-77), in which
senior scholars of Italian cinema were invited to reflect on their particular research
interests, writing and/or experience of teaching Italian film. We are delighted
that Peter Bondanella, Richard Dyer, Marcia Landy, and Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith have accepted our invitation to write on their careers and concerns; we
hope to host similar contributions from other senior scholars in future issues. The
cinegiornale rubric introduced in 2010 is usefully filled this year with reports
from conferences and workshops. Convenors of, or participants at workshops,
seminars and conferences are always invited to submit reports or critical accounts
to the journal. We would particularly like to thank graduate students Pierluigi
Erbaggio and Camilla Zamboni for their exhaustive account of film papers and
panels at the 2010 conference of the American Association of Italian Studies.
Also in the cinegiornale is a description of another journal dedicated entirely
to the study of Italian cinema: the richly packed Quaderni del CSCI, edited
from Barcelona by Daniela Aronica. In the editing suite, Lucia Cardone and
Mariagrazia Fanchi’s account of film and gender studies in Italy, including their
own essential work, is intended to encourage discussion and collaboration between
the Italian and Anglophone academies.
The scholarly articles that lead this issue cover a wide range of themes (from
single films to entire filoni), and adopt a variety of approaches from the auteurist
to the Foucauldian. This variety is gratifying and bespeaks vigour in the discipline;
it is the case, however, that the majority of submissions to the journal take the
form of close readings or even descriptive accounts of individual films (something
that may reflect the training of the writers in literary rather than film studies). We
certainly would not wish to discourage contributions on individual titles where
the study is warranted by the importance of the film itself, by the novelty of the
methodology employed, or by some other significant criterion. Still, we would
invite potential contributors to consider if the study of a single film is likely to
be the best approach to the elucidation of a given concern, or likely to be of the
greatest interest and use for the readers of the journal.
Finally, and once again, the editors would like to thank the members of
the editorial panel and others who have given of their expertise and time in the
past year to read and review the submissions to the journal. Our special thanks to
Catherine O’Rawe for help and advice in the preparation of this issue.
Millicent Marcus, Alan O’Leary
Contents
Editorial
Millicent Marcus and Alan O’Leary
ARTICLES
Áine O’Healy
‘[Non] è una Somala’: Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film
Alex Marlow-Mann
The Tears of Naples’ Daughters: Re-Interpreting the Sceneggiata in Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto
Catherine O’Rawe
More More Moro: Music and Montage in Romanzo criminale
Giancarlo Lombardi
Days of Italian Lives: Charting the Contemporary Soapscape on Italian Public Television
Alan O’Leary and Neelam Srivastava
Violence and the Wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo
Vito Zagarrio
La sceneggiatura circolare: strutture narrative in tre film di Ettore Scola
Robert S.G. Gordon
Notes on the Screenplay of Ladri di biciclette
MISE-EN-SCENE
Mary P. Wood Interview – Intervista – Insight: On the Usefulness of Interviews
EDITING SUITE
Christian Uva
Nuovo Cinema Italia: per una mappa della produzione contemporanea, tra tendenze, formule e linguaggi
Guido Bonsaver
Dall’uomo al divo: un’intervista con Paolo Sorrentino
Margherita Ganeri
Sui Vicerè e sull’impegno: intervista a Roberto Faenza
Pierpaolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary
Sotto il segno della metafora: conversazione con Giancarlo De Cataldo
CONTENTS
PREFACE Alan O’Leary, Catherine O’Rawe
‘I PADRI E I MAESTRI’: GENRE, AUTEURS, AND ABSENCES IN ITALIAN FILM STUDIES Catherine O’Rawe
ITALY’S POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA AND ITS HISTORIES OF REPRESENTATION Derek Duncan
WHY ITALIAN FILM STUDIES NEED A SECOND TAKE ON GENDER
Danielle Hipkins
FRACTIOUS COMPANIONS: PSYCHOANALYSIS, ITALIAN CINEMA, AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Fabio Vighi
ITALIAN FILM STUDIES: PERSONAL HISTORIES
DOING FILM HISTORY TODAY David Forgacs
STARS AND STARDOM IN THE STUDY OF ITALIAN CINEMA
Stephen Gundle
A COMING-OF-AGE-STORY: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RISE OF ITALIAN FILM STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES Millicent Marcus
DIFFICULT DISCUSSIONS: NOTES ON TEACHING ITALIAN CINEMA IN NORTH AMERICA Áine O’Healy
ITALIAN FILM STUDIES: A TWO-PRONGED APPROACH Mary P. Wood
REVIEW ARTICLES
AFTER BRUNETTA: ITALIAN CINEMA STUDIES IN ITALY, 2000 TO 2007
Alan O’Leary
RECENT WORK ON NEOREALISM Guido Bonsaver
The project is supported by the AHRC (UK) and the University of Leeds.
canonical list of auteurs.
1990s and the new century.
This book is now out of print, but the conversation is available here: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/videographic-essay/becoming-videographic-critics-a-roundtable-conversation?t=1572903657663
The conversation deals with questions of the definition and appeal of the historical film, national and transnational address, and the relation of historical film studies to film studies more broadly.
il fenomeno dei film di Natale viene preso in esame da vari punti di vista, in un approccio multidisciplinare che non trascura sondaggi effettuati tra il pubblico e numerose interviste agli addetti ai lavori.
Si discute del valore sociale delle pellicole, delle prese di posizione della critica e dell'accademia italiane, del contenuto carnevalesco e del supposto carattere 'volgare' e 'scurrile'. Questione di punti di vista e, soprattutto, di capovolgere un'ottica troppo sedimentata su giudizi di gusto soggettivi e, spesso, politicizzati.
E' giunto il momento di espandere il dibattito su un fenomeno che ha avuto una portata quasi trentennale nel nostro cinema.
Per ascoltare la puntata scarica l'mp3 dal link qui sotto! "
Recorded presentation on parametric videographic scholarship for the “(Italian) Media Studies Today” virtual symposium organised at The Ohio State University, 6-7 May 2021, by Jonathan Mullins, Dana Renga and Demetrio Antolini.
https://u.osu.edu/italianmediastudiestoday/
Keywords: Donna Haraway, Videographic criticism, audiovisual essays, parameters, constraints, posthuman, potlatch
The link given is to a recording of a longer version of the paper given at Leeds University in March 2015.
Organizers: Shoba Ghosh (Professor and Head of English, Uni. of Mumbai) and Alan O’Leary (Associate Professor, Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, Uni. of Leeds)
to it is to risk seeming ignorant, philistine and most of all politically suspect. We contest this insidious common sense of Italian cinema studies, a common sense that is underpinned by a notion of auteurist ‘paternity’ as the default explanatory metaphor of Italian film history, and which leads to a dismissive tone in the discussion of genre films, not to mention a disdain for the audience for such films. We critique the idea of cinema as a ‘mirror’ of the nation found in some of the pre-eminent scholars of Italian cinema, and we finish by recommending a moratorium on the mention of neorealism for at least five years. What would a silence on realism allow us to reveal
about other modes and genres?